The elder Lindbergh and "fighting Bob" LaFollette died in 1924 and 1925,
respectively. La Follette's Progressive Party of 1924 essentially died with him. 
La Follette was succeeded in politics by his two sons, Robert Jr., and Phillip,
who became, respectively, Senator, and Governor of Wisconsin. For a time, in the
thirties, from roughly 1936 to 1944, they tried to resurrect and continue the
Progressive Party in the tradition of their father. Like him, they also advocated
the program of nationalizing credit and the privately owned Central Bank.

In California in 1934, the E.P.I.C. (End Poverty in California) campaign for
governor by the novelist and former socialist, Upton Sinclair, on the Democratic
ticket, attracted the attention and the energies of a young educator and history
professor, Jerry Voorhis, also a socialist. Voorhis was galvanized into politics
on the coat-tails of Upton Sinclair's E.P.I.C. platform. In 1936 he ran for
Congress as a Democrat for the 12th congressional district (Whittier), and won.
For the next ten years Jerry Voorhis was a progressive voice in the Congress.

Although he approved and supported much of the FDR's program and the New Deal
legislation, Voorhs differed with FDR on Keynesian deficit-financing and the
nature of the national debt. Voorhis, an honest and intelligent man with an
unusually high degree of integrity for a politician, could not peddle the
administration "line," promoted by Franklin Roosevelt that the National Debt was
something "we owe to ourselves." Voorhis, in fact, initiated a resolution on the
floor of the House, calling, in effect, for the dissolution of private ownership
of the Federal Reserve Bank. In this respect, his position was closer to the
Farmer-Labor and the Socialist Party platforms of 1932, than to the Democratic
Party-line.

Voorhis' analysis of the Federal Reserve System and of banking in general never
descended from the plane of a pure systems-analysis to the Jew-baiting and racial
slurs of the crypto-fascists, who then as now also made an issue of the Fed. 
A genuine progressive, he knew that usury is a matter of class privilege and class
oppression and can not be termed a function of a "Jewish bankers' conspiracy."


"It is ethically wrong for any private person or agency to enjoy the privilege of
creating money, and for the same reason that it would be wrong to give one
citizen the right to levy a tax upon another one. The power to create money,
either in the form of currency or credit, pocketbook money or checkbook money, is
the precise equivalent of the power to tax. Anyone exercising the power to create
a new dollar can use it to require a dollar's worth of the labor or the property
of a fellow citizen without giving anything of value in exchange. "  
(Beyond Victory, 1944)

Jerry Voorhis was driven from office in 1946 by the red baiting techniques of a
young veteran, recently returned from the Pacific Theater - naval lieutenant
Richard Nixon. Nixon, detailed to go after Voorhis, was the recipient of big
monies from eastern financial elements.  According to William Costello,



"...the representative of a large New York financial house made a trip to
California in October 1945, about the time the Committee of One Hundred was
picking Nixon, and called upon a number of influential people in Southern
California. The emissary "bawled them out" for permitting Voorhis, whom he
described as "one of the most dangerous men in Washington" to "continue to
represent a part of California in the House..."
 (The Facts About Nixon,  1960)


The LaFollette Progressive Party of Wisconsin folded for the second and final
time during the War, in 1944, the same year the Farmer-Labor Party in neighboring
Minnesota was gobbled up by the National Democratic Party. Robert LaFollette Jr.
was driven, in 1946 from his Senate seat, which he had held continuously since
1925, by losing the Republican primary in Wisconsin to another navy veteran, and
Young Republican, Joe McCarthy. McCarthy, in common with his cohort Richard
Nixon, was a mob lawyer, with ties to the Pepsi-Cola Corporation. (See The
Cola Wars,  by J.C.Louis and Harvey Z. Yazijian,  Everest Press.)

In a strange twist of fate considering his later career as a red-baiter
(beginning in 1950), Joe McCarthy actually won his first Senatorial election with
the help of the Communist Party in Milwaukee, whose cadres were instructed by the
Party bosses to register before the primary as Republicans and to vote against
LaFollette and for McCarthy. (See Jack Anderson, McCarthy: The Man, The Senator, 
The "Ism," 1952, pp.103-4.)

By one means  or another, then, whether by the red-baiting techniques of Richard
Nixon or with the help of the communist true-believers in the case of McCarthy
and LaFollette, the establishment was able to pre-empt the potential for a
bi-partisan post-war push in both Houses to nationalize credit and repeal the
present, unconstitutional Federal Reserve System.  ­ Mark Walter Evans

In The Strange Case of Richard Milhous Nixon, published in 1973 in the midst of
the Watergate scandal, Jerry Voorhis, Nixon's first political opponent on his rise 
to power, had this to say about the the Federal Reserve Bank :









            Jerry  Voorhis  On The Federal Reserve:



            THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES SAYS: 


"Congress shall have power to Coin money and regulate the value thereof."
Congress does no such thing, which is the heart of our trouble. Private banks
coin our money and regulate its value. In doing so they take from the government
and people of the United States a large chunk of their sovereignty, a large chunk
of the taxing power, and the key to a prosperous economy without inflation. For
example, in testimony before the Banking and Currency Committee of the House of
Representatives in 1935, Marriner Eccles, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve
Board itself, said: 



"In purchasing offerings of Government bonds, the banking system as a whole
creates new money, or bank deposits. When the banks buy a billion dollars of
Government bonds as they are offered - and you have to consider the banking
system as a whole as a unit - the banks credit the deposit account of the
Treasury with a billion dollars. They debit their Government bond account a
billion dollars; or they actually create, by a bookkeeping entry, a billion
dollars."
Mr. Eccles' statement is exactly as true today as when he made it. Here is how it
works : The private banking system of our country creates our money in the form
of demand deposits on the banks' books. The reason it is able to do this is
because no bank is required to have in its vault anything like the amount of
money which its depositors think they have in the banks.

Banks are only required by the Federal Reserve System, which the banks are sure
they own, to have in their vaults anywhere from $1 to $1.50 for every $10 of
demand deposits on their books. That is for every $1 or $1.50 which people - or
the government-deposit in a bank, the banking system can create out of thin air
and by the stroke of a pen some $10 of checkbook money or demand deposits. It can
lend all that $10 into circulation  at interest just so long as it has the $1 or
a little more in reserve to back it up.

This is, of course, the  "fractional reserve system" of banking. It is more or
less controlled by the Federal Reserve System,  whose only stock is held by the
private  banks of  the Federal Reserve System. Not a single share of such stock
is held by the government or people of the United States, although if "national
sovereignty" means anything at all, these banks of issue should be the property
of the nation.

But what actually happens when our government engages in deficit financing? The
obvious way the government can get more buying power into the people's hands is
by itself putting more money into the stream of commerce than it takes out in
taxes. The tragedy of the situation is that, up to date, the only way our
government has enabled itself to spend more money than it takes in has been by
forcing this sovereign nation to borrow its own credit from private sources.

This has been true, despite the fact that if deficit financing accomplishes its
purpose at all it will increase production and trade, enhance tax revenues, and
broaden the base of government credit.

To the extent that government bonds are sold for cash to individuals, or
institutional purchasers other than banks, the government is taking out of
circulation approximately as many dollars as it will put back in when it spends
the money.

To accomplish its purpose, deficit financing must result in the creation of new
money,  and the use of it to increase mass buying power. Only if this happens
will there be any stimulation of idle plants to go back into production, or more
employment.

Under these circumstances what ought to happen is that the credit  of this great
nation should be drawn upon directly by the government, not that it should go
more deeply into debt.

For the credit of this or any nation is squarely based upon and derived from the
production of wealth by the nation plus the power of the government to tax. A
nation like the United States thus possesses an almost unlimited amount of
credit. Otherwise it could not possibly have persuaded investors to buy $480
billion of government securities.

By whatever percentage it can be anticipated that production and hence potential
tax revenues will increase as a result of deficit spending, by that same amount
the credit of the nation and its government will be increased. This same
percentage of the volume of money previously in circulation should appear on the
books of the Treasury as a credit entry to be drawn upon just like tax revenues.
To do that would he nothing more than rational and proper bookkeeping. It would
also he morally right bookkeeping. And it would make some sense of Mr. Nixon's
"Full employment budget" idea.

But this is not what happens at all. Instead the sovereign government of the
United States goes hat in hand to the private banking system and asks it to
create the new money that the economy needs. The government gives - the word is
used advisedly - it gives to the banking system, including the Federal Reserve
banks, government bonds, the debt of all the people. Interest-bearing bonds,
that is, bonds bearing as high an interest rate under today's regime as the banks
decide to demand. Else they won't buy the bonds.

The banks "buy" the bonds with newly created demand deposit entries on their
books - nothing more. It is fountain-pen money and considerably more
inflationary than would be the same amount of dollar bills created by the
government. The deposits the banks create with which to own the people's debt are
backed by nothing except the bonds themselves! In other words, they are backed by
the credit of the American people. What the government has "borrowed" from the
banks, what the people must for years pay interest on, is nothing more nor less
than the credit of the nation, which obviously the nation possessed in the first
place or the bonds themselves would be no good!

At long last, a few years ago the Federal Reserve made tacit acknowledgment of
these facts. As a direct result of logical and relentless agitation by members of
Congress, led by Congressman Wright Patman as well as by other competent monetary
experts, the Federal Reserve began to pay to the U.S. Treasury a considerable
part of its earnings from interest on government securities. This was done
without public notice and few people, even today, know that is being done. It was
done, quite obviously, as acknowledgment that the Federal Reserve Banks were
acting on the one hand as a national bank of issue, creating the nation's money,
but on the other hand charging the nation interest on its own credit - which no
true national bank of issue could conceivably, or with any show of justice, dare
to do.

But this is only part of the story. And the less discouraging part, at that. For
where the commercial banks are concerned, there is no such repayment of the
people's money.

When the commercial banks create money, as they do when they acquire government
bonds, they levy a tax on every person in the United States. This is so because
every new dollar that is created makes every dollar previously in existence worth
somewhat less than it was worth before. This is the very heart of inflation.

It is also taxation without representation with a vengeance. Until this system is
changed, our debt will continue to skyrocket without limit and the fixing of debt
limits by the Congress will continue to be an exercise in utter futility.




                         What ought to be done?



Banks should lend existing money. But, as the Constitution clearly requires, the
money (or credit) of the nation should never be created by any private agency, 
but by an agency of the nation itself. It is the duty of Congress to provide for
this by a carefully drawn statute.

The stock in Federal Reserve Banks should be purchased by the government from
their present private bank owners. The Federal Reserve should then become our
national bank of issue. It should create reserve Bank Credit as it does now. But
that credit should be credited to the United States Treasury, not charged against
it and the people as debt. As much such new credit should be created each year as
is needed to keep our economy running at or near capacity - and no more than
that.  A  stable  price  level  could  result.

Then and only then can we expect to overcome recessions, to put our people to
work, and do this without the artifice  of inflation and the ever-increasing debt
which are incapable under the present monetary system of ever being paid off. -
Jerry Voorhis, The Strange Case of Richard Milhous Nixon,  1973




                        How To Nationalize Credit :



Congress [could] provide for governmental purchase of the capital stock of the
12 central Federal Reserve Banks from the member banks which now own it. This
would cost $144,000,000 in round figures, and would correct the present anomalous
situation of a privately owned bank of issue. The Federal Reserve Banks could
then create money in the form of "Federal Reserve Bank credit" entries on their
books just as they do now. A "National Credit Central banks' books in favor of the
United States Treasury. To such an account would be credited each year such
amounts of newly created "Reserve Bank credit" as would provide the increased
purchasing power needed to maintain economic balance and a stable price level.

The Treasury would draw checks against their account and pay them out to those to
whom the government owed money, thus getting it into the purchasing power
stream. In this way the whole nation would derive the benefit from the creation
of the additional supply of money which its own growth had made necessary. No
interest bearing debt would be incurred, but only a bookkeeping transaction
between two public agencies. Should inflation threaten so that it was desirable
to reduce the volume of money in circulation, the process could be reversed and
the Treasury could transfer a portion of its tax revenues to the central banks
for cancellation and retirement of the requisite amount of money to restore
stability.   -  Jerry Voorhis, Beyond Victory,  1944