Jekyll Island: the secret meeting that wrote the Federal Reserve
In November 1910, six men boarded a private railway carriage in New Jersey. They arrived one at a time, on purpose. They used first names only, so the staff could not work out who they were. They told anyone who asked that they were going duck shooting. Ten days later, on a private island off the coast of Georgia, they had written the plan that became America's central bank. You do not have to take our word for a single line of that. The Federal Reserve says so on its own website.
In November 1910, six of the most powerful men in American banking and government met in secret on a private island in Georgia. They used first names only and pretended to be duck hunters. The plan they drafted there became the Aldrich Plan, and then, with the politics rearranged, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
Why anybody wanted a central bank
Start with 1907, because 1910 makes no sense without it. America had a banking panic. Depositors queued, banks that could not pay collapsed, and the man who organised the rescue was not a government: it was a banker. J.P. Morgan locked rival financiers in his library and would not let them leave until they had agreed who to save. It worked. That was the problem.
Congress looked at a country whose financial survival had depended on the private judgement of one elderly man, and asked the obvious question: what happens next time, when Morgan is dead? In 1908 it created the National Monetary Commission to find an answer, and made Senator Nelson Aldrich its chairman. Aldrich spent two years touring Europe, studying how the Bank of England and the German Reichsbank worked. Then he invited five men to go duck shooting.
The train
The instructions were unusual. Arrive separately. Do not dine together the night before. Come to a rail terminal in New Jersey where a private carriage will be waiting. Once aboard, use first names only.
This is not a rumour. It is the Federal Reserve's own account, published on its own history website, which says Aldrich "went to great lengths to keep the meeting secret, adopting the ruse of a duck hunting trip and instructing the men to come one at a time to a train terminal in New Jersey, where they could board his private train car." Once aboard, it says, "the men used only first names, Nelson, Harry, Frank, Paul, Piatt, and Arthur, to prevent the staff from learning their identities."
One detail has stuck to the story for a century, and it comes from the family of a man who was there. Paul Warburg, a banker who had never fired a gun in his life, borrowed a shotgun so he would look like a duck hunter carrying it onto the train. His son James told that story in his own memoir decades later. Nobody shot a duck. The duck shoot was the cover.
Who was actually in the room
Six men went. Here is what each of them was, in 1910:
Nelson Aldrich, United States Senator and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee: the politician. A. Piatt Andrew, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and a former Harvard economics professor: the government's technical man. Henry Davison, partner at J.P. Morgan & Co. Frank Vanderlip, president of National City Bank, the institution that grew into today's Citibank. Paul Warburg, partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Co., and the man who understood European central banking better than anyone else aboard. Arthur Shelton, Aldrich's private secretary, who did the writing.
Now read that list again and notice who is missing. No farmer. No small-town banker from Nebraska. No shopkeeper, no borrower, nobody who had ever been on the wrong end of a loan. The people who would be regulated were writing the first draft of their own regulator, in a private club, with the door shut.
What they actually wrote
They produced a design they called the Reserve Association of America: one central institution with fifteen regional branches, which would hold member banks' reserves, issue the country's currency and clear its cheques. In 1911 it was published as the Aldrich Plan.
And it died. Not because of the secrecy, which was still hidden, but because of the name on it. "Aldrich" meant Wall Street to the American public, and a Wall Street bill was not going to pass. So the plan was picked up by the other party, restructured politically, given a different name, and passed on 23 December 1913 as the Federal Reserve Act.
Here is the Federal Reserve's own history site, describing the relationship between the secret plan and the law that governs American money to this day:
"The technical details of the final bill closely resembled those of the Aldrich Plan. The major differences were the political and decision-making structures."
Read that slowly. The engine was the same engine. What changed was the badge on the bonnet and who got to sit in the driving seat. That is not a critic's accusation. It is the institution's own summary of its own origin.
They admitted it themselves
The strongest evidence for the secrecy does not come from anyone attacking the Federal Reserve. It comes from the men who were there, writing about it afterwards, in public, under their own names.
Paul Warburg published a 1,750-page history of the Federal Reserve in 1930. In it he described the conference and wrote: "The results of the conference were entirely confidential. Even the fact there had been a meeting was not permitted to become public." Frank Vanderlip told his own version in the Saturday Evening Post of 9 February 1935, a quarter of a century after the trip. Senator Aldrich's official biography, published in 1930, records that the duck shoot was a blind.
The first leak came earlier still: a young financial reporter called B.C. Forbes, who would go on to found Forbes magazine, printed an account of the expedition in 1916. Nobody had to break in anywhere to find this out. The participants told us.
This is the part most retellings skip, so we will do it properly.
It proves: that the founding design of the American central bank was drafted in secret, by a group dominated by the banks it would govern, and that the participants concealed it deliberately and admitted doing so later. All of that is documented, including by the Federal Reserve itself.
It does not prove: that everything since is a plot, that the men had one shared secret motive, or any of the larger claims that have been built on top of this meeting and sold in large numbers. Some of those claims are sourceable. Many are not. We publish the ones that are and we stop where the documents stop, because the moment we do not, everything else on this site becomes arguable too.
The question worth carrying away is not "was it secret?" That is settled, by the participants and by the Fed. The question is the one nobody at that meeting had to answer: should the people who will be regulated write the first draft of the rules? And then the harder version: where is that happening now, and who is in that room?
Britain did the same thing 216 years earlier, in daylight
If a secret island meeting sounds like the strangest way a central bank could possibly be born, consider the Bank of England. In 1694 the English government needed money to fight a war with France and could not raise it. A group of private investors put up £1.2 million, lent it to the Crown, and in exchange were given a royal charter and the right to issue banknotes against that debt.
No aliases. No shotguns. It was done in the open, by Act of Parliament, and the deal was exactly the same shape as the one drafted on Jekyll Island: government debt meets bank credit, and out of the meeting comes an institution that sits between the two forever. That is where central banks come from. London did it openly in 1694; Georgia did it in disguise in 1910. The full history is here.
The Federal Reserve's own history site carries an essay titled "Jekyll Island Conference" at federalreservehistory.org. It gives the dates (20 to 30 November 1910), all six names, the duck-hunting ruse, the first-names rule and the sentence about the final bill closely resembling the Aldrich Plan. Start there, because it is the hardest source in the world to argue with: it is the institution describing itself.
Roger Lowenstein, America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve (2015). A mainstream, heavily footnoted history of the whole six-year fight. Any decent library can get it.
Paul Warburg, The Federal Reserve System: Its Origin and Growth (1930), Volume I, page 58, for the confidentiality quote, in the words of a man who was on the train.
Nathaniel Wright Stephenson, Nelson W. Aldrich in American Politics (1930), the senator's official biography, for the duck shoot as a blind.
The Federal Reserve Act itself, signed 23 December 1913. The text is public. Read what the plan turned into.
If you find something here that a document contradicts, tell us and we will change the page. That is the deal on every page of this site.
Questions people ask
Was the Jekyll Island meeting really secret?
Yes, and this is not disputed by anyone. The participants arrived separately, used first names to hide their identities from the staff, and used a duck-shooting story as cover. Paul Warburg wrote that even the fact of the meeting was not allowed to become public. The Federal Reserve's own history site describes the secrecy in detail.
Does the Federal Reserve admit it happened?
It does, on its own website, with names, dates and the ruse. That is what makes this a history lesson rather than a rumour, and it is why this page can send you to the central bank's own pages to check every load-bearing claim in it.
Is the Federal Reserve private or government?
Both, awkwardly, and the honest answer is more interesting than either extreme. The Fed's own words: "The Federal Reserve System is not 'owned' by anyone." Member banks hold stock in their regional Reserve Bank, but the Fed says "owning Reserve Bank stock is quite different from owning stock in a private company": it is a legal requirement of membership, not an investment, and it carries no ordinary control. By law the Reserve Banks hand their net earnings to the US Treasury after expenses, dividends and a limited surplus. The Fed describes itself as having a blend of public and private characteristics. Anyone who tells you it is simply one or the other is skipping the bit that matters.
Did the same thing happen in Britain?
The same deal, but in the open. The Bank of England was created in 1694 when private investors lent the government £1.2 million for a war and received a charter and note-issuing rights in return. Government debt plus bank credit equals central bank, in both countries. Only the lighting was different.
Is this a conspiracy theory?
The meeting is not a theory; it is documented history, confirmed by the participants and by the Federal Reserve. What people build on top of it varies enormously in quality, and some of it cannot be sourced at all. This page publishes what the documents support and says plainly where the documents run out. That distinction is the whole method of this site.
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Last checked 25 August 2026.