If I haven’t been posting much lately, it’s because I’m working on a paper about the 1908-12 National Monetary Commission, and have been up to my neck in research concerning it. As that commission supplies a precedent for the Centennial Monetary Commission plan that’s presently wending its way through Congress, I thought it would be a good idea to take a closer look at it so as to better understand its merits and shortcomings, with the aim of suggesting how the new Commission might replicate the first while avoiding the last.
That the original Monetary Commission was hardly free of shortcomings seems evident enough today, for it was largely thanks to that commission’s efforts that we ended up with the Federal Reserve System, the failures of which have prompted requests for a new commission. But there were also those who recognized the Fed’s shortcomings even before the Federal Reserve Act became law at the end of 1913. One of them was Elihu Root, a brilliant Republican Senator for New York.