The Wall Street Trilogy: A History

Wall Street Trilogy by Antony C. Sutton exposes the financial and political architecture behind three epochal upheavals of the twentieth century. This trilogy comprises Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, Wall Street and FDR, and Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. Sutton demonstrates that the forces shaping revolutions, presidencies, and global wars did not emerge from ideological purity or grassroots movements but from the decisions of a concentrated financial elite.

Financial Power Brokers and Revolutionary Goals

The first volume identifies an operational alliance between prominent Wall Street financiers and the Bolshevik revolutionaries. Sutton details how Leon Trotsky, expelled from France, arrived in New York and lived in comfort—despite his claim of penury. Evidence suggests a deep-pocketed support network. Trotsky's $10,000 in funds, his expedited passport arranged with President Woodrow Wilson’s intervention, and his seamless exit back to Russia converge into a clear pattern of strategic facilitation. Wall Street figures like William Boyce Thompson, then director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, emerge not as passive observers but active participants with direct involvement in funding and logistical support.

American Red Cross missions, ostensibly humanitarian, operated as financial reconnaissance under the guise of relief. These missions carried more bankers than doctors and embedded themselves in the Bolshevik centers of power. Thompson and others aimed to control the Russian postwar market by stabilizing a regime favorable to American financial interests. This maneuver did not stem from ideological sympathy but from commercial anticipation: a controlled revolutionary Russia offered a monopolizable market and a docile labor force.

Centralization of Control and Political Capture

The key alignment Sutton identifies is between monopoly capital and centralized socialist systems. The superficial dichotomy between capitalist financiers and socialist revolutionaries collapses under scrutiny. Both systems eliminate entrepreneurial competition and consolidate control. Lenin, Trotsky, and their apparatus needed capital, and Wall Street needed access. Sutton documents how firms such as Guaranty Trust Company extended financing and legal cover to Soviet trade representatives in the early years, ensuring the survival of the new regime.

Trotsky's arrest by Canadian authorities and subsequent release under international pressure confirms the extent of diplomatic coordination at the highest levels. Charles R. Crane, an industrialist with deep ties to Wilson’s administration, played a pivotal role in managing the optics and logistics of Trotsky’s journey. These layers of interaction between private capital and political revolution unravel the myth of spontaneous historical rupture.

FDR and the Infrastructure of Corporate Socialism

In the second volume, Sutton reframes the legend of Franklin Delano Roosevelt through direct examination of his pre-presidential career. FDR's years on Wall Street reveal him not as an idealistic reformer, but as a strategic operator within the financial elite. As vice president of the Fidelity & Deposit Company, Roosevelt leveraged personal and family connections to channel investment, deflect regulation, and build influence. His conduct aligned with principles of risk minimization and profit maximization, not public service altruism.

Roosevelt’s personal involvement in speculative foreign investment, including opportunistic dealings in post-WWI Germany, illuminates a broader thesis: those closest to the mechanisms of state power manipulated international instability for financial gain. Sutton’s evidence includes documented lies to investors and manipulation of inflation-plagued currencies to secure strategic assets.

The New Deal emerges in this context as a codification of elite interests under the banner of reform. Sutton identifies key figures like Robert S. Brookings and Gerard Swope who framed collectivist policies as public good while pursuing industrial consolidation. Regulatory agencies constructed during Roosevelt’s tenure insulated monopolies from competition under legal cover. These programs did not redistribute power. They redistributed it upward.

Manufacturing Consent and Enabling Fascism

The third volume interrogates Wall Street’s investment in Nazi Germany. Sutton identifies a repeat pattern. American financiers, aware of the economic desperation gripping post-WWI Germany, funneled capital into the hands of industrial giants like I.G. Farben, German General Electric, and United Steelworks. These firms became the logistical foundation of Hitler’s war machine. Loans passed through entities like the Bank for International Settlements with full cognizance of their strategic applications.

This financing predates Hitler’s consolidation of power. It enabled it. Sutton provides detailed evidence showing how Standard Oil, General Electric, and ITT engaged in direct transfers of technology, materials, and managerial coordination with Nazi firms. The payments, contracts, and shared infrastructure continued even after war broke out. Henry Ford’s alignment with the Nazi regime, through both public statements and manufacturing collaboration, serves as a centerpiece in this exposition.

The Nuremberg Trials failed to trace responsibility beyond immediate German executives. Sutton argues that American financiers avoided prosecution due to their political insulation and the rapid geopolitical pivot toward Cold War priorities. Witnesses were suppressed. Evidence remained classified. The trials preserved the illusion of isolated German guilt.

The Axis of Power at 120 Broadway

One address reappears throughout Sutton’s trilogy: 120 Broadway in New York. The Equitable Building housed the American International Corporation, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Guaranty Securities. Its tenants participated in all three events Sutton chronicles. These firms served as the connective tissue between Wall Street and global political engineering.

The same financiers who funded Trotsky had dealings with Hitler’s industrial base and shaped Roosevelt’s regulatory policy. Sutton argues that these connections were not accidental or episodic. They reflect a coherent strategy: leverage revolution, crisis, and political reform to centralize market control and insulate financial elites from democratic accountability.

Historical Amnesia and Structural Continuity

Sutton challenges conventional historiography. He criticizes historians like George Kennan for excluding primary evidence from government archives, especially the extensive documentation in the State Department Decimal File. The oversight is structural, not accidental. Historians operated within frameworks that precluded the possibility of such financial-revolutionary alliances. The cost of this amnesia is structural miscomprehension of modern history.

By the 21st century, Sutton’s narrative resonates through movements like Occupy Wall Street. The public increasingly recognizes the consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of a financial elite that transcends partisan categories. Sutton’s trilogy anticipates these concerns by decades. His documentation of systemic collaboration between private capital and authoritarian regimes clarifies the pattern: crisis justifies intervention, intervention creates dependency, dependency ensures control.

The Legacy of Unacknowledged Power

Sutton closes his trilogy by quantifying the human cost. He estimates that the consolidation of power through these alliances contributed to the deaths of two hundred million people between 1820 and 1975. His claim hinges not on ideology but on structure. Where political and financial elites act without democratic constraint, violence becomes a rational policy tool. Markets do not discipline their sponsors. Elections do not constrain their agents.

The Wall Street Trilogy offers a template for understanding how modern power functions. It tracks the flows of capital, the decisions of men in closed rooms, and the consequences borne by the public. It defines history not as ideology in motion but as architecture shaped by deliberate engineering. Sutton’s work repositions the reader to see through the façade of spontaneous revolution and populist governance. Beneath these surfaces lies a calculus of control.