How one Lower Manhattan address connected the Bolshevik Revolution, the New Deal, and the rise of the Third Reich — and what the tenant list tells us about power in the twentieth century.
In 1915, General T. Coleman du Pont completed a massive new office building on the block bounded by Broadway and Pine Street in Lower Manhattan. The Equitable Office Building — thirty-four floors, occupying an entire city block — replaced an earlier structure destroyed by fire. The Equitable Life Assurance Company moved back to its old site. Bankers, attorneys, railroad men, and industrialists filled the upper stories. On the thirty-fourth floor sat the Bankers Club, a private dining room where New York’s financial class conducted international policy over lunch.
The address was 120 Broadway.
Historian Antony C. Sutton spent decades working through government archives, congressional testimony, State Department decimal files, and corporate records. Across three volumes — Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (1974), Wall Street and FDR (1975), and Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (1976) — Sutton traced a pattern so consistent that it could have formed the entire evidentiary spine of his research without venturing far from that single address. The directors, the corporate boards, the capital flows: they kept pointing back to 120 Broadway.
The Tenant List as a Map of Power
In 1917, the building housed the headquarters of the No. 2 District of the Federal Reserve System — the New York district, by far the most consequential in the system. Of nine directors on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, four maintained offices at 120 Broadway. Two of those four directors sat simultaneously on the board of the American International Corporation. The AIC itself occupied offices in the building, as did Guaranty Securities, several Westinghouse subsidiaries, and MacGregor Grant Company (the U.S. representative for Russo-Asiatic interests, financed by Guaranty Trust).
Ludwig Martens, appointed by the Soviet government as its first representative in the United States and head of the Soviet Bureau, held his day job in 1917 as vice president of Weinberg & Posner — also at 120 Broadway.
Sutton posed the question directly:
“Is this concentration an accident? Does the geographical contiguity have any significance?”
His answer required the reader to abandon the left-right political spectrum altogether.
The American International Corporation and the Bolshevik Revolution
The American International Corporation was organized on November 22, 1915, by J.P. Morgan interests, with major participation from Stillman’s National City Bank and the Rockefeller group. Its charter authorized it to engage in any kind of business, except banking and public utilities, in any country in the world. Frank Vanderlip, president of National City Bank, described in his memoirs the excitement the venture generated on Wall Street. William Rockefeller tried to subscribe for five million dollars in common stock. Ogden Armour, after hearing the pitch in silence, committed half a million dollars and a board seat without asking a single question.
By 1917, the AIC operated on a substantial scale in Russia, China, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, and a dozen other countries. Four AIC directors — Saunders, Stone, Wiggin, and Woodward — either served on or later joined the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. William Boyce Thompson, a director of the FRB of New York, contributed one million dollars of his personal funds to the Bolshevik cause and personally intervened with British Prime Minister David Lloyd George on behalf of the revolutionary government.
Within weeks of the November 1917 seizure of power — long before even a fraction of Russian territory fell under Soviet control — the State Department asked AIC executive secretary William Franklin Sands for his assessment. Sands expressed strong support for the new regime. A separate memorandum from Morgan associate Dwight Morrow, sent directly to Lloyd George, also urged backing for the Bolshevik forces.
William Lawrence Saunders, chairman of Ingersoll-Rand, director of the American International Corporation, and deputy chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — all at 120 Broadway — wrote to President Woodrow Wilson on October 17, 1918, declaring himself “in sympathy with the Soviet form of Government.” He disclaimed any commercial motive, insisting he was not “preparing now to get the trade of the world after the war.”
Sutton documented this statement from U.S. government files. The letter exists. The man who signed it held three positions of enormous power, and all three organizations operated from the same building.
The Guaranty Trust Company — a J.P. Morgan subsidiary whose directors overlapped heavily with those of both the AIC and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — served as a primary financial vehicle for these activities. Guaranty Trust backed Ludwig Martens and his Soviet Bureau; served as the first Soviet fiscal agent in the United States; received the first shipments of Soviet gold to arrive on American soil; and helped organize Ruskombank, the first Soviet international bank. A vice president of Guaranty Trust was installed as Ruskombank’s first vice president in charge of foreign operations. The man who co-directed the German bank involved in these same arrangements, Emil Wittenberg, sat on the Ruskombank board alongside Max May of Guaranty Trust. These transactions occurred in direct violation of State Department prohibitions against extending credit to the Soviet Union — a policy that remained in force until Roosevelt took office in 1933.
The operational logic was straightforward. A state-run economy eliminates market competition by design. Bankers who installed a centralized authoritarian regime in Russia created, in Sutton’s framework, a single state-owned corporation with which to transact on terms of their choosing — locking out smaller competitors and European rivals who lacked comparable political access.
A minor but telling detail surfaces in the building’s own corporate genealogy. The cashier of the Berlin office of Equitable Life — the company that gave 120 Broadway its name — was William Schacht, father of Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, the man who later served as Hitler’s personal banker and the financial architect of the Third Reich’s rearmament. Before joining the Nazi cause, the younger Schacht served on a Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council — a soviet — in the Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf. The interlock between the Equitable Building and the Schacht family represents a thread Sutton traced across all three volumes: the same financial families, the same buildings, the same transnational networks — operating across ideological boundaries that the public assumed were impenetrable.
FDR, the Swope Plan, and Corporate Socialism
Sutton’s second volume tracks the same address into the 1920s. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, after his 1921 polio attack, maintained his office at 120 Broadway as vice president of the Fidelity and Deposit Company. Biographer Frank Freidel recorded why: the building had only one small step up from the sidewalk. Roosevelt could manage it alone, preserving the public image of physical strength that mattered deeply to him. The grand staircases at his law office on 52 Wall Street were out of the question.
Inside the Equitable Office Building, Roosevelt worked within an environment where men had already articulated the framework that would become his signature domestic program. Bernard Baruch’s office occupied space at 120 Broadway. Hugh Johnson, later the administrator of the National Recovery Administration, served as Baruch’s research assistant at the same address. The executive offices of General Electric were in the building, and it was GE President Gerard Swope who authored the plan that became the foundation of Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Herbert Hoover, writing in his memoirs, identified the origin plainly: “Among the early Roosevelt fascist measures was the National Industry Recovery Act (NRA) of June 16, 1933. The origins of this scheme are worth repeating. These ideas were first suggested by Gerard Swope of the General Electric Company . . . following this, they were adopted by the United States Chamber of Commerce.”
The Swope Plan allowed the largest industrial corporations to write their own legally binding regulations, price controls, and production limits — bypassing antitrust laws under the banner of national recovery. The NRA formalized this arrangement into federal law. Small and mid-sized businesses, lacking representation at the drafting table, found themselves bound by rules their largest competitors had written. Senator James A. Reed of Missouri, an early Roosevelt supporter who grew disillusioned, attacked the program on the Senate floor as a “tyrannical” measure “leading to despotism,” and charged that Roosevelt was “a hired man for the economic royalists” on Wall Street. Reed added that the Roosevelt family ranked among the largest stockholders in General Electric. The Supreme Court struck down the NRA as unconstitutional in 1935 — but by then the precedent for government-enforced cartelization had been set, and the men who designed it had demonstrated what could be accomplished from a single office building.
The conventional account frames the New Deal as a populist rescue mission. Sutton’s documentary record shows a top-down restructuring of the American economy, drafted by corporate executives at 120 Broadway and enforced by a federal government whose president had kept his office steps away from the men who designed the program.
General Electric, AEG, and the Financing of the Third Reich
Sutton’s third volume follows the General Electric thread into Germany. GE maintained a long-standing relationship with Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellschaft (AEG), the German electrical giant. Owen D. Young and Gerard Swope of GE sat on the boards that negotiated the Dawes Plan (1923) and the Young Plan (1928) — reparations frameworks that restructured German debt and, in the process, channeled American capital into German industry.
These same reparations agreements produced the economic conditions that Adolf Hitler’s propagandists exploited to build political support. The Vereinigte Stahlwerke (German Steel Trust), organized in 1926 by Wall Street banker Clarence Dillon with primary financing through Fritz Thyssen, produced over fifty percent of Nazi Germany’s pig iron, over forty percent of its universal plate, and thirty-five percent of its explosives.
The financial mechanism ran through International General Electric (I.G.E.), which, from 1915 onward, operated from 120 Broadway as the parent company's foreign investment, manufacturing, and sales arm. I.G.E. held a twenty-five to thirty percent stake in AEG, giving it four directors on the German company’s board, plus an additional director at Osram, the electrical-bulb manufacturer. Sutton reproduced a bank transfer slip — Nuremberg Military Tribunal document No. 391-395 — dated March 2, 1933, from German General Electric to the Delbrück Schickler Bank in Berlin, with instructions to deposit 60,000 Reichsmark into the “Nationale Treuhand” (National Trusteeship) account administered by Hjalmar Schacht and Rudolf Hess. This fund financed Hitler’s seizure of power in the March 1933 election.
I.G. Farben (now known as Bayer, the owner of Monsanto) contributed 30% of the entire Nationale Treuhand fund, making the chemical cartel the single largest domestic financial backer of the Nazi takeover. Senator Homer T. Bone summarized the relationship for the Senate Committee on Military Affairs in 1943: “Farben was Hitler and Hitler was Farben.” The cartel had been created in 1925-26 when organizing genius Hermann Schmitz — with Wall Street financial assistance — merged six giant German chemical firms into the largest chemical manufacturing enterprise on earth. By the eve of the war, I.G. Farben produced one hundred percent of Nazi Germany’s synthetic rubber, one hundred percent of its methanol, ninety-five percent of its poison gas, and forty-six percent of its high-octane gasoline. Farben also manufactured the Zyklon-B gas used in the extermination camps.
The cartel’s American subsidiary, American I.G. Chemical Corporation, maintained a board of directors that read as a directory of Wall Street–Nazi interlocks. National City Company underwrote thirty million dollars in convertible bonds for the subsidiary in 1929. Hermann Schmitz served as president — the same Schmitz who presided over I.G. Farben in Germany and sat on the board of the Bank for International Settlements. Max Ilgner, who directed Farben’s NW7 espionage and intelligence office in Berlin, held a seat. Fritz ter Meer, later convicted at Nuremberg for war crimes involving the use of concentration camp labor, held another. The American directors included Edsel Ford of Ford Motor Company; Walter Teagle, a director of both the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Standard Oil of New Jersey; Charles E. Mitchell, a director of both the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and National City Bank; and W.H. von Rath, a director of German General Electric (AEG).
Paul Warburg occupied the most structurally revealing position on the American I.G. board. His brother Max Warburg, the Hamburg banker, had helped finance the transfer of Lenin through Germany in 1917 and later served as an advisor to Hjalmar Schacht at the Reichsbank. Paul Warburg had designed the Federal Reserve System itself, served as its first member, and from his position at the Bank of Manhattan and Kuhn, Loeb & Co. controlled the International Acceptance Bank — the vehicle through which a virtual monopoly of U.S. acceptance banking operated during the 1920s. Warburg also directed the Council on Foreign Relations and the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation, a propaganda organization established in 1930 that distributed official Hitler literature in the United States. In March 1933, the Warburg family used its control of the American Jewish Committee and its influence over the B’nai B’rith to suppress the American Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany — issuing a formal joint statement counseling that “no American boycott against Germany be encouraged” and advising that “no further mass meetings be held or similar forms of agitation be employed.” The largest American Jewish organizations thus shielded the Harriman-Bush banking network and its Farben partnership at the decisive moment of Hitler’s consolidation.
Several AEG directors sat on the I.G. Farben board simultaneously, including AEG chairman Hermann Bucher. The interlocking directorate meant that funds flowing through AEG’s 120 Broadway parent and through Farben’s Wall Street subsidiary converged on the same political account in Berlin. Sutton noted the structural parallel: Walter Rathenau, AEG’s managing director until his assassination in 1922, had authored the “Rathenau Plan” for German industrial reorganization — a program that bore a striking resemblance to the Swope Plan that became part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. The architects of state-managed economies in both Germany and the United States drew paychecks from the same corporate family.
The financing pipeline ran through additional entities connected to the same network. The Union Banking Corporation, established in 1924 at 39 Broadway by W. Averell Harriman and George Herbert Walker, functioned as the New York banking office for Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist who later published I Paid Hitler, acknowledging his role as the Nazi Party’s primary early financier. Prescott Bush, Walker’s son-in-law and a managing partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, served as a director of Union Banking alongside Harriman and several Nazi executives.
On October 20, 1942 — ten months after Pearl Harbor, while American forces prepared their first assault against Nazi military positions — the U.S. government seized Union Banking Corporation under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The Alien Property Custodian signed Vesting Order No. 248, confiscating all capital stock. Within days, two UBC subsidiaries, the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation, were also seized. The following month, Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corporation — long managed by Harriman, Bush, and Walker — met the same fate.
The New York Times ran a five-paragraph article on December 16, 1944, in which a single sentence noted: “The Union Banking Corporation, 39 Broadway, New York, has received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway.” The Times omitted two facts: that the government had seized Union Banking for trading with the enemy, and that 120 Broadway was the address of the government’s Alien Property Custodian. The Nazi banking operation literally moved into the building that had sheltered the Bolshevik financing operation two decades earlier.
The men who directed these operations regarded the political character of the Nazi regime as irrelevant to the business proposition. A militarized corporate state that crushed labor unions and offered massive, state-guaranteed contracts for rearmament represented another captive market — structured along the same lines as the Soviet model, with a different ideological label.
General Electric occupied offices at 120 Broadway. The company’s directors were connected to the Bolshevik Revolution through the AIC and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to the New Deal through the Swope Plan and the NRA, and to the rise of the Third Reich through AEG and the reparations committees. Sutton observed that “General Electric profited handsomely from Bolshevism, from Roosevelt’s New Deal socialism, and from National Socialism in Hitler’s Germany.”
The Business Plot and the Bankers Club
The Bankers Club on the thirty-fourth floor of 120 Broadway hosted a 1926 meeting that Sutton linked to the Butler Affair — an episode that mainstream historians have dismissed and Sutton treated with considerably more gravity.
In November 1934, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, a Marine Corps officer twice decorated with the Congressional Medal of Honor, testified before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee investigating subversive activities. Butler stated that a group of wealthy industrialists had approached him about leading a private army of five hundred thousand veterans to overthrow the Roosevelt administration and install a fascist dictatorship. The New York Times ran the story on its front page on November 21, 1934, reporting that “J.P. Morgan & Co. as well as Murphy & Co. were behind the plot.”
The committee’s final report confirmed Butler’s core allegations: “There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.” The committee also stated that it “was able to verify all the pertinent statements made by General Butler.”
Then the story disappeared. Congress suppressed portions of the testimony. The press dropped it. Sutton pointed to the suppression of records, the failure to call named witnesses, and the speed with which the media buried the story as indicators that Butler told the truth about men whose reach extended beyond any single committee’s willingness to act.
The financiers named in connection with the plot operated from the same network of offices and boardrooms that had underwritten the Bolshevik Revolution and drafted the New Deal. The Bankers Club, where early meetings reportedly occurred, sat on the top floor of 120 Broadway.
The Vertical Divide
Sutton did not work in total isolation. Carroll Quigley, professor of international relations at Georgetown University, had identified the same pattern from inside the establishment, writing in Tragedy and Hope (1966) that the Morgan firm had decided, more than fifty years earlier, to “infiltrate the Left-wing political movements in the United States.” Quigley added, “This was relatively easy to do, since these groups were starved for funds and eager for a voice to reach the people. Wall Street supplied both.” Sutton took the observation further. The Morgan firm infiltrated not only the domestic left, as Quigley documented, but the foreign left — the Bolshevik movement and the Third International. And through allied financial interests, particularly the Rockefeller family and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, this same network exerted persistent influence on U.S.-Russian relations from World War I forward.
The standard textbook frames the twentieth century as a collision between capitalism, communism, and fascism — three ideological systems locked in mortal conflict. The financial records tell a different story. The same banks, the same directors, the same corporate boards that funded Soviet industrialization also drafted the New Deal and channeled capital into the Nazi war machine. They operated from interconnected offices within one building. The ideological labels changed. The cash transfers did not.
Sutton’s conclusion — expressed across three volumes and several hundred footnotes drawn from State Department files, Nuremberg transcripts, and congressional hearings — identified the defining political divide not as left versus right, but as vertical: a small, interconnected financial class exercising control over populations who believed they were choosing between competing systems. In this reading, the left-right spectrum functions as a distraction. It keeps the public arguing over ideology while the same financial institutions fund both sides of a given conflict, extracting profit regardless of which faction claims victory.
This dynamic did not end with the Second World War. During the 2008 financial crisis, the public absorbed catastrophic losses while the institutions that precipitated the collapse used their political access to secure taxpayer-funded bailouts — and recovered. The architecture Sutton described at 120 Broadway had not changed in its essential character; it had only grown more sophisticated in its methods and more opaque in its institutional layers.
The concentration at 120 Broadway makes the older architecture visible in a way that later arrangements obscure. When a single building’s tenant list includes the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the American International Corporation, the executive offices of General Electric, the office of a future president of the United States, the first Soviet representative in America, and the Bankers Club where industrialists discussed replacing that same president with a military dictator — all during the same historical period — coincidence strains past its breaking point.
Kris Millegan, publisher of Sutton’s later work on Yale’s Skull and Bones society, described meeting Sutton during the mid-1990s, when the internet had barely arrived, and information about these connections remained scattered across government archives and out-of-print books. “He was just a player in the game that has to be played,” Millegan wrote, “but he played his role very well. He made a difference.”
Sutton himself offered the plainest summary of his research: “Revolution is always recorded as a spontaneous event by the politically or economically deprived against an autocratic state. Never in Western textbooks will you find the evidence that revolutions need finance, and the source of the finance in many cases traces back to Wall Street.”
If we want to understand how global history actually unfolds, Sutton’s method prescribes a specific discipline: trace the money, and look at the addresses of the people writing the checks.
For half a century, the address for the most consequential decisions in modern history was 120 Broadway.
Sources: Antony C. Sutton, The Wall Street Trilogy (Global Alliance Publications, 2018); Kris Millegan, ed., Fleshing Out Skull & Bones (TrineDay, 2003); U.S. Senate and House investigation records cited in Sutton’s endnotes; Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal (Little, Brown, 1954); Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 1929–1941 (Macmillan, 1952).
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