The Creature from Jekyll Island

What It Is

A nearly six-hundred-page attack on the Federal Reserve System, published by G. Edward Griffin in 1994 and revised through a fifth edition in 2010. The title comes from a documented event: a secret meeting on Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia, at which Senator Nelson Aldrich, Frank Vanderlip of National City Bank, Henry Davison of the House of Morgan and Paul Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb drafted the plan that became, in modified form, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

The book is part monetary history, part institutional critique and part conspiracy narrative, and it does not distinguish between the three. Around that meeting Griffin assembles a much larger story, and the size of the claim he ends up making is why the book is either revered or dismissed and almost never simply read.

It has never been reviewed by a serious economic journal and it has sold in enormous numbers. Both facts are worth holding at once.

Why It Matters

It matters because it is the book. For thirty years almost every popular American argument against the Federal Reserve has run through it, from Ron Paul's campaigns to the monetary anxieties of the 2008 crash and the cryptocurrency movement that followed. If you want to understand why millions of people regard the Fed as illegitimate rather than merely mistaken, this is the text that taught them.

The foundations are not fabricated. The meeting happened. The secrecy was real, and Vanderlip later described it in print himself, comparing his own conduct to a conspirator's. Banking legislation was drafted by bankers, out of public view, then presented as reform. Griffin did not invent that, and any honest defender of the Fed has to begin by conceding it.

What he does with it is the problem. The book moves from documented secrecy to a coherent, centuries-long design, and it makes that move by insinuation. Motives are inferred from outcomes. The chapters on international finance drift into territory, well trodden before Griffin and unpleasantly, in which the world's troubles converge on a small number of banking families. Griffin's record elsewhere, including his long advocacy of laetrile as a cancer treatment, is a fair thing to weigh. And he engages almost none of the scholarship on monetary policy, which contains far more powerful criticism of the Fed than anything here, made by people who understood it.

Before You Read

Twenty hours or more, and it does not need to be twenty. Griffin restates his conclusions with a frequency that suggests he does not trust you to have taken them.

The monetary chapters, on fractional reserve banking, on inflation, on how money is created, are the clearest part of the book and genuinely instructive whatever you conclude. The historical chapters need a sceptical eye on every page.

Which Edition to Read

• The fifth edition (American Media, 2010) — recommended. The complete and current text, with the material on the 2008 bailouts that gave the book its second life, and a corrected account of who was actually present at Jekyll Island. If you are going to read it, read the version its author last stood behind. The cost: it is enormous, loosely edited and amateurishly produced. The endnotes are uneven, which matters more here than in almost any other book on this list. View on Amazon →
• The earlier editions (1994 to 1998). Cheap, everywhere secondhand, and substantially the same argument in a shorter book. The cost: they stop before the financial crisis, the case study most readers now come for, and they preserve errors Griffin later fixed.
• The unabridged audiobook. Convenient for the long stretches of narrative history. The cost: this is the worst possible book to take by ear. Its claims demand checking, and the whole discipline of reading it consists in stopping to ask where a statement came from.

Take the fifth edition, and pair it with Roger Lowenstein's America's Bank (Penguin Press, 2015), a straight narrative history of the Fed's creation by a writer with no thesis to protect. Reading the two against each other is a far better education than either alone.

Getting the Most From This Book

Ask of every chapter: is this a fact, an inference, or a motive read backwards from a result? Griffin mixes all three in the same paragraph, and separating them is the whole exercise.

Check three of his sources, at random. What you find will tell you more about how much weight to give the rest than any review can.

Do not read it as a settled account, and do not dismiss it unread. The men on that train really did hide their names, and a country that has been told the meeting never happened will believe almost anything about what did.