In the fall of 1949 I went to the Library of Congress to get material for a newspaper article about the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. What I expected to be a week’s labor turned into a lengthy research job of nineteen months, for I discovered, in my initial inquiry, that there existed not one narrative account of the origins and activities of this powerful organization. Consequently, the majority of my information was gathered piecemeal from a vast number of periodicals, ranging from popular magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post to the exclusive bankers’ magazine, The Economist.
The standard works on the Federal Reserve System, almost entirely abstruse and technical works on economics, I found of little practical value. Even in the matter of acceptances, the usual textbooks contained no information upon such an important item in America’s economic history as the changeover from the open-book system of credit to the acceptance system, which has wrought such vast changes in our practice of commerce, and for this information I found only one source, a few pamphlets published by the American Acceptance Council from 1915 to 1928. It is, then, little wonder that the student with a Master’s Degree in Economics from one of the better universities will see here for the first time material which should have been before him in his elementary courses.
The birthplace of the Federal Reserve Act, Jekyl Island, is now operated as a public park by the State of Georgia, but the tourist will find no plaque there commemorating the event. This is not so much an oversight on the part of the park officials as it is a triumph for the more than adequate publicists of the Federal Reserve Board, who have perpetuated the comfortable fiction that the Act was born in the halls of Congress, the product of the minds of Carter Glass and Woodrow Wilson. It is the writer’s hope that this and many similar fictions will not long survive the publication of this work.
E. MULLINS,
Jan. 12, 1952