George W. Bush’s Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Was a Slave Trader

[starroute]

49. It's the principle of the old boys' club at work

It's much like the small group of (mainly Yale-educated) early leaders of the CIA. They all know each other, they're all aware of each other's crimes, and that shared guilt and those shared secrets act as the glue that holds them together. Or it's like Skull and Bones, where the price of initiation is to confess everything you've ever done that the others can use to blackmail you with.

In this case, a lot of the strands run through Texas. Some years ago, I did a series of posts here about the Farish family. William Stamps Farish was an oilman who married into a prominent Houston family -- one that went back to a Confederate officer related to Jefferson Davis who'd settled in Texas after the Civil War. The family name was Botts -- as in the Baker & Botts lawfirm. But what's most significant is that Farish was also the chairman of Standard Oil who got in trouble for dealing with the Nazis on the eve of World War II.

He died in 1942 as the result of an overdose of Congressional hearings, and his son was killed in a military training accident shortly thereafter, leaving his infant grandson as the heir to a fortune. Farish's widowed daughter-in-law became close friends with George H.W. and Barbara Bush, and the Farish family served as their entry into the Texas oil business after World War II. That grandson, William Stamps Farish III, grew up to become a close friend of the Bush family as well.

There are also some other interesting connections. That daughter-in-law was the daughter of General Robert E. Wood, a chairman of Sears Roebuck and a major right-wing activist and financial backer of the right in the McCarthy era. I checked him out online, and he was in correspondence with every Holocaust denier and revisionist historian you ever heard of.

And the wife of W.S. Farish III is the former Sarah Sharp, daughter of another close friend of the Bush family and the great-niece of the pro-Nazi Du Pont brothers who tried to pull off a coup against FDR.

So these family ties keep being reinforced. And at every step you find slavery, Nazi ties, extreme right-wing politics, and high-level connections to the oil and chemical industries. But that's why it's irrelevant to say "don't bear a grudge." For us, the slave trade may be ancient history. But for the families that got rich off it, it's just the sort of thing they do. Slaves in one generation, Nazi concentration camp labor in another. They remember their family history, they're always looking for the opportunities, and those opportunities generally mean immiseration for the rest of us.

I see checking Wikipedia that there's also a William Stamps Farish IV whose oldest son is William Stamps Farish V. You think these people don't remember where they came from?