George W. Armstrong – 1866 to 1954.
2,825 words
In the 1950s, Lieutenant General (Retired) George Van Horn Moseley led a forlorn rear-guard action against desegregation, “civil rights,” and Zionism. He attempted to speak at universities, but student protesters were able to cancel his talks and suppress his influence. Moseley was ahead of his time, however. “Civil rights” has been a disaster of crime and Africanized no-go zones. The 1964 Civil Rights Act has become an illicit second constitution. Throughout Moseley’s desperate fight against the adoption of the dystopian “civil rights” paradigm, he was supported by Judge George Washington Armstrong (1866 – 1954). Armstrong was a wealthy Texan who helped fund Moseley’s activism and participated in activism himself. Armstong said of Moseley,
I am highly honored that General George Van Horn Moseley is my friend and is associated with me. [1]
Armstrong was out of step with others of his time and social class. The mainstream narrative which claims that most high-class Texans and other Southerners resisted “civil rights” and Jewish control of American culture in the 1950s and 60s is not entirely true. At the time, most of the socially dominant whites in America, including those in the South, were wholly supportive of “civil rights” and Israel. This included President Lyndon Baines Johnson and Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough. Armstrong’s books and memoirs are worth reading since he was out of step with the rest of America at the time and his warnings about both Zionism and “civil rights” were proven correct.
Armstrong was of mostly Scots-Irish descent. However, he did have some German heritage as well as ancestors in early colonial Virginia. Several of his ancestors served in the War of Independence and his father, Ramsey Armstrong, served as the chaplain for the 9th Texas Cavalry during the Civil War. Armstrong’s grandfather, George Washington Smyth, was one of the signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence. After the Civil War, Ramsey Armstrong served as a minister and raised his family in as strict a way as one would expect. This strictness would serve George Washington Armstrong well.
Armstrong saw the prairies of Texas and Oklahoma as magical places.
Armstrong’s upbringing was very Southern. The food which he describes eating is like that of the menu at a modern Cracker Barrell restaurant. His mother also had a Negro servant who’d formerly been a slave who refused to leave after emancipation. His description of one of the ranches he owned shows a magical world. Later in life he would write about his ranch saying,
The first touch of frost had tinged the grass along the hillsides with gold and yellow, and as we went bounding along the grassy trail to the meadows beyond where grazing hundreds of beautiful white-face cows and calves, I could only murmur to myself: truly this is the life. [2]
George W. Armstrong and Jennie May on their wedding day. The personalities of the pair were too different, and the marriage ended in divorce. Armstrong paid alimony to Jennie May until her death in 1939.
Armstrong got into fights and arguments with other boys his age, but he was bright and soon decided to get as much education as he could. As a young man, he decided to become a lawyer. He graduated from University of Texas in June of 1886 and married Miss Jennie May Allen in 1887. He was 21, she was 16. The marriage eventually ended in divorce, Armstrong wrote, “We both had very much to learn, and learned it the hard way.” [3]
In 1890, Armstrong started his career as a lawyer in Fort Worth. He also became involved in politics when the people settlement around his grocery store decided to join Fort Worth. He was voted as an alderman for the seventh ward and made chairman of the Health Board. In 1894 he was elected the County Judge of Tarrant County. He was 28.
Two years later he wrote his goals for the next ten years which were:
- Rise to be on the Court of Civil Appeals or Attorney General.
- Be out of debt and have property worth $30,000 to $50,000 from which he would receive $3,500 per annum.
- Be a Christian and gentleman “without fear and without reproach.”
- Socially be respected and admired.
- Be a good lawyer, a fair historian, a master of English, and a good public speaker [4]
He continued to be a judge for the next four years. During one of his campaign speeches he outlined his philosophy of government, which was in line with the individualist libertarianism ethos which started to go mainstream after his death in 1954. He wrote,
The word democracy means to tear every unnecessary restriction away from you. To give you an equal show with the balance of the world…if you fail, it is your fault or your misfortune…instead of creating new experiments and making new laws, we ought to repeal some. It is the meddling on the part of the Government with private affairs that has put us in our present condition. [5]
However, Judge Armstrong was eventually voted out of office. Years after he stopped practicing law, Armstrong wrote,
The “administration of justice” is a misnomer. There is no such thing. It is a snare and a delusion. We have an administration of the forms and methods of procedure, of the rules of evidence and of the technicalities of the law – an administration of the law…Justice is but an incident and must always yield to the rules. If through the ignorance or negligence of the lawyer the forms are not rigidly observed, then justice must be denied. In practically one-half of the cases one side or the other does not want justice. Their effort is to obstruct, delay or defeat justice. [6]
Armstrong left the practice of law with enough money and experience to get in on the Spindletop oil boom in 1901. This oil boom took place at a time when the technology to store, transport, and refine oil was still in its infancy, so Armstrong gained insight into the adjacent businesses of developing oil, such as manufacturing pipelines, drills, and pumps. When oil was discovered in Sour Lake, Texas he went there and organized a bank with $30,000 in initial deposits.
As a banker, he dealt with the efforts of local rivals to deprive him of his job, as well as several deliberately engineered bank runs. His mettle was seriously tested when a union of white waiters sought to beat up the negro waiters in the town. He sided with the negros and deterred a mob by pointing a shotgun. He realized that the violence was fueled by drunkenness more than racial economic rivalry, so he used his connections with the local Deputy County Attorney and Sheriff to be appointed as a deputy. He slowly restored order while resisting saloon order bribes and half-serious attempts on his life.
In 1907, when an economic downturn threatened to bring down the local businesses, he worked out a system with the local meat packing plant where the packers would collect all their accounts in cash, deposit the money at his bank, and then the meat packer management would pay their employees through the bank’s cashier’s checks. This kept cash in the local bank in town and the economy ran on the locals paying for things by check. Once the economic downturn ended, Armstrong decided to quite while he was ahead. He sold out his banking assets and got into the public utilities business in Fort Worth.
Meanwhile, he invested in agricultural properties in Texas, Oklahoma, and Mississippi. In the two former states the ranches were developed and as the infrastructure improved the ranches were broken up and sold as smaller farms. In Mississippi, Armstrong had sharecroppers for tenants – many of whom were sub-Saharans. Armstrong didn’t make much money through farming. Instead, the money was made on selling the ranches after they were developed.
Armstrong was a Democrat and a supporter of Woodrow Wilson. He was politically active, involved in numerous business ventures, and successful, but his life and career were on the edge of serious change. It started with America’s entry into the First World War. Armstrong was too old to serve as a soldier, but he did wish to contribute to the war effort by shifting his business activities. He took over a failing company which shipped horses to Europe and turned that around, and then he attempted to increase the production of food in response to Wilson’s call to do so.
He moved cattle from Texas to Mississippi. Texas cattle survives when it is moved north – Montana’s vast herds were started from a herd brought there from Texas in the 1890s. However, there is a risk to the cattle when transporting Texas herds into the Southeast. Armstrong was assured that there would be no problem by government agents, however two thirds of his herd perished when he attempted to fatten them in Mississippi. Meanwhile, he had borrowed money to do all this. In 1920, the Federal Reserve – a system which he supported – adopted a deflationary monetary policy. Armstrong not only lost money from the deaths of his cattle, but the remaining cows also became worth less than what he’d paid for. He would have stayed solvent but the Federal Reserve’s policy was to limit credit, so he couldn’t get his loan refinanced or extended.
Armstrong became a white advocate when he was on the Texas Chamber of Commerce. One of that organization’s members, Joseph Cullinan, sought to use the Chamber to denounce the Ku Klux Klan, which was becoming a popular organization which had the support of President Wilson. However, Armstrong rejected Cullinan’s proposal, pointing out that the Klan was no different from the Knights of Columbus or the Jews’ B’nai B’rith. Armstrong believes that there wouldn’t have been long-term trouble over their differences, but the two men quarreled shortly after, and the breech was irreparable.
The split between Cullinan and Armstrong over the revival of the Klan following the movie The Birth of a Nation was part of a larger trend across the South. The Second Klan emerged when the South was fully under the control of its native whites. While organizations for Southern Protestants were perfectly acceptable, the Klan carried with it an association with violence and insurgency which was, in retrospect, unnecessary at the time.
Meanwhile, the Fed’s deflationary policy caused Armstrong to go bankrupt. He wrote about his bankruptcy and then wrote a book called The Crime of ’20 where he pointed out the problems of the Federal Reserve’s policy. The Crime of ’20 was read by prominent people, and it is certain that his ideas of easy credit during an economic downturn to turn the economy around was adopted during later economic recessions. Armstrong was frustrated by Jewish control of the Federal Reserve as well as the changes to the organization after it was initially chartered which supported Wall Street over Main Street. His ideas on the Fed were not much different from Congressman Louis McFadden, who initially supported the reform and then came to regret the bank’s empowering of Jews.
In 1930, Armstrong ran for governor, but his campaign ended before the general election. In the leadup to the Second World War, Armstrong was part of the movement to keep America out of the conflict. Part of that isolationist movement was awareness of the Jewish question and the organized Jewish community’s push for war. Meanwhile, Armstrong continued to work on his business ventures, and he regained much of his fortune.
During the war, Armstrong was resigned to support the Roosevelt administration’s efforts. The Japanese, after all, had attacked America, and there wasn’t much he or the other former America First isolationists could do. When he attempted to provide steel for naval shells through his firm, the Texas Steel Company, the administration made sure he didn’t get hired.
When the Second World War ended, Armstrong was nearly 80, but he continued to be a writer and activist. In 1949 Armstrong attempted to shape the university system by donating half of his mineral estate in Mississippi and 26,000 acres of land to Jefferson Military College provided that the college didn’t accept sub-Saharans and Asiatics – especially Jews. An ethno-nationalist Jewish organization called the “Anti-Nazi League” — which championed human rights for everyone except Palestinians — got wind of the offer and claimed that Armstrong had offered $50,000,000 to the college to achieve these aims to raise funds.
The college eventually backed off. Armstrong admitted he thought schools should be segregated. Like many white advocates of the time, he saw Latin Americans as whites, but not as Anglo-Saxons. During the Texas War of Independence many Tex-Mex Spaniards supported breaking away, and in 1906, sub-Saharan troops went on a cruel rampage against the Tejanos of Brownsville, Texas, so his ideas were not wrongheaded.
Jefferson Military College folded a decade later. The end of that institution and others like it are a phantom limb that helps explain America’s continued military defeats. No racially aware military officer producing program exists. Therefore, the US military produces senior leaders who claim to have beaten a rebel flag-waving group of “Klansmen” while the sub-Saharans in the barracks are carrying out rapes, drive-by shootings, and other criminal acts. Because the military cannot admit to the disparities of crime rates, the institution is hobbled by groupthink and misreading data. America’s wars have been lost as a result.
In 1950, Armstrong published a book on Zionism. The book is a decent first look at the problem of Israel. However, it is riddled with errors and philosophical inconsistencies. Armstrong, for example, claimed that Harry Truman was a Jew because his middle name was thought to be Solomon. Truman was able to use this criticism to shore up the Jewish vote because many Jews claimed he was an anti-Semite – a claim made because he was less fast in dealing with the Jews in the refugee camps of Europe than the organized Jewish community wanted.
Armstrong also believed that the Marshall Plan was a communist plot to bankrupt the United States. Obviously, this turned out to be wrong. The Marshall Plan worked to keep the Soviets out of Western Europe, but it also helped Germany and Japan industrialize and later outcompete American industry. Armstrong also believed that the “mineral wealth” of Israel belonged to the United States and Great Britian, and the Zionists were seeking to get it. The wealth of Israel, however, isn’t from “mineral wealth” – which would take work acquiring. It is from Jewish Lobbyists swindling Western governments.
Armstrong’s anti-Zionist actions did get noticed and they had something of an impact.
He quotes a letter from a Palestinian Christian dated April 20, 1950:
Dear Mr. Armstrong:
I am on a mission in this country as a delegate of the Christians of the Holy Land who are descendants of the earliest followers of Christ and descendants of Crusaders. The majority of these Christians have been dispossessed and driven out of their land by invading Zionist Forces. Most of them live now as destitute refugees over the hills of Bethlehem which has resisted successfully all Zionist armed attacks and has become the last Christian fortress in the Holy Land.
All the Christian hospitals, colleges, and schools have been occupied by force by the Zionists who now control the new city of Jerusalem, the greatest part of which was a Christian property. The future of Christianity in the land of its birth is full of gloom.
I have been sent to this country by the Mayor (my father) and Municipal Council of Bethlehem to raise a Christian voice on behalf of the oldest Christian community in the world. I was attacked on the air by Walter Winchell, the Zionist propagandist, as the Zionists do not want the American Christians to know what is happening to their fellow Christians in the birthplace of Christ. Dorothy Thompson, Mr. Morehouse, editor of the Living Church and Bishop Gilbert of New York have defended me against these malicious attacks.
The Holy Land Christian Committee has been formed under the sponsorship of the presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church to raise moral and material aid for the Holy Land Christians whom I represent.
I feel that you will be interested in this great cause and I will be very happy to have the pleasure of meeting you at your convenience.
Yours sincerely,
Yusif el Bandak [7]
Obviously, Armstrong was not able to stop either “civil rights” or Zionism. However, he did keep the flame of white advocacy and America First isolationism during a time when the political and social winds were completely against his ideas. But in the long run, he did win with his anti-communist writings.
Notes
[1] George W. Armstrong, Memoirs of George W. Armstrong, (Austin, Texas, The Steck Company, 1958) p. 191
[2] Ibid. p. 89
[3] Ibid. p.58
[4] Ibid. p. 229
[5] Ibid. p. 146
[6] p. 63
[7] George W. Armstrong, The Zionists, (Fort Worth, Texas, Judge Armstrong Foundation, 1950) pp. 105/6
George W. Armstrong, Memoirs of George W. Armstrong, (Austin, Texas, The Steck Company, 1958)
George W. Armstrong, The Crime of ’20: The Unpardonable Sin of Frenzied Finance (USA, Press of the Vinney Company, 1922)
George W. Armstrong, The Zionists, (Fort Worth, Texas, Judge Armstrong Foundation, 1950)