Six Men Booked A Duck Hunt In 1910. They Wrote A Central Bank Instead.

JEKYLL ISLAND, Ga. — In November 1910 a private railway car left Hoboken carrying six men who had agreed among themselves to use first names only. They travelled to a hunting club on an island off the Georgia coast, stayed eleven days, and went home. For eighteen years every one of them denied the trip had happened.

The denial is the part that has always been odd. The meeting is now uncontroversial — several of the participants eventually wrote about it, and the Federal Reserve's own histories acknowledge it. What has never been explained is why six of the most powerful men in American finance thought a duck hunt required an alias.

This newspaper went looking for the club's paperwork rather than the participants' memoirs. Memoirs are written afterwards, by people who know how the story ended. A game register is written the same evening by a steward who does not.

Eleven days, nothing shot

The Jekyll Island Club kept a game register. Every party recorded what it took: ducks, quail, turkey, deer. It was a club of competitive men and the register was a scoreboard.

Ambrosine Delacroix-Whitby found it in a collection nobody had catalogued for decades.

"The register runs continuously for nineteen seasons," she said. "It is filled in for every party. Every party except one."

For the eleven days in question the columns are ruled but empty. The steward has entered the party's arrival and departure, the number in the group, and the meals served. Under game there is a single stroke through the whole block.

"That is a man recording that there was nothing to record," she said. "They did not hunt. They booked a hunting club in season and they did not go out once."

The launch log survives too, and it shows the club's boat making no trips to the blinds for the duration. It shows something else: three additional crossings from the mainland, at night, carrying a total of four passengers who are not named in any club record.

Four people who were not there

The four unnamed crossings are the finding this newspaper cannot close.

The launch log gives times — 21:40, 23:15 and 02:20 on three separate nights — and a head count, and nothing else. The club's guest book for that week lists the six. It does not list four more.

Winifred Oyelaran-Tasker's great-grandfather was a steward. His wage book records an overtime payment for those eleven days at a rate he was not paid before or afterwards, with a note in the margin that she read to us over her kitchen table.

The note says: extra table, not in book.

"He set for ten," she said. "He was paid extra not to write it down and he wrote down that he was paid extra not to write it down, which tells you what he thought of it."

The objection, printed in full

Ferdinand Achebe-Sorley has spent his career on the period and thinks we are over-reading the register.

He asked that his objection appear in our words as well as his, so here it is: an empty game column can mean bad weather, and an unnamed crossing can mean a supply run miscounted by a boatman.

"You have found an absence," he told us. "Absences are the cheapest evidence there is. Everybody who has ever written about Jekyll Island has found an absence and filled it with whatever they already believed."

We put the weather to him. The coastal record for those eleven days shows two days of rain and nine days clear.

"Then they were busy," he said. "Men who are drafting legislation do not shoot ducks. That is not a conspiracy, that is a deadline."

He is right that it is not, on its own, a conspiracy. We print his reading beside ours because he may be correct and we would rather be argued with in our own pages than elsewhere.

What the meeting produced

The draft that came off the island became the Aldrich Plan, and the Aldrich Plan, revised and renamed, became the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. That is not in dispute and never has been.

What is worth stating plainly, because it usually is not: a system that now sets the price of money for a third of the world's economy was drafted in eleven days by six men and four people whose names were deliberately not recorded, in a private club, under assumed identities, and then denied for a generation.

Everything after that was public. That part was not.

What we could not establish

We could not identify the four. The launch log gives numbers, not names, and the steward who set the extra table died in 1948.

We could not obtain the club's correspondence file for 1910, which the collection's own finding aid lists as held and which the collection has been unable to produce for us on four occasions.

We could not establish what was discussed. No minutes were kept, by design, and the participants' later accounts differ from one another on points a minute would have settled.

The register is ruled and empty. Someone set a table for ten and was paid to leave two of them off the page.