Mr. Paul M. Warburg, the famous banker, who was the initiator of the American Federal Reserve Bank System, a brother of Mr. Felix M. Warburg and of Herr Max Warburg, is seriously ill with pneumonia, and his condition is causing extreme anxiety.
Mr. Warburg is 63 years of age.
If Americans were in the habit of conferring titles of distinction on creative thinkers, Paul M. Warburg would have been accorded this honour for his work in the introduction of the Currency Reform in the United States which culminated in the Federal Reserve System, Professor Edwin R. A. Seligman of Columbia University wrote in the “New York Evening Post” in 1927.
Mr. Warburg, who like all his brothers, bears the middle name Moritz, which was the name of their father, was a member of the Kuhn, Loeb banking firm (Mrs. Warburg was before her marriage Nita Loeb) resigning all his directorships, trusteeships, etc. when he was appointed by President Wilson in 1914 as a member of the Federal Reserve Board. In 1917 he was appointed a member of the United States Section of the International High Commission.
A year ago, Mr. Warburg delivered a speech in New York decrying the American isolation theory and advising the United States to seek larger international co-operation and courageous action to help the world to emerge from the stagnation into which it has fallen.
When Mr. Henry Ford was still conducting his antisemitic campaign, he launched an attack on Mr. Paul Warburg in 1925, accusing him of being the head and front of a movement in which the Federal Reserve System was being used as an instrument to foist German financial methods on the United States and to bring about a German control of American industry and business. Mr. Bernard Baruch and Mr. Aaron Sapiro, whose libel action against Mr. Henry Ford was the immediate point which brought about his recantation of his antisemitism, were included with Mr. Paul Warburg as his chief assistants in the plot.
The “Pacific Banker”, the leading financial paper in the North-west, dismissed the accusation as “a ridiculous obsession”, and wrote: Paul M. Warburg is a name which stands very high in American banking as that of the man who laid down the central idea upon which the whole Federal Reserve System was erected; who cast aside all thought of remuneration to become a member of the original Board, in fact its Deputy Governor; who has shown a genius in sound finance and a whole hearted service to the country which is recognised everywhere in responsible quarters”.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
