“America’s Bank,” Roger Lowenstein’s new book about the “epic struggle to create the Federal Reserve,” is garnering wonderful blurbs. Ben Bernanke calls it a “highly engaging historical account.” David Nasaw, a biographer of Carnegie, calls it a “small miracle.” Alan Blinder, 15th vice chairman of the Fed, says it has “lessons even for today.” The Great Volcker says it “resonates today as we debate the conduct of monetary policy.” Historian Jon Meacham says it has “lessons for our own time.”

Blamed, though, if the blurbs aren’t missing the skeptics of our central bank. Nothing from, say, Richard Shelby, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, or Jeb Hensarling, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. Not a jot from Kevin Brady, proposer of the Centennial Monetary Commission that would launch a review of the Fed as it begins its second century. Nothing from the monetary sages Steve Forbes or Judy Shelton. Not even a peep from the ex-congressman from Texas, Ron Paul.

It’s easy to see why. Mr. Lowenstein, a veteran journalist, may offer a timely tale, with a reprise of Hamilton, Jefferson, Jackson, and other giants who tilted over the idea of a national bank and the nature of money. Yet he shrinks from idea that the radical critics of the Fed might be right. Sad, given that monetary reform is fermenting in the Congress; China, Russia, Europe, and even the United Nations are fretting about the need for new reserve currency; and the Fed itself can’t figure out how to extricate itself — and our economy — from a failed zero-interest-rate policy.

Mr. Lowenstein misses some of the deep strands of the story. He covers, say, William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech. He notes that when it was delivered at the 1896 Democratic convention, the nominee-to-be was met with a “tremendous roar.” Mr. Lowenstein neglects to mention that some of the Democrats were shouting “Down with the hook-nosed Shylocks of Wall Street! Down with the Christ-killing gold bugs.” He fails to mark the way anti-Semitism was used to try to defeat McKinley and the gold standard (though he does mark the bigotry of establishment bankers, some of it directed at Paul Warburg and, eventually, the Fed itself).

The author whitewashes Bryan again when President Wilson throws in with the Nebraskan and agrees that Federal Reserve notes would be “obligations of the United States.” Mr. Lowenstein recognizes this meant, as he put it, “the long march of the twentieth century would be toward government dollars” that are “unfettered by any link to either bank assets or to specie.” He called Wilson’s compromise “a step” toward “fiat currency” and notes that the bill was opposed by the conservative newspapers, including the Sun whose flag we fly today.

“An organ of Wall Street” is how Mr. Lowenstein characterizes the Sun. He quotes the Sun as saying that the bill was “covered all over with the slime of Bryanism.”* If so, Mr. Lowenstein writes, then the Reichsbank and the Bank of France “were covered with the same slime.” He calls that “a point the Sun overlooked.” He prefers what he calls the “more dispassionate” Times, which judged the bill had much to recommend it, though it was, as Mr. Lowenstein paraphrases the Gray Lady’s point, “the work of bank-hating populists.”

The fact is that the worst fears of the contemporary critics of the Federal Reserve Act came to pass. The value of the dollar has plunged more than 98%, to less than an 1,100th of an ounce of gold from the 20.67th of an ounce it was valued at when the Fed was created. Americans have watched in horror as the Fed has ballooned its balance sheet by trillions while failing to curtail the Great Recession. It is now trapped in a zero interest rate policy that has locked the economy into neutral, with millions unemployed or withdrawn altogether from the labor market.

James Grant, editor of the Interest Rate Observer, covers much of this and more in his review, in this morning’s number of the Wall Street Journal, of Mr. Lowenstein’s paean to the Fed. He calls the book “victor’s history.” Yet few victories are ever permanent, even ones born of such an epic struggle as the creation of the Federal Reserve certainly was. The reminder of the size of that struggle, the effort it took, and the toll it claimed on those who took it, this is an element of Mr. Lowenstein’s story.

Let it be an encouragement to those who are wearying in what no doubt will be an epic struggle for reform. Mighty are those who cling to the status quo; the Times, notes Ira Stoll in a comment on his FutureOfCapitalism.com, engaged none other than Robert Rubin, ex-of-Citigroup, to write a review flattering the very Fed that helped bail out Citigroup. Mr. Lowenstein, not to mention the founders of the Fed, deserved better than that, though the review by Mr. Rubin will make another wonderful blurb.

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* Mr. Lowenstein cites for the Sun’s use of this much-quoted phrase the second volume of Arthur Link’s biography of Wilson; we confess, however, that an investigator, retained three years ago by the Sun and using all the latest equipment, was unable to confirm the use of the phrase in the Sun itself, either on the date cited by Professor Link or adjacent dates. We are not suggesting that either Messrs. Lowenstein or Link is wrong, just that we were unable to confirm the point; it’s an apt phrase, whether or not it was actually used in the Sun.