Forum Post: A right to make our own money

Federal Reserve is born

In 1907 the greatest of the depressions occurred and hundreds of thousands of people were bankrupt and suffering. The bankers said, “We must do something in order to establish a system in this country that will enable us to survive and prosper.” So in November 1910, a group of the most powerful men in the world and the leaders of the financial system in the United States met at J. P. Morgan’s private hunting estate on Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia.

The two most important individuals who took part in this were Senator Nelson Aldrich, the grandfather of Nelson Rockefeller, and a man by the name of Paul Moritz Warburg. He had come from Germany in 1902 and with Rothschild money had purchased a partnership in Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in New York. He then received an indefinite leave of absence with a salary of $500,000 a year to go up and down the United States to organize opinion in favor of a banking system based upon that of Germany. (The German banking system was presided over by Paul Warburg’s twin brother, Max Warburg. —Ed.)

What these bankers wanted was a system that would appear to be established by the federal government and in which that government would take complete responsibility for all the obligations issued by the bank. But the notes issued by the bank would be private paper, controlled entirely by the banking system. The banks would then be able to control the money supply, determine what the interest rates would be, and what credit would be extended. It would be a system by which they would achieve total control of the country and the people therein.

Conspiracy germinates and grows in secrecy.

The conspirators spent about two weeks on Jekyll Island. It was probably the most secret conclave that has ever taken place in American history. They went to Georgia from New York in a sealed train. They used code names. They sent the regular estate servants ashore for vacations and hired a temporary group of servants who didn’t know any of them. They battled for about two weeks and gradually agreed upon certain principles that would be the basis for a new American banking system.

When they came back from Georgia, Aldrich, who was a stately old solon from Rhode Island, introduced what he called the Aldrich Banking Bill. Since it stank to high heaven of Wall Street it was rejected by the Senate Banking Committee out of hand and never got to the floor of Congress.

But the wily gentleman from Germany, Paul M.Warburg, knew exactly what they would have to do in order to put this over. “We must take away from this the stigma of private enterprise,” Warburg said. “We must convince the people that it is a government agency. We must call it the Federal Reserve System. Then everybody will think that it is a government organization and that it is constitutional. But we will so operate it that actually it will be under the control of the same bankers who want it for their own private benefits.” http://web.archive.org/web/20010225021123/http://www.go-oaktree.com/LarsonFed.htm