What is it about?
This article recovers Senator Robert L. Owen's role and aims in the creation of the Federal Reserve System in service to country banks and farmers. It then explores how those aims were seemingly betrayed by the Federal Reserve's handling of the postwar recession, leading to several measures aimed at circumventing private control over agricultural credit.
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Why is it important?
This article reinterprets the origins of the Federal Reserve away from the orthodox banker-driven narrative, highlighting the Agrarian, democratic goals with which it was designed and how the perceived betrayal of these goals resulted in an expansion of the administrative state.
Perspectives
This article emerged from our studies of the 1920s and 1930s Southern farmers, who frequently blamed the Fed for their misfortunes while also claiming that the Fed had been their institution. We sought to understand whether there was any merit to their claims, and we came to believe that there was. Not only does this return credit to the design of the Federal Reserve to where it belongs, notably leading populists like Robert L. Owen, but it also investigates how the capture of the Federal Reserve in the late 1910s and early 1920s by conservative banking interests meant that farmers were vulnerable to an assault on their livelihoods by an institution they believed had been designed to benefit them.
Dr. R. Alexander Ferguson
Arizona State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Equality of Agriculture: Robert L. Owen, Country Banks, and the Populist’s Federal Reserve, The Business History Review, January 2025, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/s0007680525101153.
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