America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve Read Online Free PDF

(Laughlin all but begs, “I hope some way can be devised by which we can have a chance to know what the committee bill will be”). See also Warburg,
The Federal Reserve System,
1:82.
    “outside the breastworks”: Laughlin,
The Federal Reserve Act
,
136. The Trenton meeting was held on January 30.
    The document Glass took: The Trenton draft was reprinted in Willis,
The Federal Reserve System,
1531–53. Willis says the draft included a “limited” guaranty (ibid., 147); however, it consisted only of a plan for partial payment to depositors of failed banks and only up to the banks’ estimated asset values—that is, what depositors would receive without such a plan. For open market operations, see ibid., 1543; for compulsory membership and “not less than 15,” see ibid., 1532.
    In other respects, the Trenton draft bore a striking resemblance: The gold provision of the Trenton draft—among other criteria, reserve banks would be required to hold gold equal to 50 percent of their outstanding note circulation—is in ibid., 1548.
    The bills were also similar in scope: West,
Banking Reform and the Federal Reserve,
106, noted the bills’ organizational similarity. See also Willis,
The Federal Reserve System,
1543–44, for the agency’s functioning as the government’s fiscal arm; and West,
Banking Reform and the Federal Reserve,
108, for similar systems. In
The Federal Reserve System
, 1:178–368, Warburg prints the texts of the Aldrich Plan and the Federal Reserve Act side by side, demonstrating their similarity, including in their language. Even as Willis denied any claim of the Aldrich bill to paternity, he admitted the similarity in language in his book: “This, however, did not prevent the use of such features of the Aldrich bill as were considered to be desirable or even in various places the use of language drawn from or modeled after the language implied in the Aldrich bill” (Willis,
The Federal Reserve System,
526–27).
    The biggest was that: West,
Banking Reform and the Federal Reserve,
110; and Willis,
The Federal Reserve System,
1544–47.
    Willis would contend: Willis,
The Federal Reserve System,
523–25. See also “Aldrich Bill Compared [by Willis] with Federal Reserve Act,” Nelson W. Aldrich Papers, Reel 61, which states, “It was not drawn, even largely, from any single source, but is the product of comparison, selection, and refinement upon the various materials, ideas, and data rendered available throughout a long course of study and agitation.”
    “was not derived from”: Willis,
The Federal Reserve System,
523. In 1916, Glass similarly asserted that the Aldrich bill and his own “differ[ed] in principle, in purpose and in processes” (Warburg,
The Federal Reserve System,
1:407). On the other hand, a neutral observer, West (
Banking Reform and the Federal Reserve,
112), says that “the bills are very similar.” This topic is treated at greater length in the epilogue.
    As inauguration day neared, Wilson agonized: House diary entry, December 19, 1912, in
The Papers of Woodrow Wilson,
25:614; House to Woodrow Wilson, January 9, January 29, and February 5, 1913, all in Edward M. House Papers, Box 119a; and Cooper,
Woodrow Wilson,
189. House was not the only naysayer on Brandeis, but he was the mostdecisive—see, for instance, House to Wilson, November 22, 1912, House Papers, Box 119a; and House diary entry, February 26, 1913, in
The Papers of Woodrow Wilson,
27:137. Although House’s November 22 letter bore ugly, anti-Semitic overtones, impugning Brandeis’s “Hebrew traits of mind,” House probably feared Brandeis’s influence rather than his ethnicity. See also Cooper,
Woodrow Wilson,
183, 185, and 190. Wilson’s acquiescence is from Arthur S. Link,
Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era,
1910–1917
(New York: Harper and Row, 1954), 30. House declined Wilson’s offer of a cabinet post in his letter of January 9, House Papers, Box 119a.
    Wilson made an inspired choice: