Transcript of 1944 Bretton Woods Conference Found at Treasury
Associated Press
Acting Secretary of State Dean
Acheson, standing at center, and representatives of 28 Allied nations
met in Washington in 1945 to sign the pact reached at the Bretton Woods
conference.
By ANNIE LOWREY
The New York Times, October 25, 2012
WASHINGTON — A Treasury economist rummaging in the department’s library
has stumbled on a historical treasure hiding in plain sight: a
transcript of the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 that cast the foundations of the modern international monetary system.
The Bretton Woods Transcripts
The Center for Financial Stability has included links to the transcripts on its web site.
International Monetary Fund, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
John Maynard Keynes addressed the Bretton Woods
conference, where the International Monetary Fund was created.
Historians had never known that a transcript existed for the event held in the heat of World War II, when delegates from 44 allied nations fighting Hitler gathered in the mountains of New Hampshire to create the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. But there were three copies in archives and libraries around Washington that had never been made public, until now.
“It’s as if someone handed us Madison’s notes on the debate over the
Constitution,” said Eric Rauchway, a historian the University of
California, Davis.
Economic historians who have viewed the transcript say it adds color and
detail to the historical record, an already thick one given the many
contemporaneous and subsequent accounts of Bretton Woods. The transcript
seems to contain no great surprises, but it sheds light on the intense
debates as the war raged abroad.
It depicts John Maynard Keynes,
the British economist, hurrying to marshal support for the broad
agreements on international finance. It underscores the tremendous power
then wielded by Britain and, especially, the United States. It also
shows the seeds of contemporary disputes being sown.
For instance, seven decades ago, a number of poorer or smaller countries
were protesting their International Monetary Fund quotas, which
determine power in the fund. Many of those countries, including China
and India, are still pushing for more influence today.
In one section of the transcript, an American representative lays out a
proposal for apportioning power in the fund and underscores what was at
stake, with the war coming to its bloody climax in Europe.
“We fight together on sodden battlefields. We sail together on the
majestic blue. We fly together in the ethereal sky,” said Fred M.
Vinson, who later became chief justice of the United States. “The test
of this conference is whether we can walk together, solve our economic
problems, down the road to peace as we today march to victory.”
But the response was not one of absolute unity.
“In spite of the very eloquent and moving speech of the United States
delegate, on behalf of the Iranian delegation I wish to state that the
quota proposed for my country is entirely unsatisfactory,” a delegate
from Tehran responded.
Then, a delegate from China added: “I hesitate greatly to sound a note
of discord at this conference. It has been the effort of the Chinese
delegation to promote harmony and the success of this great common
enterprise. But every delegation has its difficulties.”
The Netherlands, Greece, Australia, India, Yugoslavia, New Zealand,
France, Ethiopia, Norway and Britain then added their comments and
objections. “I think that a lot of people have thought of Bretton Woods
as being a stitch-up job between United Kingdom and the United States,”
Mr. Rauchway said. “But that’s overstated, and it’s definitely visible
in this transcript. You can see the poorer countries fighting their own
corner.”
Kurt Schuler a Treasury Department economist, was browsing in an “out of
the way” section of uncataloged material in the library two years ago
when he came across the Bretton Woods document. He flipped through and
saw some remarks by Keynes that he was not familiar with, sort of the
economists’ equivalent of a Bob Dylan fan finding unknown lyrics.
“I checked them against Keynes’s collected works,” Mr. Schuler said. “And I knew I had something.”
His research revealed that there were three copies of the transcript
that scores of economic historians were not aware of: the version at the
Treasury Department; one in the National Archives; and the third in the
International Monetary Fund archives.
In his spare time, Mr. Schuler set about turning the yellowed transcript
into a book, with a co-editor, Andrew Rosenberg. It took a tremendous
amount of work, Mr. Schuler said. They read the transcript aloud into
transcription software. They added hyperlinks to documents referenced at
the conference, and wrote summaries, annotations and historical notes.
This week, the polished transcript was published as an 800-page e-book
by the Center for Financial Stability, a nonprofit group based in New
York that researches financial markets, where Mr. Schuler is a senior
fellow and Mr. Rosenberg a research associate.
“Everyone thinks they know what happened at Bretton Woods, but what they
know has been filtered by generations of historical accounts,” Barry
Eichengreen, a professor or economics and political science at the
University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. “International
monetary history will never be the same.”
The transcript provides “insight in how it was that they were able to
maintain a pace of work which allowed them to reach two really big
agreements, on the I.M.F. and the World Bank, within a space of three
weeks,” Mr. Schuler said. “Keynes was something of a task master,” he
added.
Benn Steil, a senior fellow and director of international economics at
the Council on Foreign Relations, said readers can see the British
Empire “disintegrating before your eyes,” in the transcript. “The
Indians are so vociferous that the British are ripping them off. The
British are both furious and mortified that their colony would do this
to them,” he said, describing a dispute over debts with the colonies.
“Bretton Woods was itself 95 percent Kabuki theater,” he said. “But it’s interesting Kabuki theater.”
