Keynes made early calculations for what Germany should pay in reparations in October, 1918. In “Notes on an Indemnity,” he presented two sets of figures – one “without crushing Germany” and one “with crushing Germany”. He objected to crushing Germany because seeking to extract too much from the enemy would “defeat its object by leading to a condition in which the allies would have to give [Germany] a loan to save her from starvation and general anarchy.” As he put in a revised version of the same memorandum, “If Germany is to be ‘milked’, she must not first of all be ruined.”

Keynes also worried that too large a reparations bill might distort international trade. “An indemnity so high that it can only be paid by means of a great expansion of Germany’s export trade must necessarily interfere with the export trade of other countries.”

The point of mentioning it is that Keynes developed these concerns prior to going to the negotiations and meeting Carl Melchior.

Which is not to say that Melchior did not make a great impression on Keynes; as Keynes wrote in 1920,

A sad lot they were in those early days, with drawn, dejected faces and tired staring eyes, like men who had been hammered on the Stock Exchange. But from amongst them there stepped forward into the middle place a very small man, exquisitely clean, very well and neatly dressed, with a high stiff collar which seemed cleaner and whiter than an ordinary collar, his round head covered with grizzled hair shaved so close as to be like in substance to the pile of a close-made carpet, the line where his hair ended bounding his face and forehead in a very sharply defined and rather noble curve, his eyes gleaming straight at us, with extraordinary sorrow in them, yet like an honest animal at bay.

Keynes was so impressed by Melchior’s account of German suffering – both his implicit and explicit account – that he would illicitly confer with Melchior to try to strike a deal whereby the Germans would receive food relief in exchange for giving up merchant ships.

In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes criticized the treaty not only for what was in it – the reparations demands – but what was not – “The Treaty includes no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe, – nothing to make the defeated Central Empires into good neighbors, nothing to stabilize the new States of Europe, nothing to reclaim Russia; nor does it promote in any way a compact of solidarity among the Allies themselves; no arrangement was reached at Paris for restoring the disordered finances of France and Italy, or to adjust the systems of the Old World and the New.” He warned that without such provisions, ” “depression of the standard of life of the European populations” would lead to a political crisis, such that some desperate people might “submerge civilization itself in their attempts to satisfy desperately the overwhelming needs of the individual.”

At the conference, Keynes himself had made such a proposal, suggesting refinancing the international debts to provide funds for reconstruction and development. Here it is worth noting that Keynes developed the plan after hearing Jan Smuts’s account of “the pitiful plight of Central Europe.”

So it seems that Melchior did matter to Keynes, and inspired him to propose relief for Germany. But as for his critique of the peace, what really mattered to Keynes was British self-interest, which inspired him to warn against reparations before he even went to France, and sympathy for the people of Central Europe, which inspired his “grand scheme for the rehabilitation of Europe” – which of course was only one of many “grand schemes” that showed Keynes’s interest in the long-run welfare of humanity.

I’ll set that issue aside for now and just address the substantial areas of dispute here; that is, the gold standard and Pearl Harbor.

The Gold Standard

Of the gold standard, Steil and Walker write,

Rauchway takes specific issue with Benn’s claim that under the classical gold standard “when gold flowed in [the authorities] loosened credit, and when it flowed out they tightened credit,” arguing that this is “at odds with historical evidence.”

Oh?

And then they insert a graphic showing “that long interest rates did indeed tend to rise when gold was flowing out of the United States and fall when gold was flowing in”, adding, “Economics lesson finished.”

I would extend the economics lesson, or anyway the economic history lesson, further. The US was not the only gold standard country. And under the gold standard, violations of the so-called “rules of the game” were commonplace. See for example, Michael Bordo’s summary here:

Most other countries on the gold standard—notably France and Belgium—did not follow the rules of the game. They never allowed interest rates to rise enough to decrease the domestic price level. Also, many countries frequently broke the rules by “sterilization”—shielding the domestic money supply from external disequilibrium by buying or selling domestic securities. If, for example, France’s central bank wished to prevent an inflow of gold from increasing the nation’s money supply, it would sell securities for gold, thus reducing the amount of gold circulating.

This is practically the first thing one learns when studying the gold standard. Keynes noticed in 1913 “how rare a thing in Europe a perfect and automatic gold standard is.” Subsequent research has verified his observation.

Pearl Harbor

Steil and Walker take issue with my discussion of White’s role with respect to Pearl Harbor.

The Battle of Bretton Woods, according to Rauchway, claims that “[Harry Dexter] White caused the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

Uh, no.

Here is what Steil says on page 55 of The Battle of Bretton Woods.

That White was the author of the key ultimatum demands is beyond dispute. That the Japanese government made the decision to move forward with the Pearl Harbor strike after receiving the ultimatum is also beyond dispute.

As I pointed out in both the TLS review and on CT, both of these statements are very much not beyond dispute, which is to say, both propositions are disputed by expert historians.

Do they add up to saying that White caused the attack on Pearl Harbor? It certainly sounds like it to me.

Finally Steil and Walker conclude by noting that I cite Haynes and Klehr’s work to dispute Steil’s use of the Schecters’ scholarship, and then say

Oh boy . . .

After reading Rauchway’s TLS review, Haynes and Klehr wrote the following to the journal’s editors, which was published on April 26:

We are flattered that Eric Rauchway mentioned our article in Intelligence and National Security (October 2011) in his review of Benn Steil’s The Battle of Bretton Woods. In that article we noted the use of what evidence indicated were faked documents in Gerald and Leona Schecter’s Sacred Secrets. (We assume the faked documents were foisted on the Schecters by unscrupulous Russian sources.) We are also flattered that Steil relies heavily on our work on White’s espionage. But, our account does not, as Rauchway suggests, undermine Steil’s story of White’s treachery or imply that he was bamboozled by fake documents. In fact, Steil cites the Schecters only once in his whole book.

Ouch.

I’ll wait to see whether this week’s TLS letter column has anything to say on this point.

But inasmuch as I had only a hunch that irritatingly subjective language was increasingly used, I knew I was being terribly inconsistent, which troubled me. So at last I went to the data.

I searched JSTOR for instances of “persuasive” and “convincing” and their opposites by year in reviews published in the American Historical Review between 1958 and 2007. To weight the occurrences, I also searched AHR reviews by year for instances of the word “that,” reckoning this was a pretty neutral word to look for. I divided the former by the latter to get a sense of the frequency of subjective language in AHR book reviews. Below is the result, which I hope is more persuasive than my hunch.

The language of “persuasive” is on the increase. Unless I’ve made an Excel error.

¹I also have a terrible prescriptivist annoyance over “persuaded … that” and “convinced … of” but we won’t get into it.

Last week I had x ounces of #Gold. Today I have x ounces. So value is unchanged. Constant at x ounces. Dollar is volatile though. #ThinkOz

I know it’s a failing in me, but it is hard not to ponder whether this is charlatanism or delusion. As John Maynard Keynes says in the first sentence of his Tract on Monetary Reform, “Money is only important for what it will procure.” With the stubborn volatility of the dollar, Rickards’s ounces procure rather less than they recently did.

The exhortation #ThinkOz is of course wonderful. I think now of hashtags past…

Last week I had x bulbs of #Tulips. Today I have x bulbs. So value is unchanged. Constant at x bulbs. Florin is volatile though. #ThinkBulbs

Money is a medium of exchange and a store of value, they say.

Data from table 1, Michael Bordo, “The Gold Standard, Bretton Woods and other Monetary Regimes: An Historical Appraisal,” NBER working paper no. 4310.

For a quick primer on where I stand on Bretton Woods, here’s an excerpt from the TLS:

…the Great Depression showed that the gold standard came at a price – it bound governments to worsen the economic slump, forcing prices to fall further by seeking to preserve convertibility to gold. As countries left gold – Britain went off in 1931, the United States in 1933 – they began to recover from the crisis. The Bretton Woods system acknowledged this lesson by permitting nations to adjust the peg that fixed their currencies to each other in case of need.

To prevent such adjustments from coming too often, members chipped in to the International Monetary Fund, on which they could draw to cover short-term international imbalances.

And to enable more nations to join the system, signatories also contributed to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (generally known as the World Bank) which would guarantee and make loans to rebuild war-torn countries and develop poor ones.

Thus the exchange rate regime would establish a prosperous status quo of trade at levels that would ensure full employment and high real incomes; the Fund would help maintain this status quo; the Bank would ensure over time that more nations could join the ranks of the prosperous and participate in this status quo.

The Bretton Woods system operated for twenty-five years, until in 1971 the United States, under President Richard Nixon, abandoned it. The Bretton Woods era saw low, stable inflation rates and high, stable economic growth. Indeed, the economic historian Michael Bordo’s comparative examination of monetary systems (including the old gold standard and the modern regime of floating currencies) shows that Bretton Woods performed “by far the best on virtually all criteria”. Capitalism has never looked more attractive than during this short happy period.

Which puts a sharper point on one of the most peculiar, if not poignant paradoxes of Bretton Woods: its major US architect was a Soviet spy.

So, to be clear, I wouldn’t argue that Bretton Woods was without flaws. But Steil says that Bretton Woods was “an economic apocalypse in the making”. (If you missed the apocalypse, it isn’t here yet. You have to wait.) And like Steil – and nearly everybody else – I think Harry Dexter White passed information to the Soviets. (To be precise, I think there is good evidence he passed information to the GRU in the middle 1930s and then to the NKVD (the later KGB) in the middle 1940s. I lay out some this story in the TLS essay.) Steil thinks White was not only a Soviet spy, but that he caused US intervention in World War II to benefit the USSR.

The story that Steil gives is dubious on its face. An NKVD officer, in his memoirs fifty years onward, remembered having lunch with White in May 1941 and asking him, “Did the United States recognize the Japanese threat, and was it determined to do something to counter Japanese aggression?”

Now, there are problems with the story already. Leave aside the source being a much-after-the-fact memoir. Note that the date is May 1941 – this is the month after the Soviets signed a neutrality pact with Japan, and a month before the Germans violated their neutrality pact with the Soviets. There is therefore no obvious reason why the Soviets should at this point want the US to go to war with Japan, let alone be anxious for it, as they are in Steil’s account. To be sure, one might concoct an explanation as to why this might be so, but Steil doesn’t, and should.

White did, in mid-1941, write a memorandum about US relations with Japan. At this time he was an assistant to the Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Morgenthau was certainly close to Roosevelt, but he was (to repeat) the Secretary of the Treasury, not of State. Which is to say he was not at the center of US-Japan negotiations at this time. (Harvey Klehr notes this here.)

Steil’s argument is that the concessions which White’s memo asked of Japan “were unrealistic; the Japanese would never accept them. This, at least, was what Soviet intelligence was counting on.” Thus, if the White memo were presented to Japan it would ensure a war – that’s what the Soviets meant to happen. White thought the opposite, saying he aimed at “the successful transformation of a threatening and belligerent powerful enemy into a peaceful and prosperous neighbor.” So if he was acting as a Soviet agent because the Soviets wanted the US at war with Japan, he was not acting very effectively.

White presented his memo to Morgenthau; Morgenthau sent it to State; some of its language did find its way into a communiqué. As the historians William Langer and Everett Gleason write, it would “lose its identity and become merged in the final draft of a State Department document” – a memorandum from Hull to the Japanese presenting ten points, delivered on November 26.

Steil says that “That White was the author of the key ultimatum demands [i.e., those of November 26] is beyond dispute.” Clearly this statement is untrue; historians do not generally believe that White was the author of this document.

Moreover, it is not “beyond dispute” either that this document was “the key” document, or even an “ultimatum” in the run-up to Pearl Harbor. As Roberta Wohlstetter writes,

… the documents of these critical days in November make clear that history has many candidates for the “initial incident” in the last moments of tension before war, and what finally sparks the explosion is largely a matter of accident. When Secretary Hull presented his Ten Point Note, the Pearl Harbor task force had been under way for 24 hours.

So, contrary to Steil, I do not know of any reading of the scholarship, however charitable, that can justify Steil’s use of the phrase “beyond dispute”.

Then there is the question of sourcing. For his Pearl Harbor section, Steil relies on the decades-later reminiscence of an NKVD officer, as noted, and on the 2002 book by Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Sacred Secrets. There’s a problem with that, though. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr describe the Schecters’ work as showing how

faulty memories, Soviet intelligence agency disinformation campaigns, sloppy citations, misplaced trust in documents provided by unidentified sources under unexplained circumstances, egregious lapses in logic and judgment can lead to conclusions unsupported by evidence.

The Schecters deposited the documents on which they depended in the Hoover library, to be available after ten years. Haynes and Klehr looked at them when they became available, and published their findings in 2011.

We did … find four purported KGB documents that internal evidence clearly indicates are inauthentic. All four documents purported to report on the espionage activities of Harry Dexter White, a senior US Treasury official who cooperated with Soviet intelligence in the 1930s and 1940s.… Sacred Secrets uses three of these fake documents in sections of the book dealing with Harry White. We do not suggest that the Schecters are responsible for creating these inauthentic documents or were aware of their inauthenticity and presume their unidentified suppliers of purported KGB material are the responsible parties. The Schecters, however, should have checked.…

Steil should have checked his sources, too. Haynes and Klehr say in that passage, it’s worth noting, that they’re sure that White spied for the Soviets. Yet they do not find the Schecters reliable.

The tale that White played an instrumental role in causing the Pearl Harbor attacks is so far from “beyond dispute” that cursory attention to scholarship would have tempered any such declaration.

Furthermore, what does it have to do with Bretton Woods? Steil gives it an extended section at the conclusion of his chapter introducing Harry Dexter White. But it is hard to understand why. These stories about White originate with scholars who thought US involvement in World War II was a terrible idea.

The war against Japan upset the whole structure of the international balance of power in Asia. The United States destroyed the one power that was able to check the flow of that Red tide in the Far East.… With the fall of Japan the last barrier to Russian domination of the Far East was removed.… The present Soviet military might, which threatens our national security, is the direct product of billions of lend-lease aid, coddling of Communists in high places in the American Government and failure to understand the basic drives of world Communism.

I do not think that Steil believes the war against the Axis was a bad idea. But I do not know what he does believe that makes the implausible Pearl Harbor story an important part of his book about Bretton Woods.

Then there is the whole thing about gold. But I’ve gone on too long already; maybe more on that another time.

So, I got these two packages from Sweden today. Obviously, this is part two of this episode. Which Jon Ronson wrote about here.

I’m not going to try to analyze the books I received yet, except to note that yes, that’s clearly the Giant Rat of Sumatra speaking the slogan from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “BORN” as a reference to the original Being or Nothingness and, uh, probably some other stuff. One of the books says “Facsimile” and the other doesn’t. I already confirmed with Jon Ronson that he got one too.

I won’t attempt any further analysis for now. But if anyone else got one (or two) please write in to say…

There’s widespread disagreement over when the US went off gold – was it with the end of domestic convertibility, which happened on March 6, though it wasn’t made clearly permanent until later? was it with the end of exports, on April 19? Scott Sumner just claimed the US didn’t permanently leave the gold standard at all in 1933, “just temporarily suspended it,” which is an answer Friedman and Schwartz sort of give, though they fudge it – “the gold standard to which the US returned was very different, both domestically and international, from the one it had left”. I myself like the answer given in one article, that the US went off gold “about crocus-daffodil time, 1933.”

Actually, I think the word “disagreement” isn’t quite right – it’s more lack of agreement; I’ve never seen anyone bother to pick apart who prefers which date and why. Obviously it depends on what you mean by “the gold standard,” and what it means to be on or off.

As the Bloomberg post indicates, I’ve been looking into Roosevelt’s intentions and expressed policies, and I’ve become persuaded that he knew pretty clearly what he was doing.

Two weeks before Roosevelt’s inauguration, Keynes wrote,

can it be possible today to forecast a respectable future for [gold], when in the meantime it has betrayed all the hopes of its friends? Yet it does not follow that the monetary system of the future will find no place for gold. A barbarous relic, to which a vast body of tradition and prestige attaches, may have a symbolic or conventional value if it can be fitted into the framework of a managed system of the new pattern. Such transformations are a regular feature of those constitutional changes which are effected without a revolution.

I predict, therefore, that central banks will continue in the future, as in the past, to keep gold reserves for the protection of their exchanges and as an emergency means of settling an adverse international balance.

That’s, in outline, the policy Roosevelt pursued – probably without having read Keynes, but who knows? – beginning with his inauguration. He wanted a managed currency, so he could influence commodity prices, but he also wanted enough gold in US vaults so he could fend off speculative attacks on his managed currency. That’s why he ended convertibility, but didn’t quite announce it. If he said convertibility was done for good and all, it would have been much harder to get hoarders to return their gold to the vaults.

It’s also, of course, the basis for the dollar that became the anchor of the Bretton Woods system, in which, Keynes would later say, reprising his language of 1933, gold had become a “’constitutional monarch’, so to speak, which would be subject to the constitution of the people and not able to exercise a tyrannical power over the nations of the world.”

FDR’s intentions matter because if he meant to do what he did, if he was carefully managing expectations, then the history of his monetary policy becomes a useful text applicable to modern affairs.

Meanwhile, in modern affairs, it’s not a good season to be a gold enthusiast. As usual, the answer to a headline that ends in a question mark is “no.”

When Roosevelt ran for reëlection in 1936, the unemployment rate was 16.9 per cent, almost twice what it had been in 1930. Yet he won five hundred and twenty-three electoral votes, and his opponent Alf Landon, eight. When Roosevelt ran for the unprecedented third term, unemployment was 14.6 per cent. He carried thirty-eight states; Wendell Willkie carried ten.

When Menand says unemployment was 16.9 and 14.6 percent when FDR ran for reëlection, he is counting federal relief workers as unemployed. According to the economist who constructed the series Menand is using, people working for the WPA were morally the same as concentration camp workers in Germany in the 1930s. If Menand realized that, the puzzle would go away: FDR and his New Deal were popular because they gave people jobs and sparked a rapid recovery.

For more, please see here.

The room was built during the war, when the AHA worked with the Office of War Information to construct it. During the heyday of the profession at the middle twentieth century it was manned day and night. An array of antennae on the roof – of another building, for security reasons – connects here. If these mechanical feelers pick up a signal, a lamp on the console begins to blink. In the old days a trained technician would look at the dials above it and determine just what assault was being made on the history of that year, and how intelligent people ought to respond. That was how C. Vann Woodward came to write The Strange Career of Jim Crow, of course, to meet head-on the distortions of history propounded by opponents of desegregation. The room saw most of its use during the war and the Cold War, when National Defense was deemed to require it.

It’s no longer classified, but no longer funded or used either. Occasionally one of the few who still have a key pops in to run a desultory sleeve across the surfaces, and to flip the test switch, which runs through each of the lamps in sequence. Some of them burn out quite frequently – the ones for 1941 and 1861 forever need replacing – and fortunately there’s a generous stock of surplus bulbs, each wrapped in paper and packed in excelsior sometime back during the war mobilization.

I mention it to you now because the light for 1963 has been blinking incessantly for some weeks. This kind of thing happens on an arbitrary anniversary of some momentous occasion – the effusion of ill-informed commentary sets the poor thing off. Normally the dials allow you to pinpoint the occasion and the source of the insult – but this time it’s the whole year that’s awash in ignorance, from all quarters. You see, 1963 brought us the onset of the sixties, proper – so people say, anyway – and we are going to have frowny-faced foot-stamping and po-faced remarks aplenty this year. The March on Washington is going to set off the machinery; so is the John Kennedy assassination. There will be a set of offensively contrarian, but ignorant, “Kennedy is overrated” pieces that will bury the needles.

Just at the moment, the 1963 light is flashing double-time because Kathleen Parker can’t understand the fuss over Betty Friedan’s focus on “the toils of sad, wealthy women.” Here’s the clever part:

Thus, the feminist movement left the station without me — except to the extent, as readers sometimes remind me, that I benefited from the protests of my foremothers. Indeed, I am grateful for the suffragists who thought my vote should be equal to any man’s. And I am thankful that the workplace I entered recognized my value. But the world in which I grew up never suggested otherwise.

Parker moves from noting that “the feminist movement” left her behind, to acknowledging “readers” who remind her that she benefited from it, to thanking “the suffragists” (not those wacky 1960s feminists, no) and noting her gratitude that her workplace recognized her. Then she begins the concluding sentence, saying she did not grow up in a “world” that needed feminism, with a “But.” Parker attributes the woman-friendly parameters of her world to her enlightened widower dad, who cooked and cleaned and brought her up to think women could do whatever they pleased and their abilities warranted (well, except for the “combat exception”). It is to sigh. Parker père, of course, explains the house in which she grew up. But he doesn’t explain the world in which she grew up; for that, she needs to acknowledge feminism and Friedan.

It’s going to be a long year, isn’t it?

The movie itself would be confusing if you don’t recall that Hyde Park in London, although technically crown property, is now overrun by the public and indeed home to radical speech and protest, and if you don’t concede that this description also applies pretty well to Hyde Park in New York, formerly a crown colony, and home to Franklin Roosevelt, then – in 1939 – seen as a radical tribune of the American people.

The two kindred parks yield two kindred stories.

In one, FDR’s distant cousin Daisy has an affair with him, believes she is unique, then discovers he has other lovers. One of them, FDR’s secretary Missy LeHand, tells Daisy that she will learn to share. And she does; in the end, happily.

In the other story, George VI (“Bertie”) and his queen, Elizabeth, come to the American Hyde Park to visit the President and court his support for Britain’s defense. It is the first visit by a British monarch to the United States, and a dark hour for Britain. But Bertie hits it off with FDR, feeling he has found a father figure in him, and declaring (in one of several bits of invention) that the two nations have forged a “special relationship.”

In case we miss the point, Daisy also says she has a “special relationship” with Franklin Roosevelt. Bertie’s special relationship with FDR is no more unique than Daisy’s. The movie ends on a high note, but we know that one day, soon, the British will learn they must share his promiscuous affections; by Bretton Woods and Yalta, FDR was courting Josef Stalin.

Perhaps, like Daisy’s bond with FDR, Britain’s tie to the US is not less special because America is so profligate with its affections.

Historians are supposed to quarrel with the film’s depiction of Roosevelt. I don’t think it’s necessary; the Roosevelt in the movie isn’t the human, historical FDR - he’s America personified – smiling, inscrutable, shameless, exploitive, powerful, popular. Bill Murray doesn’t do an impersonation – though he gets the smile right.

But there are essential things about Roosevelt the film does show, more economically and elegantly than I imagined a work of fiction could.

He got along because he made people feel good about themselves – after their meeting, Bertie bounds up the stairs, two or three at a time.

And he let people think he had not made up his mind, when in fact he had – he talks ambivalently about an alliance with Britain, but by the end of the movie we realize he has meant to make it happen, and has worked hard to make it happen.

And people did look to him, craving his attention, trusting him, even though his interior life was finally inaccessible.

The meeting between FDR and Bertie is a really terrific scene, as are all the scenes between Bertie and Elizabeth – but especially the one when they discuss the web of FDR’s promiscuity, and conclude with relief they did not bring Lilibet. There are some gorgeous scenes of the parklike Hudson scenery, humid, rolling in thistle capped by pale blue skies stacked with billowing clouds. It is a beautiful film to look at, and to think with.

Which suggested the possibly wrong or maybe trivially true observation that the echt World War II movie is a pop culture treatise on existentialist philosophy, and not about the war at all. Or rather, it is about the war as an existentialist experience and not as a world-historical event.As I say, I suppose in one way this is trivially true. The ordinary soldier, sailor, marine, airman (almost invariably, therefore, a man) experienced modern war as a vast impersonal and murderous chaos that threatened imminently and meaninglessly to destroy him, a state of affairs in which the only hope for human dignity was to assert, however absurdly, one’s individuality.

To make this point, The Great Escape concludes with the legend, “This picture is dedicated to the fifty,” i.e., the fifty airmen (mostly RAF) murdered by the Gestapo upon their recapture after escaping Stalag Luft III, and why it does not go on to mention that after the war the RAF was permitted to investigate the murders and execute some of the perpetrators: to invoke the trial would be to assert the existence of a balancing impersonal justice, a notion that would cut very much against the existentialist grain of the film.

To some extent this is the basic point of much modern war fiction, but it is especially and particularly true of the World War II movie. The Great War evokes nihilism, not existentialism. (An assignment: Compare the heroes of A Farewell to Arms and of For Whom the Bell Tolls; explain why Hemingway never successfully made the transition from pues nada to existentialism.) And it is why The English Patient is not really a World War II movie – it asserts that the problems of two people really do amount to a hill of beans, even in this crazy world.

Despite The Red Badge of Courage or the work of Ambrose Bierce, the US Civil War has acquired a narrative of overriding purpose: emancipation. (Which is why The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is really a World War II movie, and not a Civil War movie; consider who made it and where, not what characters are in it and when it is set.)

In a World War II movie the narrative of overriding purpose could as well be the emancipation of humanity. The US/UK alliance proceeds under the Atlantic Charter and the war in Europe entails the liberation of the concentration camps. But these acts constitute less, or perhaps just other, than victory; they are face-to-face confrontations with the impersonal murderous chaos that the war has always implied: consider the actions of Mark Hamill’s soldier during the liberation of Buchenwald in The Big Red One, firing mechanically and repeatedly into the corpse of a Nazi soldier who has hidden in a crematory with the intent of ambushing him. Hamill’s character is a sharpshooter and a coward, who has been forced to overcome his cowardice on the Normandy beaches – but not to a larger purpose, simply for his survival and that of his mates. The film ends with Lee Marvin’s squad desperately resuscitating a German soldier just after news of the surrender arrives – and, importantly, the German, we have been carefully and repeatedly shown, is not a “good German” at all, but a devoted Nazi. Nevertheless this act of solidarity among survivors is meant to seem essential.

This is also why we do not, as a rule, see the leaders of the armies or nations in these films, which focus on common soldiers. I know what you will say: Patton! But Patton is the exception that proves the rule; general though he be, Patton is presented as a pawn of faceless fate in that film. We never see Eisenhower, who is simply a name for that implacable force.

It’s also why we don’t see Roosevelt in these films – Roosevelt had too much personality, to present him would disturb the thematic weather too much. In Saving Private Ryan, it’s George Marshall, in real life a soldier’s soldier, who is unfairly made to set the absurd mission in motion.

Which brings me around to Saving Private Ryan – I see it as, from one angle, part of this tradition. It begins and ends with the flag – but it’s a washed out flag, not one whose colors proudly wave. It resists the national narrative. Ryan is charged to “earn this” – but he cannot, possibly, earn it, anymore than any of his predecessors in World War II films could.

The difference, of course, is that he is, in fact, so charged; you wouldn’t get that in an older World War II movie. You can’t earn it, and you won’t. The only thing you can earn is that moment of happiness and dignity that Richard Attenborough’s Roger Bartlett has, seconds before he and his recaptured comrades are murdered.

I think there are two reasons for Morgenthau’s failure. First, though, I disagree with Brad: there was not a conflict between Morgenthau and Marshall, above or below the surface. The conflict was between Morgenthau and everybody else. As John Morton Blum writes, by the end of January 1945, Morgenthau “had yielded in his views toward Germany neither to his fellow New Dealers, nor to his colleagues in the Cabinet, nor to the arguments of his subordinates. So also, he had conceded nothing to the objections of Churchill, Eden, and Sir John Anderson. Nor was he moved by Russian plans.” That’s a lot of different people not to yield to; almost nobody wanted the Morgenthau plan except Morgenthau. Not even the man whom Brad – I think not 100% seriously – calls a “Marxist,” Harry Dexter White; White wanted internationalization of the Ruhr and its industrial production used to pay reparations.It’s true that FDR and Churchill agreed to something akin to the Morgenthau plan, despite Churchill’s objections, when Morgenthau was present at the Quebec conference in September 1944. As Peter Clarke notes, though, it’s obvious why – Churchill knew that Morgenthau was one of the few real friends Britain had in the Roosevelt administration, and was keen to help him out.

At various times various players had spoken to Morgenthau without expressly opposing the plan – but he was a powerful figure within the Roosevelt administration because he was personally close to the President, so of course they would prefer not to challenge him directly.

Which points to the second reason for the Morgenthau plan’s failure: Roosevelt’s death, and Morgenthau’s swiftly consequent fall from influence.

Now, it’s true that in October 1944 FDR expressed shock that he’d agreed to the Quebec memorandum supporting the Morgenthau plan. Speaking to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, FDR said “he had no idea how he could have initialed” the Quebec memo.

Roosevelt might have been pulling a fast one – he was not above telling advisor A one thing and advisor B another – or he might well have been losing a step. People – including Morgenthau – had begun to notice Roosevelt looking bad. The episode with Stimson was one of at least three times during the debate over the Morgenthau plan that Roosevelt expressed surprise at having signed something – he did it again regarding the memorandum of March 10, 1945, repudiating the Morgenthau plan, and again the night before he died, when Morgenthau showed him a photostat of a letter Roosevelt had written suggesting Morgenthau not write a book about his plan. (The letter seems clearly in Roosevelt’s own voice – he writes, characteristically, “We must all remember Job’s lament that his enemy had not written a book.”)

After Roosevelt’s death in April, 1945 Morgenthau was increasingly on the outs in the Truman administration and in July, Morgenthau resigned – and the last, if not only, proponent of his plan had gone from leadership in Washington, DC.

It may be worth noting that Americans themselves may have agreed with Morgenthau. When polled in August 1944 and asked, “Do you think the United Nations should or should not prevent the Germans from rebuilding their steel, chemical, and automotive industries?” 51% answered “should.” On the same question in October, the share rose to 58%. And while in surveys throughout the last year and a half of the war asking whether “our chief enemy is the German people as a whole, or the German government?” large majorities answered the government – 71% in January 1944, 72% in April, 71% in June, 61% in September, 58% in January 1945, 67% in February, 69% in March – and then a drop: 56% in April – with 30% volunteering the response “both.” It was of course in April 1945 that US soldiers first liberated a concentration camp (Buchenwald). Asked in a May poll if “the German people themselves should also be held responsible for these cruelties (discovered in concentration camps in Germany)?”, 52% answered “yes.” The American people seem to have followed the same course of thinking as Morgenthau; it wasn’t until Morgenthau formally compiled a list of Nazi atrocities in December 1943 that he began thinking about a more punitive peace.

Big money went to oppose 30 – big money from mysterious Arizona outfits and from the Munger siblings. But it passed anyway. Which means Jerry Brown, the Democratic governor who backed the proposition, has a little fight in him yet.

It also means the Democrats in the state legislature have a good argument to build a new budget for public services properly funded by taxes. After all, if the voters are willing to tax themselves, who are the legislators to say no? And they can finally do it – they have a supermajority.

More than one of every eight Americans lives in California. Its habits ought to be no afterthought. But it’s three hours behind and full of hippies, so the national pundit class scarcely attends to it. Today is not the day to hold up California as an example of how American political institutions fail; it’s a warning about what an electorate can do if political institutions refuse to function – hand power to the party that promises good policy.

¹The New Yorker, The Economist, MSNBC; a web search will find you many others.

Historians of Bretton Woods might well have said, eh, a transcript – no big deal; what happened at the conference was largely theater, and the real business was done before and afterward. There is some truth in this – and the transcript amusingly shows that – but it also shows some of the ways in which it is not true.First, the amusingly true part. We know from other documents that both the Americans and the British wanted to avoid votes at the conference, partly because the Latin American nations by themselves represented almost half the countries present, and could with a few European votes have commanded a majority.

In the sessions on the Fund chaired by the US Treasury representative Harry Dexter White, there are very few votes, and of the ones taken, only one has an actual vote tally recorded in the transcript. White’s method of avoiding votes was to check for consensus.

The British also wanted to avoid votes, and in the sessions on the Bank chaired by John Maynard Keynes there are no recorded votes (though the transcript is incomplete as to the Bank sessions). Keynes’s method of avoiding votes was to pause for objections, and sometimes very briefly indeed, avoiding the hazard of debate. Here’s an interaction between the US State representative Dean Acheson and Keynes:

ACHESON: Mr. Chairman, have you passed Article VI, Section 3?

KEYNES: I was about to pass it.

ACHESON: Are you going to send that to Drafting?

KEYNES: Yes.

ACHESON: That is a pretty important section.

KEYNES: It is very important, but I heard no opposition to it.

Second, the ways in which it isn’t true. The transcript seems to me to verify what I have found in other sources – that contrary to much of what we read in the literature and what indeed we might expect, the Soviets took Bretton Woods very seriously. The US tried to accommodate the USSR without rendering the agreements unpassable by the US Congress.

You can also see smaller countries pressing for their interests – specifically, that the Fund make room for their need to improve their own economies before stabilizing their exchange rates – which is in part why the Fund is officially devoted to “the promotion and maintenance of high levels of employment and real income.” At the conference, one delegate pointed out that the Fund really needed to be devoted not only to the maintenance of high levels of real income in some countries, but to the attainment of high levels of real income in all. It is only cheap historical irony that this delegate was from Greece.