It's a cloak and dagger thing that starts out like this:
"Jekyll Island [Georgia]. On the night of November 22, 1910, a group of newspaper reporters stood disconsolately in the railway station at Hoboken, New Jersey. They had just watched a delegation of the nation’s leading financiers leave the station on a secret mission. It would be years before they discovered what that mission was, and even then they would not understand that the history of the United States underwent a drastic change after that night in Hoboken.
The delegation had left in a sealed railway car, with blinds drawn, for an undisclosed destination. They were led by...."
Some of the names on the list were:
Senator Nelson Aldrich, head of the National Monetary Commission
Shelton (?), Aldrich's private secretary
A. Piatt Andrew, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and Special Assistant of the National Monetary Commission
Frank Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank of New York
Henry P. Davison, senior partner of J.P. Morgan Company
Charles D. Norton, president of the Morgan-dominated First National Bank of New York
Benjamin Strong, also known as a lieutenant of J.P. Morgan
Paul Warburg, a recent immigrant from Germany who had joined the banking house of Kuhn, Loeb and Company in NY.
The story goes on to say: "Six years later, a financial writer named Bertie Charles Forbes (who later founded the Forbes Magazine; the present editor, Malcom Forbes, is his son), wrote: 'Picture a party of the nation’s greatest bankers stealing out of New York on a private railroad car under cover of darkness, stealthily hieing hundred of miles South, embarking on a mysterious launch, sneaking onto an island deserted by all but a few servants, living there a full week under such rigid secrecy that the names of not one of them was once mentioned lest the servants learn the identity and disclose to the world this strangest, most secret expedition in the history of American finance.
I am not romancing; I am giving to the world, for the first time, the real story of how the famous Aldrich currency report, the foundation of our new currency system, was written . . . . The utmost secrecy was enjoined upon all. The public must not glean a hint of what was to be done. Senator Aldrich notified each one to go quietly into a private car of which the railroad had received orders to draw up on an unfrequented platform. Off the party set. New York’s ubiquitous reporters had been foiled . . .
Nelson (Aldrich) had confided to Henry, Frank, Paul and Piatt that he was to keep them locked up at Jekyll Island, out of the rest of the world, until they had evolved and compiled a scientific currency system for the United States, the real birth of the present Federal Reserve System, the plan done on Jekyll Island in the conference with Paul, Frank and Henry . . . . Warburg is the link that binds the Aldrich system and the present system together. He more than any one man has made the system possible as a working reality.' "
Google "Aldrich currency report" to continue....
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9F07E1D91130E733A25750C0A9659C946297D6CF
