Foreign countries could redeem dollars at that rate from the “gold window” (as it came to be called). “To all intents and purposes,” Congressional Quarterly summed up, “the American gold bullion standard of $35 an ounce amounts to an international dollar standard with the U.S. Treasury in the role of central banker.”27 White had essentially let the problems of the gold standard back into global finance through the back door.
The Bretton Woods Conference ultimately produced the Bretton Woods agreement, a treaty signed by forty-four nations, leading to what has subsequently been called (no surprise) the Bretton Woods system. Had Keynes gotten his way, the new global order would have more seamlessly matched the Keynesian approach to domestic economic management, something White did not realize at the time. Indeed, in advancing American interests over British, he unintentionally created a global system that would ultimately work at odds with the New Deal’s domestic political economy.28 He also learned the wrong lessons of global finance coming out of World War I. Then European countries were deep in debt and faced staggering inflation. That was the disease. The symptoms had been the debt defaults, currency devaluations, and the turn to bilateral trade agreements. As American policymakers quickly realized, the same was true after World War II.
Morgenthau had not finished shaping the postwar order though. Around the same time White was negotiating with Keynes over the future of global finance, Morgenthau became increasingly interested in making postwar policy for the occupations of Germany and Japan.29 Throughout 1943 and into 1944, State Department planners had included Germany within a broad framework for trade and international economic cooperation. A typical memo from 1943 felt “no illusions as to the difficulties in … creating an effective democracy” in Germany because it would be tempting to punish the Germans for the war. But the lessons of World War I offered instruction: “A minimum of bitterness against the peace terms is in order,” the drafters argued, “to avoid an appealing program for future nationalistic upheavals at home and disturbances abroad.” Moreover, “in the interest of fostering moderate government in Germany,” the drafters recommended “a program looking to the economic recovery of Germany … and to the assimilation of Germany … into the projected international order.”30 In short, economic revival and a position within the new global system would foster a “moderate” German electorate willing to maintain the peace.
When Morgenthau learned of the State Department’s plans to include Germany in the international order, he recoiled in horror. He got hold of a draft of these plans and handed them privately to Roosevelt with a covering memo suggesting that the policies contradicted Roosevelt’s stated views on Germany.31 After reading several pages, Roosevelt threw the memo down on his desk. “Feed the Germans!” he said, “I’ll give them three bowls of soup a day, with nothing in them. Control inflation!” he continued, “Let them have all the inflation they want. I should worry. Control industry,” he concluded, “There’s not going to be any industry in Germany to control.”32 As Morgenthau knew, Roosevelt had expressed deep cynicism about the Germans throughout the war. They were “hopeless to retrain,” he told his assistant George Elsey one day. “We could do nothing with them.”33 To Morgenthau, he had been blunter and cruder. “We either have to castrate the German people or you have got to treat them in such manner so they can’t just go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.”34
A lot can be and has been said about the debate that followed over a “hard” or “soft” peace for Germany.35 In the briefest terms, Morgenthau found bureaucratic support for the “hard” peace from the most devoted of New Dealers (such as Harry Hopkins), who blended their frustration at big business with their moral outrage over Hitler’s genocide of Europe’s Jews. Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s only Jewish cabinet member, had become increasingly alarmed at the reports of atrocities and, by late 1943, had begun actively involving himself in persuading Roosevelt to do more to save Europe’s Jewry.36 When it came to the postwar period, Morgenthau felt that nothing could be done about the German people’s desire to enslave the world. The only solution lay in devastating Germany’s ability to enslave the world. As he summarized in a memo to Roosevelt: “(1) The German people have the will to try [to conquer the world] again. (2) Programs for democracy, reeducation and kindness cannot destroy this will within any brief time. (3) Heavy industry is the core of Germany’s warmaking potential.” Thus, “We are more convinced than ever that if we really mean to deprive Germany of the ability to make war again … it is absolutely essential that she be deprived of her chemical, metallurgical and electrical industries. We don’t think that this alone will guarantee peace, but that it is one of the steps we must take now.”37
Here, the New Deal’s antagonism toward “monopolists and reckless bankers” overlapped with Morgenthau’s prescription for postwar Germany. As if to symbolize the connection, soon after Congress concluded hearings into domestic monopolies (before the Temporary National Economic Committee), it began hearings on “the effects of … international cartels to the problem of national defense and the establishment of world peace” (before Committee on Military Affairs, Cartels, and National Security).38 The investigation concluded that “our Axis enemies engaged in systematic economic warfare against the United States.” Indeed, as defeat approached, “German aggressors … are already deploying their economic reserves throughout the world in preparation for a third attempt at world domination.”39 Within the context of the newly concluded Bretton Woods agreements, a “real cooperation of sovereign nations” meant “the end of the cartel system, which has in the past proven an insuperable barrier to international harmony,” a cartel system mastered by the Germans. Roosevelt agreed. “The history of the I.G. Farben trust by the Nazis reads like a detective story,” he wrote. “Defeat of the Nazi armies will have to be followed by the eradication of these weapons of economic warfare.”40 Roosevelt seemed to suggest a neutering of the Germany economy. Morgenthau couldn’t agree more.
Morgenthau’s opposition came largely from Henry Stimson, the most vocal advocate for a “soft” peace within the administration. He felt Morgenthau missed the main lesson coming out of World War I. “The question is not whether we want Germans to suffer for their sins.” Stimson, as much as anyone else, “would like to see them suffer the tortures they have inflicted on others.” The only real “question is whether over the years a group of seventy million educated, efficient and imaginative people can be kept within bounds on such a low level of subsistence.” No matter how justified, Stimson asserted, it “would be very difficult, if not impossible, for them to understand any purpose or cause for such revolutionary changes other than mere vengeance of their enemies and this alone would strongly tend towards the most bitter reactions.”41 In short, in focusing on the question of the Germans’ ability to start another war, Stimson saw Morgenthau guaranteeing their desire for that war.
More immediately, enforcing poverty would be incredibly difficult. “I do not believe that is humanly possible,” Stimson told Roosevelt. “Even if you could do this,” he asked, is it “good for the rest of the world either economically or spiritually?”42 Stimson drew support from the British who agreed that “an indefinitely continued coercion of [millions of] … technically advanced people … would at best be an expensive undertaking” and would never guarantee “real security.” The British added that “there exists no convincing reason to anticipate that the victor powers would be willing and able indefinitely to apply coercion.” In fact, “the best guarantee of security, and the least expensive, would be the German people’s repudiation of militaristic ambitions and their assimilation, as an equal partner, into a cooperative world society.”43
Roosevelt listened to the various viewpoints throughout 1944 and zigzagged back and forth without making up his mind. He favored Morgenthau’s position initially, only to slowly come around to Stimson’s. In the meantime, his health began to fail. He found it harder to make difficult decisions. In his last real conversation about postwar policy for Germany, Roosevelt explained to Morgenthau and representatives from State and the army that he “did
