Thursday, October 10, 2013

Speaking of the central bank...

From Leo Damrosch, Tocqueville's Discovery of America, p.190:
By the time of Tocqueville's arrival, the Second Bank [of the United States] and its provincial satellites had become the focus of bitter populist resentment; a senator from Ohio charged that they did their work "not in the light of day, but in darkness and in secret, between the walls of subterraneous caverns." The banks' powers and procedures were indeed bafflingly complicated, and as a historian [Lawrence Kohl] says, "One of the important functions of Jacksonian rhetoric was to help individuals order their world. It made the unseen visible, the complex simple, the confused orderly, and the impersonal personal."

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