This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2008, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Assured that his appointment to head the Federal Reserve would go a lot smoother in Congress if he allowed bankers to continue to have their way with the agency, the man from Utah responded, "You can tell your banker friends to go to hell."

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's appointee, Marriner S. Eccles, got the position anyway and went on to help change the way Americans relate to their government.

Eccles was an unlikely New Dealer. Born in 1890 in Logan to a polygamist father who taught his 21 children an ethic of hard work and thrift, Marriner was well on his way to becoming a conventional capitalist while still in knickers. At 8, he went to work in his father's factory and by age 11 had saved $100 to purchase his first shares of stock.

By 22, he was a millionaire. The bank he established, First Security, was hit hard in the Great Depression and only survived several runs thanks to Eccles' financial brilliance. Without higher degrees or a formal education in economics, Eccles was already forming theories that, besides being radically unconventional, proved to be right.

By 1933, he was noticed by FDR's people in Washington, who were casting about for ways to get the nation on its financial feet. First as assistant Treasury secretary, then later as Roosevelt's Fed chairman, Eccles was in a position to give his ideas a spin.

One was deficit spending. Three years before John Maynard Keynes came out with The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Eccles was there first, urging FDR to put the nation into debt. As a businessman he abhorred debt, but he saw that unless the government primed the pump and put money into people's pockets, business alone couldn't take up the slack.

Low interest rates had been the traditional way to goose the economy, but at the Fed lending rate of 3/10ths of 1 percent, business was still comatose. There was nothing for it but to spend and spend big on New Deal programs. The Works Progress Administration, Federal Housing Administration, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the reform of the Federal Reserve System all had Eccles' fingerprints on them. The important thing was to get help to the people.

Later, when the economy was humming, the deficits could be paid down.

Earlier in Utah, he had worked on a relief fund for the needy. Many in line were people he recognized as sharing his rock-ribbed ethic of hard work and thrift. Apparently, ethics didn't put food on the table when the whole system had seized up.

Eccles laid the blame for the Crash of '29 and the resulting Great Depression on the moneyed class.

"Had there been a better distribution of the current income from the national product - in other words, had there been less savings by business and the higher-income groups and more income in the lower groups - we would have had far greater stability in the economy," he wrote later.

"Had the $6 billion, for instance, that was loaned by corporations and wealthy individuals for stock-market speculation been distributed to the public as lower prices or higher wages, with less profits to the corporations and the well-to-do, it would have prevented or greatly moderated the economic collapse that came at the end of 1929."

FDR was assailed by his wealthy peers as a "class traitor" and "socialist." Eccles came in for similar abuse. Nonetheless, their programs helped alleviate the worst of The Depression for millions.

Toward the end of World War II, Eccles represented the U.S. at the Bretton Woods conference, which would reconfigure the global financial system for more than a generation. Only now, more than 60 years later, is there talk of another Bretton Woods to come to grips with the current global crises.

Eccles retired from government in 1951, but he is still with us, even in today's downturn. Every day, when the current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke goes to work, he goes to his office in the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building, where the nation's financial fate is discussed.

---

* PAT BAGLEY is the cartoonist for The Salt Lake Tribune. For more information on Marriner S. Eccles refer to Eccles' own recollections, Beckoning Frontiers, and works by Sydney Hyman and Dean Lowe May.