Staff Reports
The sinking of the RMS Titanic remains one of history’s great tragedies, but it also involved the sudden deaths of three of America’s wealthiest and most influential men — Benjamin Guggenheim, Isidor Straus, and John Jacob Astor IV — a fact that still catches the public’s attention today. Their deaths on April 15, 1912, are well documented and form the emotional core of the many stories and theories that swirl around that night.
John Pierpont Morgan, the titan who controlled the line that owned Titanic, reportedly had a luxury suite reserved but did not sail on the maiden voyage, a cancellation historians and fact-checkers have examined for decades. That he stayed ashore while those three men perished has understandably fed suspicion, even if historians note multiple mundane reasons for his absence and no conclusive evidence of malfeasance.
What cannot be denied is that powerful financiers quietly met on Jekyll Island in November 1910 to sketch out a plan for sweeping banking reform, a secretive moment that history has not forgotten and that conservative critics have long pointed to as the origin of an elite-driven monetary system. The meeting, convened by Senator Nelson Aldrich and attended by banking insiders, produced ideas that later influenced the central banking structure the nation would adopt.
Less than two years after the Titanic disaster, Congress enacted the Federal Reserve Act and President Woodrow Wilson signed it into law on December 23, 1913, creating a central bank with power over currency, credit, and interest rates — a seismic change in American economic life. That timing and the manner in which the legislation moved through Congress have been criticized by patriots who believe major structural reforms affecting every American ought to be debated openly, not sprung while the country was distracted.
Skeptics and independent journalists have pointed to a string of coincidences — the wealthy opponents who died, the financier who did not board, the secret island meeting, and the rapid passage of the Fed bill — and said those coincidences merit hard questions rather than being hushed away as mere curiosities. Responsible historians caution that conspiracy claims lack conclusive proof, but the absence of transparency then and now makes many citizens rightfully suspicious and angry.
As conservatives who believe in open government, private property, and the rights of the American people, we should demand more than convenient reassurances from elites and self-interested institutions. When institutions with concentrated power over money are stitched together behind closed doors, hardworking Americans pay the price through boom-and-bust cycles, inflation, and the erosion of accountability; those are facts we live with and must challenge.
This is not idle paranoia; it is a call to patriotism. We must insist on full disclosure, historical honesty, and reforms that return control of money and banking to the people and their elected representatives, not to secretive clubs and distant financial interests that too often act with impunity.
