Nelson Aldrich: Jekyll Island, the Aldrich Plan, and an Income Tax Gamble

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Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich was born in Foster, Rhode Island, in 1841, the son of a mill hand, and began as a clerk for a wholesale grocery firm, eventually becoming a partner. He served three months as a Union private in the defenses of Washington in 1862, then married Abigail Chapman, who brought wealth and social standing. After losing a child and suffering ill health in 1872, he took a five month tour of Europe and came home focused on power: a bank directorship, the Providence City Council, Speaker of the Rhode Island House, a single term in the U.S. House, and in 1881 the U.S. Senate, where he stayed 30 years under a property and poll tax system that insulated him from urban voters.

As a member of the Big Four and chair of the Finance Committee, Aldrich shaped tariffs and bank regulation, securing the rate the Sugar Trust's Theodore Havemeyer asked for. Marsden J. Perry made him a millionaire through a Rhode Island streetcar consolidation. In 1909 he proposed an income tax amendment to derail a corporate tax, expecting the states never to ratify it, and it became the 16th Amendment. After the Panic of 1907 he chaired the National Monetary Commission, and in November 1910 he led bankers disguised as duck hunters to Jekyll Island, Georgia, to draft the Aldrich Plan that shaped the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. He died in New York in April 1915 at 73.

• The Jekyll Island travelers used only first names while boarding a private rail car in New Jersey.
• Around 1906 he invested in mining and rubber in the Belgian Congo under King Leopold II.
• He helped win Senate approval of the 1898 Treaty of Paris and helped frame the Platt Amendment on Cuba.
• His daughter Abby married John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1901, and their son Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller became vice president.
• William Howard Taft served as an honorary pallbearer at his Providence funeral.