Nelson Aldrich

Rhode Island boss who mastered Senate finance and laid the intellectual groundwork for the Federal Reserve.

Overview

A former wholesale grocer, Aldrich served from 1881 to 1911 and rose to chair Finance, writing or reshaping major tariff laws including the Payne-Aldrich Act of 1909, and building the Senate's first professional staff system. After the 1907 panic he led the National Monetary Commission, studying European central banking and producing the plan that, after political revision, became the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. To reformers he was the embodiment of the System, and his daughter's marriage made him grandfather to the Rockefellers, a genealogy muckrakers never tired of citing.