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When Franklin D. Roosevelt took office as President of the United
States, he appointed as Director of the Budget James Paul Warburg,
son of Paul Warburg, and Vice President of the International
Acceptance Bank and other corporations. Roosevelt appointed as
Secretary of the Treasury W.H. Woodin, one of the biggest industrialists
in the country, Director of the American Car Foundry Company and
numerous other locomotive works, Remington Arms, The Cuba
Company, Consolidated Cuba Railroads, and other big corporations.
Woodin was later replaced by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., son of the
Harlem real estate operator who had helped put Woodrow Wilson in
the White House. With such a crew as this, Roosevelt’s promises of
radical social changes showed little likelihood of fulfillment. One of the
first things he did was to declare a bankers’ moratorium, to help the
bankers get their records in order.
World’s Work says:
"Congress has left Charles G. Dawes and Eugene Meyer, Jr. free to
appraise, by their own methods, the security which prospective
borrowers of the two billion dollar capital may offer."
Roosevelt also set up the Securities Exchange Commission, to see to it
that no new faces got into the Wall Street gang, which caused the
following colloquy in Congress:
REPRESENTATIVE WOLCOTT: At hearings before this committee in 1933,
the economists showed us charts which proved beyond all doubt that
the dollar value commodities followed the price level of gold. It did
not, did it?
LEON HENDERSON: No.