What do you think?
Rate this book
Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890–1913
The rise of corporate capitalism during the late 19th and early 20th centuries has long been a source of lively debate among historians. In Origins of the Federal Reserve System , James Livingston approaches this controversial topic from a fresh perspective, asking how, during this era, a "new order of corporation men" made itself the preeminent source of knowledge on all significant economic issues and thereby changed the character of public and political discourse in the United States. The book seeks to uncover the roots of the Federal Reserve System and to explain the awakening and articulation of class consciousness among America's urban elite, two phenomena that its author sees as inseparable. According to Livingston, the movement for banking and monetary reform that led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System played an important role in the general transition from entrepreneurial to corporate it was during this struggle for reform that a group of business leaders first emerged as a new corporate social class. This interdisciplinary account of the social, cultural, and intellectual Origins of the Federal Reserve System offers both a discussion of the sources of modern public policy and a persuasive study of upper-class formation in the United States. The book will interest a wide audience of historians, economists, political scientists, sociologists, and others who wish to understand the rise of America's corporate elite, the class that has played a large-if not dominant-role in 20thcentury America.
250 pages, Paperback
First published May 8, 1986
3 people are currently reading
137 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 21, 2015
In the 1880s, would-be robber barons were trapped in a nightmare world of many buyers, many sellers, no one of which had control over price.
Industrial titans' ability to reap an outsize share of national income was dwindling. In some cases, workers did control the means of production. Courts had declared trusts illegal.
In the aftermath of the panic of 1893, the ruling class regained control by (1) locking out workers, hiring private armies of heavily-armed Pinkerton agents, busting unions; (2) banding together in clubs, associations, interlocking directorates; (3) reorganizing into large corporations, each able to assert control over prices, conditions, and wages in its industry; (4) a concerted propaganda campaign leading up to the election of 1896, beating the drum of the gold standard that would enable the elite to control banking.
Ever since, political decisions in the U.S. have been made by and for the wealthy elite.
James Livingston's Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890-1913 is a shockingly readable account of how and for whom the modern world was created. The success of the elite in organizing, messaging, and shaping public opinion should be studied by those of us who must organize, message, and shape public opinion to remake the world for the long-term benefit of the many, rather than the short-term benefit of the few. The book is packed with citations of primary sources.
A few of Livingston's insights and my reactions:
"before the crisis of the mid-1890s, business leaders and their allies were developing an explanation for the great depression of the late nineteenth century . . . interfirm competition, . . . chronic overproduction . . . an 'excess of enterprise' might destroy profits . . . or, more accurately, . . . transfer income from capital to labor and so ultimately halt investment . . . . [Edward] Atkinson and Andrew Carnegie argued, an unequal distribution of wealth and income . . . was the condition of the majority's comfortable subsistence." (p. 53) To the contrary! As a hunting dog or falcon must have a taste for blood, but is given only enough of the kill to keep it hunting, so the corporation must have the hope of profit, but must be prevented from controlling the market and so transferring all society's wealth to itself. Since the Carnegie and Rockefeller days, the hunting dogs have been eating the bulk of the kill.
The Sherman Act, "which was intended to abolish the primary trust . . . has merely driven it into a new and utterly impregnable position" (the corporation). (p. 58) Gotta keep working on antitrust law, labor law, and progressive taxation: concentration of wealth and power is taking us back to a "one lord, many serfs" economy.
"the decisive movement toward corporate capitalism began in 1895-1896. Business leaders from throughout the nation and from every sphere of enterprise realized then that unless they entered and altered the mainstream of political discourse on economic questions, the entrepreneurial argument for monetary inflation, dispersal of concentrated assets, and free competition among small producers would become government policy." (p. 66) They were so successful that they remade the world in their image, where it has remained since. Lately, with billionaires controlling newspapers and TV networks, the rich have captured economic discourse and government policy. We on the left must ourselves enter and alter political discourse--before all wealth is in the hands of the few, the environment is fully destroyed, and our civil liberties are history.
"For [Conant], as for Bagehot, Wells, and White, periodic crises were desirable insofar as they purged 'weaker undertakings' from the market system. This process validated the leadership of larger . . . firms . . . . the function of crisis was to centralize decisions affecting production and distribution". (p. 77) The winner-take-all system we suffer under was deliberately created in the 1890s by those who would control and profit from it. The early-21st century collapses of overextended too-big-to-fail houses of speculation, with their attendant economic damage, are their legacy.
Loans during crises were to be available only for larger firms. "Thus the 'natural' process through which 'weaker undertakings' were sifted out in times of panic would be consciously furthered by making the prerogatives of the clearinghouses [forerunners of the Fed] lawful and permanent." (p. 79) The system of the rich, by the rich, for the rich, is the opposite of a healthy economy: money should be in the hands of the many, to spend and let their fellows earn, not in the hands of the few, to hoard and speculate and control messaging and government.
The bankers in 1894 who sought to change discourse from support of many small producers to a few big ones, sought to create a punditocracy of "expert opinion" to "educate the educators (small-town newspaper editors in the heartland)." (pp. 81, 83)
Advocates of the silver standard, which would make financing more readily available to small producers and deny New York bankers control of the financial system, fought back with a little book, Coin's School of Finance, by William "Coin" Harvey, 1894, which sold over 100,000 copies. (pp. 90-91) For Coin, as for most of his followers, money . . . was a means of exchange, not a means of . . . storing usable claims on the products of labor." (p. 92) And in the 21st century, we have two economies: the real economy, of the many, who spend their money on their needs; and the speculation economy, of the few for whom money is in so vast abundance they couldn't spend it if they had to, so hoard it, speculate to get more of it, buy political influence.
The plutocrats launched an intense "educational" campaign, getting their message out with cartoons and editorials sent to newspapers all over the country. (pp. 94ff)
Divide and conquer was part of the strategy: money men sought "to convince the 'better class of farmers' that it should ally not with the 'jack-legs, renters, and n'er-do-wells' but with its true counterpart--the business leadership of the metropolis." (p. 99; cites include William A. Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire)
Geographic politics were deftly used to garner support for the gold standard that would support plutocracy. "The West will not take up this cause; the East should not do so, and the central West, by reason of its importance as a factor in the commerce of the country and its geographical relation to the other sections in which financial views are considered more or less extreme, should act. For such a movement to emanate from Indiana would probably be more acceptable to all parts of the country than for it to emanate from any other state." (Report of Indianapolis Monetary Commission, 1898, quoted pp. 105, 110) "this movement would be as broad-gauged as possible, yet remain oriented toward the requirements of large enterprise." (p. 105)
Bankers pioneered using the questionnaire as an organizing tool. (p. 109) Charles Conant wrote his first article in Sound Currency December 1, 1897. Academics of the 1890s lionized big business, and would do so "until the complete collapse of modern market economies [in the 1930s] had forced a complete reevaluation of market systems." (p. 115)
"When it became clear in August 1897 that Congress would not authorize the president to appoint a monetary commission, Hanna and his colleagues began choosing their own." (p. 106) Jules Guthridge and Charles Conant, by "careful manipulation," arranged to have the commission's Jan. 3, 1898 report printed in 7500 newspapers, and built a distribution system of nearly 100,000 correspondents. (p. 109) The report was "a 'standard around which to rally.' The first step in making public opinion effective, then was to organize the business community around the reform principles found in the preliminary report." (p. 113) This was the purpose of the Jan. 1898 Monetary Convention in Indianapolis: "My word to you is, pull all together." (p. 115, Charles S. Fairchild)
Getting a bill passed was next. Despite lobbying, a Senate majority was still pro-silver. Yet this "was no reason for apathy, Hanna argued, since a bill passed by the lower house could not be long ignored. If the practical businessmen of the country would assume their political responsibilities, he insisted, that majority could be reversed as early as March 1899." (p. 117)
The gold standard men also wanted to expand the American empire by lending money and opening bank branches overseas. (p. 120; cites Charles Conant, The U.S. in the Orient 1901) "a nation whose businessmen held a large volume of contracts that stipulated certain money payments by foreigners at a future date--would have to be ready to defend them by force of arms." Wow. Killing middle-easterners in the service of Exxon is not new. (The U.S. has been deposing and replacing foreign governments since the Jefferson administration's regime change in Tripoli.) The gold men then argued that loans to the government to finance the Spanish-American war would have to be guaranteed with a gold standard and gold reserve. (p. 121)
"Ultimately, the education the corporate business community received by making its own sound money propaganda effective enabled it to conceptualize and to erect a new, corporate-industrial society. (p. 125, cites E. Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The making of a National Upper Class, 1958.) "the banking and monetary reform movement of 1894-1900 must be understood as the context in which a corporate business elite began to fork out a world view and a program appropriate to its control over and leadership of an emergent modern-industrial civilization. . . . the movement might also be understood as the preparatory school in which a modern ruling class came of age."
cite p. 130: Charles Conant, History of Modern Banks, 1896 ed.
p. 134: Joseph French Johnson, Money and Currency, 1905. "that demand for money and demand for capital were not identical--acknowledged economic conditions that were specific to a modern or corporate economy. To suggest, as Johnson did, that demand for money and demand for capital were 'in fact entirely different' was to suggest that Say's Law and its corollary, the real bills doctrine, lacked explanatory adequacy."
cite p. 140: Alexander Noyes, Forty Years of American Finance, 1909
"'sustaining normal values' under conditions of chronic oversupply clearly was a problem of demand management; it was, in short, a banking problem." (p. 150, cites James Livingston, "The Social Analysis of Economic History and Theory: Conjectures on Late-19th Century American Development," American Historical Review Feb. 1987, online at http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/omalley/g...)
"By 1906 [Frank Vanderlip] had an international reputation as a leading architect and ideologue of America's corporate-industrial system, . . . based in part on his investigations into the potential reach of a modern U.S. empire which he had published in 1902 as America's Invasion of Europe. (p. 160, also cites Charles Conant, Principles of Money and Banking)
cite p. 164: Lance E. Davis, "The Investment Market, 1870-1914," Journal of Economic History 1965, online at http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/teac...
cite p. 166: A.B. Hepburn, History of Coinage and Currency in the U.S.
By 1907, the business community was unanimous in support of a central bank, and felt that, "Reform had become a problem for 'experts' to solve. . . . 'The subject is technical. Opinions formed without a grasp of . . . principles and conditions are without value. The verdict of the uninformed majority gives no promise of being correct.' But the questions at issue were still part of normal political discourse, where they had been since Reconstruction and where, according to the Constitution, they belonged. An unprecedented mobilization of public opinion-making resources would thus be critical to the success of 'scientific' reform" (p. 174) What enabled the successful propaganda were (1) academic journals; (2) eagerly pro-business professors; (3) tycoons themselves "define[d] the puzzles fit for scholarly and journalistic investigation." (pp. 173-175)
Professor Seligman claimed the 1907 crisis was smaller than previous ones in part due to "the modern concentration and integration of industry into the vast combinations known as trusts;" the "consummately able management" of large industrial corporations give a "more correct adjustment of present investment to future needs". (pp. 176-177) Quite a cheerleader. Truth is, monopolies are great at ensuring that any income accrues only to the few owners, at the expense of customers, employees, and suppliers. And giant corporations make giant mistakes that knock giant holes in economy, society, and the environment.
cite p. 186: O.M.W. Sprague, Banking Reform in the U.S., 1911
Another paper on Livingston's subject is Elmus Wicker, "The Great Debate on Banking Reform: Nelson Aldrich and the Origins of the Fed," 2005, online at https://ohiostatepress.org/Books/Book...
cite p. 197: Henry Raymond Mussey, The Reform of the Currency, 1911, Academy of Political Science
cite p. 216: Robert Bierstedt, Power and Progress1974
"agricultural credit was a way to encourage modern business enterprise on the farms, a way to reshape the agricultural sector on the lines of the corporate model they had invented for the industrial sector. . . . The movement for agricultural credit may, then, be seen as the highest stage in the development of U.S. internal colonialism" (p. 218; see Theodore Saloutos and John D. Hicks, Agricultural Discontent in the Middle West, 1900-1939, Madison, 1950
The book was first published 1986. The author writes about himself at
http://history.rutgers.edu/?option=co...
blog: https://www.jacobinmag.com/author/jam...
youtube interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5CKQB...
Goodreads trivia questions about James Charles Livingston:
https://www.goodreads.com/trivia/auth...
Goodreads trivia questions about his Origins of the Federal Reserve System:
https://www.goodreads.com/trivia/work...
Industrial titans' ability to reap an outsize share of national income was dwindling. In some cases, workers did control the means of production. Courts had declared trusts illegal.
In the aftermath of the panic of 1893, the ruling class regained control by (1) locking out workers, hiring private armies of heavily-armed Pinkerton agents, busting unions; (2) banding together in clubs, associations, interlocking directorates; (3) reorganizing into large corporations, each able to assert control over prices, conditions, and wages in its industry; (4) a concerted propaganda campaign leading up to the election of 1896, beating the drum of the gold standard that would enable the elite to control banking.
Ever since, political decisions in the U.S. have been made by and for the wealthy elite.
James Livingston's Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890-1913 is a shockingly readable account of how and for whom the modern world was created. The success of the elite in organizing, messaging, and shaping public opinion should be studied by those of us who must organize, message, and shape public opinion to remake the world for the long-term benefit of the many, rather than the short-term benefit of the few. The book is packed with citations of primary sources.
A few of Livingston's insights and my reactions:
"before the crisis of the mid-1890s, business leaders and their allies were developing an explanation for the great depression of the late nineteenth century . . . interfirm competition, . . . chronic overproduction . . . an 'excess of enterprise' might destroy profits . . . or, more accurately, . . . transfer income from capital to labor and so ultimately halt investment . . . . [Edward] Atkinson and Andrew Carnegie argued, an unequal distribution of wealth and income . . . was the condition of the majority's comfortable subsistence." (p. 53) To the contrary! As a hunting dog or falcon must have a taste for blood, but is given only enough of the kill to keep it hunting, so the corporation must have the hope of profit, but must be prevented from controlling the market and so transferring all society's wealth to itself. Since the Carnegie and Rockefeller days, the hunting dogs have been eating the bulk of the kill.
The Sherman Act, "which was intended to abolish the primary trust . . . has merely driven it into a new and utterly impregnable position" (the corporation). (p. 58) Gotta keep working on antitrust law, labor law, and progressive taxation: concentration of wealth and power is taking us back to a "one lord, many serfs" economy.
"the decisive movement toward corporate capitalism began in 1895-1896. Business leaders from throughout the nation and from every sphere of enterprise realized then that unless they entered and altered the mainstream of political discourse on economic questions, the entrepreneurial argument for monetary inflation, dispersal of concentrated assets, and free competition among small producers would become government policy." (p. 66) They were so successful that they remade the world in their image, where it has remained since. Lately, with billionaires controlling newspapers and TV networks, the rich have captured economic discourse and government policy. We on the left must ourselves enter and alter political discourse--before all wealth is in the hands of the few, the environment is fully destroyed, and our civil liberties are history.
"For [Conant], as for Bagehot, Wells, and White, periodic crises were desirable insofar as they purged 'weaker undertakings' from the market system. This process validated the leadership of larger . . . firms . . . . the function of crisis was to centralize decisions affecting production and distribution". (p. 77) The winner-take-all system we suffer under was deliberately created in the 1890s by those who would control and profit from it. The early-21st century collapses of overextended too-big-to-fail houses of speculation, with their attendant economic damage, are their legacy.
Loans during crises were to be available only for larger firms. "Thus the 'natural' process through which 'weaker undertakings' were sifted out in times of panic would be consciously furthered by making the prerogatives of the clearinghouses [forerunners of the Fed] lawful and permanent." (p. 79) The system of the rich, by the rich, for the rich, is the opposite of a healthy economy: money should be in the hands of the many, to spend and let their fellows earn, not in the hands of the few, to hoard and speculate and control messaging and government.
The bankers in 1894 who sought to change discourse from support of many small producers to a few big ones, sought to create a punditocracy of "expert opinion" to "educate the educators (small-town newspaper editors in the heartland)." (pp. 81, 83)
Advocates of the silver standard, which would make financing more readily available to small producers and deny New York bankers control of the financial system, fought back with a little book, Coin's School of Finance, by William "Coin" Harvey, 1894, which sold over 100,000 copies. (pp. 90-91) For Coin, as for most of his followers, money . . . was a means of exchange, not a means of . . . storing usable claims on the products of labor." (p. 92) And in the 21st century, we have two economies: the real economy, of the many, who spend their money on their needs; and the speculation economy, of the few for whom money is in so vast abundance they couldn't spend it if they had to, so hoard it, speculate to get more of it, buy political influence.
The plutocrats launched an intense "educational" campaign, getting their message out with cartoons and editorials sent to newspapers all over the country. (pp. 94ff)
Divide and conquer was part of the strategy: money men sought "to convince the 'better class of farmers' that it should ally not with the 'jack-legs, renters, and n'er-do-wells' but with its true counterpart--the business leadership of the metropolis." (p. 99; cites include William A. Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire)
Geographic politics were deftly used to garner support for the gold standard that would support plutocracy. "The West will not take up this cause; the East should not do so, and the central West, by reason of its importance as a factor in the commerce of the country and its geographical relation to the other sections in which financial views are considered more or less extreme, should act. For such a movement to emanate from Indiana would probably be more acceptable to all parts of the country than for it to emanate from any other state." (Report of Indianapolis Monetary Commission, 1898, quoted pp. 105, 110) "this movement would be as broad-gauged as possible, yet remain oriented toward the requirements of large enterprise." (p. 105)
Bankers pioneered using the questionnaire as an organizing tool. (p. 109) Charles Conant wrote his first article in Sound Currency December 1, 1897. Academics of the 1890s lionized big business, and would do so "until the complete collapse of modern market economies [in the 1930s] had forced a complete reevaluation of market systems." (p. 115)
"When it became clear in August 1897 that Congress would not authorize the president to appoint a monetary commission, Hanna and his colleagues began choosing their own." (p. 106) Jules Guthridge and Charles Conant, by "careful manipulation," arranged to have the commission's Jan. 3, 1898 report printed in 7500 newspapers, and built a distribution system of nearly 100,000 correspondents. (p. 109) The report was "a 'standard around which to rally.' The first step in making public opinion effective, then was to organize the business community around the reform principles found in the preliminary report." (p. 113) This was the purpose of the Jan. 1898 Monetary Convention in Indianapolis: "My word to you is, pull all together." (p. 115, Charles S. Fairchild)
Getting a bill passed was next. Despite lobbying, a Senate majority was still pro-silver. Yet this "was no reason for apathy, Hanna argued, since a bill passed by the lower house could not be long ignored. If the practical businessmen of the country would assume their political responsibilities, he insisted, that majority could be reversed as early as March 1899." (p. 117)
The gold standard men also wanted to expand the American empire by lending money and opening bank branches overseas. (p. 120; cites Charles Conant, The U.S. in the Orient 1901) "a nation whose businessmen held a large volume of contracts that stipulated certain money payments by foreigners at a future date--would have to be ready to defend them by force of arms." Wow. Killing middle-easterners in the service of Exxon is not new. (The U.S. has been deposing and replacing foreign governments since the Jefferson administration's regime change in Tripoli.) The gold men then argued that loans to the government to finance the Spanish-American war would have to be guaranteed with a gold standard and gold reserve. (p. 121)
"Ultimately, the education the corporate business community received by making its own sound money propaganda effective enabled it to conceptualize and to erect a new, corporate-industrial society. (p. 125, cites E. Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The making of a National Upper Class, 1958.) "the banking and monetary reform movement of 1894-1900 must be understood as the context in which a corporate business elite began to fork out a world view and a program appropriate to its control over and leadership of an emergent modern-industrial civilization. . . . the movement might also be understood as the preparatory school in which a modern ruling class came of age."
cite p. 130: Charles Conant, History of Modern Banks, 1896 ed.
p. 134: Joseph French Johnson, Money and Currency, 1905. "that demand for money and demand for capital were not identical--acknowledged economic conditions that were specific to a modern or corporate economy. To suggest, as Johnson did, that demand for money and demand for capital were 'in fact entirely different' was to suggest that Say's Law and its corollary, the real bills doctrine, lacked explanatory adequacy."
cite p. 140: Alexander Noyes, Forty Years of American Finance, 1909
"'sustaining normal values' under conditions of chronic oversupply clearly was a problem of demand management; it was, in short, a banking problem." (p. 150, cites James Livingston, "The Social Analysis of Economic History and Theory: Conjectures on Late-19th Century American Development," American Historical Review Feb. 1987, online at http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/omalley/g...)
"By 1906 [Frank Vanderlip] had an international reputation as a leading architect and ideologue of America's corporate-industrial system, . . . based in part on his investigations into the potential reach of a modern U.S. empire which he had published in 1902 as America's Invasion of Europe. (p. 160, also cites Charles Conant, Principles of Money and Banking)
cite p. 164: Lance E. Davis, "The Investment Market, 1870-1914," Journal of Economic History 1965, online at http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/teac...
cite p. 166: A.B. Hepburn, History of Coinage and Currency in the U.S.
By 1907, the business community was unanimous in support of a central bank, and felt that, "Reform had become a problem for 'experts' to solve. . . . 'The subject is technical. Opinions formed without a grasp of . . . principles and conditions are without value. The verdict of the uninformed majority gives no promise of being correct.' But the questions at issue were still part of normal political discourse, where they had been since Reconstruction and where, according to the Constitution, they belonged. An unprecedented mobilization of public opinion-making resources would thus be critical to the success of 'scientific' reform" (p. 174) What enabled the successful propaganda were (1) academic journals; (2) eagerly pro-business professors; (3) tycoons themselves "define[d] the puzzles fit for scholarly and journalistic investigation." (pp. 173-175)
Professor Seligman claimed the 1907 crisis was smaller than previous ones in part due to "the modern concentration and integration of industry into the vast combinations known as trusts;" the "consummately able management" of large industrial corporations give a "more correct adjustment of present investment to future needs". (pp. 176-177) Quite a cheerleader. Truth is, monopolies are great at ensuring that any income accrues only to the few owners, at the expense of customers, employees, and suppliers. And giant corporations make giant mistakes that knock giant holes in economy, society, and the environment.
cite p. 186: O.M.W. Sprague, Banking Reform in the U.S., 1911
Another paper on Livingston's subject is Elmus Wicker, "The Great Debate on Banking Reform: Nelson Aldrich and the Origins of the Fed," 2005, online at https://ohiostatepress.org/Books/Book...
cite p. 197: Henry Raymond Mussey, The Reform of the Currency, 1911, Academy of Political Science
cite p. 216: Robert Bierstedt, Power and Progress1974
"agricultural credit was a way to encourage modern business enterprise on the farms, a way to reshape the agricultural sector on the lines of the corporate model they had invented for the industrial sector. . . . The movement for agricultural credit may, then, be seen as the highest stage in the development of U.S. internal colonialism" (p. 218; see Theodore Saloutos and John D. Hicks, Agricultural Discontent in the Middle West, 1900-1939, Madison, 1950
The book was first published 1986. The author writes about himself at
http://history.rutgers.edu/?option=co...
blog: https://www.jacobinmag.com/author/jam...
youtube interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5CKQB...
Goodreads trivia questions about James Charles Livingston:
https://www.goodreads.com/trivia/auth...
Goodreads trivia questions about his Origins of the Federal Reserve System:
https://www.goodreads.com/trivia/work...
January 28, 2025
A good relatively short history. There’s some weird elements of trying to out class analyze the marxists, however. You can see how Livingston turns into the “fuck work” liberal that he eventually does.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews