he date of the Fed's establishment, 1913, may give us a first general clue to the circumstances under which it came into being. The American frontier had been officially declared closed in 1910; there was no longer white space on the national map. The Great White Fleet had returned from its voyage around the world, symbolically marking the debut of the United States as a world power. Immigration was near its height, and sometime around 1913 the United States shifted from a predominantly rural to an essentially urban society. The Civil War lay fifty years in the past, and sectional feelings were gradually fading.
On a more specifically economic and political level, the United States was maturing as an industrial society. The age of the Robber Barons was just beginning to give way to the modern age of relatively faceless managers. The late nineteenth-century controversies over monetary policy, such as bimetallism, controversies that seem so remote to the present-day mind, were fading from public consciousness. "Reform," meaning for the most part a politi
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