The Origins of the Federal Reserve

From the author:

"The Federal Reserve Act of December 23, 1913, was part
and parcel of the wave of Progressive legislation, on local,
state, and federal levels of government, that began about 1900.
Progressivism was a bipartisan movement which, in the course
of the first two decades of the twentieth century, transformed
the American economy and society from one of roughly lais-
sez-faire to one of centralized statism.
Until the 1960s, historians had established the myth that
Progressivism was a virtual uprising of workers and farmers
who, guided by a new generation of altruistic experts and
intellectuals, surmounted fierce big business opposition in
order to curb, regulate, and control what had been a system
of accelerating monopoly in the late nineteenth century. A
generation of research and scholarship, however, has now
exploded that myth for all parts of the American polity, and
it has become all too clear that the truth is the reverse of
this well-worn fable. In contrast, what actually happened was
that business became increasingly competitive during the late
nineteenth century, and that various big-business interests..."