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June 2002
Remembering When ...
Dallas' victory in becoming one of the 12 regional Reserve bank cities
was the banner headline of the Dallas Morning News on April 3,
1914, eclipsing a story on a major victory by Pancho Villa in the Mexican
Revolution.
While a national committee had been formed to determine the location of
the regional banks, that didn't quell the fierce competition among major
cities that wanted to be a Reserve bank site. Dallas' main competitors
for the Southwestern Reserve Bank were Houston, New Orleans and Fort Worth.
In Dallas, as in most cities, the Chamber of Commerce led the effort to
attract a Reserve bank. To preserve secrecy, key players were given code
names in telegrams between Dallas and Washington: President Wilson was
Allah; Treasury Secretary McAdoo was Croesus; and Postmaster General Burleson—a
Texan, but more importantly, a member of the site selection committee—was
Mercury.
Someone tipped off Dallas that Mercury, on his way from Washington to
Texas, would be changing trains in St. Louis. So, Tom Finty, the political
editor of the Dallas Morning News, and a companion just happened
to run into him in the St. Louis train station. They invited the postmaster
to talk about why Dallas should be a Fed city. He promised them only 10
minutes, but the meeting ended several hours later, at 2 a.m. No one will
ever know if those tenacious campaigners influenced the decision, as site
selection was based strictly on merit.
For more on the selection of Reserve bank sites,
see “Locating Federal
Reserve Districts and Headquarters Cities” in the September
2001 Region.
—Rosie Cataldo
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Annual Report
