Rothbard Draws Attention to Research by Thomas Ferguson, Who Interprets the New Deal as an Anti-Morgan Coup with the Rockefellers Assuming Eastern Establishment Leadership

The Federal Reserve System, as Rothbard makes crystal clear, was the culmination of efforts that  continued throughout the nineteenth century to centralize banking.

By the 1890s, the leading Wall Street bankers were becoming disgruntled with their own creation, the National Banking System. ... [W]hile the banking system was partially  centralized under their leadership, it was not centralized enough.

As he describes the movement to cartelize banking, Rothbard introduces a dominant theme in his interpretation of twentieth-century American history: the struggle of competing groups of bankers for power.

From the 1890s until World War II, much of American political history ... can be  interpreted not so much as “Democrat” versus “Republican” but as the interaction or conflict between the Morgans and their allies on the one hand, and the Rockefeller-Harriman-Kuhn, Loeb alliance on the other.

In the agitation to establish the Fed, the House of Morgan led the way; and Rothbard stresses the importance of the conference held at Jekyll Island, Georgia, in November, 1910, under Morgan control. The entire section of his book The Case Against the Fed that deals with the origin of the Fed shows Rothbard’s incredibly detailed historical knowledge. Though he was too modest to do so, he could had he wished have echoed the boast of Fustel de Coulanges: “It is not I who speak, but history who speaks through me.” Rothbard brings the historical section of the book to a close with a discussion of the Fed’s early years in which the Governor of the New York Fed, Benjamin Strong, guaranteed Morgan control. Only with the coming of the New Deal were the Morgan interests relegated to a lesser role, as the Rockefellers assumed leadership of the Eastern Establishment.  Rothbard draws attention to the research of Thomas Ferguson, who has interpreted the New Deal as an anti-Morgan coup.

--Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto (Auburn, AL: LewRockwell.com, 2014), e-book.