America vs the Fed: Goodson's Century of Struggle
Chapter IV, part one, is the American money war as Goodson tells it. Colonial paper that worked, two Banks of the United States that did not, Lincoln’s greenbacks, then Jekyll Island and a Federal Reserve he says was never built for the public.
Book: A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind by Stephen Mitford Goodson (ISBN-13: 978-1-910881-49-1). Black House Publishing Ltd. First edition 2014; second and third 2017. Goodson was a former non-executive director of the South African Reserve Bank.
Byron, Scrip, and Fake Paper
Lord Byron opens the chapter. Who holds the balance of the world, who makes politics run? “Jew Rothschild, and his fellow-Christian, Baring.” That pairing is the thesis. One family name on almost every crash, war, and murder from here on.
Massachusetts starts paper bills of credit in 1691. Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, and Maryland follow. Goodson calls this colonial scrip. In his version it meant few taxes, little inflation, and growth the English banks did not control.
Benjamin Franklin is in London in 1763 and is shocked by the slums. Parliament asks why the colonies are prosperous. Franklin, as Goodson quotes him: they issue their own money in proportion to trade, control purchasing power, and pay interest to no one.
The next year, 1764, comes the Currency Act. Then the Revolution. The Second Continental Congress, from 10 May 1775, issues Continentals. Total: $241,552,788. Goodson says the Bank of England hires hundreds of workmen, prints millions in fakes, and ships them to New York. The Continental holds for about two years, then by 1780 a dollar is worth 2.5 cents.
He says they ran the same trick on French assignats around 1790: more than 400 workmen in 17 factories. Napoleon later introduces a government franc (14 April 1803), legal tender in 1808. British counterfeiting of Continentals is a real wartime tactic. The clean moral (public paper works until London floods it) is tidier than actual wartime inflation.
Hamilton’s Bank, Jefferson’s Warning
Before independence is even signed off, Robert Morris gets the Bank of North America running on 4 January 1782 (bill in 1781). Gold, silver, and Dutch and French bills come in. Paper goes out. Inflation from 1791 to 1796: 72 percent. Pennsylvania later pulls jurisdiction over “alarming foreign influence and fictitious credit.”
On 25 February 1791 the First Bank of the United States takes over. Hamilton’s project. Jefferson’s line, as Goodson gives it, is the one everyone still shares. Banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies. If banks control the currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, “children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied.”
Then the Panic of 1792. Cheap loans, then a sudden call-in. Six percent Treasury bonds drop 25 percent. By the end of 1795 the bank has lent the government $6 million, 60 percent of its capital. It wants money back. The government sells its shares between 1796 and 1802. Goodson says the bank is then fully private and 75 percent foreign-owned.
Charter fight, 1811. Jeffersonians want it dead. Then Goodson’s Mayer Amschel Rothschild line: renew the charter, or the United States will find itself in a disastrous war. That threat is Goodson’s claim. So is the idea that Mayer was the principal shareholder. Standard histories do not put him in that chair.
Perceval, 1812, the Second Bank
Goodson needs a British prime minister who will not declare war on America. Spencer Perceval is borrowing from Barings, then the Rothschilds, to fight France. Nathan, in this telling, wants a US war to save sinking American banking interests. Perceval refuses. The army is already stuck in the Peninsula.
On 11 May 1812, John Bellingham shoots Perceval in the lobby of the House of Commons. Goodson captions him a “Rothschild assassin,” steered by two American merchants after years of Russian imprisonment over a debt. Historians treat Bellingham as a lone, bitter merchant with a compensation grudge. Say that. The Rothschild-hitman version is the book’s glue, not the record.
War of 1812 follows. National debt goes from $45 million to $127 million. More than 24,000 dead. Peace at Ghent, 24 December 1814. Goodson says the real winner is Nathan, who gets the Second Bank of the United States on 10 April 1816, capital $35 million. Nicholas Biddle becomes president in 1822. Goodson casts him as point man for James de Rothschild, “the bank’s principal investor.”
Jackson, Tyler, Lincoln
Andrew Jackson’s 1832 line: “the monster must perish.” He vetoes recharter. On 30 January 1835, Richard Lawrence tries to kill him. Goodson calls Lawrence a presumed Rothschild agent. Historians treat Lawrence as a delusional loner, not a hired gun. Jackson pulls government deposits, pays off the national debt, leaves a $50 million surplus, and replaces the bank with an Independent Treasury on redeemable paper and coin.
John Tyler (1841-1845) vetoes two revival bills pushed by Henry Clay. He gets hundreds of assassination-threat letters. Clay, a Masonic grandmaster in Goodson’s telling, is another Rothschild “agent.”
Then 77 years with no US central bank. Lincoln issues greenbacks in 1862 after, Goodson says, rejecting private war loans at 24 to 36 percent. Greenbacks are real. The exact 24-36 percent shopping trip is populist lore. Use it as the chapter’s number, not as a bank term sheet.
Silver, Panics, Jekyll Island
Civil War debt: $5 billion in bonds, inflation-cut to $2.5 billion, scooped up (he says) by Rothschild agent August Belmont. The “Crime of 1873” kills free silver. A 1892 affidavit from Frederick A. Luckenbach claims Ernest Seyd said the Bank of England paid £100,000 to bribe enough congressional committee members. That story is contested. The Coinage Act happened. The London bribe packet is a late, thin witness.
Then the panic list: 1873, 1884, 1890-91, 1893-94, 1897, 1903, 1907. Garfield, two weeks after a quote about whoever controls the volume of money being master of industry, is shot on 2 July 1881 by Charles Guiteau. Goodson keeps “lone assassin” in scare quotes and says Guiteau claimed important men in Europe put him up to it. Guiteau was a delusional office-seeker. The European-backers line is another weak joint.
Early 1907, Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb warns that without a central bank the country will face a historic panic. Then two “rival” plans that Goodson says are the same animal: Aldrich’s National Monetary Commission plan, and Paul Warburg’s Wall Street plan, allegedly for Baron Alfred Rothschild.
Jekyll Island, late November 1910, is the real meeting. They slip out of Hoboken in Aldrich’s Pullman with the blinds drawn. The names: Nelson Aldrich, Frank Vanderlip, Henry P. Davison, Charles D. Norton, Benjamin Strong, Paul Warburg, A. Piatt Andrew. That gathering is documented. You do not need a ghost story for it.
Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh Sr. calls the Federal Reserve Act the most gigantic trust on earth and the worst currency crime of the age. Senator Robert M. La Follette fights it in the Senate. They lose.
What the Fed Became, and What He Gets Wrong
Since 1914, Goodson says, the dollar has lost 97 percent of its purchasing power. Nineteen recessions, the 1930s, and a post-2008 slump he still reads as a depression. National debt: $2.65 billion in 1910, $20 trillion by March 2017. Unfunded liabilities (Social Security, Medicare, veterans): over $240 trillion. And in 104 years, he says, the accounts have never gone to a public audit.
Then the shareholder list: Rothschild banks of London and Berlin, Lazard in Paris, Israel Moses Sieff in Italy, Warburgs in Hamburg and Amsterdam, Shearson American Express, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase.
Say this clearly. That list is a circulating internet claim, not a verified 2017 ownership table. Regional Fed banks have member commercial banks as stockholders. The Board of Governors is a federal body. Recycled name-drops are not a cap table.
Here’s what I found when I put the chapter down. Jekyll Island is real. Jackson versus the Second Bank is real. Greenbacks are real. The “Rothschild assassin” stories and the secret shareholder roster are the weak joints. The hook that still stands is simpler: who issues the dollar, and who profits when it is born as debt?
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