Secretary of State) joined the firm.
Baker & Botts founder Peter Gray had been Assistant Treasurer of the Confederate States of
America and financial supervisor of the CSA's "Trans-Mississippi Department." Gray, acting on
orders of Confederate Secretary of State Robert Toombs, financed the subversive work of
Confederate general Albert Pike among the Indian tribes of the southwest. The close of the war in
1865 hathe general US amnesty for rebels because he was thought to have induced Indians to commitd found Pike hiding in Canada, and Toombs in exile in England. Pike was excluded from
massacres and war crimes.
Pike and Toombs re-established the "Southern Jurisdiction" of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, of
which Pike had been the leader in the slave states before the war of the rebellion. Pike's deputy, onePhillip C. Tucker, returned from Scottish Rite indoctrination in Great Britain to set up a Scottish rite (^)
lodge in Houston in the spring of 1867. Tucker designated Walter Browne Botts and his relative
Benjamin Botts as the leaders of this new Scottish Rite lodge. [fn 5]
The policy of the Scottish Rite was to regroup unredisenfranchisement of black citizens and to promote Anglophile domination of finance andconstructed Confederates to secure the (^)
business. By the beginning of the twentieth century, there wre two great powers dominating Texas:
on the one hand, the railroad empire of E.H. Harriman, served by the law firm of Baker & Botts;
and on the other, the British-trained political operative Colonel Edward M. House, the controller of
President Woodrow Wilson. The close relation between Baker & Botts and the Harriman interestshas remained in place down to the present. And since the time that Captain Baker founded the
Texas Commerce Bank, the Baker family has helped the London-New York axis run the Texas
banking system.
In 1901, tdevelopment of the state, but also attracted the Anglo-American oil cartel. The Baker family lawhe discovery of large oil deposits in Texas offered great promise for the future economic
firm in Texas, like the Bush and Dulles families in New York, was aligned with the Harriman-
Rockefeller cartel. Robert S. Lovett, a Baker & Botts partner from 1882 on, later became the
chairman of Harriman's Union Pacific Railroad and chief counsel to E.H. Harriman. The Bakers
were prominent in supporting eugenics and utopian-feudalist social engineering.
Captain James A. Baker, so the story goes, the grandfather of the current boss of Foggy Bottom,
solved the murder of his client William Marsh Rice and took control of Rice's huge estate. Baker
used the money to start Rice University and became the chairman of the school's board of trustees.
Baker sought to create a center of diffusion of raHuxley of the infamous British oligarchical family to found tcist eugenics, and for this purpose broughthe biology program at Rice starting in in Julian
- [fn 6] Huxley was the vice president of the British Eugenics Society and actually helped to
organize "race science" programs for the Nazi Interior Ministry, before becoming the founding
Director General of UNESCO in 1946-48.
James A. Baker III was born April 28, 1930, in the fourth generation of his family's wealth. Baker
holdings have included Exxon, Mobil, Atlantic Richfield, Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil
of Indiana, Kerr-McGee, Merck, and Freeport Minerals. Baker also held stock in some large New
York banks during the time that he was negotiating the Latin American debt crisis in his capacity as
Secretary of the Treasury. [fn 7]
Baker grew up in patrician surroundings. His social profile has been described as "Tex-prep." Like
his father, James III attended the Hill School near Philadelphia, and then went on to Princeton,
where he was a member of Ivy Club, a traditional preserve of Eastern Anglophile Liberal
Establishment oligarchs. Nancy Reagan was enchanted by Baker's sartorial elegance and smooth