Freeing Our Money: A Sorted History
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks…will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
—Thomas Jefferson, 1809
From earliest recorded history, mankind has made a stair-step progression in everything but finance. Our technology and standard of living runs a race with currency control, a facet that unless we take command of, we will eventually lose to. What is startling is how early America’s money troubles began:
“The Colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been the poverty caused by the bad influence of the English bankers on the Parliament, which has caused in the Colonies hatred of England and the Revolutionary War.”
—Benjamin Franklin
In the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms of July 6, 1775, John Hancock wrote: “They [the British] have undertaken to give and grant our money without our consent, though we have ever exercised an exclusive right to dispose of our own property.”
It wasn’t long after our victory that we faced another financial crisis, fought by President Andrew Jackson. He considered an American central bank to be a massive threat to the safety of the republic, as “it represented a fantastic centralization of economic and political power under private control. It was a “monopoly” with special privileges, and yet it was not subject to presidential, congressional, or popular regulation.” —Robert V. Remini (Jackson biographer). Jackson ultimately destroyed the bank and was the only President in history to pay off our national debt. A generation later, a new President deplored their influence as well:
“I have two great enemies, the southern army in front of me and the financial institutions in the rear. Of the two, the one in the rear is the greatest enemy. The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace, and conspires against it in times of adversity.”
—Abraham Lincoln
Unable to secure affordable funds for the war, Lincoln’s counsel suggested he print his own interest-free currency to pay Union troops with—the origin of Greenbacks. The success of the plan prompted Lincoln to exclaim, “The privilege of creating and issuing the money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but it is the Government’s greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of these principles…the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest…Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity.”
The London Times (in 1865) responded with startling honesty: “If this mischievous financial policy, which has its origin in the American Republic, shall become permanent, then that government will furnish its own money without cost! It will pay off its debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous without precedent in the history of the world. The brains and the wealth of all countries will go to America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe!”
In his travels before the assassination of Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth gathered financial support in the drawing rooms of European bankers. Every President to scrutinize currency control has had an attempt made on his life, including Andrew Jackson, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. Congressional records documented a little-known plot to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt for reversing the banker’s constriction of capital (which caused the Great Depression). Within the records, the bankers admitted their complete control over the media (even then) as an essential ingredient. Those who have spoken out have done so at great personal risk:
“Whosoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce… And when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.”
—President James Garfield, June of 1881.
He was assassinated two weeks later.