A Duck Hunt in Georgia

November 1910

In late November 1910, Senator Nelson Aldrich sent a message to a small group of men. Bring your rifles and duck-hunting gear. Meet at the Hoboken, New Jersey train station. Board the private railcar. Tell no one where you are going. They were not going duck hunting.

The Six Men

Over the course of a few days, six men gathered at Hoboken and boarded Senator Aldrich's private railcar, attached to a southbound train. They used first names only. Some used aliases. Staff were told the men were going on a duck-hunting trip. Their destination was Jekyll Island, Georgia, a private winter retreat owned by the Jekyll Island Club, whose membership roster included J.P. Morgan, William Rockefeller, and several Vanderbilts. The annual dues alone would have excluded virtually every American alive at the time.

• Nelson Aldrich: Republican Senate leader, chairman of the National Monetary Commission, father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr.
• Abraham Piatt Andrew: Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury
• Frank A. Vanderlip: President of National City Bank of New York, the forerunner of Citibank
• Henry P. Davison: Senior Partner at J.P. Morgan & Company
• Charles D. Norton: President of the First National Bank of New York
• Paul M. Warburg: Partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Company, an immigrant from one of Germany's most prominent banking families, with deep knowledge of European central banking systems

Nine Days on the Island

For nine days, behind closed doors, these six men designed a central banking system for the United States. Paul Warburg brought the intellectual framework. He had studied the Reichsbank in Germany and the Bank of England and had been writing publicly for years about America's need for a central monetary authority. He argued for an institution that could expand and contract the money supply in response to economic conditions, serve as a lender of last resort during panics (the role Morgan had filled personally in 1907), and create an efficient system for clearing payments between banks. The challenge was not technical. It was political. Americans had killed two central banks already. Thomas Jefferson opposed the first. Andrew Jackson destroyed the second. The populist argument, that a central bank concentrated too much power in the hands of eastern financiers, was potent and bipartisan. Any plan visibly connected to Wall Street would be dead on arrival in Congress. The group designed a structure with twelve regional reserve banks instead of one central authority. The architecture created the appearance of geographic decentralization while maintaining coordinated policy through a central governing board in Washington. They named it with precision: a "Federal Reserve System." Federal suggested government oversight. Reserve suggested safety and stability. System suggested distributed authority rather than concentrated power. The name was as carefully engineered as the institution itself.

From Draft to Law

The group left Jekyll Island with a detailed draft. Senator Aldrich introduced it to Congress as the "Aldrich Plan" in early 1911. It failed. Aldrich's name was too closely associated with Wall Street and the Rockefeller family. Progressive Democrats and populist Republicans united against it. After the 1912 election, which brought Woodrow Wilson to the White House and Democratic majorities to both chambers of Congress, the core architecture was repackaged. Representative Carter Glass and Senator Robert Owen sponsored what became the Federal Reserve Act, incorporating many of the Jekyll Island design principles while adding provisions for presidential appointment of the central board. President Wilson signed it into law on December 23, 1913. The twelve-bank structure, the elastic currency mechanism, the lender-of-last-resort function, and the public-private governance model all survived largely intact from the Jekyll Island draft.

The Historical Record

The meeting was not publicly confirmed for years after it occurred. B.C. Forbes, founder of Forbes magazine, published an account in 1916 based on sources close to the participants. The fullest confirmation came from the participants themselves. Frank Vanderlip wrote in the Saturday Evening Post in 1935: "There was an occasion, near the close of 1910, when I was as secretive, indeed as furtive, as any conspirator... I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyll Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System." These are Vanderlip's own words, published under his own name. The facts of the meeting, the secrecy, the pseudonyms, the participants, and the outcome, are part of the documented historical record.

The Federal Reserve was designed in private by six men who sat at the intersection of government and private banking. The secrecy was deliberate. The political packaging was deliberate. The architecture, twelve regional banks coordinated by a central board, was a compromise between centralized monetary control and American distrust of concentrated financial power. The institution they designed has managed the US money supply for over a century. Understanding how it was created is part of understanding how it operates.