[jeckyll island] one tuesday evening in november

Though the political sensitivities of the populace in the States differ in some ways from Europe, nevertheless, the values, interests, attitudes and behaviour of the participants in the 1910 doings in the U.S. were and still are equally applicable to Britain and Europe. The mindset is the same. To begin with Jefferson:

To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition. [Thomas Jefferson February 15, 1791, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. by H. E. Bergh, Vol. III, p. 145 ff.)

The following borrows heavily from Eustace Mullins, Mullins On The Federal Reserve, Kasper and Horton, New York, 1952, commissioned by Ezra Pound in 1948:

On the night of November 22, 1910, a group of newspaper reporters watched a delegation of the nation’s leading financiers leave Hoboken, New Jersey, 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, created by President Theodore Roosevelt 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 but had not yet made a report on the results of this trip.

With him 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.

Photo right: Nelson Aldrich

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.

Story continues here.