8

Ezra Pound, and the Federal Reserve book had to be postponed. 

Mr. Hunt passed away before I could get back to my research, and 

once again I faced the problem of financing research for the book.

My original book had traced and named the shadowy figures in the 
United States who planned the Federal Reserve Act. I now 
discovered that the men whom I exposed in 1952 as the shadowy 

figures behind the operation of the Federal Reserve System were 

themselves shadows, the American fronts for the unknown figures 

who became known as the "London Connection." I found that 
notwithstanding our successes in the Wars of Independence of 1812 
against England, we remained an economic and financial colony 
of Great Britain. For the first time, we located the original 

stockholders of the Federal Reserve Banks and traced their parent 
companies to the London Connection.

This research is substantiated by citations and documentation from 
hundreds of newspapers, periodicals and books and charts showing 

blood, marriage, and business relationships. More than a thousand 
issues of The New York Times on microfilm have been checked not 

only for original information, but verification of statements from 
other sources.

It is a truism of the writing profession that a writer has only one book 
within him. This seems applicable in my case, because I am now in 

the fifth decade of continuous writing on a single subject, the inside 
story of the Federal Reserve System. This book was from its inception 

commissioned and guided by Ezra Pound. Four of his protégés have 

previously been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, William 
Butler Yeats for his later poetry, James Joyce for "Ulysses", Ernest 

Hemingway for "The Sun Also Rises", and T.S. Elliot for "The Waste 

Land". Pound played a major role in the inspiration and in the 

editing of these works--which leads us to believe that this present 
work, also inspired by Pound, represents an ongoing literary 
tradition.

Although this book in its inception was expected to be a tortuous 
work on economic and monetary techniques, it soon developed 
into a story of such universal and dramatic appeal that from the 

outset, Ezra Pound urged me to write it as a detective story, a genre 

which was invented by my fellow Virginian, Edgar Allan Poe. I 
believe that the continuous circulation of this book during the past 

forty years has not only exonerated Ezra Pound for his much 
condemned political and monetary statements, but also that it has