Chauncey Marvin Holt’s Lament

And was he working for Propoganda Master and Denazitifation OSS and Office of Scientific Information Donald Barr?

Donald Barr, who was born in Manhattan on Aug. 2, 1921, majored in mathematics and anthropology at Columbia, graduating in 1941. He went into the Army and served with the Office of Strategic Services in Washington and Europe.

Returning to Columbia, he taught in the English department while getting his master’s degree in 1951 and completing course requirements for a Ph.D. But by then he was teaching courses with field work in sociology and political science at the School of Engineering and writing science and mathematics texts for elementary and junior high school students.

…

Hard to tell if he crossed paths with OSS and CIA propogandists of Joseph Kennedy Sr.

His US Army Air Force dream was not realized and he felt both he and the government had a role in that.

In 1939 as Poland is being invaded and the USSR joins the war against Germay Holt is on an applachia bible belt college getting his degree writing his Catholic mother poems about the sufferings of Poland. At this time though they had no V-12 Navy College Training Program or Army Specialized Training Program that would come a few years later but Holt had some family problems that led him into the Bible-Belt abolitionist school that was quite unique. He had three uncle’s convicted of murder in the Great Depression fighting to make money in the Cirucs business and in bootlegging both of which were dangerous.

In the years before that he had run away from home to live as a Hobo in a era many hobos existed and traveled in large numbers often at odds with the towns they crossed through – starving and at odds with security who sometimes they outnumber and the brutality went back and forth. It does not seem odd he would later go undercover as Hobo he knew the life well having spent years as one.

One of his dreams was to fly and the US Army Air Corp was enlisting very soon as the war was breaking out later and Pearl Harbor happened and even recruits were being taken before that.

Ted Gundeson wrote about the FBI having “Control Jackets” on assets they blackmail or force into work for the FBI. Over the years Holt would continue ties to liquor runners and his fitness (coming from strike breakers as well as liquor runners) and while he was proud as a circus acrobat and perhaps popular as a liquor supplier both landed him in trouble and he was a pawn for the rest of his life after getting into a fight while undergoing flight training.

I will just copy his word for word tale of that from here.

…

SELF-PORTRAIT OF A SCOUNDREL

CHAPTER FOUR

My First Big Mistake

In October of 1939, after sampling too much of the potent brew I was hauling, I came under the spell of a persuasive recruiter and, in a fit of patriotism, mixed with temporary insanity and diminished capacity; I joined the U.S. Army Air Corps, the so-called “brown shoe” air force, which was the forerunner of our global air force. At that time it was a part of the Signal Corps.

In a lifetime of mistakes, entering the service at this particular time stands out as the colossal blunder of my life. The pre-war services were little better than being in jail and one had just about the same rights as were accorded the accused in the pre-Gideon days.

I simply did not adjust to service life and, as a consequence I was continually in trouble and became what is referred to as a “yardbird.” I was in and out of the stockade on a regular basis and was AWOL almost as often as not.

I continued delivering whiskey, on an intermittent basis, however, to supplement the $21.00 a month that I was drawing in pay, if and when I served a trouble free month. I was planning to buy myself out of the service, which was permitted in those days for $120.00, when the Selective Service Act was enacted and the practice was discontinued.

The services, at that point in time, were infested with misfits and incompetents, who could not get, or hold, a job on the outside. The hazing of recruits, especially those designated for flight training, many of whom were expected to be “washed out,” was actually brutal.

One pot-bellied drill instructor, by the name of Latta, seemed to have singled me out and rode me unmercifully.

One morning, when we fell out for close order drill, Latta was in an especially foul mood, his uniform was in disarray and he reeked of alcohol. I, too, had celebrated a little too much the night before and it was an inopportune time to be singled out for a dressing down, in front of the class.

As Latta started his inspection, I discerned, at once, that he was in a very dangerous frame of mind. I tried my best to blend in with the assembled group. As Latta strode down the ranks, he nearly passed me. However, when he focused his bloodshot eyes on me, I knew that I was in for trouble. He pushed his whiskey ravaged visage, as close to mine as he could, roared at me, “Get your chin out — get you gut in — get your slimy eyes off me.”

This was the last straw. I swung at Latta, with my Springfield; he ran across the quadrangle, with me hitting him, with the butt of the heavy rifle, at every jump. Only the arrival of the M.P.s kept me from making a complete cripple out of, or perhaps, killing this miserable wretch.

Naturally, I was given a general court martial, which was amazingly brief, since the outcome was a foregone conclusion. I was not afforded a defense counsel, and I can still hear the sing-song delivery ofthe president of the court: “To be dishonorably discharged from the service, to forfeit all pay and allowances due or to become due and to be confined at hard labor at such place as the reviewing authority may direct for the term of five years.”

Next stop — the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, just over the hill from Leavenworth Penitentiary, where life was much easier, I assure you.

In those years, a prisoner did “hard time” at this medieval institution, which could only be compared to Alcatraz, the military prison, converted to civilian use, at the whim of that faggot, J. Edgar Hoover, to house what he called “rats and vermin.” Hoover, undoubtedly, heartily approved of the treatment meted out at the Barracks. However, after seven months in that hellhole, the Reviewing Authority felt that there had been extenuating circumstances in my case and my sentence was reduced from five years to one year, and I was restored to duty, although I was not permitted to resume flight training. I was assigned to the newly formed Armored Force School at Fort Knox, Ky., which was commanded by Brigadier General Adna . Chaffee, considered to be one of the fathers of the armored forces and an avid student of Heinz Guderian, father of the Panzer Units and the blitzkrieg.

With my reputation, as having been restored to duty from Leavenworth, it was almost impossible for me to adjust to army life. I was assigned the dirtiest details, referred to as a “yardbird” and I was continually in trouble. I was in and out of the stockade for fighting numerous times. I was AWOL from time to time, when I ran whiskey, and engaged in other risky activities. I was AWOL when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and installations throughout the Pacific on that “day of infamy,” December 7, 1941. I returned to duty the next day.

Up until that time, I had mixed emotions, regarding the involvement of America in the war that was raging in Europe. On the one hand, I felt it was imperative that America mobilize, because it seemed inevitable that the U.S. would be drawn into the conflict. On the other hand, I recalled a debate, when I was attending Berea College, between socialist Norman Thomas and Robert Hutchins, whose father, William J. Hutchins, was, at that time, president of Berea. The audience was extremely hostile to Thomas, who made one statement that has remained with me all these years. In his booming voice, Thomas stated that, however noble the cause, America once mobilized and militarized would never be demobilized and demilitarized.

What a prophetic statement!

I continued to do my best to perform the duties expected of me at the Armored Force School, but it was extremely difficult, in the circumstances.

CHAPTER FIVE

FBI Justice

In January 1942, I encountered an old whiskey running buddy of mine, who was also in the service, stationed at Fort Knox. He was driving a spectacular 1940 Ford coupe that he said belonged to his cousin, who was also stationed at Fort Knox and supplemented his meager $21 a month stipend from Uncle Sam by hauling whiskey, just as I did. This vehicle was outfitted with an aluminum Edelbrock head, triple carburetors and high speed Columbia rear end. The rear springs made the car “stand on its head.” It was obvious that the car had been modified to haul whiskey. Even the FBI could see that. The auto was a delight to drive.

My friend and I decided to take a trip, in the car, from Louisville to visit my cousin, who lived in Covington, Ky., just across the Ohio river from Cincinnati. We did go over into Ohio, but we did not drive the car, since neither of us had a driver’s license. We left the car, parked at my cousin’s house and took the bus across the river.

We stayed two days and returned to Louisville. By this time, we had overstayed our three day passes, and were AWOL, which was no big deal. It would only result in KP duty for a week or two. My friend decided to return to Fort Knox that day, but I decided to stay over the weekend. My buddy told me I could keep the car to drive, and I could return it to him, when I returned to the post on Sunday night.

Unfortunately, I was involved in a fight in Stony’s Night Club, a local juke-joint, and was picked up by the MP’s and placed in a special holding cell in the Jefferson County Jail to be returned to Fort Knox, with dozens of other soldiers, picked up in the sweep by the MP’s. I made the mistake of turning over the keys, to the car I was driving, to the authorities, and asked them if they would advise my buddy at Fort Knox, so that he, or his cousin, could pick up the car.

Sometime later, I was visited by two “clones,” who questioned me at great length, about my recent activities, and where the car had been driven. They never identified themselves; I never bothered to ask, since I had nothing to hide, and answered all their questions openly and candidly. They seem particularly interested as to whether or not we had picked up any teenage girls, during our trip to Ohio. At this time, they did not ask, nor did I volunteer, the information that the car had not been driven over the state line into Ohio.

After I had been interrogated for a considerable period of time, the two gentlemen identified themselves as Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and advised me that the car I had surrendered, of my own free will, had been reported stolen.

The FBI then arrested my buddy at Fort Knox, and he proceeded to corroborate my story, but, for some strange reason, the agents were not the least bit interested. We found out years later that my rap buddy’s cousin had a third occupation — he was an informer for various law-enforcement agencies.

Unable to make bail, my rap buddy and I remained in jail from January to May 1942, before we came to trial. The only legal advice that either of us could avail ourselves of was from the “jailhouse” lawyers, who were unanimous in their opinions that, considering the evidence; the fact that we were in the service; that we had never been convicted by a civil authority and there was a war on, we would “walk.”

Also, they felt that the fact that we were barely out of our teens, and had been in jail for months, would be to our advantage. We presented facts to the FBI, which should have convinced them that we had not violated the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act, which made it a federal offense to transport a stolen vehicle across state lines. They interviewed my cousin in Covington, and she corroborated our stories, that the car, alleged to have been stolen from my rap buddy’s cousin, was parked on the Kentucky side of the river, while we visited relatives in Cincinnati, who also advised the agents that we did not arrive at their residence on Erkenbrecker Avenue by automobile.

What no one appreciated, at the time, was the fact that convictions for the Dyer Act was the FBI’s main claim to fame, along with the shooting down, often in cold blood, a bunch of depression era gangsters, such as Floyd, Nelson, Dillinger, the Barkers, Bonnie and Clyde etc.

In the end, we were charged with multiple counts of having violated the Dyer Act. The FBI claimed that we had crossed several state lines, violating the Dyer Act each time. This made it appear that they had broken a major car theft ring, when, in fact, at the very worst, it was a case of two youthful servicemen, joyriding in an automobile, which they returned, voluntarily, to the state, not the FBI. The agents involved testified in court that we admitted our guilt,
but they failed to record our confessions.

Decades later, I availed myself of the Freedom of Information Act and obtained the records of this case from the files of the FBI. These records indicated that the Commonwealth of Kentucky refused to prosecute the two of us for car theft, and that the FBI expended an inordinate number of man hours, in trying to develop evidence that we transported the car over the state line from Kentucky to Ohio. All the time, the two of us were languishing in the Jefferson County Jail, noted for its inhuman treatment of prisoners.

It appears conflicting that the agents are claiming on the one hand, that we have admitted our guilt and on the other, as indicated by the FBI records, that agents were working diligently, trying to prove that the car was taken across state lines. They even traveled to Cincinnati to interview witnesses for this purpose; and yet they finally were forced to rely on our unrecorded “confessions.” Finally, J. Edgar Hoover, personally, sent a wire to the Special Agent in Charge of the Louisville office to demand why the two of us had not been charged.

Can you imagine that? America is in the throes of a desperate fight for survival; there are fifth columnists and saboteurs on the docks of New York, threatening the shipment of troops; U-boats are sinking tankers within sight of the Jersey coast, based on information supplied to them by traitors in the U.S. and the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the agency charged with the responsibility of protecting our shores, takes the time to send a cable, inquiring why two errant soldiers have not been prosecuted.

Hoover, of course, was a master of straddling the gap, between his wishes and the evidence. In one celebrated case, when justice department offcials, who were, in theory, at least, his superiors, were pressing him for resolution of a matter, which was pending, he fell back on his usual excuse, “It is not, of course, the province of the FBI to make any prosecutive recommendations.”

This, as is apparent, was a lie; when the FBI wants a prosecution to proceed, it invariably does; when it does not, for any reason, want the culprit prosecuted, the matter is closed. The files are replete with examples of this, as is pointed out later in the book from personal experience.

Despite our youth, the fact that this was our first offense and we were members of the wartime military, a very unsympathetic e sentenced us to two years in the U.S. Industrial Reformatory at Chillicothe, Ohio.

This was my first taste of the judicial system, which I, at once, realized was, not only blind, as depicted, but deaf and dumb, as well. This fact was graphically brought home to me when the same judge, on the same day, sentenced a very notorious swindler, Wallace Groves, to less time in jail for a million dollar mail fraud scheme, that he did two soldiers, joyriding in a stolen automobile. The fact that I turned the car over to the authorities, voluntarily, and the statements of our witnesses meant nothing to the judge. Also, no evidence was developed to prove that the car ever left the State of Kentucky, except the unsupported testimony of the agents, which, in violation of Hoover’s own ironclad rules, was never recorded. The Bureau falsely imprisoned us for no other reason but to make their statistics look good for PR and budgetary purposes.

When asked on the witness stand, “How did you get the keys to the car,” the agent, in charge oft he investigation, indicated that the keys were found on my person, and that they were turned over to them by the MP’s and they searched all over Louisville, until they found a car that the keys fit. They then ran the plates, and discovered that the car had been reported stolen.

Now does that sound like a plausible story? Is that masterful police work or not? FBI agents were treated like gods, due to Hoover’s very effective public relations staff, and their word was treated as if chiseled in stone. So what, if a couple of kids were sent off to prison. It would undoubtedly do them good, the judge probably reasoned.

After my parole in December of 1942, I reported to my parole offcer, and was given virtually the same information, regarding my draft status; it would take special permission for me to re-enter the service. My PO advised me to get a job in a defense plant, if I was serious about doing my bit for the war effort.

In my naivete, I believed that I had paid my debt to society; overpaid, in fact, since I was not guilty of the charge of which I was convicted. Subsequent events shortly shattered my aspirations, beyond repair, as door after door was closed to me, because of the stigma attached to having a record. It was apparent to me that the vindictive head of the FBI had, for all intents and purposes ruined my life and this caused me to develop a corrosive skepticism.
I still had a tenacious hold on past ideals, which was difficult to let go of. I was teetering, precariously, between a world that was lost, that only existed in my desperate aspirations — and the world looming on the horizon, unable to relinquish one; unable, therefore to enter the other. My reverence for the simplicity of the world, as I had perceived it, and my feeble attempts to recapture it, were discarded for all time, at that point, and, as I stated previously, the die was cast.

I was employed as a time study engineer, doing time and motion studies of riveters, welders, burners and those other workers, who were paid on a piece rate basis.

[Now in a strange turn of events Chauncey Holt the Illustrtator is going to help anthropoligists and medical texts.]

While working in Baltimore, I honed my artistic skills and earned some extra money by doing anatomical drawings, mainly for textbook publishers, like Williams and Wilkins.

I worked on the twenty fifth edition of Gray’s Anatomy, and illustrated the works of such prominent scientists as Adolph Schultz, a noted anthropologist, and William Straus, who was the head of the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. One of the more interesting projects, which took me almost two years to complete, was an ambitious project undertaken by Schultz and involved the drawing of all the famous fossil finds such as The Java Man (Pithecantrophus Erectus), The Peking Man(Sinanthropus Pekenensis), The Piltdown Man, The Heidelberg Jaw and many others.

This was drawn on mat board with India ink, a very laborious process, but extremely fascinating.

In conjunction with this massive drawing of prehistoric man, I did drawings of the three ethnic types of modern man, as well as the more primitive types, such as the Australian aborigines, the Bushmen from the Kalahari Desert and the American Eskimo. One of the finds, that had a fascinating history, was the fossil find, referred to as Eoanthropus Dawsoni,(“Dawson’s Dawnman”), after the barrister who foisted off this fake on the cream of the anthropological world such as Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, Sir Arthur Keith and other intellectual giants of the day.

Charles Dawson was an amateur anthropologist, who actually co- mingled the skull of a relatively modern man with the mandible of a chimpanzee in the same geological strata.

I had spent many long hours drawing, not only the human skull, including the mandible, but also all of the great apes, as well. I could have drawn them in my sleep.

The mandible of the great apes, including the chimpanzee, articulates with the skull in an entirely different manner than does the human mandible. The great apes are unable to chew in a rotary fashion, as man does, due to what is called a post glenoid process that prevents them from chewing other than in an up and down fashion. In man the bony knob on the mandible, called the condyle, slips out of its socket, during chewing, and on to a small plateau, called the articular imminence and rolls around in a rotary fashion.

Dawson knew this and he broke off the condyle, so that it was impossible to fit the jaw, which had the simian shelf, present in apes but absent in humans, to the skull. In their desire to find a valid specimen of pre-historic man in England, all of the greatest anthropologists of the day, such as Sir Arthur Keith and Arthur Smith Woodward, rushed to authenticate Dawson’s find. It was a classic example of the wish being father to the thought.

Written By The Right Hand

Views: 46