Senator Aldrich issued confidential invitations to what the press said was a duck-hunting expedition in Jekyl Island, Georgia where they would write the final recommendations of the National Monetary Commission report. The secrecy of this meeting was well warranted, at stake was the future Federal Reserve system and thus control over the entire economy. Present in this group, we find the essence of the Federal Reserve then and now: powerful bankers with powerful government officials collaborating to use the nation’s money supply to serve their interests, justified by the educated economists to make it all seem scientific. They gathered two Rockefeller’s, two Morgan’s, one Kuhn, Loeb person, and an economist.
- Henry P. Davidson – J.P. Morgan senior partner
- Frank A. Vanderlip – President of the Rockefeller-owned National City Bank
- Benjamin Strons – senior member of Morgan’s Bankers Trust Company
- Paul Warburg - Kuhn, Loeb partner with Rockefeller ties
- A. Piatt Andrew – Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
- Colonel Edward House – Council of Foreign Affairs founder and President Wilson’s advisor
It was here where the wealthiest banking families worked in secret and hatched the plan to ram a central banking act through Congress. Frank Vanderlip admitted this much in his 1935 autobiography, From Farmboy to Financier:
I was as furtive as any conspirator. Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would have been wasted. If it were to be exposed that our particular group had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress. 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.
The banksters decided to promote the system as decentralized, with respect to its European cousins. A “regional reserve” system was established with four (later twelve) branches in different sections of the country. The power was set up in the New York branch and they would dominate policy over the other shell branches. Paul Warburg stressed that the name “central bank” must be avoided at all costs. The plan was packaged as the Aldrich Bill and was strongly opposed by President William Howard Taft. The bill failed to pass Congress and since Taft was a shoe-in for re-election in 1912, the conspirators had to look for a plan B…
The Federal Reserve System is a form of financial socialism which benefits the rich and the powerful, so they turned to the Progressives and their goal of socializing America. Taft’s gig was up when his predecessor, fellow Republican Theodore Roosevelt, ran on the Progressive Party ticket. Most of the Roosevelt presidential campaign was funded by J. P. Morgan and Company. The Democratic candidate was Woodrow Wilson and he was equally the property of J. P. Morgan. Dr. Gabriel Kolko in his The Triumph of Conservatism, wrote : “In late 1907 he [Wilson] supported the Aldrich Bill on banking, and was full of praise for Morgan’s role in American society.” Other bankers who were heavy contributors were Jacob Schiff, Bernard Baruch, Henry Morgenthau, and Thomas Fortune Ryan. Wilson used the influence of his other major donor, New York Time Publisher Adolph Ochs, to control the media and brought the banking issue back to the forefront of public debate.
- Wilson promised the country a money system free from domination by the international bankers of Wall Street.
- Moreover, the Democratic platform expressly stated: “We are opposed to the Aldrich plan for a central bank.”
Once the bankers got their man in office, Woodrow Wilson took advantage of Congress’s desire to adjourn for Christmas, the Federal Reserve Act was passed on December 22, 1913 by a vote of 298 to 60 in the House, and in the Senate by a majority of 43 to 25. After the vote, Congressman Charles Lindbergh Sr., father of the famous aviator, told Congress:
This act establishes the most gigantic trust on earth…When the President signs this act the invisible government by the money power, proven to exist by the Money Trust investigation, will be legalized…This is the Aldrich Bill in discuise…This new law will create inflation whenever the trust wants inflation…
The Federal Reserve Act was, and still is, hailed as a victory of “democracy” over “wall street”…NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH…
