Sunday, February 23, 2020

Chapter Eight: THE JEKYL ISLAND CONSPIRACY: The Federal Reserve Conspiracy by Antony C. Sutton from archive.org


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   

No comments:

Post a Comment