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NOTE: OVER SEVERAL HOURS OF ADDITION AND SUBTRACTION I TURNED THIS INTO A LITERARY GORDIAN KNOT. I WAS ABOUT TO THROW AWAY MY HOURS OF WORK WHEN I REALIZED I COULD GIVE AI ANOTHER TEST BY EXPLAINING I’D GOTTEN MY TEXT GARBLED AND ASKING IT TO SORT IT OUT. THE FIFTEEN SECONDS IT TOOK TO FIX THIS WERE WORTH IT. I DID NOT PUT THE ACTUAL IMAGES IN THE TEXT OF THE POST THAT FOLLOWS BUT YOU CAN SEE THEM HERE. – Harry Welty

JP Morgan in 1933 waiting to appear before the United States Senate Banking Committee. Historical context at the end of this post.
This photograph was described in a book about the Stock Market Crash of 1929 titled Once in Golconda. The Golconda book and its author John Brooks were both lauded in the most recent book on that subject 1929. The title of 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin continues: “Inside the Greatest Crash In Wall Street History – And How it Shattered a Nation. That is my follow up book to Rick Atkinson’s book of the American Revolution.
I’d forgotten the details of the end of Minnesota’s “Popular Front” in 1947 which I’d read in 2006 as I was unraveling a scandal that hobbled the Democrats in 1978. The Popular Front was tied to Stalinists who supported our alliance to defeat Hitler’s Germany. Many were communists and they could never live down their support for Russia which looked anything but benign as it swallowed up the lands freed from Hitler. I guess you could say Donald Trump’s cozying up to Putin puts him in the same sort of company.
Hubert Humphrey nailed the Popular Front into a coffin in 1947 just before he rose to President Truman’s defense with the ringing exhortation for Democrats to “walk out of the shadow of states’ rights and into the bright sunshine of human rights.” Republicans like my grandfather Robb were rubbing their hands together gleefully hoping to put an end to fifteen years of Democratic party leadership from FDR’s election. Humphreys ringing words drove Dixiecrats out of the party where South Carolina Strom Thurmond would win 2.5 percent of the voters and 37 “Solid South” electoral votes and a “Progressive” party share of the vote under Henry Wallace that, however, took not electoral votes.
So, I spent twenty minutes locating it: It was this HHH bio by Carl Solberg. You can see at least 33 post-it tabs in pages with details I wanted to be able to retrieve quickly.

So as I looked for this book my eyes fell on another book about the 1929 Stock Market Crash, “Once in Golconda”. I had just read 50 quick pages of a new best selling history of the 1929 Stock Market Crash. In its prologue the author had heaped praise on this earlier book. The unusual title stuck in my head and I thought I had it but couldn’t find it on my book shelves. Now looking for Humphrey’s rise to power I saw it. I had to take a quick peek. There were no yellow marker stains but I did find a book mark which described the photo above. What a story it told.
The Banking giant JP Morgan who was notoriously publicity shy had been called to testify at the Senate Banking Committee I presume as they tried to uncover how the hell the Depression had been sparked by the 1929 stock market crash. As JP sat sullenly waiting to be called to testify in a waiting room a publicist for the Ringling Brother’s Circus put a circus midget on his lap and encouraged all the board photographers present to take a quick potentially embarrassing and comical photo of Morgan. But Morgan remaining dignified simply asked the young woman some questions had a short pleasant conversation and then helped her off his lap. For the much despised Morgan it gave him an image boost. For they young woman it made her a subject of lurid curiosity so intense that she< a half Jew, returned to her home in Germany. She was not long after taken by the police as a faulty human and a Jew. She was sent to Auschwitz.

The NY Times best seller that prompted my discover is 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History–and How It Shattered a Nation by Andrew Ross Sorkin. He spent a decade researching it after writing the equally honored book Too Big to Fail about our 2008 Housing Crisis.
For Stock Market investors I will note that anti regulation Republicans gave us the 29 Crash and the 2008 Crash and are busy under Donald Trump of a repeat performance with the AI mania and Trump’s collusion with the Crypto crowd.
NOTE: I’M GOING TO HAVE LUNCH AND WATCH THE SECOND HALF OF THE NEW MOVIE FRANKENSTEIN. I LIKE IT BETTER THAN THE BORIS KARLOF VERSION. I WILL PROBABLY EDIT THIS LATER THIS AFTERNOON.
writing a possible As I was explaining it I made several claims each of which was worthy of a fuller explanation. The claims were these:
I think:
The Federal Judge for whom the Federal Court House is named made sure behind the scenes to shut up Don Boyd by sending him off to prison despite his innocence to protect Hubert Humphrey, and various other Democratic bigwigs.
I’m certain:
That Hubert Humphrey tried to prove that he could be as tough as integrity challenged LBJ by orchestrating a phony scandal to defeat an extremely liberal Republican Governor in the 1963? Election.
I’ve learned:
How noxious the Joe Stalin wing of the Democratic Party was in the years that Hubert Humphrey and his later betrayer Eugene McCarthy were making the DFL (Democratic Farmer Labor Party) the new darlings of Minnesota during the years the FBI put the screws to the commies.
I’ve better understood:
The political currents flowing from Kansas and Missouri to Minnesota in my journey north to the Scandinavian ideal of Minnesota in the Eras between the Cold War and the collapse of the staid Republican Party under Donald Trump
