Strong, it will be recalled, previously had been head of Morgan'sBankers Trust Company and was one of the seven participants atthe secret meeting on Jekyll Island. Professor Quigley reminds usthat "Strong owed his career to the favor of the Morgan bank.... Hebecame Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as thejoint nominee of Morgan and Kuhn, Loeb and Company."2
Strong was the ideal choice for the cartel. Not the least of hisqualifications was his alliance with the financial powers of London.
When Montagu Norman was made the Governor of the Bank ofEngland in 1920, there began a close personal relationship betweenthe two central bankers which lasted until Strong's sudden death in1928.
Norman was considered by many to be eccentric if not mentallyunbalanced. Quigley says:
Norman was a strange man whose mental outlook was one ofsuccessfully suppressed hysteria or even paranoia. He had no use forgovernment and feared democracy. Both of these seemed to him to bethreats to private banking, and thus to all that was proper andprecious in human life.... When he rebuilt the Bank of England, he 1- Rothbard,
2- Quigley,
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THE CREATURE FROM JEKYLL ISLAND
constructed it as a fortress prepared to defend itself against any popular revolt, with the sacred gold reserves hidden in deep vaults below the level of underground waters which could be released to cover them by pressing a button on the governor's desk. For much of his life, Norman rushed about the world by fast steamship, covering tens of thousands of miles each year, often travelling incognito, concealed by a black slouch hat and a long black cloak, under the assumed name of "Professor Skinner."...
Norman had a devoted colleague in Benjamin Strong.... In the 1920s, they were determined to use the financial power of Britain and of the United States to force all the major countries of the world to go on the gold standard [with an artificial value set for the benefit of England] and to operate it through central banks free from all political control, with all questions of international finance to be settled by a g r e e m e n t s b y such central b a n k s w i t h o u t i n t e r f e r e n c e from governments.1
Strong and Norman spent many holidays together, sometimesin Bar Harbor, Maine, but usually in Southern France, and theycrisscrossed the Atlantic on numerous other occasions to consultwith each other on their plan for controlling the world economy.
Lester Chandler tells us: "Their associations were so frequent andprolonged and their collaboration so close that it is still impossibleto determine accurately their relative roles in developing some of o ,
