Chapter
Eight: THE JEKYL ISLAND CONSPIRACY: The Federal Reserve Conspiracy by Antony C.
Sutton from archive.org
Chapter Eight:
THE JEKYL ISLAND CONSPIRACY
In 1910
six prominent Wall Street financial men met on
Jekyl Island to map plans for a central banking system in the United States. The Federal Reserve System
originated in a conspiracy. A
"conspiracy" is defined legally as a secret meeting for an illegal purpose. The meeting was
secret, it involved six persons and it
was illegal.. .as we shall show later.
The six conspirators were:
Senator Nelson Aldrich, father-in-law of John D.
Rockefeller, Jr. German banker Paul Warburg, of the German
bankers MM Warburg of Hamburg and Kuhn
Loeb in the United States; Henry P.
Davison, partner in J. P. Morgan and Chairman of Bankers Trust Company; Benjamin Strong, Vice President of Bankers
Trust; Frank Vanderlip, Chairman of
National City Bank; Charles D. Norton,
President of First National Bank. The
last three banks were in the Morgan group; Warburg represented Kuhn-Loeb and Aldrich represented
Rockefeller interests and the
"Standard Oil crowd." The Harriman interest in Guaranty Trust had been absorbed into the
Morgan group after the death of
Harriman. 75 The Federal Reserve Conspiracy These six dominated wealth and financial
power and had considerable political
influence. The secret Jekyl Island
meeting was actually described in
conspiratorial terms by one of the participants: 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. None of us who participated felt
that we were conspirators; on the
contrary we felt we were engaged in a
patriotic work. We were trying to plan a mechanism that would correct the weaknesses of our banking system
as revealed under the strains and
pressures of the panic of 1907. I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition
to Jekyl Island as the occasion of the
actual conception of what eventually
became the Federal Reserve System. (1)
After the 1907 panic plans were formulated to convince the public of a "need" for a central bank. The
key at this point was Senator Nelson
Aldrich, a wealthy businessman linked to the Rockefeller family through marriage of his daughter Abby to John
D. Rockefeller Jr. Former Vice President
Nelson Rockefeller was a direct descendent of
this branch of the Rockefeller family.
In the post-1907 panic era, Senator Aldrich headed a Senate Monetary Commission which toured Europe to
discuss and study European central banks
and especially the German Reichsbank system.
From this junket Aldrich emerged as the Congressional expert on bank planning. Few spotted his close links with
the banking interests. (2) Herbert L.
Satterlee was Morgan's son-in-law and, from the inside, comments on Aldrich's close relations with
the Money Trust 76 The Jekyl Island Conspiracy and planning for the Federal Reserve System.
Aldrich, according to Satterlee, ...turned to Mr. Morgan for advice and then
during the next two years they were to
spend many hours together working out an
orderly pattern for the banking world of this country from coast to coastP
Again, according to Satterlee, J. P. Morgan "lent him
(Aldrich) Harry Davison (Morgan partner)
to help with details while Paul M.
Warburg, the Kuhn Loeb partner, also "put his service at
Senator Aldrich's disposal. " (4)
This triad -Morgan- Aldrich-Warburg - was the
focal point for planning the introduction of central banking to the United States. The remaining Jekyl Island conspirators came
on the scene later. Frank Vanderlip
(whom we have already quoted) of National City Bank was linked to the Rockefeller family by
marriage and came into the group in
early 1910 after receiving a letter from Stillman, founder and chairman of National City Bank. This letter
referred to a meeting between Stillman
and Aldrich in Europe on the central bank question. From this letter we learn that the
conspirators used a code and that
Aldrich's code name was "Zivil." In his book, Vanderlip
states: Mr. Stillman wrote me that I
should make everything else subservient
to giving my whole time and thought to a
thorough consideration of the subject (i.e., the currency plan) and to draft a bill for the
new Congress without a Wall Street tag.
(5) Above all the conspirators knew
they had to maintain absolute secrecy.
If any Wall Street name ever became attached to a central banking Federal Reserve bill it would
be the kiss of death. Not only were code
names adopted but individuals went to great lengths to avoid public knowledge of their meetings and
discussions. 77 The Federal Reserve Conspiracy Without any question if the public in 1913
had known what we know today the Federal
Reserve Act would have no possibility at all of
becoming law. On the question of public suspicions of the close
family links in the group, for which the
group claimed disinterested
impartiality, Vanderlip noted:
But would the electorate have believed that? I question their ability to do so. Just to give you a faint
idea: Senator Aldrich was the
father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and himself a very rich man.Once I had written to Woodrow Wilson
at Princeton, inviting him to speak at a
dinner. Wishing to impress him with the
importance of the occasion, I had mentioned that Senator Aldrich also had been invited to speak. My friend Dr.
Wilson had astonished me by replying
that he could not bring himself to speak
on the same platform with Senator Aldrich. He did come and make a speech, however, after I had reported that
Mr. Aldrich 's health would prevent him
from appearing. Now then, fancy what sort of
head-lines might have appeared over a story that Aldrich was conferring about new money legislation with a
Morgan partner (Davison) and the
president of the biggest bank (Vanderlip). (6)
The National City Bank founded by Stillman is significant because one of its directors was Cleveland
Dodge, the financial powerhouse and
influence behind Woodrow Wilson.
Woodrow Wilson, who was to sign the Federal Reserve Act into law, was a deliberate creation of the Money
Power, who was approved in the spring of
1912 at a weekend meeting at Beechwood, the
Vanderlip estate at Scarborough on Hudson. According to one
observer, Wilson passed the test because
Vanderlip and William Rockefeller
discussed the 78 The Jekyl Island Conspiracy role of American capital abroad in front of
Wilson. (7) This we shall describe in
more detail later. The central
intellectual figure in the creation of the Federal Reserve System was not an American but a
German banker - Paul Moritz Warburg, a
banker born in 1868 into the Hamburg Oppenheim
family. Warburg's father was a partner in the M. M. Warburg banking house founded in 1798. Warburg's early career
was with Samuel Montagu & Co. in
London and the Banque Russe Pour he Commerce
Etranger in Paris. In 1891 Warburg went to work at the family bank
in Hamburg and became a partner in 1895.
In 1902 he came to the United States as
a partner in Kuhn Loeb, and in spite of defective English, began a campaign for a Federal Reserve
System. The plan may be found in his pamphlets,
"Defects and Needs of our Banking System
since 1907" and "A plan for a modified central bank"
(1907). In 1910 Warburg proposed a plan
for a United Reserve Bank and much of this
plan was embodied in the Federal Reserve System. These were the men who met in secret on
Jekyl Island to put together the initial
draft of the Federal Reserve Act. The
secret meeting was recorded by Frank Vanderlip: Since it would be 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 report and bill, precautions were taken that would have delighted the heart of James Stillman.
We were told to leave our last names
behind us. ..that we should avoid dining together on the night of our departure to come one at a
time and as unobtru- sively as possible
to the railroad terminal on the New Jersey
littoral of the Hudson, where Senator Aldrich's private car would be in readiness, attached to the rear end of
a train for the South. 79 The Federal Reserve Conspiracy When I came to that car the blinds were down
and only slender threads of amber light
showed the shape of the windows. Once
aboard the private car we began to observe the taboo that had been fixed on last names. We addressed
each other as "Ben, "
"Paul, " "Nelson, " and "Abe. " Davison
and I adopted even deeper disguises,
abandoning our own first names. On the theory that we were always right, he became Wilbur and I
became Orville, after those two aviation
pioneers, the Wright brothers. The
servants and the train crew may have known the
identities of one or two of us, but they did not know all, and it
was the names of all printed together
that would have made our mysterious
journey significant in Washington, in Wall Street, even in London. Discovery, we knew, simply must
not happen, or else all our time and
effort would be wasted. If it were to be exposed publicly that our particular group had gotten
together and written a banking bill,
that bill would have no chance whatever of
passage by Congress. (8) The
last sentence says it all from the vantage point of an insider - this was a planned conspiracy. The American
public would never hand over a monopoly
of the money supply to a small group. After all, the Sherman Antitrust Act had just made monopoly
in restraint of trade illegal and a
money monopoly was even less acceptable.
To avoid public knowledge, these bankers went skulking off to a remote island in the dead of night using code
names and disguises! Vanderlip goes on
to describe the secret meeting itself and that
Vanderlip and Strong actually wrote the so-called Aldrich report and
the bill presented to the Senate. What
is interesting is the utter assurance on
the part of Vanderlip 80 The Jekyl Island Conspiracy that the bankers were acting in the
interests of the country as a whole
rather than in their own selfish interests. What this group proposed to do - and
actually did do in 1913 - was replace
gold and silver with a paper factory which they controlled. How this could be presented as a public-spirited
act is probably beyond most
readers. We were taken by boat
from the mainland to Jekyl Island and
for a week or ten days were completely secluded, without any contact by telephone or telegraph with the
outside. We had disappeared from the
world onto a deserted island. There were
plenty of colored servants but they had no idea who Ben and Paul and Nelson were; even Vanderlip, or Davison,
or Andrew, would have meant less than
nothing to them. There we worked in the
club-house - We returned to the North as
secretly as we had gone South. It was agreed that Senator Aldrich would present the bill we had drafted
to the Senate. It became known to the
country as the Aldrich Plan. Aldrich and
Andrew left us at Washington,and Warburg, Davison, Strong, and I returned to New York. Congress was about to meet; but on a Saturday
we got word in New York that Senator
Aldrich was ill, too ill to write an
appropriate document to accompany his plan. Ben Strong and I went on to Washington and together we
prepared that report. If what we had
done then had been made known publicly, the effort would have been denounced as a piece of Wall
Street chicanery, which it certainly was
not. Aldrich never was a man to be a mere
servant of the so-called money-interests. He was a con- 81
The Federal Reserve Conspiracy _
scientious, public -spirited man. He had called on the four of us who had Wall Street addresses because he knew
that we had for years been studying
aspects of the problem with which it was his
public duty to deal. The Aldrich
plan written by Vanderlip and Strong did not get through Congress. It was shot down. An ailing
Senator Aldrich retired and the Money
Trust was forced to look elsewhere to get its plans through Congress. National City Bank director Cleveland Dodge
was a classmate (1879, Princeton) of
Woodrow Wilson. McCormick of the Harvester
Trust was in the same Princeton Class. By the early 1900s, Wilson, with help from Cleveland Dodge, had become
President of Princeton University and
Dodge let it be known that Wall Street considered Wilson "presidential
material." A flattered Woodrow
Wilson wrote journalist George Harvey in
December, 1906 to identify "the influential men who considered him
as presidential material." Harvey
replied, "naming some of the most
influential bankers, utility executives and conservative journalists in
the country."' 9 ' Wilson, for all his public image of a
teetering, owlish professor, had one
lesson down by heart, that to get along, one has to go along. In March, 1907 George Harvey introduced Wilson
to Thomas Fortune Ryan, member of the
copper trust and a prominent financier. After this meeting, Wilson wrote a brief for the Wall
Street establishment in which he
provided academic support for the Trusts -incidentally, in total contradiction to his public statements. This Wall Street cabal, with the aid of New
Jersey political bosses, pushed for
Woodrow Wilson to become Governor of New Jersey in November, 1910. Within a few months, Cleveland Dodge opened
a bank account in New York and an office
at 42 Broadway to boom 82 The Jekyl Island Conspiracy Wilson into the Presidency. The campaign
bank account was opened with a check for
$1,000 from Cleveland Dodge. Dodge then provided funds to mail out the True American of
Trenton, New Jersey to 40,000
subscribers throughout the United States, followed by a regular two pages a week of promotional material on Wilson
For President. Two-thirds of Wilson's
campaign funds for the presidency came
from just seven individuals, all Wall Streeters and linked to the very trusts Wilson was publicly denouncing.
Wilson's election slogans promoted him
as a man of peace and against trusts and monopoly. These were the very sources financing his
campaign: (10) Cleveland H. Dodge
$51,300 (Director: National City Bank,
etc.); Henry Morgenthau (financier)
$20,000 Cyrus PL McCormick (Harvester
Trust) $12,500 Abram I. Elkus (Wall
Street lawyer) $12,500 Frederick C.
Penfield $12,000 (Philadelphia real
estate) William F. McCombs $11,000 Charles R. Crane (Crane Co., Chicago)
$10,000 Wilson received the nomination
and wrote to "dear Cleve"
(Dodge) to exult, "I am so happy I can hardly think! " (11)
Wilson's acceptance speech was written
on board the Corona, Dodge's yacht,
while they planned strategy for the coming campaign. (12) In brief, Woodrow Wilson was in the hands of
the Money Trust, had lied to the American
public about his true position on the trusts and Wall Street and betrayed the
Jef-fersonian-Jacksonian tradition of the
Democratic Party. Wilson was
elected President. And the ballots had hardly been counted when Wall Street bustled about to
arrange "currency reform." By
early December, 1912, Colonel House had already talked with key members of Congress to 83
The Federal Reserve Conspiracy
get them behind Wilson, and when Paul Warburg telephoned House on December 12, 1912, the Colonel told him that
the plan was ready. Added House in his
memoirs: "I knew the President-elect thought straight concerning the issue. " (13) In March, Frank Vanderlip talked with House,
and two weeks later a group of bankers
arrived at the White House with a printed
"currency reform" bill for Wilson to present to Congress.
House suggested that it would not be
wise to flaunt the power of the House of
Morgan with a pre-printed reform bill - so the Federal Reserve Act
was taken back to Wall Street and a typewritten
copy made from the printed plan. (14) It
now only remained to get the Federal Reserve Bill through Congress.
84 The Jekyl Island
Conspiracy Endnotes to Chapter
Eight (1) Frank A. Vanderlip,
President, First National City Bank, From
Farm Boy to Financier (New York: Appleton, 1935), p. 210. (2) See Ferdinand Lundberg, America's 60
Families (New York: Vanguard Press,
1937). (3) Herbert L. Satterlee, J.
Pierpont Morgan: An Intimate Portrait
(New York: Macmillan, 1939), p. 493.
(4) Ibid., p. 550. (5) Frank
Vanderlip, op. cit., p. 211. (6) Ibid.,
p. 212. (7) John K. Winkler, The First
Billion, (New York: Vanguard Press,
1934), pp. 209-211. (8) Frank
Vanderlip, op. cit., p. 213. (9) Ray
Baker, Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters (New York, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1927-39) vol 3, p.
365. (10) Louise Overacker, Money in
Elections (New York: Macmillan, 1932). (11) Ray Baker, Ibid. (12) op cit. p. 372. 85
The Federal Reserve Conspiracy
(13) Charles Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1926-28),
vol. I, p. 161. (14) Seymour, op cit.
p. 161. 86 Chapter Nine THE MONEY TRUST CONS CONGRESS 
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