A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II by Murray N. Rothbard

Author:Murray N. Rothbard [Rothbard, Murray N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Published: 2011-08-17T05:00:00+00:00

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A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II

banker whose father-in-law’s iron manufacturing company had prominent Morgan as well as rival Rockefeller men on its board; and Adolph C. Miller was an academic economist at Berkeley who had married into the wealthy Morgan-connected Sprague family of Chicago. Thus, of the seven members of the original board, three were Morgan men (but of whom two were ex officio); one was Kuhn, Loeb; one Rockefeller; one an independent banker with both Morgan and Rockefeller connections; and one was an economist with vague family ties to the Morgans.

Hardly complete Morgan control of the board!

But the Morgans not only had by far the most powerful Federal Reserve banker, Benjamin Strong, in their corner, they also had the Republican administrations of the 1920s. Although there were various groups around President Warren G. Harding, as an Ohio Republican he was closest to the Rockefellers, and his secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, was a mentor of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s, New York Bible class, a leading Standard Oil attorney, and a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation.4 Harding’s sudden death in August 1923, however, unexpectedly elevated Vice President Calvin Coolidge to the presidency.

Coolidge has been misleadingly described as a colorless small-town Massachusetts attorney. Actually, the new president was a member of a prominent Boston financial family, who were board members of leading Boston banks. One, T. Jefferson Coolidge, became prominent in the Morgan-affiliated United Fruit Company of Boston. Throughout his political career, 4Hughes was both counsel and chief foreign policy adviser to the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil of New Jersey. On Hughes’s close ties to the Rockefeller complex and their being overlooked even by Hughes’s biographers, see the important but neglected article by Thomas Ferguson,

“From Normalcy to New Deal: Industrial Structure, Party Competition, and American Public Policy in the Great Depression,” International Organization 38 (Winter 1984): 67. On Hughes’s and Rockefeller’s men’s Bible class, see Raymond B. Rosdick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: A Portrait (New York: Harper and Bros., 1956), p. 125.

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