One of the central figures of the Bush effort would be James Baker III, Bush's friend of
ten years' standing. Baker's power base derived first of all from his family's Houston law
firm, Baker & Botts, which was founded just after the end of the Civil War by defeated
partizans of the Confederate cause. Judge Peter Gray and Walter Browne Botts
established a law partnership in 1866, and this became Baker & Botts during the 1870's
when James Baker (the great-grandfather of Bush's 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 had found Pike hiding in Canada, and Toombs in
exile in England. Pike was excluded from the general US amnesty for rebels because he
was thought to have induced Indians to commit 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, one Phillip 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 unreconstructed Confederates to secure the
disenfranchisement of black citizens and to promote Anglophile domination of finance
and 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 interests has 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, the discovery of large oil deposits in Texas offered great promise for the future
economic development of the state, but also attracted the Anglo-American oil cartel. The
Baker family law 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 racist
eugenics, and for this purpose brought in Julian Huxley of the infamous British
oligarchical family to found the biology program at Rice starting in 1912. [fn 6] Huxley