Spotlight -- Featured Item -- Crowded Years

Crowded Years: The Reminiscences of William G. McAdoo, by William Gibbs McAdoo. Published by Houghton Mifflin : Riverside Press Cambridge, Boston, MA, 1931. Hard Cover, Fair with No jacket. Signed by the author. Green boards with mild shelf wear, rubbing to extremities, light soiling, faded gilt titles. Text clean, binding soft, front hinge slightly loose. Signed by the author on the front free end page. 553 pages, with index. Sewn binding, cloth over boards, 24 cm, 39 oz. #27648

 

William Gibbs McAdoo was appointed Secretary of the Treasury in 1913 by President Woodrow Wilson after working on Mr. Wilson's presidential campaign. He married Wilson's daughter, Eleanor Randolph Wilson, in 1914. His tenure as head of the Department of the Treasury is marked by his involvement in transforming the Federal Reserve System into an operational central bank, and by the actions he took in 1914 to halt the drain of gold out of the United States by foreign investors seeking to liquidate their U.S. assets at the outbreak of World War I. McAdoo closed the New York Stock Exchange for four months to prevent Europeans from selling their securities, and converting their proceeds to gold for transport to Europe, a then standard monetary practice. He is credited by some historians for forestalling an economic depression, and for shifting the global balance of economic power from Europe to the United States.

During his time in the Wilson Cabinet, McAdoo also served as Director General of Railroads for the newly formed United States Railroad Administration, a post he held until the end of World War I.

Secretary of the Treasury

Eleanor Wilson McAdoo

Wilson and granddaughter

The McAdoo Policy

Before his entry into Washington politics, Mr. McAdoo owned a small streetcar company in Knoxville, Tennessee, the Knoxville Street Railroad, and succeeded in electrifying the company's railroad system. The company went bankrupt in 1892, and he moved to New York and subsequently started an investment securities business. In 1895, McAdoo returned to Knoxville and attempted to reclaim his interest in the streetcar company. An interesting and entertaining depiction of the "Battle of Depot Street" can be found here. This incident effectively ended his foray into the streetcar business, and sent him back to his work in New York.

Mr. McAdoo's "Reminiscences" primarily focuses on his years in the Wilson cabinet, in an effort to clarify "a vast amount of misinformation and misinterpretation of events" of that era. He recruited his friend, W. E. Woodward, a skilled historical biographer, to help him organize and select the pertinent ideas, documents, and events to include in the book. McAdoo wanted his memoirs to be contained in one volume, and to be accessible to the average reader, and not a "voluminous, documented, and dry story". There are no footnotes, which the author deemed "useless appendage(s)", which "retard the flow of the narrative". (Quotes are from the Preface of the book.)

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