The Creature from Jekyll Island

The duck hunters who changed everything

One night in November 1910, a private railcar was hitched to a southbound train at a station in Hoboken, New Jersey. The shades were drawn before the passengers boarded. The men arrived separately, and they had been instructed to use only their first names. If anyone on the platform noticed them, the story was simple: they were heading south for a duck-hunting weekend at a private club on the Georgia coast.

They were not going duck hunting.

The men on that train represented, by various estimates, somewhere between one-quarter and one-sixth of the total wealth of the entire world. There was Senator Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, chairman of the National Monetary Commission and father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr. There was A. Piatt Andrew, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. There was Frank Vanderlip, president of National City Bank of New York, who was there representing the Rockefeller banking interests. There was Henry Davison, senior partner at J.P. Morgan. There was Charles Norton, president of Morgan's First National Bank. There was Benjamin Strong, another Morgan man, who would later become the first and most powerful head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And there was Paul Warburg, the soft-spoken partner at Kuhn, Loeb and Company, who had emigrated from Germany carrying in his head a detailed understanding of how the great European central banks operated.

The train pulled into Brunswick, Georgia the next morning. A launch was waiting to ferry them across the water to Jekyll Island, where the Jekyll Island Club maintained a private resort for America's wealthiest families. Nobody from the press followed. Nobody from the public knew they had gone. They spent nine days in a clubhouse on a barrier island, and when they left, they had the rough draft of what would become the Federal Reserve System.