Jackals At Jekyll

About the Book

How did a group of private bankers devise, promote and ramrod a plan through Congress to take over the money and credit of the United States at a time when anti-trust laws were being invoked to curb corporate monopolies? 

Answer.  With money, foreign connections, inside Congressional help, propaganda and a gullible president who believed their scheme to set up the Federal Reserve System was for the welfare of the United States.

That’s what his book is about. The story begins late in the first decade of the 20^th Century and involves a secret and successful scam that would make any Hollywood cloak-and-dagger mystery pale by comparison.

The perpetrators of the swindle include prominent New York bankers, a foreigner sent by European banking interests, a key senator and alleged front man for the Rockefeller interests.  They pulled off a successful scheme to the take over the people’s money and credit by forming the Federal Reserve System, a deliberate misnomer, since the institution formed was not Federal nor did it have the reserves its name implies.

The machinations involved tops anything Alfred Hitchcock and other Hollywood mystery producers have ever come up with.  It might even rival the great Edgar Poe, the master of ratiocination himself.

The book delves into how it was done and sketches those who participated in the scheme often referred to as the greatest scam in history.  It pulls together various accounts of the episode as well as biographies of some participants and quotes from one autobiography of a banker who was in on the fraud and who also was a former economics writer.

The story is astounding because the bankers were able to establish a private cartel at the very time when the Sherman and Clayton Anti-Trust Acts were being invoked to dismantle corporate monopolies such as Standard Oil.

They used as much secrecy as they could contrive to conceal their identity using first or phony names and disguising their trip from New York to an idyllic island off the southern Georgia coast as a hunting expedition.  Jekyll Island, where week-long mysterious meetings took place in 1910, was then owned by J.P. Morgan and other wealthy Americans at time.

The bankers not only wrote their legislation but railroaded it through Congress in what the late historian Antony Sutton called ‘’one of the most disgraceful unconstitutional perversions of political power in American history.’’

It is obvious the Fed is a failure and has not achieved its stated objective of stabilizing the economy, protecting the dollar or preventing inflation or economic cycles, some severe.  As one writer points out it has presided over two stock market crashes, the Great Depression and several recessions.  It has also financed several wars at least some of which its policies helped cause, some historians charge.

The dollar has declined more than 90 cents since the Fed was founded in 1913, the nation is officially about $8 billion in debt and it may be alarmingly more, it is running record budget and trade deficits and has become a debtor nation.  Some stability!  Even former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan warned of the large deficits before leaving office.

Congressman Ron Paul claims the Fed ‘’…is inherently incompatible with real free market capitalism,’’ and compares it to the centralized planning of prices, wages and production in the former Soviet Union.

The scheme was unconstitutional from the beginning because the Constitution forbids fiat money; Congress delegated its constitutional power to coin and regulate money to private bankers, and it also shifted some of its constitutional power to the executive branch.

The Fed’s sorry record is reason enough for its abolishment, which spineless politicians will never do.  At least its enigmatic and mystic nature should be stripped and its true nature should be imparted to the public via of a government-sponsored educational campaign.

The mess we are in started on a cold night in Hoboken, N. Y. in November 1910 when a private railroad car loaded with New York bankers coupled on to a train headed south.  Destination:  Jekyll Island.     

About the Author

Richard Sizemore is a veteran newspaperman with more than forty years’ experience in writing, editing, and reporting for a wire service, daily newspapers, and trade publications. He spent more than twenty years in Washington with UPI and Fairchild Publications. He also worked for Fairchild and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Dallas and has freelanced for various publications. In Washington, his beats included the Commerce, Treasury, State, and Labor Departments and from time to time, the White House and the Federal Reserve Board, whose actions affected everyone. The story of the Fed has always been fascinating and amazing to him because it is an enigma and constitutionally suspect, but few have challenged it, and those who have tried seriously to do so have met with unkind fates.  Since semi-retirement in 1990, Sizemore has devoted his time to reading, researching, and writing on this and other subjects. He writes essays on his Web site, www.sanspap.com, and he has written one other book titled U.S. Sovereignty Under Attack. He lives in Richardson, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, with his wife, Elizabeth.