the "ROOM" as predecessor of the OSS

[Peter Lemkin]

One of their less obvious characteristics was that they remained as private
unincorporated firms, usually partnerships, until relatively recently, offering no shares, no
reports, and usually no advertising to the public. This risky status, which deprived them
of limited liability, was retained, in most cases, until modern inheritance taxes made it
essential to surround such family wealth with the immortality of corporate status for taxavoidance
purposes. This persistence as private firms continued because it ensured the
maximum of anonymity and secrecy to persons of tremendous public power who dreaded
public knowledge of their activities as an evil almost as great as inflation. As a
consequence, ordinary people had no way of knowing the wealth or areas of operation of
such firms, and often were somewhat hazy as to their membership. Thus, people of
considerable political knowledge might not associate the names Walter Burns, Clinton
Dawkins, Edward Grenfell, Willard Straight, Thomas Lamont, Dwight Morrow, Nelson
Perkins, Russell Leffingwell, Elihu Root, John W. Davis, John Foster Dulles, and S.
Parker Gilbert with the name "Morgan," yet all these and many others were parts of the
system of influence which centered on the J. P. Morgan office at :3 Wall Street. This
firm, like others of the international banking fraternity, constantly operated through
corporations and governments, yet remained itself an obscure private partnership until
international financial capitalism was passing from its deathbed to the grave. J. P.
Morgan and Company, originally founded in London as George Peabody and Company
in 1838, was not incorporated until March 21, 1940, and went out of existence as a
separate entity on April 24, 1959, when it merged with its most important commercial
bank subsidiary, the Guaranty Trust Company. The London affiliate, Morgan Grenfell,
was incorporated in , and still exists.
International Bankers Felt Politicians Could Not Be Trusted
With Control of the Monetary System
The influence of financial capitalism and of the international bankers who created it
was exercised both on business and on governments, but could have done neither if it had
not been able to persuade both these to accept two "axioms" of its own ideology. Both of
these were based on the assumption that politicians were too weak and too subject to
temporary popular pressures to be trusted with control of the money system; accordingly,
the sanctity of all values and the soundness of money must be protected in two ways: by
basing the value of money on gold and by allowing bankers to control the supply of
money. To do this it was necessary to conceal, or even to mislead, both governments and
people about the nature of money and its methods of operation.