As Washington spoke, McClellan beheld a “living map” which showed all the various troop positions. He took up a pen and copied down everything he saw. When Washington was assured that McClellan understood the military situation, he then spoke to the general about the 20th century, when other perils would beset the country even as America took its place as a leader among the nations of the world. McClellan would later write that the country would become “a Messenger of Succor and Peace from the Great Ruler, who has all nations in his keeping.”
THE PRESIDENTS DENOUNCE ECONOMIC INEQUALITY
But not all the messages from the next world are so cheery and hopeful. “The Prophecies of the Presidents” also deals with information obtained through 19th century mediums like Lucy Brown, quite renowned in her day. She, too, felt she was in contact with the spirit of George Washington, who “predicted fascist dictatorship and its threat to America’s destiny,” according to Beckley and Crockett.
“Clouds in the horizon that are looming up to overcast the future of America,” Washington allegedly spoke through Brown, “becoming very dense, dark and foreboding ill, will burst in an unexpected moment upon the heads of her people. The mutterings of discontent, engendered by a sort of incipient, despotic rule, mild, perhaps, at present in its hold over the masses, and swelling into vaster proportions and power, is breeding discontent and disharmonies in the ranks of all classes of minds who labor diligently for a subsistence and gain a small and inadequate pittance of their hourly needs and daily bread.”
This economic unrest among the working classes is due to the “widespread and desolating schemes of the robbers of the people of their rightful inheritance to life, land, home and pursuit of happiness.” This financial chicanery does not go unnoticed by the hosts of spirits who dwell above the mortal sphere and can see into the secret workings of the minds and motives of the oppressors.
After Washington spoke, Thomas Jefferson added to the indictment by saying, “If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
President James Madison spoke even more frankly: “We are free today, substantially, but the day will come when our republic will come to impossibility because its wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few. When that day comes, then we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nation to the changed conditions.”
Abraham Lincoln confessed that he trembled for the safety of future America because, “As a result of war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow. The money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people until all the wealth is aggregated into a few hands and the public is destroyed.”
It was presumably a later medium that channeled Woodrow Wilson, who grimly charged that, “The masters of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States. The government of the United States at present is a foster child of the special interests. It is not allowed to have a will of its own. The government, which was designed for the people, has gotten into the hands of bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy. America is not a place of which it can be said, as it used to be, that a man may choose his own calling and pursue it as far as his abilities enable him to pursue it. American industry is not free as it once was free; American enterprise is not free.”
THEIR WORDS FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE FULFILLED
I have quoted this section of “Prophecies of the Presidents” so carefully and extensively because it strikes me as being genuinely prophetic. The spirit voices of this small grouping of American chief executives are addressing what would in fact become a major issue for dissent in this country, as expressed by the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in September 2011. The movement’s unforgettable slogan, “We are the 99 Percent,” neatly summarizes the present condition of social and economic inequality suffered by the American people that has resulted from the greed, corruption and undue influence of corporations on government.
In 2012 and 2014, the media uncovered proof that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security had monitored Occupy Wall Street through its Joint Terrorism Task Force despite labeling it a peaceful movement. Declassified documents showed extensive surveillance and infiltration of OWS-related groups across the country. Perhaps the wary suspicion of the two law enforcement agencies was also fueled by corrupt corporations seeking to guard their financial empires from a change in the national temperament.
Whether or not the “messages” spoken through the mediums were truly sent from the departed souls of some of our late presidents, or even if Beckley and Crockett made them up from whole cloth, they were nevertheless FULFILLED. One should realize that “Prophecies of the Presidents” was initially published in 1992, a full 19 years before the Occupy Wall Street movement first entered New York’s Zuccotti Park.
Someone somewhere did indeed see the future and managed to get it written down in Beckley and Crockett’s book. Some unknown power wanted it etched in stone and on the record. To me, that’s a little uncanny. But, given my many years of writing for Tim Beckley, I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. He has always seemed to occupy some kind of publishing netherworld unto himself where books like “American’s Strange and Supernatural History” with its “Prophecies of the Presidents” bonus reprint just come with the territory.
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