3. Frank A. Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank of New York, the most powerful of the banks at that time, representing William Rockefeller and the international investment banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Company;
4. Henry P. Davison, senior partner of the J.P. Morgan Company; 5. Charles D. Norton, president of J.P. Morgan's First National Bank of New York;
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6. Benjamin Strong, head of J.P. Morgan's Bankers Trust Company; and
7. Paul M. Warburg, a partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Company, a representative of the Rothschild banking dynasty in England and France, and brother to Max Warburg who was head of the Warburg banking consortium in Germany and the Netherlands.
1. In private correspondence between the author and Andrew L. Gray, the Grand Nephew of Abraham P. Andrew, Mr. Gray claims that Strong was not in attendance. On the other hand, Frank Vanderlip—who was there— says in his memoirs that he was. How could Vanderlip be wrong? Gray's response: 'He was in his late seventies when he wrote the book and the essay in question.... Perhaps the wish was father to the thought.' If Vanderlip truly was in error, it was perhaps not so significant after all because, as Gray admits: 'Strong would have been among those few to be let in on the secret.' In the absence of further confirmation to the contrary, we are compelled to accept Vanderlip's account.
6 THE CREATURE FROM JEKYLL ISLAND
CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH
Centralization of control over financial resources was far advanced by 1910. In the United States, there were two main focal points of this control: the Morgan group and the Rockefeller group.
Within each orbit was a maze of commercial banks, acceptance banks, and investment firms. In Europe, the same process had proceeded even further and had coalesced into the Rothschild group and the Warburg group. An article appeared in the
In 1913, the year that the Federal Reserve Act became law, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Currency and Banking, under the chairmanship of Arsene Pujo of Louisiana, completed its investigation into the concentration of financial power in the United States. Pujo was considered to be a spokesman for the oil interests, part of the very group under investigation, and did everything possible to sabotage the hearings. In spite of his efforts, however, the final report of the committee at large was devastating: Your committee is satisfied from the proofs submitted ... that there is an established and well defined identity and community of interest between a few leaders of finance ... which has resulted in great and rapidly growing concentration of the control of money and credit in the hands of these few men....
Under our system of issuing and distributing corporate securities the investing public does not buy directly from the corporation. The securities travel from the issuing house through middlemen to the investor. It is only the great banks or bankers with access to the mainsprings of the concentrated resources made up of other people's money, in the banks, trust companies, and life insurance companies, and with control of the machinery for creating markets and distributing securities, who have had the power to underwrite or guarantee the sale of large-scale security issues. The men who through their control over the funds of our railroad and industrial companies are able to direct where such funds shall be kept, and thus to create these great reservoirs of the people's money are the ones who are in a THE JOURNEY TO JEKYLL ISLAND
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position to tap those reservoirs for the ventures in which they are interested and to prevent their being tapped for purposes which they do
When we consider, also, in this connection that into these reservoirs of money and credit there flow a large part of the reserves of the banks of the country, that they are also the agents and correspondents of the out-of-town banks in the loaning of their surplus funds in the only public money market of the country, and that a small group of men and their partners and associates have now further strengthened their hold upon the resources of these institutions by acquiring large stock holdings therein, by representation on their boards and through valuable patronage, we begin to realize something of the extent to which this practical and effective domination and control over our greatest financial, railroad and industrial corporations has developed, largely within the past five years, and that it is fraught with peril to the welfare of the country.1
Such was the nature of the wealth and power represented by those seven men who gathered in secret that night and travelled in the luxury of Senator Aldrich's private car.
DESTINATION JEKYLL ISLAND
As the train neared its destination of Raleigh, North Carolina, the next afternoon, it slowed and then stopped in the switching yard just outside the station terminal. Quickly, the crew threw a switch, and the engine nudged the last car onto a siding where, just as quickly, it was uncoupled and left behind. When passengers stepped onto the platform at the terminal a few moments later, their train appeared exactly as it had been when they boarded.
They could not know that their travelling companions for the night, at that very instant, were joining still another train which, within the hour, would depart Southbound once again.
The elite group of financiers was embarked on a thousand-mile journey that led them to Atlanta, then to
