Adescendant of Roger Williams, Nelson Aldrich was born in Foster, on November 6, 1841, and educated in the common schools of the area. His marriage to Abby Chapman in 1865 brought him a measure of wealth and gave him entry to society, but he was essentially a self-made man.
After service in the Civil War, he rose to partnership in a wholesale grocery business. He invested shrewdly and ultimately became one of Rhode Island's foremost financiers.
A resourceful leader, Aldrich was a man of extraordinary charm, lucidity, and willpower. He served two terms in the Rhode Island Legislature and one in Congress before being elected to the U. S. Senate in 1881. There for 30 years he represented the corporate and financial world's point of view with wit, irony, and intelligence. He shared power with a half dozen other conservatives through the McKinley and first Roosevelt administrations but stood virtually alone as the spokesman of the Old Guard thereafter. More than any other senator, he was able to thwart, retard, or modify Roosevelt's progressive recommendations between 1905 and 1909.
Aldrich's conservatism reflected the arrogance of the self-made man and an almost unqualified belief that what was good for big business was good for the nation. He supported the gold standard and the protective tariff and generally opposed the regulation of business. He was also unsympathetic to social-justice measures and democratic procedural reforms. Yet he was realistic enough to accept the inevitability of change, and he endeavored to shape change along lines congenial to his own views.
In 1906 Aldrich succeeded in having the Hepburn rate bill amended to the railroads' partial satisfaction. The next year he sponsored the Aldrich-Vreeland emergency banking bill. As head of the National Monetary Commission created by that measure, he declared, "I am going to have a central bank in this country. " In 1911 his proposals, the so-called Aldrich Plan, were unveiled with strong banking and civic support. Many of these recommendations were incorporated in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Significantly, however, Aldrich opposed two of the act's key provisions: public control of the central board and the issuance of government notes.
Following the Panic of 1907, Aldrich took control as chairman of the Congressionally established National Monetary Commission. A proponent of Progressive Era themes of Efficiency and scientific expertise, he led a team of experts to study the European national banks. After his trip, he came to believe that Britain, Germany and France had much superior central banking systems. He worked with several key bankers and economists, including Paul Warburg, Abram Andrew and Henry Davison, to design a plan for an American central bank in 1911. In 1913 Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Federal Reserve Act patterned after Aldrich's vision, creating the modern Federal Reserve System.
For all his indomitable qualities, Aldrich was a gracious, pleasure-loving man. A connoisseur and collector of paintings, he maintained a luxurious estate and consorted almost exclusively with the social and economic elite.
On October 9, 1866, he married Abigail Pearce Truman "Abby" Chapman, a wealthy woman with impressive antecedents. They had a total of eleven children.
