The mustachioed man in the silk top hat strode to his private railcar parked at a New Jersey train station, a mahogany-paneled affair with velvet drapes and well-polished brass accents. Five more men — and a legion of porters and servants — soon joined him. They referred to one another by their first names only, an uncommon informality in 1910, intended to give the staff no hints as to who the men actually were, lest rumors make their way to the newspapers and then to the trading floors of New York and London. One of the men, a German immigrant named Paul Warburg, carried a borrowed shotgun in order to look like a duck hunter, despite having never drawn a bead on a waterfowl in his life.
Two days later, the car deposited the men at the small Georgia port town of Brunswick, where they boarded a boat for the final leg of their journey. Jekyll Island, their destination, was a private resort owned by the powerful banker J.P. Morgan and some friends, a refuge on the Atlantic where they could get away from the cold New York winter. Their host — the man in the silk top hat — was Nelson Aldrich, one of the most powerful senators of the day, a lawmaker who lorded over the nation’s financial matters.
For nine days, working all day and into the night, the six men debated how to reform the U.S. banking and monetary systems, trying to find a way to make this nation just finding its footing on the global stage less subject to the kinds of financial collapses that had seemingly been conquered in Western Europe.
Secrecy was paramount. “Discovery,” wrote one attendee later, “simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would have been wasted. If it were to be exposed publicly that our particular group had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress.”
For decades afterward, the most powerful men in American finance referred to one another as part of the “First Name Club.” Paul, Harry, Frank and the others were part of a small group that, in those nine days, invented the Federal Reserve System. Their task was more than administrative. Because the men at Jekyll Island weren’t just trying to solve an economic problem — they were trying to solve a political problem as old as their republic.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/12/21/the-federal-reserve-was-created-100-years-ago-this-is-how-it-happened/TO AGREE TO THE REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON CONFERENCE ON H. R. 7837, WHICH REPORT PROPOSES TO ELIMINATE VOTING POWER OF CLASS C DIRECTORS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE AND TO PROHIBIT ANY SENATOR OR REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM HOLDING OFFICE IN FEDERAL RESERVE OR ANY BANK AND TO ELIMINATE PUBLIC RIGHT TO VOTE FOR EACH $15,000 OF STOCK, THE APPOINTMENT OF PERSONS WITHOUT REGARD TO CIVIL SERVICE, AND THE ACCEPTANCE OF DRAFTS AND BILL OF EXCHANGE ON DOMESTIC SHIPMENTS. (P.1469- 1,2; 1470-1,2)
Aye 43
Nay 25
Not Voting 18
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/63-2/s185
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