Tea at Trianon: Harry Dexter White and Capitalism

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Harry Dexter White and Capitalism

From the Whittaker Chambers blog:

In the end, it remains difficult to say why Harry Dexter White acted as he did. Why did a Soviet spy construct a system that helped save and indefinitely prolong world capitalism? It is in the nature of espionage that documentation is rare and inaccessible, and witnesses lie. What evidence we have suggests something like the following about White’s career: in 1934, when he was an academic, the US Treasury asked him to report on the problem of a monetary standard. His response already included basics of what became the Bretton Woods system: a case against both the gold standard and floating exchange rates (the latter of which White regarded as practically feasible, but politically unlikely) and a case for the adjustable peg, to be kept in place by an international monetary fund. This report got him a longer term job at the Treasury. Sometime after this, White began passing information to Whittaker Chambers, a GRU agent. One memorandum in White’s handwriting survives, and though it contains little if anything that qualifies as actual confidential information, perhaps other, vanished memos contained secrets for the Soviets. According to Chambers, White was keen also to send the Soviets his plan for monetary reform in the USSR, and the Soviets were eager to have it. (Read entire post.)