The politics of elite anxiety: Carter Glass and American financial policy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Carter Glass played an important role in every financial question that the U.S. Congress addressed from the Federal Reserve Act through the New Deal. Although Glass is often remembered today as a reformer, he was fundamentally a reactionary whose foremost impulse was ensuring that the banking system remained the instrument of financial elites. He promoted legislation that upheld elite banking interests, and employed a rhetorical framework that denigrated subordinate groups and their allegedly unsound financial ideas. But the Great Depression left the bankers disgraced and discredited orthodoxies that Glass insisted were sacrosanct.