dramamine
Well-known member
Reminds me immediately of this excellent tune.
Cracker — The Golden Age - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ9sS6VrD-k
-
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top of the heap to third world status in one generation
- Thread starter Gry
- Start date
Reminds me immediately of this excellent tune.
Cracker — The Golden Age - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ9sS6VrD-k
How FDR Was Manipulated and Betrayed by His Own Naval Intelligence Chief in the Fateful Last Months of WWII
https://covertactionmagazine.com/202...onths-of-wwii/
"In the 1840s, President Roosevelt’s grandfather, Warren Delano, Jr., made a fortune as the American Opium King of China."
We have been lied to about so damned much.
This touches upon only a very small part of
the whoppers they have poured over us
with respect to China.
https://covertactionmagazine.com/202...onths-of-wwii/
"In the 1840s, President Roosevelt’s grandfather, Warren Delano, Jr., made a fortune as the American Opium King of China."
We have been lied to about so damned much.
This touches upon only a very small part of
the whoppers they have poured over us
with respect to China.
How Profits From Opium Shaped 19th-Century Boston
Part one.
On the second day of 1826, an elegant gentleman with a full head of white hair sits down behind a desk -- perhaps at his stately Boston townhouse, or maybe at his Brookline estate.
Thomas Handasyd Perkins, one of Boston's leading merchants, has been taking risks with shipments to China for nearly 40 years. But now, he may have gone too far.
Perkins drafts a letter to his nephew and business partner in the Chinese port city of Canton, now known as Guangzhou. The message is an apology and a warning: More than 150,000 pounds of Turkish opium is on its way.
"As respects Opium I must take all the blame in going as far as we have," writes Perkins, 65, to 39-year-old John Perkins Cushing. "I thought it best to extend ourselves, to prevent intruders; ... I am mortified that the quantity that will go out in the spring so far surpasses y'r wishes."
Thomas Perkins portrait, by Thomas Sully (Courtesy Boston Athenæum)
But the savvy older businessman and the group of relatives who form Perkins and Co. just might be able to handle his overly enthusiastic opium order. The firm has spent more than a decade building an elaborate smuggling operation to protect what's become its most valuable commodity in China.
Perkins and Co. was among the first -- if not the first -- American companies to establish a permanent trading office in Canton. With employees on the scene year-round, the firm can optimize profits on the drug — which is still legal in the United States, but illegal in China.
Company agents store chests filled with squash-size balls of opium in ships anchored offshore, to have some control over supply and price. They develop relationships with smugglers and corrupt top government officials. And they use boats manned by dozens of rowers to speed past inspectors, sneak up the coast, and deliver opium beyond the official port.
The business plan pays off again and again. On Jan. 11, 1827, one year after the apology, Perkins is back at his desk, writing another letter to his nephew. This time the tone is almost giddy.
"I have written and thought so much of opium that it gives me an opiate to enter upon the subject," Perkins tells Cushing.
Perkins may have been high on the money coming in. 1826 turned into a good year. Perkins' wealth is reported to have grown to more than $1 million -- the equivalent of about $25 million today.
In the early 1800s, the Brits controlled 90 percent of the Chinese opium trade. But within the 10 percent of business handled by Americans, Perkins and his brother James had the largest share. They owned at least seven ships, and held interest in others. The ships sailed from Massachusetts shores to Turkey, where they bought opium; from Turkey to China, where they sold the drug; and from China to Boston, loaded with tea, porcelain and silk.
Perkins and Co. alone created fortunes for a network of in-laws, nephews and cousins, says John Rogers Haddad, a professor of American Studies at Penn State University.
"That company generated a tremendous amount of revenue and profit," Haddad says. "Multiple people, not just Thomas Perkins himself, were made millionaires by the trade."
An 1837 plan of the city of Boston by Charles Stimpson (Courtesy of the Cape Ann Museum Library & Archive)
Of course, not everyone struck it rich trading in opium. It was a competitive, highly volatile market. But those who worked for Perkins and a few other firms became the city's elite — otherwise known as Boston Brahmins. The Cabots, Cushings, Welds, Delanos (the grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and Forbes all built fortunes on opium.
"That money changes the face of Boston and makes it possible for Boston to develop a reputation as one of the world's true civic cities," said Salem State University historian Dane Morrison.
In a city steeped in history, very few residents understand the powerful legacy of opium money.
Hospitals, Railroads, Schools: What Opium Profits Funded
Thomas Perkins invested in mills in Newton, an iron manufacturing plant in Vermont and what some historians say was the country's first railroad. It ran from the Quincy Quarry into Boston. Another Perkins' nephew, John Murray Forbes, invested his opium profits in steamships, mines and railroads that would eventually cross the country.
Haddad is among a handful of historians exploring the connection between America’s industrial revolution and the profitable opium trade, dominated by merchants from Boston.
"China had a really strong economy in the early part of the 19th century and the Americans were able to tap into that by exchanging tea for opium," he says. "Opium was really a way that America was able to transfer China’s economic power to America’s industrial revolution."
Perkins' ships deposited tremendous wealth in Boston too. Chests of tea, bolts of silk, crates of porcelain and cakes of opium -- which was legal in the U.S. -- were hauled off ships onto giant scales outside Boston’s Custom House. The goods were tallied and taxed in basements and warehouses around Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. Tax revenue from the trade funded Massachusetts police and fire departments, roads, bridges, courthouses and schools.
Historian Dane Morrison stands in front of Boston's Custom House, where in the 1800s goods from China that had been hauled off ships were weighed on giant scales. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
Opium profits funded many leading Boston institutions. The Perkins brothers helped found Massachusetts General Hospital, McLean Hospital and the Boston Athenæum. The names of other opium barons are engraved on university buildings, high schools and public libraries.
Fred Delano Grant, the great-great-grandson of opium trader Warren Delano, says there's a connection between these merchants' industrial age investments and their charitable giving: They were building a knowledge-based economy.
"They knew that knowledge was how you win" in life and in trade, says Grant, a lawyer and scholar of Chinese trade. And these traders, many of whom came from modest families, "knew that you need an educated group of people to bring an economy forward."
Thomas Perkins had a hand in many civic projects as well. He championed construction of the Bunker Hill Monument, was a major contributor to an orphanage, and he donated one of his homes for a new school that would be called Perkins School for the Blind.
An Unwitting Dependency'
"There was an unwitting dependency in Boston on profits from the opium trade," says Towson University associate history professor Elizabeth Kelly Gray.
But today, that history is largely buried. Most institutions contacted for this story did not know their benefactors got rich selling an illegal drug in China.
Perkins School research librarian Jennifer Arnott did some digging into Thomas Perkins’ business history. He behaved like many merchants, she reasons, and followed demand.
"It really was a sort of awareness that you did the trade that was there and that you looked for the opportunities that made sense for your business at that point," Arnott says.
The Boston Athenæum said, in part, in a statement:
Many Chinese opium traders became pillars of the Boston community. In his eulogy, Perkins is remembered as "one of the noblest specimens of humanity to which our city has ever given birth."
Arnott says the fact that Perkins was trading in opium was probably not a secret in Boston, but the question, “'Is this trade good for the people we’re trading with?' is a more recent philosophical concept.”
There are signs opinion shifted as Perkins aged, which may help explain why opium is not mentioned even once in a memoir compiled by his son-in-law and published in 1856, two years after Perkins' death.
Debating The Morality Of The Opium Trade
But among merchants, there was a robust debate about the morality of selling opium in China, where at least 2 million residents -- and 10 million by some estimates -- were addicted to the drug by the mid-1800s. New York merchant David Olyphant refused to trade opium, calling it "an evil of the deepest dye." Partners at Perkins and Co. made fun of Olyphant.
"God protect me from all the hallowing influence of holy Joe," wrote Murray Forbes, Perkins' nephew, in a memo. "His ships are all commanded by JC - officered by angels and manned by saints."
Part one.
On the second day of 1826, an elegant gentleman with a full head of white hair sits down behind a desk -- perhaps at his stately Boston townhouse, or maybe at his Brookline estate.
Thomas Handasyd Perkins, one of Boston's leading merchants, has been taking risks with shipments to China for nearly 40 years. But now, he may have gone too far.
Perkins drafts a letter to his nephew and business partner in the Chinese port city of Canton, now known as Guangzhou. The message is an apology and a warning: More than 150,000 pounds of Turkish opium is on its way.
"As respects Opium I must take all the blame in going as far as we have," writes Perkins, 65, to 39-year-old John Perkins Cushing. "I thought it best to extend ourselves, to prevent intruders; ... I am mortified that the quantity that will go out in the spring so far surpasses y'r wishes."
Thomas Perkins portrait, by Thomas Sully (Courtesy Boston Athenæum)But the savvy older businessman and the group of relatives who form Perkins and Co. just might be able to handle his overly enthusiastic opium order. The firm has spent more than a decade building an elaborate smuggling operation to protect what's become its most valuable commodity in China.
Perkins and Co. was among the first -- if not the first -- American companies to establish a permanent trading office in Canton. With employees on the scene year-round, the firm can optimize profits on the drug — which is still legal in the United States, but illegal in China.
Company agents store chests filled with squash-size balls of opium in ships anchored offshore, to have some control over supply and price. They develop relationships with smugglers and corrupt top government officials. And they use boats manned by dozens of rowers to speed past inspectors, sneak up the coast, and deliver opium beyond the official port.
The business plan pays off again and again. On Jan. 11, 1827, one year after the apology, Perkins is back at his desk, writing another letter to his nephew. This time the tone is almost giddy.
"I have written and thought so much of opium that it gives me an opiate to enter upon the subject," Perkins tells Cushing.
Perkins may have been high on the money coming in. 1826 turned into a good year. Perkins' wealth is reported to have grown to more than $1 million -- the equivalent of about $25 million today.
In the early 1800s, the Brits controlled 90 percent of the Chinese opium trade. But within the 10 percent of business handled by Americans, Perkins and his brother James had the largest share. They owned at least seven ships, and held interest in others. The ships sailed from Massachusetts shores to Turkey, where they bought opium; from Turkey to China, where they sold the drug; and from China to Boston, loaded with tea, porcelain and silk.
Perkins and Co. alone created fortunes for a network of in-laws, nephews and cousins, says John Rogers Haddad, a professor of American Studies at Penn State University.
"That company generated a tremendous amount of revenue and profit," Haddad says. "Multiple people, not just Thomas Perkins himself, were made millionaires by the trade."
An 1837 plan of the city of Boston by Charles Stimpson (Courtesy of the Cape Ann Museum Library & Archive)Of course, not everyone struck it rich trading in opium. It was a competitive, highly volatile market. But those who worked for Perkins and a few other firms became the city's elite — otherwise known as Boston Brahmins. The Cabots, Cushings, Welds, Delanos (the grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and Forbes all built fortunes on opium.
"That money changes the face of Boston and makes it possible for Boston to develop a reputation as one of the world's true civic cities," said Salem State University historian Dane Morrison.
In a city steeped in history, very few residents understand the powerful legacy of opium money.
Hospitals, Railroads, Schools: What Opium Profits Funded
Thomas Perkins invested in mills in Newton, an iron manufacturing plant in Vermont and what some historians say was the country's first railroad. It ran from the Quincy Quarry into Boston. Another Perkins' nephew, John Murray Forbes, invested his opium profits in steamships, mines and railroads that would eventually cross the country.
Haddad is among a handful of historians exploring the connection between America’s industrial revolution and the profitable opium trade, dominated by merchants from Boston.
"China had a really strong economy in the early part of the 19th century and the Americans were able to tap into that by exchanging tea for opium," he says. "Opium was really a way that America was able to transfer China’s economic power to America’s industrial revolution."
Perkins' ships deposited tremendous wealth in Boston too. Chests of tea, bolts of silk, crates of porcelain and cakes of opium -- which was legal in the U.S. -- were hauled off ships onto giant scales outside Boston’s Custom House. The goods were tallied and taxed in basements and warehouses around Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. Tax revenue from the trade funded Massachusetts police and fire departments, roads, bridges, courthouses and schools.
Historian Dane Morrison stands in front of Boston's Custom House, where in the 1800s goods from China that had been hauled off ships were weighed on giant scales. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)Opium profits funded many leading Boston institutions. The Perkins brothers helped found Massachusetts General Hospital, McLean Hospital and the Boston Athenæum. The names of other opium barons are engraved on university buildings, high schools and public libraries.
Fred Delano Grant, the great-great-grandson of opium trader Warren Delano, says there's a connection between these merchants' industrial age investments and their charitable giving: They were building a knowledge-based economy.
"They knew that knowledge was how you win" in life and in trade, says Grant, a lawyer and scholar of Chinese trade. And these traders, many of whom came from modest families, "knew that you need an educated group of people to bring an economy forward."
Thomas Perkins had a hand in many civic projects as well. He championed construction of the Bunker Hill Monument, was a major contributor to an orphanage, and he donated one of his homes for a new school that would be called Perkins School for the Blind.
An Unwitting Dependency'
"There was an unwitting dependency in Boston on profits from the opium trade," says Towson University associate history professor Elizabeth Kelly Gray.
But today, that history is largely buried. Most institutions contacted for this story did not know their benefactors got rich selling an illegal drug in China.
Perkins School research librarian Jennifer Arnott did some digging into Thomas Perkins’ business history. He behaved like many merchants, she reasons, and followed demand.
"It really was a sort of awareness that you did the trade that was there and that you looked for the opportunities that made sense for your business at that point," Arnott says.
The Boston Athenæum said, in part, in a statement:
Our own legacy, like that of many historic institutions, reveals inherent contradictions. We acknowledge that the Perkins brothers built their fortune at the expense of the lives of others ... while supporting a great number of educational, medical, and cultural causes through their generous philanthropy.
... We encourage our members, researchers, and visitors to engage critically with our rare materials by asking important and sometimes difficult questions.
... We encourage our members, researchers, and visitors to engage critically with our rare materials by asking important and sometimes difficult questions.
Many Chinese opium traders became pillars of the Boston community. In his eulogy, Perkins is remembered as "one of the noblest specimens of humanity to which our city has ever given birth."
Arnott says the fact that Perkins was trading in opium was probably not a secret in Boston, but the question, “'Is this trade good for the people we’re trading with?' is a more recent philosophical concept.”
There are signs opinion shifted as Perkins aged, which may help explain why opium is not mentioned even once in a memoir compiled by his son-in-law and published in 1856, two years after Perkins' death.
Debating The Morality Of The Opium Trade
But among merchants, there was a robust debate about the morality of selling opium in China, where at least 2 million residents -- and 10 million by some estimates -- were addicted to the drug by the mid-1800s. New York merchant David Olyphant refused to trade opium, calling it "an evil of the deepest dye." Partners at Perkins and Co. made fun of Olyphant.
"God protect me from all the hallowing influence of holy Joe," wrote Murray Forbes, Perkins' nephew, in a memo. "His ships are all commanded by JC - officered by angels and manned by saints."
"There was an unwitting dependency in Boston on profits from the opium trade."says Towson University associate history professor Elizabeth Kelly Gray.
But today, that history is largely buried. Most institutions contacted for this story did not know their benefactors got rich selling an illegal drug in China.
Perkins School research librarian Jennifer Arnott did some digging into Thomas Perkins’ business history. He behaved like many merchants, she reasons, and followed demand.
"It really was a sort of awareness that you did the trade that was there and that you looked for the opportunities that made sense for your business at that point," Arnott says.
The Boston Athenæum said, in part, in a statement:
Many Chinese opium traders became pillars of the Boston community. In his eulogy, Perkins is remembered as "one of the noblest specimens of humanity to which our city has ever given birth."
Arnott says the fact that Perkins was trading in opium was probably not a secret in Boston, but the question, “'Is this trade good for the people we’re trading with?' is a more recent philosophical concept.”
There are signs opinion shifted as Perkins aged, which may help explain why opium is not mentioned even once in a memoir compiled by his son-in-law and published in 1856, two years after Perkins' death.
Debating The Morality Of The Opium Trade
But among merchants, there was a robust debate about the morality of selling opium in China, where at least 2 million residents -- and 10 million by some estimates -- were addicted to the drug by the mid-1800s. New York merchant David Olyphant refused to trade opium, calling it "an evil of the deepest dye." Partners at Perkins and Co. made fun of Olyphant.
"God protect me from all the hallowing influence of holy Joe," wrote Murray Forbes, Perkins' nephew, in a memo. "His ships are all commanded by JC - officered by angels and manned by saints."
Jonathan Goldstein, a research associate at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, says Boston merchants defended the trade, "even though they knew it was a debilitating drug that ruined lives." Their thinking, says Goldstein, was that opium was no worse than alcohol and better than other forms of trade, namely: slaves.
Opium was seen as "mild by comparison," Goldstein says.
The Perkins family indeed traded slaves from a base in Haiti in the late 1700s. Business shifted to China and opium in the early 1800s and later some members of the next generation condemned slavery. By the mid-1800s, Murray Forbes had become an active abolitionist. But on the business side, there are strong connections between the slavery and opium trades.
"The kind of expertise they [Perkins and Co.] bring to [opium] in terms of managing goods and finances is something that starts in the slave trade," says Dael Norwood, an assistant professor of history at Binghamton University who studies 19th-century U.S.-China trade.
And money earned selling slaves helped fund the China trade.
"It's the capital that ties it all together," Norwood says.
The Opium Trade's Cultural Legacy
While Boston merchants may not have boasted about what they were selling in China, they did flaunt Chinese goods. Chinese birds and flowers floated across the wallpaper in the drawing room of Perkins' Brookline mansion. Guests entered past tall, ornate ceramic urns and rested on bamboo furniture, covered in silks.
"There’s no doubt that if you were involved in the China trade, you held your head high," says Dan Finamore, a curator of maritime art and history at the Peabody Essex Museum. "It was considered alluring in its way, it was mysterious in its way; it was literally the other side of the world."
The museum houses a substantial collection of jewelry, sculpture, paintings and intricately carved wood furniture traders brought back to Boston, Salem, Newburyport and Fairhaven.
All the places sailors stopped along the way to China seeped into the language, foods and culture of Boston in the early 1800s. Professor Morrison, of Salem State, says it would have been common for a Boston mother to send her son on an errand with these instructions:
"'I need you to go to the bazaar. I need a chou of dungaree and ... bohea. And if you go chop, chop, I’ll give you a cumchou,' " which Morrison translates as "'Go to the market, get me an assortment of spices, and if you're quick, I’ll give you a reward.' "
Opium merchants brought Chinese men and women to Boston to work as cooks, servants and office assistants.
The Boston firms dissolved or stopped doing business with China by the end of the 19th century, but the bonds it created remain. The Keechong Society, a largely social group of families associated with the China trade, formed in the mid-1800s and continued meeting on and off into the early 1970s.
Phyllis Forbes Kerr compiled a book of letters from her great-great-great-grandfather, Robert Bennett Forbes, who was an opium baron. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
Among the descendants of Boston’s opium barons, some never discuss the source of family wealth. Others know the history and tease each other about it.
"The boys in my family, my uncles, were quite wicked to my grandmother," says Phyllis Forbes Kerr, remembering dinners with her grandmother at the Forbes mansion in Milton. It’s now a museum. "We would sit at the table and she would say something about Forbes and they would say, ‘Oh, you mean the drug dealer,’ and she would get really mad."
Kerr collected correspondence from her great-great-great-grandfather, Robert Bennett Forbes, in a book, "Letters from China." Sitting in her Cambridge living room, Kerr opens a map of Boston Harbor, at the height of the China trade. The city is ringed by wharves.
"These are all the ports. You just looked out. There were tons of ships there all the time, I mean it's crazy," Forbes says.
Museums and libraries mount the occasional exhibit about Boston and the China trade but these shows rarely mention opium.
"We've come to a moment where that trade can and should be looked at more closely," says the PEM's Finamore.
Foundations created by the families of opium dealers are funding the work of Binghamton professor Norwood and other historians. Norwood says this signals a willingness to take an honest look at opium as a source of early American wealth. But Norwood says it's hard to say where a reckoning with the legacy of opium profits might lead.
"It’s still in the early stages of people recognizing that this was a thing, as is the case with slave reparations," Norwood says. "We do need to recognize and account for what it means to be the beneficiaries of that money and what that changes about our obligations to the rest of the people in society, including people who were harmed by it."
That’s primarily the Chinese, but Boston would not escape the scourge of opium in the 1800s.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2017/07/31...boston-history
But today, that history is largely buried. Most institutions contacted for this story did not know their benefactors got rich selling an illegal drug in China.
Perkins School research librarian Jennifer Arnott did some digging into Thomas Perkins’ business history. He behaved like many merchants, she reasons, and followed demand.
"It really was a sort of awareness that you did the trade that was there and that you looked for the opportunities that made sense for your business at that point," Arnott says.
The Boston Athenæum said, in part, in a statement:
Our own legacy, like that of many historic institutions, reveals inherent contradictions. We acknowledge that the Perkins brothers built their fortune at the expense of the lives of others ... while supporting a great number of educational, medical, and cultural causes through their generous philanthropy.
... We encourage our members, researchers, and visitors to engage critically with our rare materials by asking important and sometimes difficult questions.
... We encourage our members, researchers, and visitors to engage critically with our rare materials by asking important and sometimes difficult questions.
Many Chinese opium traders became pillars of the Boston community. In his eulogy, Perkins is remembered as "one of the noblest specimens of humanity to which our city has ever given birth."
Arnott says the fact that Perkins was trading in opium was probably not a secret in Boston, but the question, “'Is this trade good for the people we’re trading with?' is a more recent philosophical concept.”
There are signs opinion shifted as Perkins aged, which may help explain why opium is not mentioned even once in a memoir compiled by his son-in-law and published in 1856, two years after Perkins' death.
Debating The Morality Of The Opium Trade
But among merchants, there was a robust debate about the morality of selling opium in China, where at least 2 million residents -- and 10 million by some estimates -- were addicted to the drug by the mid-1800s. New York merchant David Olyphant refused to trade opium, calling it "an evil of the deepest dye." Partners at Perkins and Co. made fun of Olyphant.
"God protect me from all the hallowing influence of holy Joe," wrote Murray Forbes, Perkins' nephew, in a memo. "His ships are all commanded by JC - officered by angels and manned by saints."
"There was an unwitting dependency in Boston on profits from the opium trade."
Elizabeth Kelly Gray, Towson University professor
Elizabeth Kelly Gray, Towson University professor
Jonathan Goldstein, a research associate at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, says Boston merchants defended the trade, "even though they knew it was a debilitating drug that ruined lives." Their thinking, says Goldstein, was that opium was no worse than alcohol and better than other forms of trade, namely: slaves.
Opium was seen as "mild by comparison," Goldstein says.
The Perkins family indeed traded slaves from a base in Haiti in the late 1700s. Business shifted to China and opium in the early 1800s and later some members of the next generation condemned slavery. By the mid-1800s, Murray Forbes had become an active abolitionist. But on the business side, there are strong connections between the slavery and opium trades.
"The kind of expertise they [Perkins and Co.] bring to [opium] in terms of managing goods and finances is something that starts in the slave trade," says Dael Norwood, an assistant professor of history at Binghamton University who studies 19th-century U.S.-China trade.
And money earned selling slaves helped fund the China trade.
"It's the capital that ties it all together," Norwood says.
The Opium Trade's Cultural Legacy
While Boston merchants may not have boasted about what they were selling in China, they did flaunt Chinese goods. Chinese birds and flowers floated across the wallpaper in the drawing room of Perkins' Brookline mansion. Guests entered past tall, ornate ceramic urns and rested on bamboo furniture, covered in silks.
"There’s no doubt that if you were involved in the China trade, you held your head high," says Dan Finamore, a curator of maritime art and history at the Peabody Essex Museum. "It was considered alluring in its way, it was mysterious in its way; it was literally the other side of the world."
The museum houses a substantial collection of jewelry, sculpture, paintings and intricately carved wood furniture traders brought back to Boston, Salem, Newburyport and Fairhaven.
All the places sailors stopped along the way to China seeped into the language, foods and culture of Boston in the early 1800s. Professor Morrison, of Salem State, says it would have been common for a Boston mother to send her son on an errand with these instructions:
"'I need you to go to the bazaar. I need a chou of dungaree and ... bohea. And if you go chop, chop, I’ll give you a cumchou,' " which Morrison translates as "'Go to the market, get me an assortment of spices, and if you're quick, I’ll give you a reward.' "
Opium merchants brought Chinese men and women to Boston to work as cooks, servants and office assistants.
The Boston firms dissolved or stopped doing business with China by the end of the 19th century, but the bonds it created remain. The Keechong Society, a largely social group of families associated with the China trade, formed in the mid-1800s and continued meeting on and off into the early 1970s.
Phyllis Forbes Kerr compiled a book of letters from her great-great-great-grandfather, Robert Bennett Forbes, who was an opium baron. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)Among the descendants of Boston’s opium barons, some never discuss the source of family wealth. Others know the history and tease each other about it.
"The boys in my family, my uncles, were quite wicked to my grandmother," says Phyllis Forbes Kerr, remembering dinners with her grandmother at the Forbes mansion in Milton. It’s now a museum. "We would sit at the table and she would say something about Forbes and they would say, ‘Oh, you mean the drug dealer,’ and she would get really mad."
Kerr collected correspondence from her great-great-great-grandfather, Robert Bennett Forbes, in a book, "Letters from China." Sitting in her Cambridge living room, Kerr opens a map of Boston Harbor, at the height of the China trade. The city is ringed by wharves.
"These are all the ports. You just looked out. There were tons of ships there all the time, I mean it's crazy," Forbes says.
Museums and libraries mount the occasional exhibit about Boston and the China trade but these shows rarely mention opium.
"We've come to a moment where that trade can and should be looked at more closely," says the PEM's Finamore.
Foundations created by the families of opium dealers are funding the work of Binghamton professor Norwood and other historians. Norwood says this signals a willingness to take an honest look at opium as a source of early American wealth. But Norwood says it's hard to say where a reckoning with the legacy of opium profits might lead.
"It’s still in the early stages of people recognizing that this was a thing, as is the case with slave reparations," Norwood says. "We do need to recognize and account for what it means to be the beneficiaries of that money and what that changes about our obligations to the rest of the people in society, including people who were harmed by it."
That’s primarily the Chinese, but Boston would not escape the scourge of opium in the 1800s.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2017/07/31...boston-history
Part two.
As The Opium Trade Boomed In The 1800s, Boston Doctors Raised Addiction Concerns
n the early 1800s, many Boston merchants became millionaires in part by selling opium illegally in China. The profits funded Boston-area schools, libraries, hospitals and early ventures into the industrial revolution, creating a financial dependence on the opium trade.
The opium trade fueled an epidemic in China — and there are signs the merchants unwittingly fed addiction in Massachusetts.
Take this editorial in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (BMSJ), forerunner of the New England Journal of Medicine. It was published in 1833, during the peak period when Boston merchants were sailing to Turkey to buy opium, stopping in China to sell the drug, then returning home with tea, silk, porcelain and some opium.
The editorial from Sept. 4, 1833, begins with this question:
The author, a doctor, says he asks the questionon behalf of a young woman who was prescribed opium to treat "a slight nervous irritation." She's become "a bound and servile slave" to the drug, and alarmed to realize she must increase her dose to avoid feeling sick. For almost a year, the doctor has tried everything he can think of, including substituting other drugs and attempting to wean the patient off opium. But she, "whilst under a course of gradual reduction or of substitution, convulsed for hour after hour in every muscle, and vomiting almost with intermission."
This 2011 photo shows the entrance to the Boston editorial offices of the New England Journal of Medicine -- previously the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. (Michael Dwyer/AP)
Physicians today would recognize these ascommon symptoms of detox or withdrawal. And it appears doctors in 1833 were becoming familiar with this stage of opium addiction as well. Comments about the "opium habit" and suggestions about how to treat the woman poured in to the journal offices in Boston, above what is now the Downtown Crossing MBTA station.
"Starting with the next issue, you see a flood of doctors saying, 'Hey, I also know people that are addicted to opium. Here’s what I’ve done to treat them and this is actually a bigger problem than we realize,' " says Jonathan Jones, a Ph.D. history candidate at Binghamton University.
The First Addiction Warnings
The conversation triggered by the 1833 editorial is astonishingly similar to those taking place in hospitals, pharmacies and doctor's offices today. Most doctors who wrote in to the BSMJ divided patients into two categories: those who became addicted as a result of a physician's prescription, and those who took opium without consulting a doctor, perhaps just for fun.
Those early 19th century doctors argue they are obligated to help patients who get hooked on a medicine, but not those seeking a thrill. Jones says some doctors dismissed patients who were too poor to see a doctor, especially women and immigrants, and purchased opium directly from a pharmacist.
"They were not worthy of doctors intervening and trying to help them," says Jones, whose work explores the way physicians defined the "right and wrong" kinds of addiction patients.
A month into the conversation, back in 1833, a physician from Northampton, Dr. C.L. Seeger, raises an issue that is still controversial in some circles: Is opium addiction an illness or the sign of a weak, immoral character?
"I consider this practice generally a real and complicated disease," writes Seeger, who says he's certain he can "prove the correctness of the definition just given, at least to every unbiased mind."
Thus began the first robust warnings about opium addiction in Massachusetts. The conversation revealed a problem: Physicians and pharmacists were dispensing opium without regard for its potentially dangerous effects.
"Most of this would be what we would think of now as prescription drug abuse," says Elizabeth Kelly Gray, associate history professor at Towson University.
Laudanum was commonly used as a painkiller and a sedative in 19th-century America. (Courtesy U.S. National Library of Medicine)
Opium was becoming one of, if not the most common medicine of the time.
"The tendency was to keep laudanum [a liquid form of the drug] on hand the way we keep Tylenol today," Gray says.
There were no limits on the drug's use and no restrictions on who could purchase it. Twelve-year-olds might stop at a druggist to pick up a bottle for their mother. In a typical case of addiction, a patient would start taking laudanum or opium pills to treat a headache, insomnia, diarrhea, stomach pains, cholera or a toothache, "and then three years later the person is still using it," Gray says.
Historians do not have records that connect patients who were becoming addicted directly to opium unloaded on Boston wharves. But the traders returning from China are a likely source of the drug.
"They do bring home small supplies of opium, usually what they can’t sell in China," says Sam Houston State University historian Thomas Cox.
In diaries, opium merchants mention taking it themselves.
"They just simply refer to it as the drug or the blue pills," Cox says. "Opium was compressed into these small pills, which you could make in a chemist’s shop very easily."
It's not clear how much opium was coming into Boston in the early 1830s, when doctors sound the alarm.
"It was enough to keep a medicinal trade going," says Jonathan Goldstein, a research associate at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
David Courtwright, author of "Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America," estimates the annual total for all U.S. ports was just over 27,000 pounds a year between 1827 and 1842. Boston merchants were the dominant American opium traders.'Opium Habit ... Prevalent In Many Parts Of The State'
The conversation about opium addiction continues in the BMSJ through the 1830s and into the next decade. Many writers warn about accidental overdoses. One writer argues that a mother or her apothecary should be held responsible for the death of a 3-month-old infant given drops of an alcohol-based opium medicine.
Poems about opium use appear in Boston literary journals, including Maria White Lowell's "An Opium Fantasy" and Rose Terry Cooke's "Poppies."
The first stanza of "An Opium Fantasy"
Opium addiction does not reach epidemic proportions in the U.S. until the late 1800s. It was a legacy of the Civil War, when the opium derivative morphine was widely distributed to both Confederate and Union soldiers. But Courtwright says the real driver was the introduction of hypodermic needles, which delivered strong doses of morphine that produced immediate relief and were overused.
Massachusetts would not be particularly hard hit during this opium epidemic, but as it builds, state public health officials worry. Doctors and pharmacists report that opium consumption is increasing every year and urge the state to prepare for this insidious foe.
Dr. Fitch Edward Oliver, a physician at what was then Boston City Hospital, distributes a questionnaire to physicians and druggists across Massachusetts. He compiles the results in an essay called "The Use and Abuse of Opium," which is included in the state's third annual health report, published in 1872. Some communities say they do not have anyone addicted to opium, but Oliver concludes that "the opium habit is more or less prevalent in many parts of the state."
In Boston, he says "two prominent druggists each have six habitual users" and "in parts of the city where those addicted to the habit mostly reside, the sales are much larger." In Worcester, "one druggist reports that opium is used to an alarming extent." And in Chicopee, in western Massachusetts, "the druggists report a great many regular customers."
Oliver says women, particularly those in rural areas, appear to be at greatest risk, which he blames more on moral than physical causes.
"Doomed, often, to a life of disappointment, and, it may be, of physical and mental inaction, and in the smaller and more remote towns…deprived of all wholesome social diversion, it is not strange that nervous depression, with all its concomitant evils, should sometimes follow,-opium being discreetly selected as the safest and most agreeable remedy,” Oliver writes.
Again, as in 1833, doctors responding to questions about addiction in 1872 say, according to Oliver, it is "caused by the injudicious and often unnecessary prescription of opium."
Historians say it was a change in prescribing behavior that brought the post-Civil War epidemic to an end.
"Doctors became much more circumspect about prescribing," says Courtwright, who teaches history at the University of North Florida. "Even before the federal government intervened with the 1914 Harrison Narcotic Act, the medical profession was becoming much more cautious about prescribing opiates."
Courtwright says he’s been surprised to see another opium epidemic, driven by over-prescribing, emerge in the U.S. — and disturbed because this one is more complicated.
"One thing a morphine addict in 1890 didn’t have was a massive alternative supply of something like heroin," says Courtwright. "Now increasingly that cheap heroin is spiked with cheap and potent synthetics, like fentanyl."
Most of that fentanyl or the ingredients used to make it are produced in China and shipped to the U.S.
"In the 19th century, China was widely seen as a drug consumer nation. Now, in the early 21st century, it is a producer nation, especially when it comes to drugs like fentanyl," Courtwright says. "There is a kind of bitter irony in that."
As The Opium Trade Boomed In The 1800s, Boston Doctors Raised Addiction Concerns
n the early 1800s, many Boston merchants became millionaires in part by selling opium illegally in China. The profits funded Boston-area schools, libraries, hospitals and early ventures into the industrial revolution, creating a financial dependence on the opium trade.
The opium trade fueled an epidemic in China — and there are signs the merchants unwittingly fed addiction in Massachusetts.
Take this editorial in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (BMSJ), forerunner of the New England Journal of Medicine. It was published in 1833, during the peak period when Boston merchants were sailing to Turkey to buy opium, stopping in China to sell the drug, then returning home with tea, silk, porcelain and some opium.
The editorial from Sept. 4, 1833, begins with this question:
Is there any sure and safe method of curing a person of the habit of opium [use], when that habit is confirmed by many years' of use of the article?
The author, a doctor, says he asks the questionon behalf of a young woman who was prescribed opium to treat "a slight nervous irritation." She's become "a bound and servile slave" to the drug, and alarmed to realize she must increase her dose to avoid feeling sick. For almost a year, the doctor has tried everything he can think of, including substituting other drugs and attempting to wean the patient off opium. But she, "whilst under a course of gradual reduction or of substitution, convulsed for hour after hour in every muscle, and vomiting almost with intermission."
This 2011 photo shows the entrance to the Boston editorial offices of the New England Journal of Medicine -- previously the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. (Michael Dwyer/AP)Physicians today would recognize these ascommon symptoms of detox or withdrawal. And it appears doctors in 1833 were becoming familiar with this stage of opium addiction as well. Comments about the "opium habit" and suggestions about how to treat the woman poured in to the journal offices in Boston, above what is now the Downtown Crossing MBTA station.
"Starting with the next issue, you see a flood of doctors saying, 'Hey, I also know people that are addicted to opium. Here’s what I’ve done to treat them and this is actually a bigger problem than we realize,' " says Jonathan Jones, a Ph.D. history candidate at Binghamton University.
The First Addiction Warnings
The conversation triggered by the 1833 editorial is astonishingly similar to those taking place in hospitals, pharmacies and doctor's offices today. Most doctors who wrote in to the BSMJ divided patients into two categories: those who became addicted as a result of a physician's prescription, and those who took opium without consulting a doctor, perhaps just for fun.
Those early 19th century doctors argue they are obligated to help patients who get hooked on a medicine, but not those seeking a thrill. Jones says some doctors dismissed patients who were too poor to see a doctor, especially women and immigrants, and purchased opium directly from a pharmacist.
"They were not worthy of doctors intervening and trying to help them," says Jones, whose work explores the way physicians defined the "right and wrong" kinds of addiction patients.
A month into the conversation, back in 1833, a physician from Northampton, Dr. C.L. Seeger, raises an issue that is still controversial in some circles: Is opium addiction an illness or the sign of a weak, immoral character?
"I consider this practice generally a real and complicated disease," writes Seeger, who says he's certain he can "prove the correctness of the definition just given, at least to every unbiased mind."
Thus began the first robust warnings about opium addiction in Massachusetts. The conversation revealed a problem: Physicians and pharmacists were dispensing opium without regard for its potentially dangerous effects.
"Most of this would be what we would think of now as prescription drug abuse," says Elizabeth Kelly Gray, associate history professor at Towson University.
Laudanum was commonly used as a painkiller and a sedative in 19th-century America. (Courtesy U.S. National Library of Medicine)Opium was becoming one of, if not the most common medicine of the time.
"The tendency was to keep laudanum [a liquid form of the drug] on hand the way we keep Tylenol today," Gray says.
There were no limits on the drug's use and no restrictions on who could purchase it. Twelve-year-olds might stop at a druggist to pick up a bottle for their mother. In a typical case of addiction, a patient would start taking laudanum or opium pills to treat a headache, insomnia, diarrhea, stomach pains, cholera or a toothache, "and then three years later the person is still using it," Gray says.
Historians do not have records that connect patients who were becoming addicted directly to opium unloaded on Boston wharves. But the traders returning from China are a likely source of the drug.
"They do bring home small supplies of opium, usually what they can’t sell in China," says Sam Houston State University historian Thomas Cox.
In diaries, opium merchants mention taking it themselves.
"They just simply refer to it as the drug or the blue pills," Cox says. "Opium was compressed into these small pills, which you could make in a chemist’s shop very easily."
It's not clear how much opium was coming into Boston in the early 1830s, when doctors sound the alarm.
"It was enough to keep a medicinal trade going," says Jonathan Goldstein, a research associate at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
David Courtwright, author of "Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America," estimates the annual total for all U.S. ports was just over 27,000 pounds a year between 1827 and 1842. Boston merchants were the dominant American opium traders.'Opium Habit ... Prevalent In Many Parts Of The State'
The conversation about opium addiction continues in the BMSJ through the 1830s and into the next decade. Many writers warn about accidental overdoses. One writer argues that a mother or her apothecary should be held responsible for the death of a 3-month-old infant given drops of an alcohol-based opium medicine.
Poems about opium use appear in Boston literary journals, including Maria White Lowell's "An Opium Fantasy" and Rose Terry Cooke's "Poppies."
Opium addiction does not reach epidemic proportions in the U.S. until the late 1800s. It was a legacy of the Civil War, when the opium derivative morphine was widely distributed to both Confederate and Union soldiers. But Courtwright says the real driver was the introduction of hypodermic needles, which delivered strong doses of morphine that produced immediate relief and were overused.
Massachusetts would not be particularly hard hit during this opium epidemic, but as it builds, state public health officials worry. Doctors and pharmacists report that opium consumption is increasing every year and urge the state to prepare for this insidious foe.
Dr. Fitch Edward Oliver, a physician at what was then Boston City Hospital, distributes a questionnaire to physicians and druggists across Massachusetts. He compiles the results in an essay called "The Use and Abuse of Opium," which is included in the state's third annual health report, published in 1872. Some communities say they do not have anyone addicted to opium, but Oliver concludes that "the opium habit is more or less prevalent in many parts of the state."
In Boston, he says "two prominent druggists each have six habitual users" and "in parts of the city where those addicted to the habit mostly reside, the sales are much larger." In Worcester, "one druggist reports that opium is used to an alarming extent." And in Chicopee, in western Massachusetts, "the druggists report a great many regular customers."
Oliver says women, particularly those in rural areas, appear to be at greatest risk, which he blames more on moral than physical causes.
"Doomed, often, to a life of disappointment, and, it may be, of physical and mental inaction, and in the smaller and more remote towns…deprived of all wholesome social diversion, it is not strange that nervous depression, with all its concomitant evils, should sometimes follow,-opium being discreetly selected as the safest and most agreeable remedy,” Oliver writes.
It was a change in prescribing behavior that brought the post-Civil War opium epidemic to an end.
Oliver suggests that opium addiction may be on the rise in reaction to the prohibition of alcohol. A temperance movement that lead to a ban on the sale and manufacturing of alcohol in Maine in 1851 was spreading across the country. But the Massachusetts Board of Health says nothing in Oliver's paper proves "that any clear connection exists between this evil and a legally enforced abstinence from the use of alcoholic stimulant."Again, as in 1833, doctors responding to questions about addiction in 1872 say, according to Oliver, it is "caused by the injudicious and often unnecessary prescription of opium."
Historians say it was a change in prescribing behavior that brought the post-Civil War epidemic to an end.
"Doctors became much more circumspect about prescribing," says Courtwright, who teaches history at the University of North Florida. "Even before the federal government intervened with the 1914 Harrison Narcotic Act, the medical profession was becoming much more cautious about prescribing opiates."
Courtwright says he’s been surprised to see another opium epidemic, driven by over-prescribing, emerge in the U.S. — and disturbed because this one is more complicated.
"One thing a morphine addict in 1890 didn’t have was a massive alternative supply of something like heroin," says Courtwright. "Now increasingly that cheap heroin is spiked with cheap and potent synthetics, like fentanyl."
Most of that fentanyl or the ingredients used to make it are produced in China and shipped to the U.S.
"In the 19th century, China was widely seen as a drug consumer nation. Now, in the early 21st century, it is a producer nation, especially when it comes to drugs like fentanyl," Courtwright says. "There is a kind of bitter irony in that."
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/564442-senate-panel-adds-25b-to-bidens-defense-budget
$25 billion added to defense with the snap of a finger. zero "how are you going to pay for that" rhetorical points made like they endlessly do/did with Bernie Sanders' proposals. this charade is tiresome.
$25 billion added to defense with the snap of a finger. zero "how are you going to pay for that" rhetorical points made like they endlessly do/did with Bernie Sanders' proposals. this charade is tiresome.
It is a fair point (how are we going to pay for that)… 10% yearly inflation means the poor must survive on 10% less each year as wages are the last thing to rise….
is it a coincidence that Inflation jumps to the highest point in 40 years just after the creation of trillions of US dollars (20% of all US dollars ever conjured were conjured in the last year)
I do agree I’d rather create inflation by giving made up money to the poor than giving made up money to the military to waste on preparing against drummed up bullshit “enemies”
is it a coincidence that Inflation jumps to the highest point in 40 years just after the creation of trillions of US dollars (20% of all US dollars ever conjured were conjured in the last year)
I do agree I’d rather create inflation by giving made up money to the poor than giving made up money to the military to waste on preparing against drummed up bullshit “enemies”
It's not a fair point lol inflation is only ever mentioned when the far right doesnt want to do anything and to make the other party look bad because they're gatekeepers and don't want their taxes raised.
Inflation happens regardless. Raise peoples wages and adjust for inflation. Boom problem solved.
Also Bernie's entire platform was paid for
Inflation happens regardless. Raise peoples wages and adjust for inflation. Boom problem solved.
Also Bernie's entire platform was paid for
.............
Active member
What is with the hard on for the term 'third world' lol
source: the meme
Chronic Inflammation is Insidious and Dangerous. You May Not Even Know You Have It.
People often learn they have it when by developing an autoimmune disease. But the ailment might also play a role with heart disease, cancer, other disorders.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/...ven-know-you-have-it?utm_source=pocket-newtab
People often learn they have it when by developing an autoimmune disease. But the ailment might also play a role with heart disease, cancer, other disorders.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/...ven-know-you-have-it?utm_source=pocket-newtab
.............
Active member
They said inflation not inflammation hehe
funkyhorse
Well-known member
As long as the world keeps subsidizing the dollar by using it as the world savings and trade currency I doubt anyone in Usa be it the far right, center or far left, be it fiscals or judges wont say a peep.
But if the world changes this amazing habit of using the Us dollar as the main world currency from one day to the other, instead of peep you will smell a lot of poop coming from all politicians and all the judiciary
But if the world changes this amazing habit of using the Us dollar as the main world currency from one day to the other, instead of peep you will smell a lot of poop coming from all politicians and all the judiciary
Operation Fox Hunt: How China Exports Repression Using a Network of Spies Hidden in Plain Sight
https://www.propublica.org/article/...idden-in-plain-sight?utm_source=pocket-newtab
https://www.propublica.org/article/...idden-in-plain-sight?utm_source=pocket-newtab
What is Pegasus spyware and how does it hack phones?
Pegasus can infect a phone through ‘zero-click’ attacks, which do not require any interaction from the phone’s owner to succeed.
NSO Group software can record your calls, copy your messages and secretly film you
https://www.theguardian.com/news/20...-does-it-hack-phones?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Pegasus can infect a phone through ‘zero-click’ attacks, which do not require any interaction from the phone’s owner to succeed.
NSO Group software can record your calls, copy your messages and secretly film you
https://www.theguardian.com/news/20...-does-it-hack-phones?utm_source=pocket-newtab
How is this legal?
Frito-Lay worker Brandon Ingram was severely electrocuted on the job, disabled and denied medical care.
Now Brandon, his wife, and children are being stalked and secretly filmed by company agents.
This is the most disturbing Frito-Lay story we’ve covered.
(8 minute video in link)
https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/st...47374531895296
Frito-Lay worker Brandon Ingram was severely electrocuted on the job, disabled and denied medical care.
Now Brandon, his wife, and children are being stalked and secretly filmed by company agents.
This is the most disturbing Frito-Lay story we’ve covered.
(8 minute video in link)
https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/st...47374531895296
