Henry P. Davison, by late 1910, realizes they all should be brought together.
I mean, let's get the whole thing worked out and have one plan,
because otherwise we'd lose if we have several different proposals.
So he gets the idea of a small group, a small, top elite group,
to get together at some pleasant resort and hammer out the draft of the plan.
That's it. Write the bill, which would then become the Fed.
And they met at Jekyll Island Club in Georgia.
It was top secret, because they realized that the public didn't trust banks for good reason.
Second of all, they didn't trust Wall Street.
Third of all, they certainly don't like secret conclave to put in the central bank.
So the sort of thing we're now familiar with, sort of like a CIA thing, they old rich
chartered a private car from New York, a private railroad car to go down to Jekyll Island,
and he told everybody this was a duck-hunting expedition.
In those days, Jekyll Island Club was largely a duck hunting club. I don't know why they hunt ducks anymore.
I know about 1910. I don't know about now.
But anyway, he said, no, no, we're just going on a friendly duck hunting expedition.
This was in November, I guess, which is duck season.
And they all went under an assumed name, by the way.
You know, Joe Jones, whatever their names were, except for not Henry P. Davison.
And one of the press apparently got wind of this.
One enterprising reporter found out what they were doing, and he was silenced by Davison.
by Davidson.
Somehow Davidson was able to give him an offer he couldn't refuse.
Another interesting thing is who got them, you have to be a member of a club that remains
a facilities and neither of these guys, as big shoddy as they were, none of these guys
were members of the Jekyll Island Club.
J.P. Morgan, however, was a member and so the conjecture is actually fairly, it's fairly
substantiated.
The J.P. Morgan facility was a guy who turned over the facilities of the Jekyll Island
Club to the top secret week-long conclave.
So here you have the secret six, so to speak, the six guys who got together and hammered
out the Fed. Who were they? Well, the chairman of the one who called the meeting officially,
the Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, Rockefeller-in-Law, Henry P. Davison, of course, Morgan partner,
who had the idea of this, Paul Warburg, Kuhn-Loha partner, Frank Vanderlip, who was Vice President
of the National City Bank, who was a big Rockefeller, which was a big Rockefeller bank, also a big
The Big Activist type in the forefront, and Charles Norton was the president of the First
National Bank of New York, which is one of the top Morgan banks.
He had five people, five big businessmen at this meeting, two Rockefeller persons, Old
Rich and Van der Lipp, two Morgan persons, Davidson and Norton, and one Cunlola person,
Warburg.
It's like a 2-2-1 parody, like the Washington Naval agreement in the 1920s.
And a sixth guy to actually do the drastic, a technician, you need a technician, an economist
in other words. A Harvard professor naturally, the only thing about history and status history,
Harvard is usually in their first, A. Piot Andrew, who had been assistant to Oldridge
in the National Monetary Commission, he was there to actually get the resources, the research
of the National Monetary Commission to actually be able to provide the techniques of it.
So this is also, this symbol, this meeting symbolizes many things, symbolizes the Rockefeller-Morgan-Coulomb
alliance and the weight, the general weight proportionate weight of them, and the alliance
The big business types with economists and technicians actually do the work, you know, the actual detail stuff.
So basically, they hammered out an agreement, and basically it was the Warburg Plan with a little soup song of stuff from Morrowitz.
The only real argument they ever had, either now or later, was that Aldrich wanted a frank central bank thing,
one bank where the banker's really running it, the banker's making all the appointments.
And Warburg said, no, I'd love to have a central bank. We couldn't get away with it in the United States. We should have fake decentralization, make 12 regions and claim it's not really a central bank and give a political stop to the public.
And essentially he won out on that. The funny thing is here you have a politician, Aldrich, in one of the straight, hard, down-the-line ideological programs, and Warburg, the banker, thinking in terms of politics. It's got an interesting switch.