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Show President Franklin D. Roosevelt shares a laugh with Marriner Eccles, second from right, and other government leaders after signing a bill into law. Courtesy of Spencer F. Eccles Ironically, perhaps, his election as president of Utah Construction did not dominate Marriner Eccles' thoughts as it did the thoughts of many among the Wattis families. Like his father and Thomas Dee before him, Eccles held the office of president at arm's length. He was preoccupied in the early 1930s by a crisis of faith in the area that dominated his life - finance. "Since the crash of 1929, men I respected assured me that the economic crisis was only temporary," Eccles recounted. "Instead of easing, the economic crisis worsened. The pit grew deeper and I found myself in it.... There were times when I felt the whole Depression was a personal affront." Repeatedly he agonized, "Wherein had I been at fault?" Eccles had modeled his career on his father's. "Throughout those years, I managed and multiplied the estate he left to my family without hesitation or doubt.... But I became disenchanted of this simple faith, and my search for a body of ideas and practices more suited to an economy that had outgrown the frontier set the stage for my entry on the Washington scene in 1933." Eccles discarded conventional theories of a national balanced budget. "The fact is that we were not profligate in the twenties," he wrote in his autobiography. "We did not as a nation consume more than we produced. Far from it. We were excessively thrifty." He emphasized, "the only way we could get out of the Depression was through government action in placing purchasing power in the hands of people who were in need of it." He developed a five-point plan known as compensatory fiscal policy. Since he was as unknown in Washington, D. C, as he was known in Utah, friends arranged for him to testify before the Senate Committee on Finance. His testimony created a stir and caught the attention of the newly-elected president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. For one thing, Eccles suggested a way out of the Depression rather than simply describing the economic devastation. Suddenly the ideas of this "radical," millionaire banker from Utah were very much in demand. |