Americans in Europe

(Part 6)

In last week’s column I said the story I wanted to tell was how England wound up with German kings and that the story begins in Heidelberg, where we spent the first three days of our journey.

Reading a first draft of this week’s column, my wife, Culley Jane, a retired university professor of languages and a stickler for details, complained that they were not “German” kings.

“That’s what I’ve always called them,” I pleaded.

She wouldn’t budge. “Your father is French-Canadian. Your mother is Swedish. When you met people when we were in Europe you didn’t tell them you were French-Canadian or Swedish. You said you were an American.”

She had a point. She always does. We were Americans in Europe.

In 1714, when England got its first “German king,” there was, actually, no such place as “Germany,” so to speak. All of that land mass was divided up into dozens of princely domains, each ruled by local members of a larger family living in castles throughout the Holy Roman Empire. Not until Bismarck came along in the late 19^th century did Germany become Germany as we think of Germany today.

England’s first “German king,” George I, was born in one of those princely states – Hanover, a muddy two-day’s journey by horse and carriage from Heidelberg. His mother had been born in the Netherlands. His mother’s mother had been born in Scotland. So, technically speaking, England’s first “German king” was no more German than I’m French-Canadian or Swedish. More correctly, he was the first of the Hanover line of English kings, succeeding the Plantagenets, the Tudors and the Stuarts and preceding the Windsors. Actually, all of the intermingled blood lines of all of Europe’s royalty for all of what my teachers called “World History” is traced by them back to a common pool that becomes clearly distinct around the time of Charlemagne. It’s an infinitely complex story and useful background material, but my interest in it begins with a family from Hanover and how they became kings of England.

Obviously, as a newspaper reporter, I must think it’s an important story -- bigger than Hoffa -- or I wouldn’t be spending the dozens of hours of my retirement years thinking and researching and writing about it. Certainly, the mainstream press is not covering the story. I’ve never seen anything of substance about the Hanovers in the Denver Post. Maybe with the recent coronation there might have been a sidebar attached to a back page story about the Hanoverian line preceding the Windsors. If there was, I missed it.

I’ll bet that if I went out on the street to ask people what they thought about the Hanover story they’d say things like they had better things to think about. Like: “The Air Force Academy is nearby and maybe there’ll be a nuclear war and we’ll be a first-strike target….” Or, “The Nuggets just won the NBA title…” Or, “Mom broke her hip…” Or, “Fifty bucks to fill a compact! Can you believe it? German kings ruling England? Never heard of it. The Hanovers, you say? Don’t know noth’n ‘bout it.”

I’ve known the outlines of the story for a long time and it didn’t take me long to realize it was a big story, maybe the biggest in the word. I smelled a Pulitzer and a spot on the Johnny Carson Show. Colleagues used to say I had a nose for news, an instinct. I always thought it was because I grew up in a small town at the edge of the woods where you need to first get the lay of the land before you go out there.

I first learned about the Hanovers in the late 80s, before I became an over-the-road trucker. I was an investigative reporter at a major metro in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. I tried to push interest in the story at editorial board meetings but was brushed aside like one of the girls from the society department who had to write about weddings and teas. So, it’s not the peoples’ fault that they don’t know about it. Some of them are plumbers and their minds are filled with different categories of information. On the street, they’re only repeating what they hear and read in all the news that’s fit to print.

It was only by luck that I ever even heard about the Hanover story.  The “S&L Crisis” was big news at the time, especially in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The Speaker of the House was Jim Wright. He was from Fort Worth and had gotten himself mixed up in the thing. Me and a couple of the other investigative reporters were told to keep an eye on the situation.

That’s when I first started to learn about economics. I did what I had been told to do when I was a rookie reporter starting out at a small town daily near the Michigan/Indiana border -- “Follow the money.” An old-timer who’d covered Capone told me that… go down the money trail, follow Dorothy’s yellow brick road to the curtain.

At first, the kinetic motion of paper money during the S&L years came at our investigative team like a blinding snow storm, icy crystals flying all over the place. Its appearance was chaotic, hurried, random. But soon it became obvious that appearances can be deceiving; like the randomness had been created by a coherent, but unseen mind.

We were starting to learn that the money was magically winding up in the pockets of crooks like Boesky and Milken and mobsters out of New Orleans and Jersey, even Denver where the President’s son was mixed up in it. I figured it couldn’t be happening just by chance, an infinity of accidents.

Taxpayers were on the hook for the bills.

While the other reporters were going to press conferences and writing about trials and localizing the national news coming out of Washington, I started wandering down a trail that looked to be leading towards a cedar swamp as the sun was going down, like in Hemingway’s Two Heart River stories. Should I camp for the night, or keep going?

I did what the old-timer had told me to do -- I kept going and it turned out to be like getting a peek behind the scenes of a movie while it was still being produced at the Paramount or the Warner Brothers studios in southern California where Brando might show up for work in the morning hung over. It wasn’t anything like what people were seeing in darkened movie houses. It was another world. Another perspective.

The trail led me back to England at the dawn of the 18^th century around the time when two institutions -- the Bank of England and the British East India Company -- were becoming significant world players. Benjamin Franklin was born around that time. Franklin would one day clash with the new British institutions and their influence over Parliament and George III, the third king of the Hanoverian line, grandson of George I.

The Hanovers became the ruling monarchs during the high times of the British Empire, wearing crowns studded with rare minerals extracted from the earth by the labor of other people scattered about the four corners of the globe. How, I wondered, had they pulled it off? They hadn’t started out from even the most powerful of the princely states. They could hardly conquer a neighbor, let alone a continent. How, I wondered? Then it came to me. I did what the old timer had told me to do. I followed the money and it didn’t take me long to figure it out

It was the same deal as with the S&L situation. They were all in on it – the trading companies, the bankers and Parliament and the kings that soldiers pledged their allegiance to. Using threats and bribes, pretty much the first thing they did wherever they created another colony was to tell the locals what money was, and what it was not. Kind of like telling them what religion they had to be if they wanted to get something to eat at the grocery store.

That’s what England tried to do to Abraham Lincoln. We had just fought the Mormon Wars in Utah and were still fighting Indians, so the national Treasury was empty when suddenly Lincoln had to raise and equip a million-man army. England’s banks, flush with gold from the Crown’s worldwide “possessions,” told Lincoln they’d lend him the money to do it… at interest rates above twenty percent! Lincoln said no thanks. The country would have to slave for a hundred years to pay it back. Instead, Lincoln decided to redefine what money was. He was the president of a sovereign nation state and with the consent of Congress he issued Greenbacks and said it was money and we won the war.

FDR did essentially the same thing in the 30s with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. And we won the war.

It was simple. But by the late 80s, sitting at my desk in the newsroom of a big city newspaper peering beneath the surface complexities of the S&L Crisis, I couldn’t make myself shake the disquieting feeling that we were, like, losing something.

And it seemed like a big story to me.

But not to my bosses.

The big boss pulled out his wallet and slammed a twenty on the table. “That’s money!” he growled like Lou Grant. “Everybody knows what it is. Anybody who says it might be something different gets drummed out of here as a crackpot. There’s no room in this business for crackpots.”

In the end, it was me who had to go. I didn’t mind too much. I’d always thought that I’d like to be an over-the-road trucker. Time to think and I had lots to think about.

Fast forward thirty years and I’m suddenly retired, have my own newspaper with a couple of readers in a few different countries and can write what I want. Like Marx said, acquire the means of production.

Obviously, you don’t want to waste anybody’s time writing about things that don’t matter, so you go with the big story.

The story of the Hanovers' rise to power fit the bill.

But I had to have what we called a “news peg,” something to hang the story on. I couldn’t just run a front page banner headline: “ENGLAND HAD A GERMAN KING,” especially now that I know the truth. Maybe I could get away with it if I was running the National Enquirer. Reporters are always tempted to not let the truth get in the way of a good story. But I want to run a newspaper built on the old ethic of the “general welfare.”

Thanks to Culley Jane I got my news peg. She’s the one who first suggested that we should go to Europe and take our 15-year-old granddaughter so she could turn 16 in Paris. As a trucker, I got to go “every where man.” But I’d never been to Europe. Then, all of a sudden I’m standing on a busy street corner in Heidelberg looking at tourist brochures when, boom, right there in front of me… the news peg hits me!

I didn’t know it before I got there, but that’s when I realized that Heidelberg was where the big story really began when a 16-year-old Scottish girl first saw Heidelberg Castle. I could write at the level of a tourist from Texas wearing a big cowboy hat… I could write from that perspective and get the big story out there that way, sort of like the hidden message in secret code. I own the newspaper. I can write what I want. Like Franklin. An American.