Andrew Ross Sorkin

So that was, by the way, one of the great surprises for me as I was going through the letters and archives of this period, which was I think we all have this impression that this great Bill Glass-Steagall, which broke up the banks, was sort of driven by...

Carter Glass and this idea that the bank should be broken up and this was to make the system safer.

Correct.

You were dividing the casino from the actual bank.

But the truth was that this entire process had been corrupted.

And the only reason I would argue this bill even came about was because the Rockefeller family, which effectively owned a big chunk of Chase, which was a major competitor to Citigroup, wanted to break up Citigroup, but also more importantly, wanted to break up J.P.

Morgan.

and that the Rockefeller family had it out for J.P.

Morgan.

And as a result, they went to Roosevelt, who, by the way, wasn't so excited originally about passing this bill.

This bill had been sitting around for a while, and he was slow walking Carter Glass in so many different ways.

By the way, interestingly, Roosevelt was not really for the FDIC, which was also a piece of this bill, effectively insuring bank deposits.

Roosevelt originally wasn't even for that either.

But there was a whole bunch of sort of efforts afoot to put all of these pieces in place to the point where I found a letter that Carter Glass had written that actually walked through the whole thing where he was basically complaining that the bill wasn't really his and had been effectively taken over by the bankers.

And there's a section of the bill that was physically written by the son-in-law of Rockefeller.

You know, first of all, Andrew Mellon was a capitalist with a capital C in just every way.

You know, if you had great success, God bless you.

If you had great failure, God bless you.

He did not – he wasn't there to pick up the pieces in any way, shape or form.

I would argue, by the way, that the American dream shifted in the 1920s.