Upon seeing the Fed stray far from his expected policies, H. Parker Willis, in the 1920s and 1930s, was a tireless and perceptive critic of the inflationary policies of the Fed, whether in boom or depression. The criticism was particularly intense to the extent that the Fed engaged in open market operations on government securities, or discounted bank loans to corporate securities. On Willis, see Rothbard, America’s Great Depression.
After resigning as editor of the Journal of Commerce in May 1931, Willis continued to slam the inflationist policies of the Fed in the pages of the Commercial and Financial Chronicle during 1931 and 1932. A Willis article in a French publication in January 1932 upset George Harrison so much that he went so far as to plead with Senator Carter Glass to help put an end to “Willis’s rather steady flow of disturbing and alarming articles about the American position.” Harrison to Glass, January 16, 1932, cited in Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States (Princeton, N.J.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1963), pp. 408–09, n. 162.
22Commercial and Financial Chronicle 131 (August 2, 1930): 690–91; Commercial and Financial Chronicle 132 (January 17, 1931): 428–29. Even though the Chase Bank was still in Morgan control at the time, Benjamin Anderson had always pursued an independent course.
23Business Week (October 22, 1930). Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, p. 213.
24It is also true that Meyer was never particularly close to Blumenthal. Merlo J. Pusey, Eugene Meyer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974).
25The advent of World War I cut the American textile industry off from the dyes of the German dye cartel, which had supplied 90 percent of its dyes. Meyer was astute enough to discover and finance a new dye-making process invented by a struggling chemist and German dye salesman, Dr. William Beckers, and Meyer quickly set up the Beckers Aniline and Chemical Works to sell dyes to the woolen industry. In 1916, Meyer brought about a merger with another new dye firm selling to the cotton industry, and with the supplier of aniline oil to both companies, forming the National Aniline and Chemical Company. Meyer eventually seized control of National Aniline and Chemical, which made heavy profits during the war selling blue dyes to the Navy. After the war, Meyer engineered the merger of National Aniline with companies making acids, alkalis, coke ovens, chemical by-products, and coal-tars, to form the powerful and highly profitable Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation on January 1, 1921. Pusey, Eugene Meyer, pp. 117–25.
26Ibid., pp. 82–88.
27On the Council of National Defense and the War Industries Board, see Murray N. Rothbard, “War Collectivism in World War I,” in A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American State, Ronald Radosh and Murray N. Rothbard, eds. (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972), pp. 70–83. On Meyer’s role, see Pusey, Eugene Meyer, pp. 137–49.
28Pusey, Eugene Meyer, p. 163.
29Rothbard, “War Collectivism,” pp. 100–05. On an abortive attempt to continue collectivist planning through the Industrial Board of the Department of Commerce, see ibid., pp. 105–08; and Robert F. Himmelberg, “Business, Antitrust Policy, and the Industrial Board of the Department of Commerce, 1919,” Business History Review (Spring 1968): 1–23.
30Thomas W. Lamont, Morgan partner, made the proposal to Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Russell Leffingwell, and Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo pushed the measure through Congress. Not only was McAdoo solidly in the Morgan ambit, as we have seen, but Leffingwell, after he left the Treasury, became a leading partner of the Morgan bank. Burton I. Kaufman, Efficiency and Expansion: Foreign Trade Organization in the Wilson Administration, 1913–1921 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974), pp. 231–32; and Carl P. Parrini, Heir to Empire: United States Economic Diplomacy, 1916–1923 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969), pp. 54–55.
31Pusey, Eugene Meyer, p. 164.
32Houston was a respected academic, who had been a political scientist and college president in Texas, and then served as chancellor of Washington University of St. Louis. It is refreshing to see a person of laissez-faire principle in this critical post. Ibid., pp. 169–70; and Burch, Elites, 2, pp. 210–11.
33Pusey, Eugene Meyer, p. 174.
34Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, pp. 199–200.
35Pusey, Eugene Meyer, pp. 183–92; Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, pp. 196–98; and James Stuart Olson, Herbert Hoover and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, 1931–1933 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1977), p. 12.
36Pusey, Eugene Meyer, pp. 209–15.
37Gerald D. Nash’s story of a Hoover bitterly resisting the Reconstruction Finance Corporation until the last moment has now been replaced by a more accurate portrayal provided by James Olson: willing to give “voluntarism” a brief play, but then cheerfully falling back on pure statism. Gerald D. Nash, “Herbert Hoover and the Origins of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation,” in Mississippi Valley Historical Review 46 (December 1959): 455–68; and James Olson, Herbert Hoover, pp. 24–29.
38Theodore Knappen, “The Irony of Big Business Seeking Government Management,” in Magazine of Wall Street 49 (January 23, 1932): 386–88, cited in Olson, Herbert Hoover, pp. 45–46. See also ibid., pp. 39–46; and the excellent article by William E. Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal and the Analogue of War,” in Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America, John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and Everett Walters, eds. (New York: Harper and Row, [1964] 1967), pp. 81–143.
39Thus, see Arthur Stone Dewing, The Financial Policy of Corporations, 5th ed. (New York: Ronald Press, 1953), 2, p. 1263. On the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in this period, see Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, pp. 261–65.
40Pusey, Eugene Meyer, p. 226.
41John T. Flynn, “Inside the RFC,” Harper’s Magazine 166 (1933): 161–69, quoted in Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, pp. 263–64. See also J. Franklin Ebersole, “One Year in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (May 1933): 464–87.
42The Glass-Steagall Act of 1932 also contributed to inflation of bank credit by broadening the description of what assets were eligible for banks to rediscount at the Fed. Pusey, Eugene Meyer, pp. 227–31; and Susan Estabrook Kennedy, The Banking Crisis of 1933 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), pp. 46–47.
43Seymour E. Harris, Twenty Years of Federal Reserve Policy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933), 2, p. 700. See also Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, pp. 266–72.
44The Young Committee included Walter S. Gifford, head of AT&T (Morgan), Charles E. Mitchell of the National City Bank (Rockefeller), Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors (DuPont-Morgan), and Walter C. Teagle of Standard Oil of New Jersey (Rockefeller). Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, pp. 271–72.
45Chernow, House of Morgan, pp. 330–36, 358–59; Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, p. 289.
46Murray N. Rothbard, “The New Deal and the International Monetary System,” in The Great Depression and New Deal Monetary Policy (San Francisco: Cato Institute, [1976] 1980), pp. 93–95.
47In early 1933, Mary Harriman Rumsey, sister of Averell, decided to establish a major pro-New Deal newspaper to offset the Republican ownership of the bulk of the press. She, Averell, and their friend and associate Vincent Astor, tried to buy the near-bankrupt Washington Post, but were beaten out by Eugene Meyer, who was looking for a satisfying post after leaving the Federal Reserve Board in the early days of the Roosevelt administration. The trio then established the weekly news magazine Today, bringing in former New Deal brain truster Raymond Moley as editor, and, in a couple of years, merged with, and took control over, the influential weekly, Newsweek. Philip H. Burch, Jr., Elites in American History, vol. 3, The New Deal to the Carter Administration (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980), p. 60.
48The unsung power of Harriman in the New Deal may be gauged by his neglected but vital role in the two most left-wing appointments to the Roosevelt Cabinet: Frances Perkins as secretary of labor and Harry Hopkins as sec
retary of commerce. How did these two social workers, without apparent ties to either labor or business, acquire these posts? Frances Perkins was a close, longtime friend of Mary Harriman Rumsey, and indeed lived in the same house as Mrs. Rumsey in Washington (the latter had been widowed since 1922) until her accidental death in 1934. Perkins was also a close friend of the New York banker Henry Bruere, who was president of the large Bowery Savings Bank, treasurer of the influential left-liberal Twentieth Century Fund, and a director of the Harriman-controlled Union Pacific Railroad. Bruere served as credit coordinator in the Roosevelt administration and as executive assistant to Secretary of the Treasury William Woodin.
As for Hopkins, he was a friend of Harriman’s, who obtained the unanimous support of the BAC for Hopkins’s Cabinet appointment. Hopkins chose as his No. 2 man at commerce Edward J. Noble, who had been a board member in the early 1930s of the ambitious but ill-fated Aviation Corporation, set up by Harriman, and by Robert Lehman of Lehman Brothers. In 1933, the Aviation Corporation was reorganized, and most of its assets sold to the newly formed Pan American Corporation, on whose board sat both Robert Lehman and FDR’s cousin, Lyman Delano. It did not harm Hopkins that he was also a friend of John D. Hertz, partner in Lehman Brothers. Burch, Elites, 3, pp. 30–31, 59.
49Aldrich’s father, Nelson W. Aldrich, had been a moderately wealthy wholesale grocer who became senator from Rhode Island. Nelson’s daughter Abby married John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and from then on Nelson, a longtime Republican majority leader, was Rockefeller’s man in government. Winthrop was therefore a brother-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and uncle to the next generation of Rockefeller brothers.
50Burch, Elites, 3, pp. 26–27.
51See Rothbard, “The New Deal,” pp. 93–97; Chernow, House of Morgan, pp. 357–59; and Jordan Schwarz, 1933: Roosevelt’s Decision, the United States Leaves the Gold Standard (New York: Chelsea House, 1969). Fisher was also a partner with James H. Rand, Jr., in a card-index manufacturing firm.
52Rothbard, “The New Deal,” pp. 97–105. On the World Economic Conference, see Leo Pasvolsky, Current Monetary Issues (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1933). The full text of the Roosevelt bombshell message can be found in ibid., pp. 83–84.
53Lewis W. Douglas, The Liberal Tradition (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1935).
54Professor Thomas Ferguson, who has done particularly illuminating research on the Morgan-Rockefeller battle in the New Deal, had access to the Rene Leon papers, which, as well as oral testimony from Leon’s widow, attests to the crucial Leon-Moffett role in persuading Roosevelt to make his decisive repudiation of the London agreement. Moffett was later to join the Rockefeller-controlled Standard Oil of California. Thomas Ferguson, “Industrial Conflict and the Coming of the New Deal: The Triumph of Multinational Liberalism in America,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 28–29.
55Debevoise served as the general counsel for all three top Rockefeller philanthropies: the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the General Education Board, and the Rockefeller Foundation. John Ensor Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Century (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), p. 160.
56Ibid., pp. 312–15; Ferguson, “The Coming of the New Deal,” pp. 14–15; and Chernow, House of Morgan, pp. 206–09, 362.
57The Roosevelt administration was embarrassed by the appearance on the Morgan preferred list of its secretary of the Treasury, William H. Woodin of the American Car and Foundry Company, and Vice President John Nance Garner led a campaign at a Cabinet meeting to fire Woodin. Roosevelt, however, refused to fire his friend, who resigned from the Cabinet in late 1933 on account of illness. The Cabinet was also disturbed by the appearance on the Morgan list of another of FDR’s old friends, Norman H. Davis, a roving ambassador in the State Department. Davis, however, was able to retain his place in the administration, and used his post later to enable the Morgans to recoup their political fortunes in the later New Deal. Chernow, House of Morgan, pp. 369–74. Other notables on the Morgan preferred list included former President Calvin Coolidge; Charles Francis Adams of the famed Boston Adams family, secretary of the Navy under Hoover and father-in-law of Harry Morgan, son of J.P. Morgan, Jr.; John J. Raskob of DuPont, Democratic National Committee chairman; former Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, a senator actually sitting on the Pecora committee; and many others.
Norman Davis, son of a successful Tennessee businessman and a millionaire from financial dealings in Cuba before World War I, was known, correctly, as a longtime friend of the Morgans. Davis had been a close friend of key Morgan partner Henry P. Davison, and was made Morgan’s representative to Cuba in 1912, negotiating a $10 million Morgan loan to the Cuban government two years later. Davis became a financial adviser on foreign loans to Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo during World War I, and after the war worked with Morgan partner Thomas W. Lamont as a financial adviser to the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. During the Wilson administration, Davis had become undersecretary of state and was a director of the American Foreign Banking Corporation, headed by Albert Wiggin of Chase. See G. William Domhoff, The Power Elite and the State: How Policy Is Made in America (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990), pp. 115–16.
58The Rockefeller forces, noted their friendly biographers, had “thrown [Wiggin] to the wolves.” Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), p. 161; and Burch, Elites, 3, p. 39.
59Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, pp. 278–79; see also, pp. 170, 219, 241.
60Chernow, House of Morgan, pp. 352–53.
61Joel Seligman, The Transformation of Wall Street: A History of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Modern Corporate Finance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), pp. 20–21, 29–30; Kennedy, Banking Crisis, pp. 106–28; Chernow, House of Morgan, pp. 362–74; and Ferguson, “Coming of the New Deal,” p. 16.
62This Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 is not to be confused with the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932, which had broadened the eligibility of bank assets to be rediscounted by the Fed.
63Benston points out, for example, that Albert Wiggin’s much-denounced practice of acquiring Chase stock helped align his managerial interests with that of the Chase bank, and was therefore economically helpful. See George J. Benston, The Separation of Commercial and Investment Banking: The Glass-Steagall Act Revisited and Reconsidered (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 88–89, and, more largely, pp. 1–133.
64Ibid., pp. 128–33. The banks set up these wholly owned affiliates by state charter because the National Banking Act, setting up national banks during the Civil War, had been interpreted as prohibiting underwriting operations carried out directly. Ibid., p. 25.
65The National City Bank, powerful rival of Chase in New York, was also unfairly pilloried at the Pecora hearings. See Bentson.
66Edward J. Kelly, III, “Legislative History of the Glass-Steagall Act,” in Deregulating Wall Street: Commercial Bank Penetration of the Corporate Securities Market, Ingo Walter, ed. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1985), pp. 53–63.
67Chernow, House of Morgan, pp. 362–63, 375.
68Ibid., pp. 384ff.
69Benston, Separation of Commercial and Investment Banking, pp. 136, 221–22.
70Sidney Hyman, Marriner S. Eccles: Private Entrepreneur and Public Servant (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Graduate School of Business, 1976), pp. 156–57; Kennedy, Banking Crisis, p. 210; and Chernow, House of Morgan, p. 383.
71Vincent P. Carosso, Investment Banking in America: A History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 357. See also Benston, Separation of Commercial and Investment Banking, pp. 136–37.
72Carosso, Investment Banking, pp. 356–68, 375–79.
73Chernow, House of Morgan, pp. 316, 421–29. The revelation, conviction, and imprisonment of Richard Whitney in 1938 for
embezzlement of Stock Exchange funds to cover reckless personal debts was another horrific blow to Morgan power, especially since Morgan partners George Whitney and Thomas W. Lamont, by the end knew of (but did not condone) Whitney’s criminal activities, but failed to report them to the authorities. Radical New Dealer William O. Douglas, then chairman of the SEC and out for Morgan blood, was able to use the scandal to dominate, alter, and dictate Stock Exchange procedures from then on.
74For Frankfurter’s role in the securities acts, see Seligman, Transformation of Wall Street, pp. 39–127. The sinister Brandeis-Frankfurter connection lasted for decades until 1937, when Frankfurter broke with his mentor and paymaster for opposing Roosevelt’s plan to pack the Supreme Court. It was a case of Frankfurter, for the first time trapped between Brandeis and FDR, choosing to serve the more powerful friend. It was also yet another case in history of one of the leaders of a revolution (in this case the New Deal Revolution), here the aging Brandeis, being left behind by a movement that had become too radical for him. On Brandeis and Frankfurter, see the illuminating Bruce Allen Murphy, The Brandeis-Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Connection of Two Supreme Court Justices (New York: Anchor Press, [1982] 1983), pp. 130–38 and passim.
75In recent years, historians have fortunately been able to shake off the hagiographical tradition, depicting Brandeis as a saintly “people’s lawyer” and devotee of free competition—a tradition typified in Alpheus Thomas Mason, Brandeis: A Free Man’s Life (New York: Viking, 1946). Instead, we are beginning to find a duplicitous statist and advocate of retail cartelization at the expense of consumers. For excellent revisionist works on Brandeis, in addition to Murphy, see Allon Gal, Brandeis of Boston (1980), and Thomas K. McCraw, “Brandeis and the Origins of the FTC,” in Prophets of Regulation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 80–142. The later revisionist works were inspired by the publication of the letters and papers of Brandeis during the 1970s, a task completed in 1980.
A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II Page 47