From Jim Ewart at zns@interserv.com
Hi Larry:
Thanks for the input re the John F. Kennedy "silver-certificate" item. As chance would have it, about two months ago I helped Ed Griffin ("Creature From Jekyll Island") write a letter to a guy who raised this issue with Ed. Ed and I came to the same conclusion as you did, that the story being circulated by some "patriots" was seriously flawed.
As you may recall, some 20 years ago a different story was making the rounds of the "patriot" community. This story said that JFK made a speech at Columbia University a couple of weeks before his death. In that speech JFK supposedly said, "I have discovered that the high office of the presidency has been used to foment a plot against the American people," and allegedly, this presentation continued with him saying that he was going to take decisive steps to stop that plot in its tracks.
JFK supposedly then ordered the US Treasury to immediately print zillions of US Notes (_not_ silver certificates) to replace all the Federal Reserve Notes then in circulation. The implication was that by replacing the Federal Reserve Notes with US Notes, the federal government would no long have to pay interest to the Fed on the face value of all the paper currency -- precisely because US Notes are "spent into circulation interest free" (echoing the late Pastor Sheldon Emery and others of his persuasion, that is, the advocates of "populism" and/or "social credit.")
A few days before JFK's death, supposedly about $300 million of these US Notes were placed in circulation, and it was exactly this action by JFK that caused the bad guys, the "banksters," to arrange for JFK to be killed. However, while this story is interesting, it apparently has almost no factual basis.
One of Congressman Ron Paul's researchers was a libertarian gal with heavy economic and finance credentials, a Masters Degree in finance if I recall correctly, and many years of investment analysis for a major brokerage firm. This gal, Rita something or another, spent several months early in 1983 investigating the story for Ron Paul. She called me later that year to see if I could supply her with any supporting information.
I told her I had heard the rumor but did not have any facts to support it. She said she'd been in close touch with top-level people in the Kennedy family, and in contact with several of JFK's closest political cronies, and also in contact with top people at Columbia University. The University had no memory or other record of JFK being on that campus or in the area for any meeting of any kind within several years of the alleged appearance, and none of JFK's associates, political or personal, offered anything but negative comment on the whole tale.
This researcher (Rita D. Simone, from Arlington, Virginia, whose name, address, and phone number is still in the ZNS database) concluded that the alleged event simply did not happen.
However, some US Notes were issued in 1962 but solely to replace worn-out Federal Reserve Notes from the series of 1950 and earlier. The US Notes were used because the Treasury had already issued all of its authorized inventory of uncirculated Federal Reserve Notes, and because the Treasury could print US Notes without special prior approval from the Federal Reserve banking system.
But the US Notes were strictly an interim solution to the problem of replacing worn Federal Reserve Notes. Please recall that the next year, in 1963, the Treasury printed and began issuing Federal Reserve tokens, FRTs, the "new Federal Reserve Note" bills, the ones missing the phrases "will pay to the bearer on demand" and "and is redeemable in lawful money at the United States Treasury or at any Federal Reserve Bank."
FRTs would eventually replace _all_ then-circulating paper currency: US Notes, Federal Reserve Notes from the series of 1950 and earlier, and silver certificates. Within 10 years or so, the only paper currency circulating in the U.S. was the FRT.
The man who contacted Ed Griffin, questioning something Ed had said in "Creature from Jekyll Island," said he had heard the US Note story from an organization called "Christian" something or another. I had not heard of that entity, I had no record of it in my big database of patriotic groups, publications, and broadcasts, etc., and I had no record of any similar-sounding entity in the general area of the writer's home address.
I concluded that the "Christian" something or another "group" was really
just a dba of a lone individual patriot, someone who simply and innocently echoed a highly inaccurate version of the largely fictional JFK-Columbia University tale. |
