“It is a stern fact of history that no nation that rushed to the abyss ever turned back. Not ever, in the long history of the world. We are now on the edge of the abyss. Can we, for the first time in history, turn back? It is up to you."
-Taylor Caldwell, 1957.
I once heard Taylor Caldwell’s 1972 novel Captains and the Kings described as one of the most telling - and chilling - tales ever penned of how power, privilege and politicking really works at the very top. I made a mental note and promptly forgot it. My faulty memory was tweaked the other day when I came across a battered copy of the 816-page novel in a little neighbourhood library. I got home and opened this brick of a book at random. The binding split and pages began falling out. Could this half-century old curio, with its potboiler cover art, have any relevance to the present times?
I was surprised and impressed by what I read.
The central character of the book, Joseph Francis Xavier Armagh, is a penniless, twelve year-old Irish Catholic immigrant when he arrives in the promised land of America. In his final years he is an immensely rich and powerful man, who tries to orchestrate his eldest son Rory’s ascent into the US Senate.
My comments interspersed with quotes from the book below.
His father had shown him one day. "Here," he had said, "and in their quarters in other capitals, lies the real power of the world, and here it is decided what the world will do.”
“Without benefit of elections and the people's will, of course,” Rory had said. His father had looked at him sharply and with disgust. “Don't be a fool, Rory," he had said. "Sometimes you sound like child. Elections and the people's will, for God's sake! When were they ever of any consequence?”
Rory knew that the Committee for Foreign Studies had some three hundred members in nearly every country in the world, all bankers or industrialists, politicians and financiers, and that they had meeting places in every capital and that those meetings were discreet and unostentatious and that the general public was unaware of them.
- Captains and the Kings
The novel spans the late 19th to early 20th century. The Federal Reserve bank is just one of the glorious inventions of the circle to which patriarch Joseph belongs, with some ambivalence.
They controlled interests in almost all the important newspapers in the world, appointed writers for those newspapers, and editors, directed editorial policy. They were the real owners of publishing houses, of magazines, of all the media that guided public information. They were the ones who really appointed the Cabinets of Presidents, and the Ministers to government in nearly all other countries. They controlled elections, built up their candidates, financed them, everywhere in the world. Any presumptuous or intrepid man who did not meet with their approval was lampooned in the press, discreetly libeled, or exposed. The politicians, themselves, were often quite unaware of who had advanced or destroyed them. Even Presidents did not always know. Kings and emperors sometimes were vaguely aware of the momentous shadow that hung over their thrones and decided the destinies of their nations, and many were quite convinced that should they denounce that shadow they would be exiled, or perhaps even assassinated. The grip on events was not iron, but it was equally pervasive and persuasive, as soft and silent as mist which concealed invincible armies. They were never quoted in the press concerning politics or wars or other policies. There was never any public opinion except through their manikins, who were excellently chosen for their popularity with the people.
- Captains and the Kings
Secret meetings…Invisible Government..exile…assassination. It reads like a 70’s dispatch from David Icke in diapers. Needless to say, the colourfully paranoid picture painted by Caldwell differs radically from the monotone canvas offered by legacy media, past and present. While reporters and editorialists will occasionally make passing reference to highly influential groups led by unelected figures, from Blackrock to the Bank of International Settlements to the “Plunge Protection Team,” they rarely examine the beginnings, reach or membership of such organizations. And they’ve never been up for digging into claims about any sort of unofficial, rumoured bodies - like the one painted by Caldwell - which leave smoking ruins rather than paper trails.
In this mainstream picture, there are no circles of concealed influence, certainly not ones that can alter the course of history. The historical record is ‘one damn thing after another’, with nation states stumbling from war to war and recession to depression, blown about on the winds of inflationary spirals, resource problems and bad leadership. And always - always! - with some foreign man, movement or microbe presenting an existential threat to the domestic population.
As for powerful, unelected bodies - from the alphabet agencies to the banking sector and beyond - representative democracy can and will weather their lapses and excesses. In theory anyway, what with a brave free press offering its hard-hitting revelations of crime and corruption to the electorate. (Alas, being the swine they are, they perennially fail to respond appropriately to such pearls.) So counsels the legacy media, which is undeniably objective on these matters, being the legacy media and all.
So who actually offers more in the way of meta-fiction: the late Caldwell or the current fourth estate?
The gentlemen had many weapons and never hesitated to use them, on kings, emperors, princes, Popes and Presidents. Sometimes it needed but one emphatic event. Sometimes it needed coups d'tat. But whatever was needed was ruthlessly and invincibly employed, not only as a punishment but as a warning to others. Revolution was one of their weapons, and "popular uprisings," and incendiaries and attacks on the forces of law and order.
Rory knew all about this Invisible Government which decided the destinies of nations, their survival or their obliteration, for his father had told him. Moreover, he had taken political science in college, which, while it did not reveal the enemies of mankind and their peace and security, hinted at it. “The world really exists on money and on nothing else,” a professor had told his students. “This is a fact of human existence which must be acknowledged, however we might wish to protest. Some call manifestations of it commerce. Some call it politics. Some call it it 'spontaneous movements of the People.' Some call it 'revolutionary change of governments.' Some call it holy wars in behalf of freedom. But all these things are implacably plotted by the men who really rule us, and not our ostensible elected administrations. It is a matter of money. Even the most unworldly of idealists comes face to face with that fact eventually. If he can be used he will be financed. He then deludes himself that worthy and compassionate persons, or whatever,' have come to his aid in the Name of the People. If he does not meet with approval, if he honestly believes that there should be some other motivation for the energies of man besides simple greed--if he believes that the nature of man can be exalted to heroic proportions--then he is destroyed by public laughter and public ignominy and it is suggested that he is insane. If he is an authentic hero his fate is much worse: obscurity. His name will never be mentioned in the public means of communication. What he writes and says will never again be known by the people. He is consigned to Limbo.”
- Captains and the Kings
The idea that powerful interests work behind the scenes to gently (or not so gently) pull the strings of politicians, policy wonks, publishers and pundits has always been mocked by legacy media as unhinged silliness at best, and dangerous lunacy at worst (even with things advancing considerably over time, with governments and media worldwide falling under greater and greater regulatory capture).
I imagine for respectable commentators of the time, Caldwell’s triptych of power, privilege and politics must have resembled a cross between Heironymous Bosch and Dr. Seuss.
Yup:
“Secrets … secrets … They grow like fungi in Taylor Caldwell's jungle of a novel,” begins a brief 1972 New York Times review of Captains and the Kings. “Yes, there is something here for the birds,” the reviewer sniffs, after tossing in a major plot spoiler like a grenade.
The men of the Invisible Government were wiser in their understanding of human nature than were the men who cheerfully believed that humanity could be advanced, could be totally human. “Give a dog a bone and he will happily crunch on it and never know what is going on about him,” Rory was to hear that day in London. “Nor will he care.” They supplied the bones, as Rory finally understood, and the good men who protested were blown into silence by hurricanes of public-induced laughter, or were assassinated. The Invisible Government controlled public opinion over assassinations. They sometimes made the murdered man a hero--and attributed to him opinions which only confirmed their own powers. All that he had wished o warn his people against was obliterated in a rose shower of sentimentality, or was perverted against those who had stood with him in fighting the enemies of his country. This Rory learned on the January day he met the dangerous men in London and began to understand them. They did not speak of "assassinations," for they were delicate gentlemen, and decorous. But the implications were there. They did not speak of controlling governments. They spoke of "information" and "guidance" to rulers.
- Captains and the Kings
Author Janet Miriam Holland Taylor Caldwell was born in 1900 in Manchester, England and moved with her family to Buffalo, New York in 1907. At the age of six, she won a medal for an essay on Charles Dickens and began writing stories at the age of eight. Astoundingly, she completed her first novel when she was twelve.
Caldwell was said to be one of the most prolific and widely read authors of the 20th century. Her novels sold an estimated 30 million copies. It could have been more: according to Time magazine, her husband burned the manuscripts of 140 unpublished novels in 1947.
Captains and The Kings was on the New York Times bestseller list for months - in spite of the newspaper’s own poor review - and was adapted into an eight-part TV miniseries by NBC in 1976. I’d love to know how much of the plot line survived the transition to prime time.
"They are all bastards," Joseph had told his son. "They are, without doubt, the wickedest men on earth, though I am sure they would be astonished to hear they were wicked. They might even be outraged. Many, am sure, even believe in God and support churches, and this is no hypocrisy on their part. I remember what Disraeli, the Prime Minister of England, said about them, with some surprise, ‘The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes!’
- Captains and the Kings
There’s an interesting interpretation on the Wiki page for The Captains and Kings (spoiler alert): “The saga nears its end when Armagh’s success in making his eldest son, Rory (modeled after John Fitzgerald Kennedy), become a senator fails. When Rory is going to become the first Catholic President of the United States, he is then assassinated by the cabal of the rich and powerful.”
This makes sense, since the father is Joseph, and the patriarch of the Kennedys was also Joseph. It appears Caldwell tried to speak the unspeakable by dressing 60’s parapolitics in early 20th century garb. Truth in the guise of a lie. If there is a major difference between her picture of the recent past and our troubled present, it’s that ‘public ridicule’ through social media makes covert assassination plots a bit redundant. Twitter mobs don’t need much incentivizing to cancel and professionally assassinate, to say nothing of Twitter’s own ‘community standards,’ which lump hate speech in with troublesome information from authoritative sources. The same applies to other portals.
That said, there are obviously still oases on the Internet where free speech still prevails.
Rory sat among the men of whom his father had told him, he understood completely what his father had meant: That it was very probable that they did not consider themselves in the least wicked or reprehensible or evil or amoral. They had looked upon the world and made that world their own. They were a a criminal conspiracy, but they did not regard themselves as either criminal or conspirators. They were businessmen, realists. What gave them power was, in their eyes, virtuous and righteous and reasonable, for who was more worthy than themselves to control and manipulate the world of men? Someone had to rule, and who better than men of intellect, money, strength, and unemotional judgment? But what could they do, thought Rory now as he listened with youthful deference to the gentlemen about the table, if the tens, hundreds, of millions of people opposed them? Call out their mercenaries in every country in the world, their armies, their navies, which they control? Could they slaughter a whole planet? But there was no danger of that, of the corrupted people rebelling, for the people never learned or knew the names of their enemies, of those who ordered wars or their cessation, of those who threw down or raised up governments, of those who inflated or devalued money, who decided who was to live and who to die or be exiled. In fact, the people would not care under any circumstances SO long as their tiny pleasures and tiny needs were met. It was such an ancient story: bread and circuses. Benevolent despotism accompanied by an entertaining show of elections and plebiscites- which meant nothing at all.
- Captains and the Kings
I don’t want to end this piece on an entirely dark note, so here’s a different angle on these matters with a bigger picture in mind. Two decades after the publication of Captains and the Kings, the incendiary comic Bill Hicks prowled American comedy club stages, raging against unaccountable power while remaining a relatively marginal figure in pop culture. I’ll leave the last words to him.
Though out of print for years, Caldwell’s book now available here.
Yikes! I remember this book dimly, but thanks for reviving its corpse for us. Caldwelll is a fascinating figure and clearly, the book's message is stating something that should be obvious: we are ruled by Potemkin Villagers...
Great find Geoff. Reminds me of the truths so clearly there in C.C Lewis's Cosmic Trilogy which I then was surprised to find acknowledged by a guest presenter on Info Wars, not something I usually watch, but the guy being a literature expert by the name of Jay Dyer gave a pretty insightfull summery of why this trilogy speaks so pertinently about the power structures that exist in the world today, their machiavellian motivations, and the kind of errors of judgement we can make to lead us down that path.