speak.1 The hearings were widely reported in the press, and thepublic was given the impression that the favorable testimony wastruly representative of expert opinion. Kolko summarizes: Although they were careful to keep the contents of their work confidential, to aid the passage of any bill that might be agreed upon Glass deemed it desirable to hold public hearings on the topic and to make sure the course of these hearings was not left to chance.... The public assumption of the hearing was that no bills had been drafted, and Willis' draft was never mentioned, much less revealed.... The hearings of Glass' subcommittee in January and February, 1913, were nothing less than a love feast.
BANKERS BECOME DIVIDED
The public was not the only victim of deception. The bankersthemselves were also targeted—at least the lesser ones who werenot part of the Wall Street power center. As early as February, 1911,a group of twenty-two of the country's most powerful bankers metfor three days behind closed doors in Atlantic City to work out astrategy for getting the smaller banks to support the concept ofusing the government to authorize and maintain their own cartel.
The objective frankly discussed among those present was that theproposed cartel would bring the smaller banks under control of thelarger ones, but that this fact had to be obscured when presenting itto them for endorsement.
The annual meeting of the American Bankers Association washeld a few months later, and a resolution endorsing the Aldrich Billwas steam rollered through the plenary session, much to thedismay of many of those present. Andrew Frame was one of them.
Representing a group of Western bankers, he testified at thehearings of the Glass subcommittee, mentioned previously, and described the hoax:
When that monetary bill was given to the country, it was but a few days previous to the meeting of the American Bankers Association in New Orleans in 1911. There was not one banker in a hundred who had read that bill. We had twelve addresses in favor of it. General Hamby of Austin, Texas, wrote a letter to President Watts asking for a hearing against the bill. He did not get a very courteous answer. I refused to 1. Lindbergh, p. 129.
2. Kolko,
3. Rothbard,
THE CREATURE SWALLOWS CONGRESS 463
vote on it, and a great many other bankers did likewise.... They would not allow anyone on the program who was not in favor of the bill.1
It is interesting that, during Frame's testimony, CongressmanGlass refrained from commenting on the unfairness of allowingonly one side of an issue to be heard in a public forum. He couldhardly afford to. That is exactly what he was then doing with hisown agenda.
As the Federal Reserve Act moved closer to its birth in the formof the Glass-Owen Bill (Owen was the co-sponsor in the Senate),both Aldrich and Vanderlip threw themselves into a great publicdisplay of opposition. No opportunity was overlooked to make astatement to the press—or anyone else of public prominence—
