Clendenin J. Ryan

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Clendenin James Ryan was best known as the Publisher and owner of The American Mercury Magazine, published in Baltimore, Maryland in the early 1950s when McCarthyism was at it strongest.

Ryan mingled with millionaires, politicians and military and intelligence operatives for most of his life and he knew how to wield power in order to get what he wanted done. He and Godfrey Rockefeller were stockholders in the Enterprise Development Corporation, a closed end investment trust for the heirs of William Rockefeller and Thomas Fortune Ryan, Clendenin's entrepreneurial grandfather, who invested heavily in Copper Mining and smelting. The Directors of EDC included Clendenin J. Ryan himself, Frederic W. Lincoln who married into the Rockefeller family, and an enigmatic individual, Morehead Patterson whose family owned American Machine and Foundry, AMF, originally the makers of the "Patterson Cigarette Packer" which automated the manufacture and packing of cigarettes around the turn of the Century (1897). (Trust to Supply Venture Capital. New York Times, Mar. 31, 1948.) Later AMF branched out during World War II into military machinery for gun loaders, missile movement and launch mechanisms, radar components and even parts for Rockwell International's B-29 bombers among other weapons of war. Only later did AMF diversify into Bowling pin spotters, the Ben Hogan Golf line and the Voit sporting goods division.

Morehead Patterson and his family owned thousands of shares in the American Tobacco Company and RJR Tobacco and he was later on the Atomic Energy Commission as well. Patterson's family was close to both the Draper family Eugenics War Machine and the Nuclear interests of the Bowman Gray Family's Reynolds Tobacco Company interests and the Willard F. Rockwell military interests in Viet Nam for the Minuteman Missiles and B-29 manufacturing process. Patterson would have been a natural link to coalesce interests among the North Carolina based anti-Union forces and anti-Communist efforts that included the Eugenicists involved with the Wickliffe Draper Textile loom equipment interests and The Pioneer Fund, the Bowman Gray RJR Tobacco interests the Morehead Patterson American Tobacco interests, and the links outside of North Carolina to the Willard F. Rockwell nexus of characters at Rockwell Intl which later bought out the failing Draper Corp. after the JFK Assassination. The Pattersons counted both the Rockwells, the Grays and the Drapers as the customers of American Machine and Foundry over the decades covering military, textile and tobacco applications.

Clendenin Ryan, who was once characterized as a somewhat quixotic multi-millionaire once served as an assistant to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York City, ran for the New York mayoralty himself on an independent ticket and later campaigned for the governorship of New Jersey. He often sent large sums abroad to break up communist-inspired strikes and influence voters in favor of anti-communist candidates for higher office in France and other countries.

What is not known about Ryan is the private life he led as a sort of combination Walter Mitty and Dudley Doright as he attempted to fight against any injustices or corruption that he discovered in his travels. Ryan served in the Navy during World War II under Admiral James Forrestal who eventually committed suicide under some very strange and suspicious circumstances after a distinguished career in the OSS, the CIA and the Navy. Clendenin J. Ryan also committed suicide at the age of 52 as did his father before him after a series of disappointments rocked his life.

Clendenin J. Ryan was deeply committed as a financial backier of numerous adventurous schemes involving foreign intrigue bordering on violating The Neutrality Act, with another infamous spymaster and former OSS Colonel by the name of Ulius L. "Pete" Amoss who ran the Baltimore, MD based Information Services of Information, Inc. which published INFORM, a private circulation subscription service which disseminated tidbits of intrigue, espionage and foreign intelligence starting just before the McCarthy era in the late 1940's. Ryan's relationships with these two intelligence agents and military men literally defined and characterized his own life which found him quite often emulating or imitating their lives of adventure, intrigue and espionage on a first hand basis as a self financed Soldier of Fortune and amateur spy of sorts.

Ryan was a self-styled exposer of political corruption in Tammany Hall and a staunch anti-Communist super patriot and McCarthy supporter who used his family's vast fortunes earned by his father in Copper mining and smelting to carry out a personal vendetta against anyone he perceived to threaten his way of life or any of his vast investments in the Chilean Copper mines. He opposed Unions, Communism and Soviet oppression with equal fervor during his career as a self-styled extension of Senator Joe McCarthy himself whom he idolized.

He even went so far as to lead a proxy fight against Sosthenes Benes, the founder of ITT, in order to get a majority of the Board of Directors elected at ITT who would support Ryan's efforts at preventing his family's Chilean Copper Mines from being nationalized if Chile ever came under Communist control. He used the excuse of trying to get Benes to pay a dividend on his family's ITT shares which had been skipped for 14 years as the justification for his proxy battle but in fact he had an ulterior motive behind his plans. And that was to assure that the use of ITT influence and control in Chile would prevent Chilean Communism from gaining a foothold. Later Salvador Allende and Orlando Letellier would lead a successful revolt which turned Chile into a Communist puppet state after he died and it took years to reverse that revolution.

The actual fight for voting interest domination and Board of Directors control of IT&T started as early as 1947. It was then that Manhattan multi-millionnaire Clendenin J. Ryan made an unfriendly takeover attempt launched against Behn's dictatorial rule. Ryan was able to get 7 of his directors onto IT&T's 23 man board of directors before he gave up the fight (TIME, Jan. 5, 1948). The chief supporters of Ryan's group on the Board of ITT included Alleghany Corp's President Allan Kirby whose family started F. W. Woolworth's who was a business partner of Robert "Railroad" Young. Young had majority positions in the Missouri Pacific, Penn Central and the Long Island Railroads, a New Mexico Publisher, Robert McKinney, the cousin of Robert Young and ex-Governor Charles Edison of New Jersey whose father was Thomas Alva Edison. Charles Edison funded the seed money for the arch conservative Young American's for Freedom (YAF) begun by William F. Buckley, Jr. in Sharon, CT according to Douglas Caddy, another YAF founder, who said that he was the college roommate of Ryan's son, Clendenin J. Ryan, Jr. at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service during the late 1950's. Also on the ITT Board as Ryan's supporters were Chairman Arthur Hill of Greyhound Corp.'s executive committee and a conservative Houston Oilman, George Brown.

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