Dexy’s Red Life Cover

It’s me, Mr. Wonderful! And I’m back. Reader you may or may not know that I have no time for war reenactors and even wrote a post about it way back in August of 2013 called Too Much Bulge in the Battle. However, I myself and many of my generation have been forever stuck with the identities of Cold War Reenactors because we lived through the Cold War and to this day we can remember what those days felt like. Unlike the other reenactors who play dress up and march around and pretend to shoot each other (minus the actual horror of war of course) we Cold War reenactors don’t enjoy re-fighting a past war. We have no special uniforms and we don’t meet each other, don’t even know each other, we just sit around and remember what it was like when nuclear annihilation was a very real possibility. You basically just reenact the nervousness and paranoia of your possible incineration. And unlike the other war reenactors there are literally hundreds of millions of us. So with all that baggage, very few of us (excepting a large portion of college professors) have any great love for the Soviet Union of the mid to late 20th century. And while I have plenty of problems with the United States, I’ve written vehemently numerous times about my disdain for the Soviets and you can go to the archives and roll around in those posts if you want to which I do literally on my four-post bed with the actual hard copies of my posts.

But the Soviets aren’t really what this post is about, not yet anyway. (English teachers across the nation instinctively reach for their red pens when I kick off paragraph two with that line) No I’m going to talk about the economic system that was set up for the world in 1944 just around the time U.S. forces were fighting the battles of the hedgerows in Normandy, the Soviets were liberating Minsk, the cabal of anti-Hitler conspirators nearly killed the Austrian corporal, and FDR announced he’d run for President for an unprecedented fourth time.This post concerns two guys who at the Bretton-Woods Conference more or less set up the economic system that has ruled the world since 1944. These two were the famous Englishman John Maynard Keynes and the less famous but just as important American Harry Dexter White. White, at the time the second highest official at the Treasury Department, worked closely with FDR’s Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. and was the senior American representative at the conference. More on White in a minute.

Up until 1944, even after the creation of the monstrous Fed in 1913, there was at least some semblance of the old gold standard system that had existed for many decades and at least kept governments honest in the sense that they couldn’t print paper money like, well, like governments do today. White and Keynes didn’t want anything to do with the old system and instead wanted to replace it with a more, uh, Keynesian system whereby fiscal constraints would be more or less removed from sovereign nations, and the IMF and World Bank would oversee the whole thang in one rolling, elite controlled, scheme of easy money and gub’ment spending.

I’ll pull this from a Wall Street Journal piece rather than switching the words around and basically saying the same thing.

Though White and Keynes fought over many things, they agreed that the experts—themselves, notably—knew best. Governments had come of age, Keynes contended. And as they had become “trustworthy,” so they should direct and control the financial life of nations. As for central banking, pronounced the famous economist from King’s College, Cambridge, (Keynes) it should “be regarded as a kind of beneficent technique of scientific control such as electricity or other branches of science are.” Not even Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke could utter those words today without blushing.

Okay, say what you want about the Bretton Woods system, personally I think we can look around us at the fiscal situation we’re in and more or less close the case on it, but it was a system hammered out in good faith by people who, though elitists at least thought they were doing the right thing. Or was it? This brings us back to the first paragraph of this post which concerned the Cold War and the Soviets and such.

So it seems to be a fun pastime of many leftists, when not laundering their capitalist-created Che Guevera t-shirts, (for Millenials unsure about Che think Bernie Sanders except with machismo, facial hair, and a penchant for cracking the skulls of class enemies) to point accusingly at the Red Scare in the United States in the mid twentieth century and cry foul. We know the litany: thousands of innocent lives ruined, state power run amok, (usually not a problem for them) a cult of personality around Joe McCarthy, a dark dark day in the history of the Republic. Except, well there were in fact Communists in the power structure of the U.S., many directly working for the Soviet Union.

And it turns out that some people in the halls of power back during the 1940’s actually looked at Harry Dexter White, a highly placed official in the FDR administration and co-creator of the economic system that was designed after World War II and said hey, White might be Red. (way to vet em’ FDR. Or maybe he was vetted. Wink wink) So White was hauled before the House un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and of course he issued a vehement denial and put that ridiculous accusation to bed. Let’s face it, it was a time of high paranoia in America and Red hunters were somehow finding Commie-symps in every level of society and often coming out red-faced themselves whenever their wild-eyed theories fell apart. And White was apparently so shaken up by the whole affair that he went and died from a heart attack just two days after his HUAC appearance and after giving his all to the country he loved and doing his best to set it on the right economic course for the future. White was considered a martyr to the cause of destroying the power of HUAC. That was White’s privelege.

Then the Venona Cables came out. Uh oh. In short the Venona Project was a clandestine espionage program carried out by U.S. intelligence mainly in the 1940’s that sought to decrypt intercepts of Soviet intelligence communication. Though it did the bulk of its work in the 40’s the secret program lasted for decades and was only declassified in 1995, nearly 15 years after it ended. Analysis of the cables, and information from Russian Soviet-era intelligence archives prove that White was certainly a communist sympathizer and did in fact pass on classified information to Soviet intelligence agents as well as attempting to infiltrate parts of the United States government with fellow communists. He went by several code names including Jurist, Lawyer, and Richard. Hmm, a lawyer who’s a Dick.

So let’s just sum this up now. Mmkay? We have this system that was designed for the United States specifically and the world in general just as the planet was starting to crawl away from the total shit-mess known as World War II. It was to be the economic system that would provide peace and prosperity with elite intellectuals pulling the levers (sometimes each other’s in Keynes’ case, heh heh.) and manipulating the economies of entire nations. They would use central banks to control the money supply and make the U.S. dollar the reserve currency of the world. Thus giving politicians (always far-sighted and willing to self-sacrifice) the ability to print money, manipulate interest rates, and pile slag heaps of debt upon people who wouldn’t be born for decades. And…and, to top off the whole steamy pile you had a Communist sympathizer helping to design the whole thing at a time when the main enemy of the United States was no longer Germany or Japan but instead the Communist bloc. The hipsters love irony (and beards, Buddy Holly glasses, and themselves. Is that in itself ironic?) but for the middle-aged history major that’s the kind of irony that gets me going.

H.R. Gross