A Monetary History as a model for historians.

• Author: Meltzer, Allan H.
• Position: Book Review

In 1963, the American Bankers Association invited the late James Tobin and me to review A Monetary History of the United States at a conference held at Princeton. At the time, I wrote and subsequently published a review article that began this way:

This volume is a delight to the economist. The book is clearly destined to be a classic, perhaps one of the few emerging in that role rather than growing into it. The reader cannot fail to be impressed by the size of the task to which the authors committed themselves, by the authors' ability to treat the broad sweep of a century of monetary history without being overcome by the mass of detail that they carefully examine, by the originality of the scholarship that is everywhere displayed, and by a host of other considerations, most of which are conveyed by the word "classic" [Meltzer 1965: 404]. Some of those words have greater resonance now that I am well along in the second volume of A History of the Federal Reserve. I do not know whether Anna Schwartz and Milton Friedman anticipated the size of the task and the amount of detail. I certainly did not. I have available most of the correspondence, minutes, and internal records that they were not permitted to access. That made their task very different from mine. To write their history, they had to find substitutes for the internal records.

One of the curious facts about their work is that the Federal Reserve discussed releasing internal documents during much of the period when they were working, but it would not release old minutes to Anna and Milton with a lag to protect confidentiality of current or recent discussions.

There was a strong precedent for releasing materials. Seymour Harris wrote a Federal Reserve history about 1930 using internal records. A Committee on the History of the Federal Reserve System worked in the 1950s. Allan Sproul, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, was an active participant in the Committee's work. Aside from some unpublished interviews stored at the Brookings Institution, the only completed work was Lester Chandler's biography of Benjamin Strong Jr., the first governor of the New York Fed and the dominant personality in the early years.

Chandler had access to all of Strong's papers, including minutes of the committee that, under different names, made decisions about open market operations. Strong's papers were stored at Columbia University as well as at the New York Fed. Anna and Milton therefore had...