WEBVTT

NOTE How did the Federal Reserve Act come about?

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Henry P. Davison, by late 1910, realizes they all should be brought together.

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I mean, let's get the whole thing worked out and have one plan,

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because otherwise we'd lose if we have several different proposals.

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So he gets the idea of a small group, a small, top elite group,

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to get together at some pleasant resort and hammer out the draft of the plan.

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That's it. Write the bill, which would then become the Fed.

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And they met at Jekyll Island Club in Georgia.

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It was top secret, because they realized that the public didn't trust banks for good reason.

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Second of all, they didn't trust Wall Street.

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Third of all, they certainly don't like secret conclave to put in the central bank.

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So the sort of thing we're now familiar with, sort of like a CIA thing, they old rich

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chartered a private car from New York, a private railroad car to go down to Jekyll Island,

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and he told everybody this was a duck-hunting expedition.

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In those days, Jekyll Island Club was largely a duck hunting club. I don't know why they hunt ducks anymore.

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I know about 1910. I don't know about now.

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But anyway, he said, no, no, we're just going on a friendly duck hunting expedition.

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This was in November, I guess, which is duck season.

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And they all went under an assumed name, by the way.

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You know, Joe Jones, whatever their names were, except for not Henry P. Davison.

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And one of the press apparently got wind of this.

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One enterprising reporter found out what they were doing, and he was silenced by Davison.

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by Davidson.

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Somehow Davidson was able to give him an offer he couldn't refuse.

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Another interesting thing is who got them, you have to be a member of a club that remains

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a facilities and neither of these guys, as big shoddy as they were, none of these guys

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were members of the Jekyll Island Club.

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J.P. Morgan, however, was a member and so the conjecture is actually fairly, it's fairly

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substantiated.

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The J.P. Morgan facility was a guy who turned over the facilities of the Jekyll Island

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Club to the top secret week-long conclave.

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So here you have the secret six, so to speak, the six guys who got together and hammered

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out the Fed. Who were they? Well, the chairman of the one who called the meeting officially,

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the Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, Rockefeller-in-Law, Henry P. Davison, of course, Morgan partner,

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who had the idea of this, Paul Warburg, Kuhn-Loha partner, Frank Vanderlip, who was Vice President

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of the National City Bank, who was a big Rockefeller, which was a big Rockefeller bank, also a big

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The Big Activist type in the forefront, and Charles Norton was the president of the First

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National Bank of New York, which is one of the top Morgan banks.

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He had five people, five big businessmen at this meeting, two Rockefeller persons, Old

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Rich and Van der Lipp, two Morgan persons, Davidson and Norton, and one Cunlola person,

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Warburg.

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It's like a 2-2-1 parody, like the Washington Naval agreement in the 1920s.

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And a sixth guy to actually do the drastic, a technician, you need a technician, an economist

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in other words. A Harvard professor naturally, the only thing about history and status history,

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Harvard is usually in their first, A. Piot Andrew, who had been assistant to Oldridge

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in the National Monetary Commission, he was there to actually get the resources, the research

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of the National Monetary Commission to actually be able to provide the techniques of it.

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So this is also, this symbol, this meeting symbolizes many things, symbolizes the Rockefeller-Morgan-Coulomb

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alliance and the weight, the general weight proportionate weight of them, and the alliance

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The big business types with economists and technicians actually do the work, you know, the actual detail stuff.

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So basically, they hammered out an agreement, and basically it was the Warburg Plan with a little soup song of stuff from Morrowitz.

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The only real argument they ever had, either now or later, was that Aldrich wanted a frank central bank thing,

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one bank where the banker's really running it, the banker's making all the appointments.

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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.

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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.