Success Has Many Fathers: The Federal Reserve Act of 1913, The Battle of the Memoirs, and the Growth of Federal Competence

Abstract

The passage of The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 has been lauded as one of the great achievements of Woodrow Wilson's administrations and of the whole Progressive Era. Given the Act's significance it was unsurprising that many of the leading players in its drafting and passage claimed paternity of it. Jostling for credit for a widely-recognized achievement in statecraft, the fathers of The Federal Reserve Act sought to bolster their contemporary reputations and historical legacies. Now, a century later, we can revisit their claims not so much to settle an argument between long-dead protagonists, but instead to see through their bickering to discern important debates about the nature of modern banking and over the proper scope of government intervention in the modern economy. Those debates most fruitfully connect the squabbles of the founding fathers of banking reform to the broader progressive movement and to fundamental questions of state competence with which many progressives grappled.