The Secrets of the Federal Reserve - Eustace Mullins

CHAPTER ONE
 Jekyll Island
"The matter of a uniform discount rate was discussed and settled at 
Jekyll Island."--Paul M. Warburg
On the night of November 22, 1910, a group of newspaper reporters 
stood disconsolately in the railway station at Hoboken, New Jersey. 
They had just watched a delegation of the nation’s leading 
financiers leave the station on a secret mission. It would be years 
before they discovered what that mission was, and even then they 
would not understand that the history of the United States 
underwent a drastic change after that night in Hoboken.
The delegation had left in a sealed railway car, with blinds drawn, 
for an undisclosed destination. They were led by Senator Nelson 
Aldrich, head of the National Monetary Commission. President 
Theodore Roosevelt had signed into law the bill creating the 
National Monetary Commission in 1908, after the tragic Panic of 
1907 had resulted in a public outcry that the nation’s monetary 
system be stabilized. Aldrich had led the members of the 
Commission on a two-year tour of Europe, spending some three 
hundred thousand dollars of public money. He had not yet made a 
report on the results of this trip, nor had he offered any plan for 
banking reform.
Accompanying Senator Aldrich at the Hoboken station were his 
private secretary, Shelton; A. Piatt Andrew, Assistant Secretary of 
the Treasury, and Special Assistant of the National Monetary 
Commission; Frank Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank of 
New York, Henry P. Davison, senior partner of J.P. Morgan 
Company, and generally regarded as Morgan’s personal emissary; 
and Charles D. Norton, president of the Morgan-dominated First 
National Bank of New York. Joining the group just before the train 
left the station were Benjamin Strong, also known as a lieutenant of 
J.P. Morgan; and Paul Warburg, a recent immigrant from Germany 
who had joined the banking house of Kuhn, Loeb

and Company, New York as a partner earning five hundred 
thousand dollars a year.
Six years later, a financial writer named Bertie Charles Forbes (who 
later founded the Forbes Magazine; the present editor, Malcom 
Forbes, is his son), wrote:
"Picture a party of the nation’s greatest bankers stealing out 
of New York on a private railroad car under cover of 
darkness, stealthily hieing hundred of miles South, embarking 
on a mysteriouslaunch, sneaking onto an island deserted by 
all but a few servants, living there a full week under such rigid 
secrecy that the names of not one of them was once 
mentioned lest the servants learn the identity and disclose to 
the world this strangest, most secret expedition in the history 
of American finance. I am not romancing; I am giving to the 
world, for the first time, the real story of how the famous 
Aldrich currency report, the foundation of our new currency 
system, was written . . . . The utmost secrecy was enjoined 
upon all. The public must not glean a hint of what was to be 
done. Senator Aldrich notified each one to go quietly into a 
private car of which the railroad had received orders to draw 
up on an unfrequented platform. Off the party set. New
York’s ubiquitous reporters had been foiled . . . Nelson 
(Aldrich) had confided to Henry, Frank, Paul and Piatt that he 
was to keep them locked up at Jekyll Island, out of the rest of 
the world, until they had evolved and compiled a scientific 
currency system for the United States, the real birth of the 
present Federal Reserve System, the plan done on Jekyll 
Island in the conference with Paul, Frank and Henry . . . . 
Warburg is the link that binds the Aldrich system and the 
present system together. He more than any one man has 
made the system possible as a working reality."
The official biography of Senator Nelson Aldrich states:
"In the autumn of 1910, six men went out to shoot ducks, 
Aldrich, his secretary Shelton, Andrews, Davison, Vanderlip 
and Warburg. Reporters were waiting at the Brunswick 
(Georgia) station. Mr. Davison went out and talked to them. 
The reporters dispersed and the secret of the strange journey 

The Secrets of the Federal Reserve - Eustace Mullins