The Unlikely Reformer: Carter Glass and Financial Regulation
2020; Oxford University Press; Volume: 107; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jaaa271
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Economic Theory and Policy
ResumoMatthew P. Fink's The Unlikely Reformer reminds us that once upon a time there existed white Democrats in the American South, who dominated the region's politics and constituted an important block in that party's progressive wing from the Woodrow Wilson era through World War II. With roots in the radical southern populism of the 1890s, these leaders were not led astray by the free-silver panacea that motivated their midwestern allies such as William Jennings Bryan. Rather, they kept their focus on the many structural abuses perpetrated by the titans of finance capitalism and big corporations. Congressman and later Senator Carter Glass of Virginia was one such southerner, who played a seminal role in virtually every federal effort to bring the nation's largest banking institutions under some measure of public accountability from the New Freedom through the New Deal. To the extent that he endorsed segregation and authored Virginia's draconian restrictions on African American voting, Glass was a typical southern Democrat who also supported Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt on key foreign policy issues. But unlike Hugo Black, Sam Rayburn, or Alben Barkley, he voted against most of Roosevelt's New Deal legislation, with the exception of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the banking reforms of 1933 and 1935.
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