Charles Sumner Hamlin (1861-1938), a Democrat, served on the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) during the time that Calvin Coolidge was president. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, 1913-1914; a governor of the Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C., 1914-1916; a member of the Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C., 1916-36; and Special Counsel to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Board, 1936-38. (DETAIL NOTE Federal Reserve Board)
The Hamlin Papers at the Library of Congress represent a remarkable feat of will, organizational ingenuity and sheer endurance by a member of the Federal Reserve Board who was also a man-about-town, resolved to document for posterity virtually every waking moment of his professional and social life. (As an example of what a reader might find out about his social life, Hamlin's full Diaries include jottings about a seance that he and his wife attended at the home of Mrs. Wreidt, a clairvoyant, on February 18, 1927, though this incident is not reported in the more abbreviated Diary Extracts.)
Overall, Hamlin's papers represent five passes over the same ground, each in different form. They are: 1) his handwritten, paginated Diaries, covering the years 1887-1937; 2) a typed, paginated, multi-volume Index-Digest to the Diaries, covering the years 1887-1936; 3) many paginated volumes of Scrapbooks, preserving newspaper clippings and lengthy reports, some of them confidential, pasted into the Scrapbooks, pertaining to banking and economic matters, covering the years 1886-1938; 4) a typed, multi-volume, paginated Index-Digest to the Scrapbooks, covering the years 1886-1912; and 5) fifteen volumes of typed, consecutively paginated Diary Extracts, with occasional corrections handwritten in pencil, based on his own handwritten Diaries, covering the period March 15, 1913-January 4, 1929.
The Coolidge-Consumerism collection contains a portion of the last of these efforts at documentation,
The period represented in the selection is the end of the Coolidge era, when the economy gave signs of beginning to stall. As early as 1927, a downturn in the economy was exerting a negative impact on the standard of living of the working classes, though the stock market "crash" of 1929 was as yet unimaginable. The Extracts contain some confidential assessments by Hamlin of President Coolidge and the usually invisible Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, who appears here in a more personal light than he does in other documents in the collection.
Other significant economic issues of the day -- including the European gold standard, the domestic farm crisis, and what Hamlin calls "improved industrial processes" -- are visible in the narrative through their impact on the banking system, particularly the setting of the interest rate to member banks, by means of which the FRB attempted to control credit, investment, speculation, and the volume of loans advanced both to businesses and individuals.
Hamlin devotes quite a lot of time and worry to President Coolidge's January 6, 1928 statement to the press that he was not alarmed by the volume of speculative loans made on the stock market, a statement that spurred a new speculative round. (INTRO NOTE Coolidge Presidency)
In Calvin Coolidge: The Quiet President (1967, rpt. 1988), biographer Donald R. McCoy comments on this episode, beginning with Coolidge's January 6, 1928 statement to the press that he had no evidence that brokers' loans (which had jumped to almost $4 billion in value) had expanded too rapidly. McCoy notes: "His statement declared that brokers' loans were not excessive because they reflected steadily increasing bank deposits and the larger number of securities on the market. To give emphasis to his reassuring view, he allowed it to be quoted directly in the press. . . . A few days later H. Parker Willis, who was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Commerce, discussed the statement with Coolidge at the White House. The President indicated that his official view and his personal opinion were divergent. He said, 'If I were to give my own personal opinion about it, I should say that any loan made for gambling in stocks was an '"excessive loan."' He continued by way of explanation, 'I regard myself as the representative of the government and not as an individual. When technical matters come up I feel called on to refer them to the proper department of government which has some information about them and then, unless there is some good reason, I use this information as a basis for whatever I have to say; but that does not prevent me from thinking what I please as an individual'" (pp. 319-20).In the
The date of composition of the Extracts is unknown, as are the precise circumstances of their composition. Some of the pages appear older than others (the paper is more yellowed, for example), so the draft may have been written over a span of years. Since it is not clear when the Diary Extracts were composed, it is difficult to assess exactly how much hindsight they involve. According to the Manuscript Division's accession notes, at least four of the fifteen Extract volumes came to the Library of Congress directly from the Federal Reserve Board, subsequent to the Hamlin family's deposit of materials. Although Hamlin reports, in the Memorandum which begins the Coolidge-Consumerism file, that the Extracts were intended as a history of the Federal Reserve Board, their blow-by-blow level of detail, of the "he-said-then-I-said" variety, means that they do not "read" like a history in the generally accepted sense of the word.
Volume 2 appears to be the beginning of the Diary Extracts. The Manuscript Division reports that Volume 1 was missing when the Hamlin material arrived at the Library. To judge by the introductory nature of the first page of Volume 2, however, it is unclear what Volume 1 would have contained if it had existed. The last volume of the extracts, volume 15, stops in mid-sentence, in the middle of the January 4, 1929 entry, although the heading on the first page of the volume indicates that it was expected to record events through March 22, 1929 (which would have been three weeks or so beyond the end of President Coolidge's term).
Though not an insurmountable problem, the Extracts are more meaningful if the user has some knowledge of how the Federal Reserve System works, as Hamlin's remarks provide almost nothing provided in the way of an overview. Furthermore, Hamlin's narrative provides very few contextualizing historical markers. In volume 7, for example, entries for August 2, 1923 and then, immediately after, for August 14, 1923, make no reference to the fact that in the interim, President Harding has died (August 2) and Calvin Coolidge has assumed the presidency (August 3). As mentioned above, Donald Rea Hanson's exceptionally clear account of how actions by the Federal Reserve Board relate to speculation on the New York Stock Exchange, printed in the
Although their length and somewhat less immediate bearing on the topic of this collection militated against selecting more of the Hamlin material, readers should note that perhaps the most remarkable of Hamlin's five passes over the historic ground is his typed Index-Digest (not included in this collection) to the handwritten Diaries. The Index summarizes the high points of the Diaries -- while occupying more pages than the Diaries -- and is composed of sentences that read virtually like a running narrative of the years they cover. The Index-Digest is laid out first by topic and personage, then within each entry by date; entries are cross-referenced to other topics and personages; and each entry is then keyed to the pages of the handwritten Diaries and even, in some cases, to page numbers in the Scrapbooks.