LaFollette. Yet, when they requested to appear before the Committee, both of them were denied access. The only witnesses to testifywe're the bankers themselves and their friends. Kolko tells us: Fortunately for the reformers, the Pujo Committee swung into high gear in its investigation of the Money Trust during the summer of 1912 and for eight months frightened the nation with its awesome, if inconclusive, statistics on the power of Wall Street over the nation's economy.... Five banking firms, the elaborate tables of the committee showed, held 341 directorships in 112 corporations with an aggregate capitalization of over $22 billion. T h e evidence seemed conclusive, and the nation was suitably frightened into realizing that reform of the banking system w a s urgent—presumably to bring Wall Street under control....
T h e orgy of Wall Street w a s resurrected by the newspapers, who quite ignored the fact that the biggest advocates of banking reform were the bankers themselves, bankers with a somewhat different view of the problem.... Yet it was largely the Pujo hearings that m a d e the topic of banking reform a serious one.
Kolko has touched upon an interesting point. Almost no oneput any significance to the fact that some of the biggest bankers onWall Street were the first marchers to lead the parade for bankingreform. The most conspicuous among these was Paul Warburg ofKuhn, Loeb & Company who, for seven years prior to passage ofthe Federal Reserve Act, travelled around the country doingnothing but giving "reform" speeches and writing scholarly articlesfor the media, including an eleven-part series for
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joined in and made regular appearances before professional andpolitical bodies echoing the call for reform. Yet no one paid anyattention to the unmistakable odor of fish.
ENLISTING THE HELP OF ACADEMIA
The speeches and articles by big-name bankers were neverintended to sway the public at large. They served the function ofputting forth the basic arguments and the technical details whichwere to be the starting point for the work of others who could notbe accused of having self-serving motives. To carry the message tothe voters, it was decided that representatives from the world ofacademia should be enlisted to provide the necessary aura ofrespectability and intellectual objectivity. For that purpose, thebanks contributed a sum of $5 million to a special "educational"
fund, and much of that money found its way into the environs ofthree universities: Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Chicago, all of which had been recipients of large endowments fromthe captains of industry and finance.
