Bretton Woods and Brazil Interview, Part One
Here is the text of an e-mail interview I had with Cyro Franklin de Andrade, editor of the Brazilian magazine Valor econômico, which formed the basis of two articles in Portuguese mentioned in myprevious post. Questions are in italics, answers are in Roman (regular) type.
1. How could it be explained that the transcripts you have found remained forgotten for so long? What were your immediate next steps after finding them? Where are the originals now?
Much of the answer, I think, is that the Bretton Woods conference received more attention from economists than from historians. Economists are trained to analyze statistical or verbal material prepared by others. They are not as often trained to go find new or neglected material.
After I found the transcripts in the U.S. Treasury Library I showed them to the librarians, who were unaware that the transcripts existed. The Treasury Library’s set of the transcripts is now stored in a cabinet. As for the other sets, see my reply to question 3.
2. Which remarks by John Maynard Keynes were unfamiliar to you and caught your attention? What other details and / or passages of the transcripts would you highlight as being especially telling about what was only partly known so far?
I saw Keynes’s remarks in a meeting of the “commission” (committee) on the World Bank. Keynes was the chairman of the commission, so of course he did much of the talking. (Unfortunately, because of a shortage of stenographers, there is only one meeting of that commission in the transcripts.) Because Keynes has been a person of such great interest to so many researchers, I thought that if the transcript had already been known, it would already have been published somewhere. I found that it had not been published.
On the question of what is especially telling, the transcripts make clear a number of points. One is that the allocation of “quotas” (capital subscriptions), which were linked to voting power, was extremely contentious and many countries were dissatisfied—as has often happened in later years, when quotas have been reallocated. A second point is that there is a place in the transcripts where the delegates are talking about whether the IMF should conduct its business in gold or whether it should accept currencies convertible into gold. A U.S. delegate remarks that the U.S. dollar was at the time the only major currency convertible into gold. That was the origin of the Bretton Woods monetary system as being based on both the dollar and gold, rather than being purely based on gold. Yet another point that is very clear in the transcripts is that the Soviet Union did not want to reveal information about its economy to the rest of the world. The Soviet Union signed the Bretton Woods agreements but later decided not to become a member of the IMF and World Bank, and part of the reason was that they did not want to comply with the obligation of IMF members to reveal detailed economic information.
3. You found that there was another copy of the transcripts in the IMF archives and what appears to be the original in the National Archives. Are these copies of the same originals? Or are there differences that distinguishes one copy from another, including the one you’ve found in the Treasury’s Library?
The copies in the IMF Archives and the Treasury Library appear identical. They are both Photostats, an early kind of photocopy, bound in 4 volumes. The only difference is that the Treasury Library copies have the name of Harry Dexter White written in them, while the IMF copies have the name of Edward Bernstein written in them. (White was the chief U.S. negotiator at Bretton Woods and Bernstein was his deputy. Both men worked at the U.S. Treasury Department during Bretton Woods and later went to work at the IMF.) The National Archives has what appears to be the original set. The National Archives papers are loose, rather than being bound in volumes; the paper not shiny like a Photostat copy; and it has clear type and original pencil or pen marks. As far as I know, these three sets of the transcripts are the only ones in existence. In its early years, the IMF used its copy of the transcript to make a retyped version of the portions of the transcripts dealing with the IMF. It distributed a limited number of copies for internal use. The IMF Archives has a few of them. The IMF Archives posted a copy online earlier this year, when Andrew Rosenberg and I were finishing work on our book. It is here:
4. You’ve found that the transcripts had been known to and cited by earlier scholars, but that present-day scholars were unaware of the earlier references. Which of the different copies had been known of and cited by earlier scholars? Which scholars?
J. Keith Horsefield, who wrote the official history of the IMF’s early years (published in 1969), cited the copy in the IMF Archives. Henry Bittermann, an American who was part of the conference secretariat, cited one of the transcripts in a 1971 article in a law journal, but did not specify where the transcript was located. Dag Halvorsen, a Norwegian journalist, cited the National Archives holdings in a 1982 history dissertation published in Norwegian. (I found what may be the only copy of the dissertation outside of Norway, in the Library of Congress in Washington.)
5. In your opinion, which books came closer to the essential points of the transcripts you found? What information failures have been diffused throughout the years that can now be noticed with the publication of the transcripts?
Previously, the only detailed book exclusively devoted to the conference was Armand van Dormael’s 1978 book Bretton Woods: The Birth of a Monetary System. Van Dormael is a Belgian businessman who, during a long retirement (he is now in his 90s) has developed a productive second career as a historian of modern times and technology. There are also some letters, memos, and reminiscences by participants at the conference, such as those in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes and in Stanley Black’s book of interviews with Edward Bernstein, A Levite Among the Priests.
I don’t think there were any great information failures about the Bretton Woods conference. We already knew the main result of the conference, of course: the agreements on the IMF and World Bank. We also had some details from previously published material. What the conference transcripts do is add much more detail, and, in particular, they help us understand how the conference accomplished so much: the conference did not start from zero (the Atlantic City conference, just before Bretton Woods, arrived at preliminary draft agreements for the IMF and World Bank—see the answer to question 7); the delegates were smart; they focused on essential matters; they generally avoided giving long speeches; and they worked very hard, from 9 a.m. sometimes to 3 a.m. the next morning.
6. You’ve said that the official history of the IMF’s early years, written by Keith Horsefield and published in 1969, referred to them [the transcripts] only to dismiss them as “unofficial verbatim reports, but the incomplete and provisional nature of these reports makes them of uncertain value”. How should we interpret the expression “uncertain value”?
Because the transcripts were not intended for publication, they contain sections where the stenographers could not hear clearly what was being said, or did not understand well the topic being discussed. Unlike the case with a transcript of a legislative hearing or a courtroom trial, the stenographers at Bretton Woods did not consult the speakers or other witnesses and try to clarify all the unclear sections. In my opinion, though, it is possible from the context to give a likely account of what the delegates said in most of the unclear sections.
7. Some say that what happened in Bretton Woods was just a sort of “theater”: what was to be discussed and decided was discussed and decided before and after the conference. How do you evaluate this opinion?
Immediately before Bretton Woods, there was a two-week conference in Atlantic City, New Jersey for a smaller group of delegates (mainly those from the larger economies, although I do not know if Brazil participated). At that conference some basic ideas about the IMF and World Bank received concrete form. It was still the job of the Bretton Woods conference to accept or reject those proposals, however, and to add many more details in areas where the Atlantic City conference had offered few or no specific proposals.
(Part 2 will come in a later post.)
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