Marriner Eccles and the Debt That Cured a Depression
Near Ogden, Utah
Marriner Stoddard Eccles was born in Logan, Utah, in eighteen ninety, the son of a Scottish immigrant who had built a banking and business empire across northern Utah. When the elder Eccles died in nineteen twelve, Marriner, barely twenty-two, took over the family's interconnected network of banks and businesses and ran them through everything that followed: the boom years of the nineteen twenties, the catastrophic bank runs of the early Depression.
At the moment that most American bankers were arguing that the federal government had to cut spending and balance its books, Eccles was arguing something almost exactly opposite. He had arrived at his view empirically, through watching what actually happened to his banks and his depositors in nineteen thirty and nineteen thirty-one. He testified before the Senate Finance Committee in early nineteen thirty-three, laying out the case for deficit spending, public works programs, and progressive taxation as the only mechanism capable of restarting a collapsed economy. The testimony drew attention in Washington. Henry Morgenthau Jr. brought Eccles to the Treasury Department. Franklin Roosevelt appointed him Chairman of the Federal Reserve in nineteen thirty-four.
He served as chairman until nineteen forty-eight, through the entire New Deal, through World War Two, through the postwar reconversion. He wrote the Banking Act of nineteen thirty-five, which restructured the Federal Reserve into something closer to its modern form. He was, more than any other single individual, the architect of the Federal Reserve as it currently functions.
The Federal Reserve building in Washington, D.C., was renamed the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building in nineteen eighty-two.
He had grown up near Ogden, ran banks in Ogden, bought the Ben Lomond Hotel here in nineteen thirty-three after the previous owner's bank collapsed. The building where the country's monetary policy was redesigned had its roots in Weber County.
Note: some details of Eccles's early business career are reconstructed from family accounts and may vary at the margins across sources.
