The Essential Rothbard - Ludwig von Mises Institute

The Essential Rothbard 51
Rothbard maintained that the House of Morgan held effective
control of the American government for much of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, down to the onset of Franklin
Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933. He traces in detail Morgan backing
for a central bank, culminating in the creation of the Federal
Reserve System in 1913. His Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign
Policy124 and The Case Against the Fed are other presentations
of his thesis.
The House of Morgan was by no means the first group in
American history to seek the ill-gotten gains of centralized banking.
Rothbard discusses in great detail, e.g., the struggles over the
First and Second Banks of the United States.
The Federal Reserve System, Rothbard makes clear, was the
culmination of efforts that continued throughout the nineteenth
century to centralize banking.
By the 1890s, the leading Wall Street bankers were becoming
increasingly disgruntled with their own creation, the
National Banking System . . . while the banking system was
partially centralized under their leadership, it was not centralized
enough. 125
As he describes the movement to cartelize banking, Rothbard
introduces a dominant theme in his interpretation of twentiethcentury
American history: the struggle of competing groups of
bankers for power.
From the 1890s until World War II, much of American political
history . . . can be interpreted not so much as “Democrat”
versus “Republican,” but as the interaction or conflict between
the Morgans and their allies on the one hand, and the Rockefeller-Harriman-Kuhn,
Loeb alliance on the other. 126
124 Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy (1984; Burlingame,
Calif.: Center for Libertarian Studies, 1995).
125 Case Against the Fed, p. 79; emphasis in the original.
126 Ibid. p. 92.