"Mr. Chairman, we have in this Country one of the most corrupt institutions the
world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks,
hereinafter called the Fed. The Fed has cheated the Government of these United States and
the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the Nation's debt. The
depredations and iniquities of the Fed has cost enough money to pay the National debt
several times over.
"This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of these United
States, has bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted our Government. It has done
this through the defects of the law under which it operates, through the maladministration
of that law by the Fed and through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who
control it.
"Some people who think that the Federal Reserve Banks United States Government
institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United
States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic
speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lender. In that dark crew of
financial pirates there are those who would cut a man's throat to get a dollar out of his
pocket; there are those who send money into states to buy votes to control our
legislatures; there are those who maintain International propaganda for the purpose of
deceiving us into granting of new concessions which will permit them to cover up their
past misdeeds and set again in motion their gigantic train of crime.
"These twelve private credit monopolies were deceitfully and disloyally foisted
upon this Country by the bankers who came here from Europe and repaid us our hospitality
by undermining our American institutions. Those bankers took money out of this Country to
finance Japan in a war against Russia. They created a reign of terror in Russia with our
money in order to help that war along. They instigated the separate peace between Germany
and Russia, and thus drove a wedge between the allies in World War. They financed
Trotsky's passage from New York to Russia so that he might assist in the destruction of
the Russian Empire. They fomented and instigated the Russian Revolution, and placed a
large fund of American dollars at Trotsky's disposal in one of their branch banks in
Sweden so that through him Russian homes might be thoroughly broken up and Russian
children flung far and wide from their natural protectors. They have since begun breaking
up of American homes and the dispersal of American children. "Mr. Chairman, there
should be no partisanship in matters concerning banking and currency affairs in this
Country, and I do not speak with any.
"In 1912 the National Monetary Association, under the chairmanship of the late
Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, made a report and presented a vicious bill called the National
Reserve Association bill. This bill is usually spoken of as the Aldrich bill. Senator
Aldrich did not write the Aldrich bill. He was the tool, if not the accomplice, of the
European bankers who for nearly twenty years had been scheming to set up a central bank in
this Country and who in 1912 has spent and were continuing to spend vast sums of money to
accomplish their purpose.
"We were opposed to the Aldrich plan for a central bank. The men who rule the
Democratic Party then promised the people that if they were returned to power there would
be no central bank established here while they held the reigns of government. Thirteen
months later that promise was broken, and the Wilson administration, under the tutelage of
those sinister Wall Street figures who stood behind Colonel House, established here in our
free Country the worm-eaten monarchical institution of the "King's Bank" to
control us from the top downward, and from the cradle to the grave.
"The Federal Reserve Bank destroyed our old and characteristic way of doing
business. It discriminated against our 1-name commercial paper, the finest in the world,
and it set up the antiquated 2-name paper, which is the present curse of this Country and
which wrecked every country which has ever given it scope; it fastened down upon the
Country the very tyranny from which the framers of the Constitution sough to save us.
PRESIDENT JACKSON'S TIME
"One of the greatest battles for the preservation of this Republic was fought out
here in Jackson's time; when the second Bank of the United States, founded on the same
false principles of those which are here exemplified in the Fed was hurled out of
existence. After that, in 1837, the Country was warned against the dangers that might
ensue if the predatory interests after being cast out should come back in disguise and
unite themselves to the Executive and through him acquire control of the Government. That
is what the predatory interests did when they came back in the livery of hypocrisy and
under false pretenses obtained the passage of the Fed.
"The danger that the Country was warned against came upon us and is shown in the
long train of horrors attendant upon the affairs of the traitorous and dishonest Fed. Look
around you when you leave this Chamber and you will see evidences of it in all sides. This
is an era of misery and for the conditions that caused that misery, the Fed are
fully liable. This is an era of financed crime and in the financing of crime the Fed does
not play the part of a disinterested spectator.
"It has been said that the draughtsman who was employed to write the text of the
Aldrich bill because that had been drawn up by lawyers, by acceptance bankers of European
origin in New York. It was a copy, in general a translation of the statues of the
Reichsbank and other European central banks. One-half million dollars was spent on the
part of the propaganda organized by these bankers for the purpose of misleading public
opinion and giving Congress the impression that there was an overwhelming popular demand
for it and the kind of currency that goes with it, namely, an asset currency based on
human debts and obligations. Dr. H. Parker Willis had been employed by Wall Street and
propagandists, and when the Aldrich measure failed- he obtained employment with Carter
Glass, to assist in drawing the banking bill for the Wilson administration. He
appropriated the text of the Aldrich bill. There is no secret about it. The test of the
Federal Reserve Act was tainted from the first.
"A few days before the bill came to a vote, Senator Henry Cabot
Lodge, of Massachusetts, wrote to Senator John W. Weeks as follows:
