The Monetary Treason of 1913

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before morning." — Henry Ford

If you held a $20 bill in 1913, you held a contract. It was a claim on roughly one ounce of gold - a hard, physical reality. Today, that same piece of paper is a broken promise. It retains less than 4% of its original purchasing power.

This 96% collapse wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t “market volatility” or “bad luck.” It was an architectural feature of the system. We are told the Federal Reserve exists to stabilize the economy. That is the marketing pitch.

In reality, for over a century, the only thing the Fed has successfully stabilized is the efficient transfer of wealth from your labor into the hands of the state and the banking elite.

This wasn't the first time they tried to rig the game. America was born with a deep, cultural hatred for central banks. The Founding Fathers feared them, and the public despised them. We had two central banks in the 19th century, and we killed them both. President Andrew Jackson famously vowed to slay the Second Bank of the United States, viewing it as a "hydra of corruption" that enriched the elite at the expense of the common man.

For decades after Jackson’s victory, the U.S. operated without a central ruler. It was an era of "free banking," where gold was money, and banks had to sink or swim on their own merits. To the average American, this was freedom. But to the Wall Street elite, this was a nightmare. They were tired of the "chaos" of the free market where they actually had to compete. They craved the stability of a monopoly and spent years scheming for a way to bring the central bank back from the dead. But they knew the public would never accept it without a terrifying reason.

To sell a cure, you first need a disease. In 1907, the bankers got one.

The market collapsed, shedding 50% of its value. Runs on banks spread like a contagion. But the panic revealed a deeper problem for the Wall Street elite: they were losing control. Agile, state-chartered banks were stealing market share from the New York giants. The elite realized that in a truly free market, they couldn't mandate interest rates or corner the supply of credit. To maintain their dominance, they needed a central authority powerful enough to bring these independent competitors to heel. They didn't want a safety net; they wanted a cartel enforcer.

The public was clamoring for protection from the "Money Trust" - the cabal of Wall Street giants who controlled the nation's credit. But the Money Trust was already two steps ahead. They weren't fighting the regulation; they were writing it.

In November 1910, Senator Nelson Aldrich - the most powerful man in the Senate and father-in-law to John D. Rockefeller Jr. - boarded a private railcar in Hoboken, New Jersey. Absolute secrecy was paramount. To avoid detection, the curtains were drawn, and the men addressed each other only by first name.

He was joined by a small group of the financial elite, including:

They traveled to Jekyll Island, Georgia, an exclusive hunting club for the ultra-wealthy. For nine days, these men - who collectively represented roughly one-quarter of the world’s wealth - sat in a parlor and drafted the Aldrich Plan.

This was the blueprint for the Federal Reserve. They returned to D.C. with a masterstroke: a central bank that looked like a government agency to the public, but functioned as a private cartel for the banks.

The bankers had a problem. The Aldrich Plan - which called for the creation of a "National Reserve Association" - was dead on arrival. The name sounded too much like what it actually was: a private club for banks. The Democrats, who controlled the House, had vowed to oppose any "central bank" run by Wall Street.

So, they executed a brilliant political pivot. They took the core of the Aldrich Plan, gave it a cosmetic makeover, and rebranded it as the Federal Reserve Act.

They employed a strategy of controlled opposition. The bankers publicly criticized the new bill, claiming it was "too harsh" on business. This was pure theater designed to convince skeptical lawmakers that the bill was actually anti-Wall Street. Behind the scenes, however, they were funding the very politicians pushing it through. They used "dummy men" in Congress to sponsor the legislation, ensuring the fingerprints of J.P. Morgan and the Rockefellers were nowhere to be found on the final document.

With the deception complete, the final step was a brute-force legislative maneuver. Now that the bill was successfully disguised as a measure to curb Wall Street rather than empower it, the Democrats fell in line.

The party leadership, which controlled both the White House and Congress, was eager to deliver a signature "victory" for President Wilson. But they couldn't risk a full, protracted debate where the details of the bill - and the hidden banker control - might be exposed to the public.

So, the leadership stalled. They refused to adjourn for the holidays, keeping the Senate in session late into December. They knew that many reform-minded skeptics and opposition Senators would eventually be forced to leave Washington to return to their families for the break.

They waited until the opposition had thinned out. On December 23, 1913 - two days before Christmas - the Senate forced a vote. The Federal Reserve Act passed. Woodrow Wilson signed it into law just hours later at 6:00 PM.

We are taught that the Fed was created to rein in the "excesses" of capitalism. The historical record suggests the exact opposite.

Historian Gabriel Kolko, in his formative work The Triumph of Conservatism, shattered the myth that this was a victory for the people. Kolko exposed the dirty secret of the era: The big banks were actually suffering from too much competition. Smaller, state-chartered banks were nimble and growing. The Wall Street giants didn't want a free market; they wanted a guaranteed monopoly.

Kolko’s conclusion was damning:

The Federal Reserve was not designed to protect you from the banks. It was designed to protect the banks from you. By creating a "lender of last resort," they successfully privatized their gains and socialized their risks. They ensured that no matter how recklessly they gambled, the printing press would always be there to bail them out.

They don't steal your wealth by kicking down your door. They do it slowly, silently, through a process the state calls "monetary policy," but which you should call the inflation tax.

Most people think inflation is "prices going up." That is incorrect. Rising prices are merely the symptom. True inflation is the expansion of the money supply.

Here is the mechanism of the heist:

This is simple supply and demand. When the supply of dollars explodes - as seen in the parabolic rise of the M2 Money Supply - but the supply of houses, steaks, and gas remains the same, the price of everything must rise.

Every time the Fed prints a new dollar, the value of the dollars in your pocket shrinks. It is a hidden tax on your labor. You work just as hard, but your time buys less.

For decades, gold was the only leash on this beast. Under the Bretton Woods agreement, foreign nations could demand gold for their dollars, which strictly limited how much the Fed could print.

That restraint died on August 15, 1971.

Facing a massive run on U.S. gold reserves due to reckless spending on the Vietnam War and Great Society programs, President Richard Nixon went on television and "temporarily" suspended the convertibility of the dollar into gold. That "temporary" measure became the permanent reality.

From that moment on, the dollar became a "fiat" currency - backed by nothing but the "full faith and credit" of the government. Unshackled from reality, the money supply exploded. Since 1971, the cost of living has skyrocketed, asset bubbles have become the norm, and real wages for the average worker have flatlined.

This isn't a glitch; it is the mathematical certainty of a fiat system.

Understanding the scam is the only way to survive it. The Federal Reserve relies on your belief that paper money is wealth. It isn't. It is a melting ice cube.

The path to sovereignty is simple: Trade their fake money for real assets. Own things that a bureaucrat in Washington cannot print.

The goal isn't just to get rich. The goal is to become unprintable. When you hold your wealth in fiat, you are a serf subject to the whims of the printing press. When you hold it in scarce assets, you are free.

Stop saving in their currency. Start building your own standard.