THE CITY OF LONDON'S tentacles reached deep into the pockets of the 1900s American Banker... The Jekyll Island meeting (November 1910) was a secret gathering of top bankers and officials who drafted the core plan that led to the Federal Reserve. It took place at the exclusive Jekyll Island Club off the Georgia coast. The group traveled under the cover of a duck-hunting trip so the public and press wouldn’t know Wall Street figures were writing banking reform legislation. Who was there (the main participants): Senator Nelson Aldrich — Chairman of the National Monetary Commission; he organized the meeting. Paul M. Warburg — Partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Co.; the leading technical expert on central banking from THE CITY OF LONDON. Henry P. Davison — Senior partner at J.P. Morgan & Co. Frank A. Vanderlip — President of National City Bank of New York. Benjamin Strong — Vice president of Bankers Trust (Morgan-related). Charles D. Norton — President of First National Bank of New York (also Morgan-aligned). A. Piatt Andrew — Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and economist for the Monetary Commission. What it was for: After the manufactured panic of 1907, Congress had created the National Monetary Commission to study banking reform. Aldrich needed a concrete bill..... At Jekyll Island the group spent about a week writing the framework for a central banking system (the Aldrich Plan / National Reserve Association). The plan called for a privately owned central bank with regional branches that could issue currency and act as a lender of last resort. That draft was later modified under the recovering President Woodrow Wilson... (After an Assassination attempt) The Wilson administration made the modifications and it became the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The secrecy was deliberate—Aldrich and the bankers believed open knowledge of Wall Street’s role would kill the legislation. Just like it nearly killed the President for resisting...