[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

276 85; idem, Capitalism the Creator (New York: Macmillan, 1940), pp. 226 28.
9
D.H. Robertson,  The Trade Cycle, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed.
(1929), vol. 22, p. 354.
10
D.H. Robertson,  How Do We Want Gold to Behave? in The International
Gold Problem (London: Humphrey Milford, 1932), p. 45; quoted in Phillips, et al.,
Banking and the Business Cycle, pp. 186 87.
174 America s Great Depression
The siren song of a stable price level had lured leading politi-
cians, to say nothing of economists, as early as 1911. It was then
that Professor Irving Fisher launched his career as head of the  sta-
ble money movement in the United States. He quickly gained the
adherence of leading statesmen and economists to a plan for an
international commission to study the money and price problem.
Supporters included President William Howard Taft, Secretary of
War Henry Stimson, Secretary of Treasury Franklin MacVeagh,
Governor Woodrow Wilson, Gifford Pinchot, seven Senators, and
economists Alfred Marshall, Francis Edgeworth, and John May-
nard Keynes in England. President Taft sent a special message to
Congress in February, 1912, urging an appropriation for such an
international conference. The message was written by Fisher, in
collaboration with Assistant Secretary of State Huntington Wil-
son, a convert to stable money. The Senate passed the bill, but it
died in the House. Woodrow Wilson expressed interest in the plan
but dropped the idea in the press of other matters.
In the spring of 1918, a Committee on the Purchasing Power
of Money of the American Economic Association endorsed the
principle of stabilization. Though encountering banker opposition
to his stable-money doctrine, led notably by A. Barton Hepburn of
the Chase National Bank, Fisher began organizing the Stable
Money League at the end of 1920, and established the League at
the end of May, 1921 at the beginning of our inflationary era.
Newton D. Baker, Secretary of War under Wilson, and Professor
James Harvey Rogers of Cornell were two of the early organizers.
Other prominent politicians and economists who played leading
roles in the Stable Money League were Professor Jeremiah W.
Jenks, its first president; Henry A. Wallace, editor of Wallace s
Farmer, and later Secretary of Agriculture; John G. Winant, later
Governor of New Hampshire; Professor John R. Commons, its
second President; George Eastman of the Eastman Kodak family;
Lyman J. Gage, formerly Secretary of the Treasury; Samuel Gom-
pers, President of the American Federation of Labor; Senator
Carter Glass of Virginia; Thomas R. Marshall, Vice-President of
the United States under Wilson; Representative Oscar W. Under-
wood; Malcolm C. Rorty; and economists Arthur Twining Hadley,
Theory and Inflation: Economists and the Lure of a Stable Price Level 175
Leonard P. Ayres, William T. Foster, David Friday, Edwin W.
Kemmerer, Wesley C. Mitchell, Warren M. Persons, H. Parker
Willis, Allyn A. Young, and Carl Snyder.
The ideal of a stable price level is relatively innocuous during a
price rise when it can aid sound money advocates in trying to check
the boom; but it is highly mischievous when prices are tending to
sag, and the stabilizationists call for inflation. And yet, stabilization
is always a more popular rallying cry when prices are falling. The
Stable Money League was founded in 1920 1921, when prices
were falling during a depression. Soon, prices began to rise, and
some conservatives began to see in the stable money movement a
useful check against extreme inflationists. As a result, the League
changed its name to the National Monetary Association in 1923,
and its officers continued as before, with Professor Commons as
President. By 1925, the price level had reached its peak and begun
to sag, and consequently the conservatives abandoned their sup-
port of the organization, which again changed its name to the Sta-
ble Money Association. Successive presidents of the new associa-
tion were H. Parker Willis, John E. Rovensky, Executive Vice-
President of the Bank of America, Professor Kemmerer, and
 Uncle Frederic W. Delano. Other eminent leaders in the Stable
Money Association were Professor Willford I. King; President
Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University; John W. Davis,
Democratic candidate for president in 1924; Charles G. Dawes,
Director of the Bureau of the Budget under Harding, and Vice-
President under Coolidge; William Green, President of the Ameri-
can Federation of Labor; Charles Evans Hughes, Secretary of State
until 1925; Otto H. Kahn, investment banker; Frank O. Lowden,
former Republican Governor of Illinois; Elihu Root, former Secre-
tary of State and Senator; James H. Rand, Jr.; Norman Thomas, of
the Socialist Party; Paul M. Warburg and Owen D. Young. Enlist-
ing from abroad came Charles Rist of the Bank of France; Eduard
Benes of Czechoslovakia, Max Lazard of France; Emile Moreau of
the Bank of France; Louis Rothschild of Austria; and Sir Arthur
Balfour, Sir Henry Strakosch, Lord Melchett, and Sir Josiah Stamp
of Great Britain. Serving as honorary vice-presidents of the Asso-
ciation were the Presidents of the following organizations: the
176 America s Great Depression
American Association for Labor Legislation, American Bar Associa-
tion, American Farm Bureau Federation, American Farm Economic
Association, American Statistical Association, Brotherhood of Rail-
road Trainmen, National Association of Credit Men, National Con- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]