That wasn’t their intention or expectation, of course, but that was the effect of it.The men in question were Benjamin Strong, governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Sir Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England; Hjalmar Schacht, head of the Reichsbank in Germany; and Charles Rist, deputy governor of the Banque de France. For men of such importance, they were a rather odd quartet. One was strange, one was dying, one was a future Nazi, and one was quite normal but of little consequence in the present circumstances.They gathered at the Long Island estate of Ogden Livingston Mills, a rich Republican who had recently been beaten (indeed, heartily clobbered) by Al Smith in the race for the governorship of New York. As a kind of consolation prize, Mills had been made undersecretary of the treasury in Washington. He would eventually succeed Andrew Mellon as treasury secretary—ironically just in time to deal with the mess now being set in motion by his well-meaning but misguided houseguests.The bankers must have felt quite at home, for Mills’s vast and blocky mansion looked more like a central bank than a comfortable residence.
What do You think about One Summer: America, 1927?
