Chapter 3

Jekyll Island & the Creation of the Federal Reserve

In November 1910, six men representing a quarter of the world's wealth boarded a private rail car in New Jersey. Their destination: a private island off the coast of Georgia. Their mission: to draft the blueprint for a new central bank.

Veritas Worldwide · March 2026 · 1907–1913

In 1910, the six most powerful men in American finance boarded a private railcar at a New Jersey station and traveled south under assumed names to a private island off the coast of Georgia.

The six most powerful men in American finance boarded a private railcar at a New Jersey station and traveled south under assumed names. They told their servants they were going duck hunting. They told no one else anything. When they arrived at Jekyll Island, Georgia — a private retreat owned by a club of millionaires that included J.P. Morgan, William Rockefeller, and Joseph Pulitzer — they locked the doors and spent nine days writing the legislation that would become the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. [1] This is not a conspiracy theory. It is documented history, confirmed by the participants themselves in their own memoirs and in the historical record. Frank Vanderlip, president of National City Bank (now Citibank), wrote about the meeting in a 1935 article in the Saturday Evening Post: "I was as secretive — indeed, as furtive — as any conspirator. Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would be 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." [1]