Foreword

In 1949, while I was visiting Ezra Pound who was a political prisoner at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington, D.C. (a Federal institution for the insane), Dr. Pound asked me if I had ever heard of the Federal Reserve System. I replied that I had not, as of the age of 25. He then showed me a ten dollar bill marked "Federal Reserve Note" and asked me if I would do some research at the Library of Congress on the Federal Reserve System which had issued this bill. Pound was unable to go to the Library himself, as he was being held without trial as a political prisoner by the United States government. After he was denied broadcasting time in the U.S., Dr. Pound broadcast from Italy in an effort to persuade people of the United States not to enter World War II. Franklin D. Roosevelt had personally ordered Pound’s indictment, spurred by the demands of his three personal assistants, Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, and Alger Hiss, all of whom were subsequently identified as being connected with Communist espionage.

I had no interest in money or banking as a subject, because I was working on a novel. Pound offered to supplement my income by ten dollars a week for a few weeks. My initial research revealed evidence of an international banking group which had secretly planned the writing of the Federal Reserve Act and Congress’ enactment of the plan into law. These findings confirmed what Pound had long suspected. He said, "You must work on it as a detective story." I was fortunate in having my research at the Library of Congress directed by a prominent scholar, George Stimpson, founder of the National Press Club, who was described by The New York Times of September 28, 1952:

"Beloved by Washington newspapermen as ‘our walking Library of Congress’, Mr. Stimpson was a highly regarded reference source in the Capitol. Government officials, Congressmen and reporters went to him for information on any subject."

I did research four hours each day at the Library of Congress, and went to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in the afternoon. Pound and I went over the previous day’s notes. I then had dinner with George Stimpson at Scholl’s Cafeteria while he went over my material, and I then went back to my room to type up the corrected notes. Both Stimpson and Pound made many suggestions in guiding me in a field in which I had no previous experience. When Pound’s resources ran low, I applied to the Guggenheim Foundation, Huntington Hartford Foundation, and other foundations to complete my research on the Federal Reserve. Even though my foundation applications were sponsored by the three leading poets of America, Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, and Elizabeth Bishop, all of the foundations refused to sponsor this research. I then wrote up my findings to date, and in 1950 began efforts to market this manuscript in New York. Eighteen publishers turned it down without comment, but the nineteenth, Devin Garrity, president of Devin Adair Publishing Company, gave me some friendly advice in his office.

"I like your book, but we can’t print it," he told me. "Neither can anybody else in New York. Why don’t you bring in a prospectus for your novel, and I think we can give you an advance. You may as well forget about getting the Federal Reserve book published. I doubt if it could ever be printed."

This was devastating news, coming after two years of intensive work. I reported back to Pound, and we tried to find a publisher in other parts of the country. After two years of fruitless submissions, the book was published in a small edition in 1952 by two of Pound’s disciples, John Kasper and David Horton, using their private funds, under the title Mullins on the Federal Reserve. In 1954, a second edition, with unauthorized alterations, was published in New Jersey, as The Federal Reserve Conspiracy. In 1955, Guido Roeder brought out a German edition in Oberammergau, Germany. The book was seized and the entire edition of 10,000 copies burned by government agents led by Dr. Otto John.

The burning of the book was upheld April 21, 1961 by judge Israel Katz of the Bavarian Supreme Court. The U.S. Government refused to intervene, because U.S. High Commissioner to Germany, James B. Conant (president of Harvard University 1933 to 1953), had approved the initial book burning order. This is the only book which has been burned in Germany since World War II. In 1968 a pirated edition of this book appeared in California. Both the FBI and the U.S. Postal inspectors refused to act, despite numerous complaints from me during the next decade. In 1980 a new German edition appeared. Because the U.S. Government apparently no longer dictated the internal affairs of Germany, the identical book which had been burned in 1955 now circulates in Germany without interference.

I had collaborated on several books with Mr. H.L. Hunt and he suggested that I should continue my long-delayed research on the Federal Reserve and bring out a more definitive version of this book. I had just signed a contract to write the authorized biography of Ezra Pound, and the Federal Reserve book had to be postponed. Mr. Hunt passed away before I could get back to my research, and once again I faced the problem of financing research for the book.

My original book had traced and named the shadowy figures in the United States who planned the Federal Reserve Act. I now discovered that the men whom I exposed in 1952 as the shadowy figures behind the operation of the Federal Reserve System were themselves shadows, the American fronts for the unknown figures who became known as the "London Connection." I found that notwithstanding our successes in the Wars of Independence of 1812 against England, we remained an economic and financial colony of Great Britain. For the first time, we located the original stockholders of the Federal Reserve Banks and traced their parent companies to the London Connection.

This research is substantiated by citations and documentation from hundreds of newspapers, periodicals and books and charts showing blood, marriage, and business relationships. More than a thousand issues of The New York Times on microfilm have been checked not only for original information, but verification of statements from other sources.

It is a truism of the writing profession that a writer has only one book within him. This seems applicable in my case, because I am now in the fifth decade of continuous writing on a single subject, the inside story of the Federal Reserve System. This book was from its inception commissioned and guided by Ezra Pound. Four of his protégés have previously been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, William Butler Yeats for his later poetry, James Joyce for "Ulysses", Ernest Hemingway for "The Sun Also Rises", and T.S. Elliot for "The Waste Land". Pound played a major role in the inspiration and in the editing of these works -- which leads us to believe that this present work, also inspired by Pound, represents an ongoing literary tradition.

Although this book in its inception was expected to be a tortuous work on economic and monetary techniques, it soon developed into a story of such universal and dramatic appeal that from the outset, Ezra Pound urged me to write it as a detective story, a genre which was invented by my fellow Virginian, Edgar Allan Poe.

I believe that the continuous circulation of this book during the past forty years has not only exonerated Ezra Pound for his much condemned political and monetary statements, but also that it has been, and will continue to be, the ultimate weapon against the powerful conspirators who compelled him to serve thirteen and a half years without trial, as a political prisoner held in an insane asylum a la KGB. His earliest vindication came when the government agents who represented the conspirators refused to allow him to testify in his own defense; the second vindication came in 1958 when these same agents dropped all charges against him, and he walked out of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, a free man once more.

His third and final vindication is this work, which documents every aspect of his exposure of the ruthless international financiers to whom Ezra Pound became but one more victim, doomed to serve years as the Man in the Iron Mask, because he had dared to alert his fellow-Americans to their furtive acts of treason against all people of the United States.

In my lectures throughout this nation, and in my appearances on many radio and television programs, I have sounded the toxin that the Federal Reserve System is not Federal; it has no reserves; and it is not a system at all, but rather, a criminal syndicate. From November, 1910, when the conspirators met on Jekyll Island, Georgia (click image left), to the present time, the machinations of the Federal Reserve bankers have been shrouded in secrecy.

Today, that secrecy has cost the American people a three trillion dollar debt, with annual interest payments to these bankers amounting to some three hundred billion dollars per year, sums which stagger the imagination, and which in themselves are ultimately unpayable.

Officials of the Federal Reserve System routinely issue remonstrances to the public, much as the Hindu fakir pipes an insistent tune to the dazed cobra which sways its head before him, not to resolve the situation, but to prevent it from striking him.

Such was the soothing letter written by Donald J. Winn, Assistant to the Board of Governors in response to an inquiry by a Congressman, the Honorable Norman D. Shumway, on March 10, 1983. Mr. Winn states that,

"The Federal Reserve System was established by an act of Congress in 1913 and is not a ‘private corporation’."

On the next page, Mr. Winn continues,

"The stock of the Federal Reserve Banks is held entirely by commercial banks that are members of the Federal Reserve System."

He offers no explanation as to why the government has never owned a single share of stock in any Federal Reserve Bank, or why the Federal Reserve System is not a "private corporation" when all of its stock is owned by "private corporations".

American history in the twentieth century has recorded the amazing achievements of the Federal Reserve bankers.

• First, the outbreak of World War I, which was made possible by the funds available from the new central bank of the United States.

• Second, the Agricultural Depression of 1920.

• Third, the Black Friday Crash on Wall Street of October, 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression.

• Fourth, World War II.

• Fifth, the conversion of the assets of the United States and its citizens from real property to paper assets from 1945 to the present, transforming a victorious America and foremost world power in 1945 to the world’s largest debtor nation in 1990.

Today, this nation lies in economic ruins, devastated and destitute, in much the same dire straits in which Germany and Japan found themselves in 1945. Will Americans act to rebuild our nation, as Germany and Japan have done when they faced the identical conditions which we now face--or will we continue to be enslaved by the Babylonian debt money system which was set up by the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 to complete our total destruction? This is the only question which we have to answer, and we do not have much time left to answer it.

Because of the depth and the importance of the information which I had developed at the Library of Congress under the tutelage of Ezra Pound, this work became the happy hunting ground for many other would-be historians, who were unable to research this material for themselves. Over the past four decades, I have become accustomed to seeing this material appear in many other books, invariably attributed to other writers, with my name never mentioned. To add insult to injury, not only my material, but even my title has been appropriated, in a massive, if obtuse, work called "Secrets of the Temple--the Federal Reserve".

This heavily advertised book received reviews ranging from incredulous to hilarious. Forbes Magazine advised its readers to read their review and save their money, pointing out that "a reader will discover no secrets" and that "This is one of those books whose fanfares far exceed their merit." This was not accidental, as this overblown whitewash of the Federal Reserve bankers was published by the most famous nonbook publisher in the world.

After my initial shock at discovering that the most influential literary personality of the twentieth century, Ezra Pound, was imprisoned in "the Hellhole" in Washington, I immediately wrote for assistance to a Wall Street financier at whose estate I had frequently been a guest. I reminded him that as a patron of the arts, he could not afford to allow Pound to remain in such inhuman captivity. His reply shocked me even more. He wrote back that "your friend can well stay where he is."

It was some years before I was able to understand that, for this investment banker and his colleagues, Ezra Pound would always be "the enemy".

Eustace Mullins
Jackson Hole, Wyoming
1991
 

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Introduction

Here are the simple facts of the great betrayal. Wilson and House knew that they were doing something momentous. One cannot fathom men’s motives and this pair probably believed in what they were up to. What they did not believe in was representative government. They believed in government by an uncontrolled oligarchy whose acts would only become apparent after an interval so long that the electorate would be forever incapable of doing anything efficient to remedy depredations.

EZRA POUND
(St. Elizabeth’s Hospital,
Washington, D.C. 1950)


(AUTHOR’S NOTE: Dr. Pound wrote this introduction for the earliest version of this book, published by Kasper and Horton, New York, 1952. Because he was being held as a political prisoner without trial by the Federal Government, he could not afford to allow his name to appear on the book because of additional reprisals against him. Neither could he allow the book to be dedicated to him, although he had commissioned its writing. The author is gratified to be able to remedy these necessary omissions, thirty-three years after the events.)


JEFFERSON’S OPINION ON THE CONSTITUTIONALITY OF THE BANK

February 15, 1791

(The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. by H. E. Bergh, Vol. III, p. 145 ff.)

The bill for establishing a national bank, in 1791, undertakes, among other things,--

1. To form the subscribers into a corporation.

2. To enable them, in their corporate capacities, to receive grants of lands; and, so far, is against the laws of mortmain.

3. To make alien subscribers capable of holding lands; and so far is against the laws of alienage.

4. To transmit these lands, on the death of a proprietor, to a certain line of successors; and so far, changes the course of descents.

5. To put the lands out of the reach of forfeiture, or escheat; and so far, is against the laws of forfeiture and escheat.

6. To transmit personal chattels to successors, in a certain line; and so far, is against the laws of distribution.

7. To give them the sole and exclusive right of banking, under the national authority; and, so far, is against the laws of monopoly.

8. To communicate to them a power to make laws, paramount to the laws of the states; for so they must be construed, to protect the institution from the control of the state legislatures; and so probably they will be construed.

I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground--that all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states, or to the people (12^th amend.). To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.

The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill, have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States by the Constitution.

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CHAPTER ONE  - Jekyll Island

"The matter of a uniform discount rate was discussed and settled at Jekyll Island."

--Paul M. Warburg ¹

On the night of November 22, 1910, a group of newspaper reporters stood disconsolately in the railway station at Hoboken, New Jersey. They had just watched a delegation of the nation’s leading financiers leave the station on a secret mission. It would be years before they discovered what that mission was, and even then they would not understand that the history of the United States underwent a drastic change after that night in Hoboken.

The delegation had left in a sealed railway car, with blinds drawn, for an undisclosed destination. They were led by Senator Nelson Aldrich, head of the National Monetary Commission. President Theodore Roosevelt had signed into law the bill creating the National Monetary Commission in 1908, after the tragic Panic of 1907 had resulted in a public outcry that the nation’s monetary system be stabilized. Aldrich had led the members of the Commission on a two-year tour of Europe, spending some three hundred thousand dollars of public money. He had not yet made a report on the results of this trip, nor had he offered any plan for banking reform.

Accompanying Senator Aldrich at the Hoboken station were his private secretary, Shelton; A. Piatt Andrew, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and Special Assistant of the National Monetary Commission; Frank Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank of New York, Henry P. Davison, senior partner of J.P. Morgan Company, and generally regarded as Morgan’s personal emissary; and Charles D. Norton, president of the Morgan-dominated First National Bank of New York. Joining the group just before the train left the station were Benjamin Strong, also known as a lieutenant of J.P. Morgan; and Paul Warburg, a recent immigrant from Germany who had joined the banking house of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, New York as a partner earning five hundred thousand dollars a year.

1 Prof. Nathaniel Wright Stephenson, Paul Warburg’s Memorandum, Nelson Aldrich A Leader in American Politics, Scribners, N.Y. 1930

Six years later, a financial writer named Bertie Charles Forbes (who later founded the Forbes Magazine; the present editor, Malcom Forbes, is his son), wrote:

"Picture a party of the nation’s greatest bankers stealing out of New York on a private railroad car under cover of darkness, stealthily hieing hundred of miles South, embarking on a mysterious launch, sneaking onto an island deserted by all but a few servants, living there a full week under such rigid secrecy that the names of not one of them was once mentioned lest the servants learn the identity and disclose to the world this strangest, most secret expedition in the history of American finance. I am not romancing; I am giving to the world, for the first time, the real story of how the famous Aldrich currency report, the foundation of our new currency system, was written . . . .

 

The utmost secrecy was enjoined upon all. The public must not glean a hint of what was to be done. Senator Aldrich notified each one to go quietly into a private car of which the railroad had received orders to draw up on an unfrequented platform. Off the party set. New York’s ubiquitous reporters had been foiled . . . Nelson (Aldrich) had confided to Henry, Frank, Paul and Piatt that he was to keep them locked up at Jekyll Island, out of the rest of the world, until they had evolved and compiled a scientific currency system for the United States, the real birth of the present Federal Reserve System, the plan done on Jekyll Island in the conference with Paul, Frank and Henry . . . . Warburg is the link that binds the Aldrich system and the present system together. He more than any one man has made the system possible as a working reality." ²

The official biography of Senator Nelson Aldrich states:

"In the autumn of 1910, six men went out to shoot ducks, Aldrich, his secretary Shelton, Andrews, Davison, Vanderlip and Warburg. Reporters were waiting at the Brunswick (Georgia) station. Mr. Davison went out and talked to them. The reporters dispersed and the secret of the strange journey was not divulged. Mr. Aldrich asked him how he had managed it and he did not volunteer the information." ³

Davison had an excellent reputation as the person who could conciliate warring factions, a role he had performed for J.P. Morgan during the settling of the Money Panic of 1907. Another Morgan partner, T.W. Lamont, says:

"Henry P. Davison served as arbitrator of the Jekyll Island expedition."⁴

2 "CURRENT OPINION", December, 1916, p. 382.
3 Nathaniel Wright Stephenson, Nelson W. Aldrich, A Leader in American Politics, Scribners, N.Y. 1930, Chap. XXIV "Jekyll Island"
4 T.W. Lamont, Henry P. Davison, Harper, 1933

From these references, it is possible to piece together the story. Aldrich’s private car, which had left Hoboken station with its shades drawn, had taken the financiers to Jekyll Island, Georgia. Some years earlier, a very exclusive group of millionaires, led by J.P. Morgan, had purchased the island as a winter retreat. They called themselves the Jekyll Island Hunt Club, and, at first, the island was used only for hunting expeditions, until the millionaires realized that its pleasant climate offered a warm retreat from the rigors of winters in New York, and began to build splendid mansions, which they called "cottages", for their families’ winter vacations.

The club building itself, being quite isolated, was sometimes in demand for stag parties and other pursuits unrelated to hunting. On such occasions, the club members who were not invited to these specific outings were asked not to appear there for a certain number of days. Before Nelson Aldrich’s party had left New York, the club’s members had been notified that the club would be occupied for the next two weeks.

The Jekyll Island Club was chosen as the place to draft the plan for control of the money and credit of the people of the United States, not only because of its isolation, but also because it was the private preserve of the people who were drafting the plan. The New York Times later noted, on May 3, 1931, in commenting on the death of George F. Baker, one of J.P. Morgan’s closest associates, that "Jekyll Island Club has lost one of its most distinguished members. One-sixth of the total wealth of the world was represented by the members of the Jekyll Island Club." Membership was by inheritance only.

The Aldrich group had no interest in hunting. Jekyll Island was chosen for the site of the preparation of the central bank because it offered complete privacy, and because there was not a journalist within fifty miles. Such was the need for secrecy that the members of the party agreed, before arriving at Jekyll Island, that no last names would be used at any time during their two week stay. The group later referred to themselves as the First Name Club, as the last names of Warburg, Strong, Vanderlip and the others were prohibited during their stay.

The customary attendants had been given two week vacations from the club, and new servants brought in from the mainland for this occasion who did not know the names of any of those present. Even if they had been interrogated after the Aldrich party went back to New York, they could not have given the names. This arrangement proved to be so satisfactory that the members, limited to those who had actually been present at Jekyll Island, later had a number of informal get-togethers in New York.

Why all this secrecy? Why this thousand mile trip in a closed railway car to a remote hunting club? Ostensibly, it was to carry out a program of public service, to prepare banking reform which would be a boon to the people of the United States, which had been ordered by the National

Monetary Commission. The participants were no strangers to public benefactions. Usually, their names were inscribed on brass plaques, or on the exteriors of buildings which they had donated. This was not the procedure which they followed at Jekyll Island. No brass plaque was ever erected to mark the selfless actions of those who met at their private hunt club in 1910 to improve the lot of every citizen of the United States.

In fact, no benefaction took place at Jekyll Island. The Aldrich group journeyed there in private to write the banking and currency legislation which the National Monetary Commission had been ordered to prepare in public. At stake was the future control of the money and credit of the United States. If any genuine monetary reform had been prepared and presented to Congress, it would have ended the power of the elitist one world money creators. Jekyll Island ensured that a central bank would be established in the United States which would give these bankers everything they had always wanted.

As the most technically proficient of those present, Paul Warburg was charged with doing most of the drafting of the plan. His work would then be discussed and gone over by the rest of the group. Senator Nelson Aldrich was there to see that the completed plan would come out in a form which he could get passed by Congress, and the other bankers were there to include whatever details would be needed to be certain that they got everything they wanted, in a finished draft composed during a onetime stay. After they returned to New York, there could be no second get together to rework their plan. They could not hope to obtain such secrecy for their work on a second journey.

The Jekyll Island group remained at the club for nine days, working furiously to complete their task. Despite the common interests of those present, the work did not proceed without friction. Senator Aldrich, always a domineering person, considered himself the chosen leader of the group, and could not help ordering everyone else about. Aldrich also felt somewhat out of place as the only member who was not a professional banker. He had had substantial banking interests throughout his career, but only as a person who profited from his ownership of bank stock.

He knew little about the technical aspects of financial operations. His opposite number, Paul Warburg, believed that every question raised by the group demanded, not merely an answer, but a lecture. He rarely lost an opportunity to give the members a long discourse designed to impress them with the extent of his knowledge of banking. This was resented by the others, and often drew barbed remarks from Aldrich.

The natural diplomacy of Henry P. Davison proved to be the catalyst which kept them at their work. Warburg’s thick alien accent grated on them, and constantly reminded them that they had to accept his presence if a central bank plan was to be devised which would guarantee them their future profits.

Warburg made little effort to smooth over their prejudices, and contested them on every possible occasion on technical banking questions, which he considered his private preserve.

"In all conspiracies there must be great secrecy." ⁵

The "monetary reform" plan prepared at Jekyll Island was to be presented to Congress as the completed work of the National Monetary Commission. It was imperative that the real authors of the bill remain hidden. So great was popular resentment against bankers since the Panic of 1907 that no Congressman would dare to vote for a bill bearing the Wall Street taint, no matter who had contributed to his campaign expenses. The Jekyll Island plan was a central bank plan, and in this country there was a long tradition of struggle against inflicting a central bank on the American people.

It had begun with Thomas Jefferson’s fight against Alexander Hamilton’s scheme for the First Bank of the United States, backed by James Rothschild. It had continued with President Andrew Jackson’s successful war against Alexander Hamilton’s scheme for the Second Bank of the United States, in which Nicholas Biddle was acting as the agent for James Rothschild of Paris. The result of that struggle was the creation of the Independent Sub-Treasury System, which supposedly had served to keep the funds of the United States out of the hands of the financiers. A study of the panics of 1873, 1893, and 1907 indicates that these panics were the result of the international bankers’ operations in London.

The public was demanding in 1908 that Congress enact legislation to prevent the recurrence of artificially induced money panics. Such monetary reform now seemed inevitable. It was to head off and control such reform that the National Monetary Commission had been set up with Nelson Aldrich at its head, since he was majority leader of the Senate.

The main problem, as Paul Warburg informed his colleagues, was to avoid the name "Central Bank". For that reason, he had decided upon the designation of "Federal Reserve System". This would deceive the people into thinking it was not a central bank. However, the Jekyll Island plan would be a central bank plan, fulfilling the main functions of a central bank; it would be owned by private individuals who would profit from ownership of shares. As a bank of issue, it would control the nation’s money and credit.

5 Clarendon, Hist. Reb. 1647

In the chapter on Jekyll Island in his biography of Aldrich, Stephenson writes of the conference:

"How was the Reserve Bank to be controlled? It must be controlled by Congress. The government was to be represented in the board of directors, it was to have full knowledge of all the Bank’s, affairs, but a majority of the directors were to be chosen, directly or indirectly, by the banks of the association." ⁶

Thus the proposed Federal Reserve Bank was to be "controlled by Congress" and answerable to the government, but the majority of the directors were to be chosen, "directly or indirectly" by the banks of the association. In the final refinement of Warburg’s plan, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors would be appointed by the President of the United States, but the real work of the Board would be controlled by a Federal Advisory Council, meeting with the Governors. The Council would be chosen by the directors of the twelve Federal Reserve Banks, and would remain unknown to the public.

The next consideration was to conceal the fact that the proposed "Federal Reserve System" would be dominated by the masters of the New York money market. The Congressmen from the South and the West could not survive if they voted for a Wall Street plan. Farmers and small businessmen in those areas had suffered most from the money panics. There had been great popular resentment against the Eastern bankers, which during the nineteenth century became a political movement known as "populism". The private papers of Nicholas Biddle, not released until more than a century after his death, show that quite early on the Eastern bankers were fully aware of the widespread public opposition to them.

Paul Warburg advanced at Jekyll Island the primary deception which would prevent the citizens from recognizing that his plan set up a central bank. This was the regional reserve system. He proposed a system of four (later twelve) branch reserve banks located in different sections of the country. Few people outside the banking world would realize that the existing concentration of the nation’s money and credit structure in New York made the proposal of a regional reserve system a delusion.

Another proposal advanced by Paul Warburg at Jekyll Island was the manner of selection of administrators for the proposed regional reserve system. Senator Nelson Aldrich had insisted that the officials should be appointive, not elected, and that Congress should have no role in their selection. His Capitol Hill experience had taught him that congressional opinion would often be inimical to the Wall Street interests, as Congressmen from the West and South might wish to demonstrate to their constituents that they were protecting them against the Eastern bankers.

6 Nathaniel Wright Stephenson, Nelson W. Aldrich, A Leader in American Politics, Scribners, N.Y. 1930, Chap. XXIV "Jekyll Island" p. 379
 

Warburg responded that the administrators of the proposed central banks should be subject to executive approval by the President. This patent removal of the system from Congressional control meant that the Federal Reserve proposal was unconstitutional from its inception, because the Federal Reserve System was to be a bank of issue.

Article 1, Sec. 8, Par. 5 of the Constitution expressly charges Congress with "the power to coin money and regulate the value thereof.". Warburg’s plan would deprive Congress of its sovereignty, and the systems of checks and balances of power set up by Thomas Jefferson in the Constitution would now be destroyed. Administrators of the proposed system would control the nation’s money and credit, and would themselves be approved by the executive department of the government. The judicial department (the Supreme Court, etc.) was already virtually controlled by the executive department through presidential appointment to the bench.

7 Paul Warburg, The Federal Reserve System, Its Origin and Growth, Volume I, p. 58, Macmillan, New York, 1930
 

Paul Warburg later wrote a massive exposition of his plan, The Federal Reserve System, Its Origin and Growth 7 of some 1750 pages, but the name "Jekyll Island" appears nowhere in this text. He does state (Vol. 1, p. 58):

"But then the conference closed, after a week of earnest deliberation, the rough draft of what later became the Aldrich Bill had been agreed upon, and a plan had been outlined which provided for a ‘National Reserve Association,’ meaning a central reserve organization with an elastic note issue based on gold and commercial paper."

On page 60, Warburg writes,

"The results of the conference were entirely confidential. Even the fact there had been a meeting was not permitted to become public." He adds in a footnote, "Though eighteen [sic] years have since gone by, I do not feel free to give a description of this most interesting conference concerning which Senator Aldrich pledged all participants to secrecy."

B.C. Forbes’ revelation ⁸ of the secret expedition to Jekyll Island, had had surprisingly little impact. It did not appear in print until two years after the Federal Reserve Act had been passed by Congress, hence it was never read during the period when it could have had an effect, that is, during the Congressional debate on the bill. Forbes’ story was also dismissed, by those "in the know," as preposterous, and a mere invention. Stephenson mentions this on page 484 of his book about Aldrich. ⁹

"This curious episode of Jekyll Island has been generally regarded as a myth. B.C. Forbes got some information from one of the reporters. It told in vague outline the Jekyll Island story, but made no impression and was generally regarded as a mere yarn."

The coverup of the Jekyll Island conference proceeded along two lines, both of which were successful. The first, as Stephenson mentions, was to dismiss the entire story as a romantic concoction which never actually took place. Although there were brief references to Jekyll Island in later books concerning the Federal Reserve System, these also attracted little public attention.

As we have noted, Warburg’s massive and supposedly definite work on the Federal Reserve System does not mention Jekyll Island at all, although he does admit that a conference took place. In none of his voluminous speeches or writings do the words "Jekyll Island" appear, with a single notable exception. He agreed to Professor Stephenson’s request that he prepare a brief statement for the Aldrich biography.

This appears on page 485 as part of "The Warburg Memorandum". In this excerpt, Warburg writes,

"The matter of a uniform discount rate was discussed and settled at Jekyll Island."

Another member of the "First Name Club" was less reticent. Frank Vanderlip later published a few brief references to the conference. In the Saturday Evening Post, February 9, 1935, p. 25, Vanderlip wrote:

"Despite my views about the value to society of greater publicity for the affairs of corporations, there was an occasion near the close of 1910, when I was as secretive, indeed, as furtive, as any conspirator. . . .

 

Since it would have been fatal to Senator Aldrich’s plan to have it known that he was calling on anybody from Wall Street to help him in preparing his bill, precautions were taken that would have delighted the heart of James Stillman (a colorful and secretive banker who was President of the National City Bank during the Spanish-American War, and who was thought to have been involved in getting us into that war) . . .

I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyll Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System."

In a Travel feature in The Washington Post, March 27, 1983, "Follow The Rich to Jekyll Island", Roy Hoopes writes:

"In 1910, when Aldrich and four financial experts wanted a place to meet in secret to reform the country’s banking system, they faked a hunting trip to Jekyll and for 10 days holed up in the Clubhouse, where they made plans for what eventually would become the Federal Reserve Bank."

Vanderlip later wrote in his autobiography, From Farmboy to Financier:¹⁰

"Our secret expedition to Jekyll Island was the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System. The essential points of the Aldrich Plan were all contained in the Federal Reserve Act as it was passed."

Professor E.R.A. Seligman, a member of the international banking family of J. & W. Seligman, and head of the Department of Economics at Columbia University, wrote in an essay published by the Academy of Political Science, Proceedings, v. 4, No. 4, p. 387-90:

"It is known to a very few how great is the indebtedness of the United States to Mr. Warburg. For it may be said without fear of contradiction that in its fundamental features the Federal Reserve Act is the work of Mr. Warburg more than any other man in the country. The existence of a Federal Reserve Board creates, in everything but in name, a real central bank. In the two fundamentals of command of reserves and of a discount policy, the Federal Reserve Act has frankly accepted the principle of the Aldrich Bill, and these principles, as has been stated, were the creation of Mr. Warburg and Mr. Warburg alone.

 

It must not be forgotten that Mr. Warburg had a practical object in view. In formulating his plans and in advancing in them slightly varying suggestions from time to time, it was incumbent on him to remember that the education of the country must be gradual and that a large part of the task was to break down prejudices and remove suspicion. His plans therefore contained all sorts of elaborate suggestions designed to guard the public against fancied dangers and to persuade the country that the general scheme was at all practicable. It was the hope of Mr. Warburg that with the lapse of time it might be possible to eliminate from the law a few clauses which were inserted largely at his suggestion for educational purposes."

8 CURRENT OPINION, December, 1916, p. 382

9 Nathaniel Wright Stephenson, Nelson W. Aldrich, A Leader in American Politics, Scribners, N.Y. 1930, Chap. XXIV "Jekyll Island" p. 379

10 Frank Vanderlip, From Farmboy to Financier
 

Now that the public debt of the United States has passed a trillion dollars, we may indeed admit "how great is the indebtedness of the United States to Mr. Warburg." At the time he wrote the Federal Reserve Act, the public debt was almost nonexistent.

Professor Seligman points out Warburg’s remarkable prescience that the real task of the members of the Jekyll Island conference was to prepare a banking plan which would gradually "educate the country" and "break down prejudices and remove suspicion". The campaign to enact the plan into law succeeded in doing just that.

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CHAPTER TWO - The Aldrich Plan

"Finance and the tariff are reserved by Nelson Aldrich as falling within his sole purview and jurisdiction. Mr. Aldrich is endeavoring to devise, through the National Monetary Commission, a banking and currency law. A great many hundred thousand persons are firmly of the opinion that Mr. Aldrich sums up in his personality the greatest and most sinister menace to the popular welfare of the United States. Ernest Newman recently said, ‘What the South visits on the Negro in a political way, Aldrich would mete out to the mudsills of the North, if he could devise a safe and practical way to accomplish it.’"

--Harper’s Weekly, May 7, 1910."

The participants in the Jekyll Island conference returned to New York to direct a nationwide propaganda campaign in favor of the "Aldrich Plan". Three of the leading universities, Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Chicago, were used as the rallying points for this propaganda, and national banks had to contribute to a fund of five million dollars to persuade the American public that this central bank plan should be enacted into law by Congress.

Woodrow Wilson, governor of New Jersey and former president of Princeton University, was enlisted as a spokesman for the Aldrich Plan. During the Panic of 1907, Wilson had declared,

"All this trouble could be averted if we appointed a committee of six or seven public-spirited men like J.P. Morgan to handle the affairs of our country."

In his biography of Nelson Aldrich in 1930, Stephenson says:

"A pamphlet was issued January 16, 1911, ‘Suggested Plan for Monetary Legislation’, by Hon. Nelson Aldrich, based on Jekyll Island conclusions."

 

Stephenson says on page 388, "An organization for financial progress has been formed. Mr. Warburg introduced a resolution authorizing the establishment of the Citizens’ League, later the National Citizens League . . . Professor Laughlin of the University of Chicago was given charge of the League’s propaganda." ¹¹

11 Nathaniel Wright Stephenson, Nelson W. Aldrich, A Leader in American Politics, Scribners, N.Y. 1930
 

It is notable that Stephenson characterizes the work of the National Citizens League as "propaganda", in line with Seligman’s exposition of Warburg’s work as "the education of the country" and "to break down prejudices".

Much of the five million dollars of the bankers slush fund was spent under the auspices of the National Citizens’ League, which was made up of college professors. The two most tireless propagandists for the Aldrich Plan were Professor O.M. Sprague of Harvard, and J. Laurence Laughlin of the University of Chicago.

Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., notes:

"J. Laurence Laughlin, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the National Citizens’ League since its organization, has returned to his position as professor of political economics in the University of Chicago. In June, 1911, Professor Laughlin was given a year’s leave from the university, that he might give all of his time to the campaign of education undertaken by the League . . . He has worked indefatigably, and it is largely due to his efforts and his persistence that the campaign enters the final stage with flattering prospects of a successful outcome . . . The reader knows that the University of Chicago is an institution endowed by John D. Rockefeller, with nearly fifty million dollars."¹²

12 Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., Banking, Currency and the Money Trust, 1913, p. 131

In his biography of Nelson Aldrich, Stephenson reveals that the Citizens’ League was also a Jekyll Island product. In chapter 24 we find that: The Aldrich Plan was represented to Congress as the result of three years of work, study and travel by members of the National Monetary Commission, with expenditures of more than three hundred thousand dollars (In 1911, the Aldrich Plan became part of the official platform of the Republican Party).

Testifying before the Committee on Rules, December 15, 1911, after the Aldrich plan had been introduced in Congress, Congressman Lindbergh stated,

"Our financial system is a false one and a huge burden on the people . . . I have alleged that there is a Money Trust. The Aldrich plan is a scheme plainly in the interest of the Trust . . . Why does the Money Trust press so hard for the Aldrich Plan now, before the people know what the money trust has been doing?"
Lindbergh continued his speech,

"The Aldrich Plan is the Wall Street Plan. It is a broad challenge to the Government by the champion of the Money Trust. It means another panic, if necessary, to intimidate the people. Aldrich, paid by the Government to represent the people, proposes a plan for the trusts instead. It was by a very clever move that the National Monetary Commission was created. In 1907 nature responded most beautifully and gave this country the most bountiful crop it had ever had. Other industries were busy too, and from a natural standpoint all the conditions were right for a most prosperous year. Instead, a panic entailed enormous losses upon us.

 

Wall Street knew the American people were demanding a remedy against the recurrence of such a ridiculously unnatural condition. Most Senators and Representatives fell into the Wall Street trap and passed the Aldrich Vreeland Emergency Currency Bill. But the real purpose was to get a monetary commission which would frame a proposition for amendments to our currency and banking laws which would suit the Money Trust.

 

The interests are now busy everywhere educating the people in favor of the Aldrich Plan. It is reported that a large sum of money has been raised for this purpose. Wall Street speculation brought on the Panic of 1907. The depositors’ funds were loaned to gamblers and anybody the Money Trust wanted to favour. Then when the depositors wanted their money, the banks did not have it. That made the panic."

Edward Vreeland, co-author of the bill, wrote in the August 25, 1910 Independent (which was owned by Aldrich),

"Under the proposed monetary plan of Senator Aldrich, monopolies will disappear, because they will not be able to make more than four percent interest and monopolies cannot continue at such a low rate. Also, this will mark the disappearance of the Government from the banking business."

Vreeland’s fantastic claims were typical of the propaganda flood unleashed to pass the Aldrich Plan. Monopolies would disappear, the Government would disappear from the banking business. Pie in the sky.

Nation Magazine, January 19, 1911, noted,

"The name of Central Bank is carefully avoided, but the ‘Federal Reserve Association’, the name given to the proposed central organization, is endowed with the usual powers and responsibilities of a European Central Bank."

After the National Monetary Commission had returned from Europe, it held no official meetings for nearly two years. No records or minutes were ever presented showing who had authored the Aldrich Plan. Since they held no official meetings, the members of the commission could hardly claim the Plan as their own. The sole tangible result of the Commission’s three hundred thousand dollar expenditure was a library of thirty massive volumes on European banking.

Typical of these works is a thousand page history of the Reichsbank, the central bank which controlled money and credit in Germany, and whose principal stockholders, were the Rothschilds and Paul Warburg’s family banking house of M.M. Warburg Company. The Commission’s records show that it never functioned as a deliberative body. Indeed, its only "meeting" was the secret conference held at Jekyll Island, and this conference is not mentioned in any publication of the Commission.

Senator Cummins passed a resolution in Congress ordering the Commission to report on January 8, 1912, and show some constructive results of its three years’ work. In the face of this challenge, the National Monetary Commission ceased to exist.

With their five million dollars as a war chest, the Aldrich Plan propagandists waged a no-holds barred war against their opposition. Andrew Frame testified before the House Banking and Currency Committee of the American Bankers Association.

He represented a group of Western bankers who opposed the Aldrich Plan:

CHAIRMAN CARTER GLASS: "Why didn’t the Western bankers make themselves heard when the American Bankers Association gave its unqualified and, we are assured, unanimous approval of the scheme proposed by the National Monetary Commission?"

ANDREW FRAME: "I’m glad you called my attention to that. When that monetary bill was given to the country, it was but a few days previous to the meeting of the American Bankers Association in New Orleans in 1911. There was not one banker in a hundred who had read that bill. We had twelve addresses in favor of it. General Hamby of Austin, Texas, wrote a letter to President Watts asking for a hearing against the bill. He did not get a very courteous answer. I refused to vote on it, and a great many other bankers did likewise."

MR. BULKLEY: "Do you mean that no member of the Association could be heard in opposition to the bill?"

ANDREW FRAME: "They throttled all argument."

MR. KINDRED: "But the report was given out that it was practically unanimous."

ANDREW FRAME: "The bill had already been prepared by Senator Aldrich and presented to the executive council of the American Bankers Association in May, 1911. As a member of that council, I received a copy the day before they acted upon it. When the bill came in at New Orleans, the bankers of the United States had not read it."

MR. KINDRED: "Did the presiding officer simply rule out those who wanted to discuss it negatively?"

ANDREW FRAME: "They would not allow anyone on the program who was not in favor of the bill."

CHAIRMAN GLASS: "What significance has the fact that at the next annual meeting of the American Bankers Association held at Detroit in 1912, the Association did not reiterate its endorsement of the plan of the National Monetary Commission, known as the Aldrich scheme?"

ANDREW FRAME: "It did not reiterate the endorsement for the simple fact that the backers of the Aldrich Plan knew that the Association would not endorse it. We were ready for them, but they did not bring it up."

Andrew Frame exposed the collusion which in 1911 procured an endorsement of the Aldrich Plan from the American Bankers Association but which in 1912 did not even dare to repeat its endorsement, for fear of an honest and open discussion of the merits of the plan.

Chairman Glass then called as witness one of the ten most powerful bankers in the United States, George Blumenthal, partner of the international banking house of Lazard Freres and brother-in-law of Eugene Meyer, Jr.  Carter Glass effusively welcomed Blumenthal, stating that "Senator O’Gorman of New York was kind enough to suggest your name to us." A year later, O’Gorman prevented a Senate Committee from asking his master, Paul Warburg, any embarrassing questions before approving his nomination as the first Governor of the Federal Reserve Board.

George Blumenthal stated,

"Since 1893 my firm of Lazard Freres has been foremost in importations and exportations of gold and has thereby come into contact with everybody who had anything to do with it."

Congressman Taylor asked, "Have you a statement there as to the part you have had in the importation of gold into the United States?" Taylor asked this because the Panic of 1893 is known to economists as a classic example of a money panic caused by gold movements.

"No," replied George Blumenthal, "I have nothing at all on that, because it is not bearing on the question."

A banker from Philadelphia, Leslie Shaw, dissented with other witnesses at these hearings, criticizing the much vaunted "decentralization" of the System. He said,

"Under the Aldrich Plan the bankers are to have local associations and district associations, and when you have a local organization, the centered control is assured. Suppose we have a local association in Indianapolis; can you not name the three men who will dominate that association? And then can you not name the one man everywhere else. When you have hooked the banks together, they can have the biggest influence of anything in this country, with the exception of the newspapers."

To promote the Democratic currency bill, Carter Glass made public the sorry record of the Republican efforts of Senator Aldrich’s National Monetary Commission. His House Report in 1913 said,

"Senator MacVeagh fixes the cost of the National Monetary Commission to May 12, 1911 at $207,130. They have since spent another hundred thousand dollars of the taxpayer’s money. The work done at such cost cannot be ignored, but, having examined the extensive literature published by the Commission, the Banking and Currency Committee finds little that bears upon the present state of the credit market of the United States.

 

We object to the Aldrich Bill on the following points:

• Its entire lack of adequate government or public control of the banking mechanism it sets up.

• Its tendency to throw voting control into the hands of the large banks of the system.

• The extreme danger of inflation of currency inherent in the system.

• The insincerity of the bond-funding plan provided for by the measure, there being a barefaced pretense that this system was to cost the government nothing.

• The dangerous monopolistic aspects of the bill.

Our Committee at the outset of its work was met by a well-defined sentiment in favor of a central bank which was the manifest outgrowth of the work that had been done by the National Monetary Commission."

Glass’s denunciation of the Aldrich Bill as a central bank plan ignored the fact that his own Federal Reserve Act would fulfill all the functions of a central bank. Its stock would be owned by private stockholders who could use the credit of the Government for their own profit; it would have control of the nation’s money and credit resources; and it would be a bank of issue which would finance the government by "mobilizing" credit in time of war.

In "The Rationale of Central Banking," Vera C. Smith (Committee for Monetary Research and Education, June, 1981) writes,

"The primary definition of a central bank is a banking system in which a single bank has either a complete or residuary monopoly in the note issue. A central bank is not a natural product of banking development. It is imposed from outside or comes into being as the result of Government favors."

Thus a central bank attains its commanding position from its government granted monopoly of the note issue. This is the key to its power. Also, the act of establishing a central bank has a direct inflationary impact because of the fractional reserve system, which allows the creation of book-entry loans and thereby, money, a number of times the actual "money" which the bank has in its deposits or reserves.

The Aldrich Plan never came to a vote in Congress, because the Republicans lost control of the House in 1910, and subsequently lost the Senate and the Presidency in 1912.

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