
Carter Glass
Former United States Secretary of the Treasury
Education
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Overview
Carter Glass was an American newspaper publisher and Democratic politician from Lynchburg, Virginia. He represented Virginia in both houses of Congress and served as the United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Woodrow Wilson. He played a major role in the establishment of the U.S. financial regulatory system, helping to establish the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
After working as a newspaper editor and publisher, Glass won election to the Senate of Virginia in 1899. He was a delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1902, where he was an influential advocate for segregationist policies. Historian J. Douglas Smith described him as “the architect of disenfranchisement in the Old Dominion.”He also promoted progressive fiscal and regulatory reform but these contributions were often superficial since Glass generally opposed the most reformist aspects of federal legislation and was a New Deal critic. Glass won election to the United States House of Representatives in 1902 and became Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency in 1913. Working with President Wilson, he passed the Federal Reserve Act, which established a central banking system for the United States. Glass served as Secretary of the Treasury from 1918 until 1920, when he accepted an appointment to represent Virginia in the United States Senate. Glass was a favorite son candidate for the presidential nomination at the 1920 Democratic National Convention.
Glass served in the Senate from 1920 until his death in 1946, becoming Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee in 1933. He also served as president pro tempore of the Senate from 1941 to 1945. He co-sponsored the 1933 Banking Act, also known as the Glass–Steagall Act, which created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and enforced the separation of investment banking firms and commercial banks. An ardent supporter of states' rights, Glass opposed much of the New Deal and clashed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt over the control of federal appointments in Virginia.
Early career :
When Glass was 19 years old, he moved with his father to Petersburg. However, when young Glass could not find a job as a newspaper reporter in Petersburg, he returned to Lynchburg, and went to work for former Confederate General (and future U.S. Senator) William Mahone's Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio Railroad (AM&O), which was in receivership from 1877 to 1880. Glass was a clerk in the auditor's office at the railroad's headquarters. Several years later, under new owners and with headquarters relocated to Roanoke, the railroad became the Norfolk and Western (N&W). However, by then Glass had found the newspaper job he had initially wanted. His formative years as Virginia struggled to resolve a large pre-War debt (Mahone being a leading figure in the Readjuster Party) and dealing with boom-and-bust economic cycles (some linked with stock speculation), helped mold Glass' conservative fiscal thinking, much as it did many other Virginia political leaders of his era.
At the age of 22, Glass finally became a reporter, a job he had long sought, for the Lynchburg News. He rose to become the morning newspaper's editor by 1887. The following year, the publisher retired and offered Glass an option to purchase the business. Desperate to find financial backing, Glass received the unexpected assistance from a relative who loaned him enough for a $100 down payment on the $13,000 deal. Free to write and publish whatever he wished, Glass wrote bold editorials and encouraged tougher reporting in the morning paper, which increased sales. Soon, Glass was able to acquire the afternoon Daily Advance, then to buy out the competing Daily Republican. Thus he became Lynchburg's sole newspaper publisher; the modern-day Lynchburg News and Advance is the successor publication to his newspapers.
Secretary of the Treasury:
Glass was elected to the United States House of Representatives as a Democrat in 1902, to fill a vacancy. In 1913, he became Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, where he worked with President Woodrow Wilson to pass the Glass-Owen Federal Reserve Act. In 1918, Wilson appointed him Secretary of the Treasury, succeeding William Gibbs McAdoo. His signature as Secretary of the Treasury can be found on series 1914 Federal Reserve Notes, issued while he was in office. At the 1920 Democratic National Convention Glass was nominated for President as a favorite son candidate from Virginia.
Glass served at the Treasury until 1920, when he was appointed to the United States Senate to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Virginia's senior senator, Thomas Staples Martin. Martin had been widely regarded as the head of Virginia's Democratic Party, a role filled during the 1920s by Harry Flood Byrd of Winchester, another Virginia newspaperman who shared many of Glass's political views and who headed the political machine of Conservative Democrats known as the Byrd Organization, which dominated Virginia's politics until the 1960s. In 1933, Byrd became Virginia's junior Senator, joining Glass in the Senate after former Governor and then-senior U.S. Senator Claude A. Swanson was appointed as U.S. Secretary of the Navy by President Franklin Roosevelt. Both Glass and Byrd were opposed to Roosevelt's New Deal policies. Each was a strong supporter of fiscal conservatism and states' rights. Glass and Byrd invoked senatorial courtesy to defeat Roosevelt's nomination of Floyd H. Roberts to a federal judgeship, as part of a broader conflict over control of federal patronage in Virginia.
Glass served in the U.S. Senate for the remainder of his life, turning down the offer of a new appointment as Secretary of the Treasury from President Roosevelt in 1933. When the Democrats regained control of the Senate that year, Glass became Chairman of the Appropriations Committee. He was President pro tempore from 1941 to 1945, being succeeded as such by Kenneth McKellar at the start of the custom of giving that post to the senior senator of the majority party. As a Senator, Glass's most notable achievement was passage of the Glass–Steagall Act, which separated the activities of banks and securities brokers and created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Glass, however, opposed the concept of bank deposit insurance and was “very unhappy” about this reform. A less successful minor legislative initiative from Glass was a 1930 resolution to ban dial telephones from the Senate, a measure that was successfully resisted by younger Senators who favored dial telephony.
Early Life
Carter Glass was born on January 4, 1858, in Lynchburg, Virginia, the last child born to Robert Henry Glass and his first wife, the former Augusta Elizabeth Christian. His mother died on January 15, 1860, when Carter was only two years old, so his sister Nannie, ten years older (and Elizabeth's only daughter), became his surrogate mother. Carter, a slight boy, got his nickname, "Pluck", for his pugnacious willingness to stand up to bullies.
His father, Robert Henry Glass, was Lynchburg's postmaster beginning in 1853, and in 1858 bought the Lynchburg Daily Republican newspaper (where he had worked since 1846). The city's other newspaper was the Lynchburg Daily Virginian, then published by Joseph Button, who on June 23, 1860, (while R. H. Glass was out of town) died in a duel with Glass's editor at the time, George W. Hardwicke, over accusations that Glass used his postal office to disadvantage the rival paper.
When the American Civil War (1861–1865) broke out, Lynchburg was pro-Union but also pro-slavery, since its economy depended on the manufacture of tobacco as well as slave-trading and the new railroads. R. H. Glass volunteered and joined the Virginia forces in 1861, and then joined the Confederate Army, where he became a major on the staff of Brigadier General John B. Floyd, a former Governor of Virginia. Major Glass ultimately remarried and had seven more children, including Meta Glass (president of Sweet Briar College) and Edward Christian Glass (Lynchburg's school superintendent for five decades).
In poverty-stricken Virginia during the post-War period, Glass received only a basic education at a private school run by one-legged former Confederate Henry L. Daviess. However, his father kept an extensive library. He became an apprentice printer to his father (and Hardwicke) when he was 13 years old, and continued his education through reading Plato, Edmund Burke and William Shakespeare, among others who stimulated his lifelong intellectual interest. He thought that Shakespeare's works were not written by William Shakespeare, refusing to accept that their author could have risen from humble origins. In 1876, Major Glass accepted an offer to edit the Petersburg News, and Carter joined him as a journeyman printer. Not long afterward, Major Glass accepted the editorship of the Danville Post, but Carter did not join him, instead returning to Lynchburg.
Career
- United States - Former Secretary of the Treasury