Bush Family Chronicles: The Patriarchs

By Morgan Strong


To fully understand the present manifestation of the Bush family and its excesses, one must consider its history over several generations, a difficult and painful undertaking since it reveals so much about the self-destructive apathy of the American people.

James Madison wrote passionately in the Federalist Papers that in order for a democracy to function and not descend into a tyranny of the wealthy and the well-connected, the citizenry must stay well informed. In Madison’s view, a democratic society was wholly dependent on an informed citizenry.

Much of the responsibility to inform was placed on the press and the educational system. Indeed, the Founders gave the press the unchallenged right to seek out and publish information under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In recent years, however, the U.S. press has failed in that responsibility dreadfully. Education in this country also has been a dismal failure. But in the end, it is the citizens who bear the principal duty to make themselves informed.

Below, in a bleak and foreboding history, is what occurs when the citizenry is deprived of meaningful information and then fails in its obligation to find out the facts and exercise the critical judgment required for self governance.

The Bushes

In the late 19th Century, Samuel Bush moved to Ohio from Orange, New Jersey, where he had attended the nearby Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken. He made the first big move in his manufacturing career as an engineer with Buckeye Steel Castings Company, which produced gun barrels and railroad parts.

Samuel Bush became a confidante of the company’s president, Frank Rockefeller, a brother of the enormously wealthy and powerful John D. Rockefeller, who owned Standard Oil. Another participant in Buckeye Steel was railroad baron E.H. Harriman.

The Rockefeller-Harriman connection was to remain important through the lives and careers of several generations of the Bush family.

Samuel Bush took over from Frank Rockefeller as president of the company in 1908, and held that job for the next 20 years. Through his Rockefeller-Harriman connections, he was made chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms and Ammunition Section of the War Industries Board in the Wilson administration during World War I.

Percy Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller’s first cousin who had acquired Remington Arms in 1914, built a new plant just in time to enjoy enormous profit from the sale of weapons in World War I. Percy benefited from no-bid contracts to manufacture arms and supply ammunition to the U.S. military, arranged by Samuel Bush.

Samuel Bush’s Buckeye Steel made the gun barrels for Remington, which also outfitted the Czar’s forces in Russia after contracting to supply a million rifles to Russia in 1916. During World War I, Remington supplied 67 percent of all the weapons and ammunition used by the Allied forces.

Samuel’s son, Prescott Bush, served as an artillery liaison officer with the French forces during the war and wrote back home about his heroic exploits in letters that were published. But the exploits proved to be fabricated, forcing Prescott to apologize. But that didn’t deter him – or dim his career prospects.

Prescott was a Yale College graduate and a member of the influential Skull and Bones Society along with Averell Harriman, the son of his father’s associate, railroad magnate E.H. Harriman. Prescott also married well, wooing the favorite daughter of financier George Herbert Walker, who brought Prescott into the Wall Street firm of Harriman & Co., which later became Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.

During the 1930s, Prescott Bush was a fanatical opponent of Franklin D. Roosevelt. There were even rumors that Bush tried to encourage a military coup against Roosevelt after his election as President in 1933. But the evidence – while intriguing – has never been conclusive.

Similar secrecy and uncertainty surrounded the intricate web of ownership and control of Harriman’s Union Banking Corp., which Prescott Bush administered in collaboration with backers of Germany’s Nazi Party...............