Ferlinghetti In the Shadow of Edwin Kirby Smith

An Interview With Burroughs Kerouac Ginsberg
By Rolland Spinout, CPW News Service

    Born Lawrence Monsanto Ferling in Yonkers, New York, Lawrence Ferlinghetti loathed imitation.  He left Paris and the shadows of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and sought his own voice.  Kenneth Rexroth’s anarchy provided the young writer a new way.  Paris became for Ferlinghetti San Francisco in 1951 after he arrived in the United States and traveled by train across the continent.

    Ferlinghetti received his undergraduate degree from UNC Chapel Hill, a Masters from Columbia University in 1947 and a Doctorate from de l'Université de Paris (Sorbonne) in 1950.   He met Selden Kirby-Smith the granddaughter of General Edmund Kirby Smith (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Giada Diano, Writing Across the Landscape, p. 115), the last Confederate General to surrender in the Civil War and the officer in charge of the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi West.   They married in Duval County, Florida in 1951 in that apparent bastion of Southern sentiments named for William Pope Duval the first civilian governor of Florida and father of Burr Duval who died alongside James Walker Fannin the cousin of Samuel F.B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph. The Ferlinghettis divorced in 1976.  That was over a century after Morse's telegraph line that was going to run alongside the first transcontinental rail line across the Great Southwest which with William Walker's failed annexation of Southern California and Baja and the approaching advent of Alfred Nobel's invention, Dynamite in 1867, two years after the Civil War, provided the China Traders the impetus to dream higher....through the Rockies and avoiding the Southern lowlands.   Morse's invention followed the Russell's old Pony Express route through the Rockies to San Francisco where William Tecumseh Sherman and George Bragg had worked together in pre-Civil War California to secure the rail head for Leland Stanford and the "Big Four". The Union Pacific contracted with Western Union for Morse's telegraph technology.  Morse's early chief financial officer prior to the Civil War was Benjamin Brown French, the Scottish Rite Mason at the White House who initiated Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor as the first SR President. 

    With his publication of Allen Ginsburg’s Howl and other poems Lawrence’s influence as the promoter of the “Beat Generation” and of San Francisco as an oasis for free-thinking paved the way for the hippie era of Haight-Asbury freedom romps and trippin’ trips.

     Burroughs Kerouac Ginsberg, a self-professed student of the “Beat Generation” and of Civil War history, provides a fascinating glimpse of this poet laureate-promoter of a modern Gilgamesh writers' group.  "San Francisco holds a very special place in our national mythology what with the Anglophile Hell's Angels' phalanx along the Bay to the east in Oakland, the Bohemians cremating care in the Red Wood forests up near Fort Bragg, Bechtel domiciled there with its eye on stripping Bolivia of its lithium through its imposed 'water wars' and people wondering just why the AT&T offices downtown hold the data splitters for the world-wide-web cable feeding from San Luis Obispo so that 'Big Brother' can watch you and Edward Snowden," said BKG.

RS:  You say that you were born as the result of an acid drop.  Could you explain?

BKG:  Sure.  I had heard that Dr. Lauretta Bender had conducted secret LSD experiments for the CIA at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Children were included in her research and they were basically unwitting guinea pigs.  I read an early unpublished account of Boston’s Whitey Bolger.  Bolger participated in a CIA study of LSD at his Atlanta prison before he was transferred to Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay.  When Whitey surfaced in Boston after prison and became the key Irish Mafioso protecting a renegade element of the FBI I was dumbfounded.  So dumbfounded that I decided to drop some acid.   I entered the experience as Homer Ragsdale Freeman and came out of it Burroughs Kerouac Ginsberg.

RS:  I see.  Well was this also a mind-expanding experience?

BKG:  You could say that.   More importantly it was as if I could see clear across continents, familial connections, political intrigues and hidden motives.  My vision was 20/.000000020.  My understanding was on steroids and the truth has set me free-er than free.

RS:  Free-er than free.  Could you elaborate?

BKG:  Sure.  Did Lawrence Monsanto Freeling change his name to distance himself from the chemical company that made not LSD but “Agent Orange”?   Did he have the same negative reaction to the whole Vietnam War era because his use of LSD had shown him, too, that the Viet Nam War was, like the war on terror that is focused in the historic drug route from Baghdad to Bombay, now Mumbai, to the lucrative money markets of China and the West?  Was he, like the son of Admiral Morrison who conducted the Gulf of Tonkin Affair, Jim Morrison of the Doors, rejecting the national proper line, or was he paving the way for a new period of mind molding like that which Whitey had experienced as a government shill?  My trip triggered an open window into these and other questions.

RS:  The "Beat Poets" are not unfamiliar with military service.  Ferlinghetti, ah… Monsanto Freeling, was in the U.S. Navy.

BKG:  Yes, and don’t forget that he married the granddaughter of the last Confederate General to surrender.   Edmund Kirby Smith had, with his command of the Confederate troops west of the Mississippi, tried to recapture the city of Vickburg, Mississippi where William Tecumseh Sherman had destroyed the future railroad crossing site for a Southern transcontinental railroad.  Selden Ferlinghetti’s grandfather had also appointed Albert Pike, the father of Scottish Rite Masonry in the U.S. into fuller service and Pike’s followers included Alphonso Taft and his son William Howard who joined his father’s Scottish Rite Masonic lodge in Cincinatti in 1909.   Pike's close associate Ben McCulloch and fellow Texas Ranger, John Coffee "Jack" Hays became sheriffs of Sacramento and San Francisco on the same day in 1850 while Hay's cousin, John Hays Hammond was the right hand associate of Cecil Rhodes....hello Rhodes scholars and diamond dealers!  The good Masonic women of Cincinnati had sent McCulloch his two girl friends who stood beside him in the Texas Revolution at the Battle of San Jacinto.

RS:  The "Yellow Rose of Texas"?  What was her name?  And her sister?

BKG:  Nope.  I'm talking about the "Twin Sisters".

RS: They were twins?

BKG:  "Nope.  The two brass cannons that turned the tide of battle.  Deadly little bitches!"
Also in Cincinatti where Alphonso, a founder of Yale’s Skull & Bones along with William Huntington Russell, China Traders extraordinaire along with Caleb Cushing who negotiated, as any San Francisco China Town resident can tell you, the Wanghia Treaty, is the Spring Grove Cemetery.  HOWL!

RS:  Wanghia?  That was the treaty that replaced the British trade agreement with China that digressed into the Opium Wars?

BKG:  Bingo.  Yes, and working in the Baltimore clipper shipyards of the New England China Traders was, as San Franciscans now know thanks to the excavation of the 1850’s opium clipper found north of San Francisco near Fort Bragg named for William Tecumseh Sherman's pre-war financial advice client, Braxton Bragg, may have been laid by Fred Bailey, also known as abolitionist, Frederick Douglass.  Douglass would give his speech supporting  abolitionism after Caleb Cushing had invited Jefferson Davis to speak at Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall arguing for slavery.  Caleb was an early version of Dana White and the Ultimate Fighting Championships controlling both corners of the octagon and the popcorn and beer concessions.

RS:  So you are saying that more recent events in San Francisco are based an older order of things?

BKG:  Sure.  Albert Pike’s gnostic mumbo-jumbo played right into a kind of global Gestalt.  It was mind-control on an upward, pyramidal progression toward greater and greater degrees of enlightenment.  Enlightenment?  Surprise!  HOWL!  All you need know is that buried next to Alphonso Taft in Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati is the largest contingent of Union Generals from the Civil War which was neither civil nor a real war.  Well, a drug war maybe.  It was the power elites of the North fighting the power elites of the South for the rail route to the Pacific and to David Sassoon’s opium imports out of Baghdad and Bombay to be used as trading chips and ultimately....personal wealth wagons.  Of course, wars cannot be fought for outright greed so the motive needed doctoring with a more acceptable rationale...ending slavery....which as we know from Iran-Contra, Gary Webb's Dark Alliance and others who spilled the beans on Air America is a sissified myth.

RS:  Refresh my memory.  Who was Pike?

BKG:   The founder of Scottish Rite Masonry in the U.S..  A Confederate General and chief Indian agent for the Confederacy who was an expert in getting the civilized Indian tribes of the West to fight in the Civil War for the South.   Scottish Rite?  It was not Scottish.   It originated in the Prussian Royal Court and its leadership merged with the Italian wing of the movement under Guisieppi Mazzini.  Of course, you cannot forget that the leading Italian family in California was that of Juan Bandini, founder of the oldest vineyard in California Buena Vista, likely a member of the Italian family that killed the brother of Lorenzo de Medici and whose daughter Arcadia was married to the Alcade of San Diego, Abel Stearns from Boston and who was the leading Stearns in Boston?   “Secret Six” backer of abolitionist John Brown, George Luther Stearns who saw the “Civil War” as a means of cornering the lead market….as in bullets.  No lead?  No bullets!  Pike would become the chief legal counsel of the KKK. 

RS:  Don’t the Scottish Riters do lots of good things?  Children’s hospitals?  Circuses?  Elephant acts?

BKG:  Elephant acts?  That’s like arguing the point in the recent film Whiplash that it’s better have your head whacked with a flying cymbal and end up being Charlie Parker than to live a sane life.  It’s appealing I know.  However, to argue that young Charlie Parker was great because of his mistreatment and that his self-medicating wasn’t a death wish is, frankly, bullshit.  Have you ever seen the amazing drum solo of Buddy Rich when he’s in his 70’s?  J.K. Simmons' should stick to selling us Farmer's Insurance.  Have you ever compared the leadership of James Levine to Terrence Fletcher?   Fletcher the Anglo had become Captain Ahab, Pharaoh, Arturo Toscanini.

     But I’m moving far afield of this mind expanded trip….suffice it to say that Selden’s grandfather was holding on to the dream that the South would control the rail route from Savannah to San Diego which William Tecumseh Sherman’s work in San Francisco in the 1850’s and then his demolition of the South’s rail head from Atlanta to Savannah which insured that Caleb Cushing, the Huntingtons, Russells and Tafts….the Brahmins….would control the flow of imports from Baghdad to Boston.

RS:  What if Selden Kirby-Smith Ferlinghetti didn’t know all this about her grandfather?   You are saying that Ferlinghetti knowingly used the “Beat Generation” to influence public sentiments, modern pop culture?  A type of mind-control of the masses.

BKG:  Well, yes, but my mind has been expanded.  Has yours?  Consider that Frederick Douglass was the “Freeway” Ricky Ross of his day and time and that someone like GHWB…..hell, not like GHWB….GHWB…..is the Caleb Cushing of our day and time only now he’s not unloading ships like The Frolic near San Francisco but shipping through the Panama Canal and suddenly the capture of Manuel Noriega who said “I have Bush by the balls” takes on new relevance along with the filibusterer William Walker’s attempts to conquer lower California in the 1840’s and Honduras in the 1850’s and a repeat in Honduras and Nicaragua in the 1980's. Not much changes.   HOWL!  HOWL!  HOWL!

Oh, and don’t forget that William S. Burroughs another “Beat” buddy was right in there among the American Fascists……Ford, Firestone, Burroughs, Lindbergh….the same guys to whom Boston’s Joseph P. Kennedy was beholding as Ambassador to the Court of St. James….Britain...when he supported Adolf Hitler and had to be recalled when Churchill complained to FDR.

RS:  So when Crosby, Stills and Nash were singing Four Dead In Ohio not far from Cincinnati….

BKG:  Yea, they were in what was called "New Connecticut," .... Ohio…..and Connecticut was home to Yale and the 1833 “Order” and saw itself as the arsenal of freedom, but by the time Edmund Kirby Smith comes along the freedom loving York Rite tradition of Washington’s and Franklin’s Masonry had been commandeered by Pike’s draconian model of Gnostic gibberish and the big bamboozle was off and running.  The four students shot dead in Ohio were very close to the disorder of the Order and simply didn’t know it.  Nixon hated the Order....called them "the most faggity goddamn thing I've ever seen....so did he really order the killing considering that Woodward and Bernstein's Washington Post crucified Nixon for child's play compared to Iran-Contra while more recent WP reporters like Steve Coll who bludgeoned Gary Webb and killed the messenger's message were promoted....Coll to the Henry Luce Professorship and Dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism?  Hey, and don't forget that Charles Wright Mills whose mother claimed he was the great nephew of Braxton Bragg the biggest shill in the Confederacy for the Brahmins wrote The Power Elite after being brought to Columbia by Paul Lazersfeld and Robert Merton, mind-benders par excellence.   Merton's son gave us the formula for the Wall Street's "credit default swaps" that tanked the entire U.S. and world economies.  HOWL!

 The Order makes a fine living as fight promoters and from a left/right dialectic that will, in time, push its confused victims to self-medicate in various forms and ways before brain death.   Same for those who drink coffee at City Lights.  Light, dark and shades of gray…..meaningless for someone whose mind has been freed from all of that.  But I’m no Mormon and I refuse to give up coffee!   But I do ask that Mr. Guzman in Peru who gets $6500 a year for his 60 tons of coffee that makes Starbucks over $10 million will soon get paid fairly and I'm not talking that "fair price" b.s. of 20 cents a pound.  You want to stop the border problem then change some of that crap! 

You can argue that Guzman's family of six doesn't need $60,000 a year.  They'll be like the Doughboys after WWII and not stay down on the farm pickin' cotton, plantin' corn or coffee, but hey, so they take their excess to the local city or Lima and go into mechanical and electrical engineering and invent a new product using Bolivia's lithium in its batteries and the world is a better place.  Maybe one will be like Henry Ford with an eighth grade education but makes a car that runs on solar power or hydrogen fuel because of their deep appreciation of ubiquitous, clean water.  San Francisco's Bechtel may not be happy it lost Bolivia's "water wars" but screw them!  HOWL! HOWL!  HOWL!  HOWWWWLLLLLLL!

HOWL!