Hidden Order: A Thriller

“Nice work and even nicer clients if you can get them,” said Harvath.

“Nothing happens by accident with these people,” said Wise. “Also on board were Benjamin Strong and Henry Davison of J. P. Morgan Company, as well as Charles Norton, the president of J. P. Morgan’s First National Bank of New York. There to greet them all as they boarded was the owner of the mahogany-lined railcar, our pal, Senator Nelson Aldrich. In total, there were six men who were conservatively rumored to represent one-fourth of the world’s wealth.

“With the shades drawn and white-gloved staff seeing to cigars and cocktails for the men of the lustrous private car, the train steamed out of Hoboken south toward Brunswick, Georgia, where they would complete the final leg of their eight-hundred-mile journey by boat to Jekyll Island.

“Lest any of the staff figure out who their passengers were or what they were up to, the powerful men had all agreed to address each other by first names only. Vanderlip and Davison were so cocky, though, they insisted on being called not Frank and Henry, but Orville and Wilbur.”

“Like the Wright brothers? Why?”

“Because,” said Wise, “according to Vanderlip, he and Davison were always ‘right’ about everything.”

Harvath shook his head.

“The last thing any of them wanted was for word to get out that they had all come together for one very sinister purpose.”

“Which was?”

“To create a banking monopoly that would tilt the playing field exclusively to their advantage and crush any competition by yoking the brute force of the U.S. government completely under their control. In short, they were headed to Jekyll Island to assemble the blueprint for the Federal Reserve.”

Harvath remembered being told by Jacobson, the Federal Reserve’s director of security, that this was the meeting so many conspiracy theorists like to point to. He wondered what it said about Bill Wise that he was drawing attention to it as well. “I hear their visit had everything but a devil worship mass and animal sacrifice.”

The man laughed heartily and caused Harvath to be even more reminded of Santa Claus. “If only that was the extent of what they were up to,” he said. “They stayed on Jekyll Island for nine days, crafting a master plan for an American central bank. Warburg was the sharpest and most knowledgeable about banking so he was given the task of writing the bill that would go before Congress. Aldrich rode herd to make sure the bill was crafted in such a way that it would be passed. The others at the meeting were there to make sure their respective interests were seen to and to help remediate any problems that might pop up.

“Because of the money panics that had so devastated the country, the men at Jekyll Island knew Congress was anxious to be seen doing something bold. They also knew that the public saw bankers as the reason for the panics and hated them with a passion. That meant that they had to put a lot more than just lipstick on their pig of a central bank. They had to dress it up so it looked like a racehorse.

“Warburg was a very smart man and suggested they avoid the words ‘central bank’ altogether. When his cohorts asked him what it should be called, he said the ‘Federal Reserve System.’

“To disguise it even more, Warburg suggested they put branches across the country, which could be helmed by prominent, and well-known locals in each region. Anything to minimize the appearance of the Federal Reserve being an operation of eastern bankers, who were a particularly detested class of bankers at that time.”

It was still a lot for Harvath to take in. “By all accounts, these men were already financial successes; big-time, even by today’s standards. Why go to all this trouble?” he asked.

“Simple. Self-defense. By 1910, banks in general were booming. They had more than doubled over the prior ten years and most of the new ones were out west and in the South.”

“Which meant that the New York bankers were seeing an ever-shrinking market share.”

Wise nodded. “The most alarming thing for the bankers, though, was that businesses at the time were doing very well and funding their own expansions out of their profits. Only thirty percent of businesses were coming to banks for loans. It was as if businesses didn’t even need banks anymore. You want to talk about panic? The bankers thought their world was coming to an end.”

“So what?” said Harvath. “Why shouldn’t people be able to make up their own minds about how they want to finance the growth of their own businesses?”

Wise put up his hands. “I agree with you. Then again, I’m not a banker. I actually believe in free markets.”

“So what happened?”

“The banks needed to change the way people thought. In particular, they needed people to adopt a ‘buy now, pay later’ mentality and encourage them to borrow rather than save. For that to happen, they were going to have to make it as cheap as possible to borrow money. That became one of four key items on their agenda at Jekyll Island.

“How to crush competition, how to control interest rates, how to be able to make as many loans as they wanted regardless of how much money they had in their vaults, and finally the big one.

“Everyone at that meeting knew that at some point, maybe not in twenty years, maybe not even in fifty years, but at some point all of it would come crashing down and the system would eventually collapse. When that happened, they needed a safeguard so that the bankers themselves wouldn’t be held financially accountable, but rather the taxpayers would be left footing the bill.”

The more Harvath learned about these people, the more they disgusted him. “Talk about morally bankrupt.”

“They not only invented too big to fail, they invented too big to jail. They were brilliant propagandists. J. P. Morgan was famous for handing out shiny dimes to street urchins. Paul Warburg was the basis for the character of Daddy Warbucks in Little Orphan A