Episode 3: I Don't Believe that it Happened!
It took 9 days for the 7 men to hammer out all of the important details of what would eventually become the Federal Reserve.
For a number of years after the meeting all 7 denied that the meeting ever took place. It was only after the Fed was firmly established that they began openly talking about it.
For those who are still of the opinion that Jekyll Island never happened, several books have been written by some of the participants detailing what they had accomplished. Visit your local library and check them out.
Frank Vanderlip, one of the "unmagnificent 7", wrote an article which appeared in the February 9, 1935 edition of the Saturday Evening Post. Here is a brief excerpt.
" I do not feel it is an 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. We were told to leave our last names behind us. We were told further that we should avoid dining together on the night of our departure. We were instructed to come one at a time and as unobtrusively as possible to the railroad terminal on the New Jersey littoral of the Hudson where Senator Aldrich's private car would be in readiness attached to the rear-end of a train to the south. Once aboard the private car we began to observe the taboo that had been fixed on last names. We addressed one another as Ben, Paul, and Abe. Davison and I adopted even deeper disguises abandoning our first names. On the theory that we were always right, he became Wilbur and I became Orville after those two aviation pioneers the Wright brothers. The servants and train crew may have known the identities of one or two of us, but they did not know all and it was the names of all printed together that would've made our mysterious journey significant in Washington, Wall Street, even in London. Discovery we knew simply must not happen."
"If it were to be exposed publicly that our particular group had gotten together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress."
Next - Episode 4: What exactly is the Federal Reserve?
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