Harry Dexter White

• Born: October 9, 1892
• Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: August 16, 1948
• Place of death: Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire

Economist and government official

An economist with expertise in international finance and monetary issues, White served in the U.S. Treasury Department, rising to the position of assistant secretary of the Treasury. He was one of the principal architects of the Bretton Woods agreements in 1944 that established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Areas of achievement: Economics; government and politics

Early Life

Harry Dexter White (HAY-ree DEHK-stuhr wit) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Isaac Joseph Weit (later White) and Sarah Magilewski, immigrants from Lithuania. Harry Dexter White adopted Dexter as his middle name in 1909 to appear more American. He followed his father into the family hardware business after high school. White took classes at Massachusetts Agricultural College in Amherst (now University of Massachusetts) in 1911 and 1912, but he returned to the hardware business until World War I began. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in April, 1917, and then went overseas in 1918. He served in France but did not see combat. Before leaving for Europe, White married Russian-born Anne Terry, who later became a successful author of children’s books. They had two daughters.

Upon his return to the United States in 1919, White moved to New York, where he directed a variety of social service institutions before he enrolled at Colombia University in 1922. A year later, he transferred to Stanford University, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1924, then a master’s degree in 1925. He enrolled at Harvard University, where he taught and studied economics, earning his Ph.D. in 1930 under the direction of Frank W. Taussig. His dissertation was published as The French International Accounts, 1880-1913 (1933). White taught at Harvard from 1926 to 1932, but he left for a more permanent position as associate professor of economics at Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1932.

Life’s Work

In 1934, White traveled to Washington, D.C., at the request of Jacob Viner, a University of Chicago economist then working on a research project for the Treasury Department, to study the gold standard and international trade. This summer research project turned into a career at the Treasury as an economist. One of his first important assignments laid the groundwork for the signing of the Tripartite Agreement of 1936. Subsequently, White became director of the division of monetary research in 1940; then, in 1942, he was appointed special assistant to the secretary of the Treasury. As he rapidly earned the respect and confidence of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., he was given the powers of assistant secretary and served as Morgenthau’s principal arbiter of U.S. foreign economic policy.

When the United States entered World War II in December. 1941, Morgenthau placed White in charge of all international matters for the department of the Treasury. In this capacity, White influenced U.S. international economic policy throughout World War II, and he was further involved with establishing postwar fiscal policy and economic assistance policies with China, Japan, and Europe after the war. At Morgenthau’s request, White assisted in the development of the Morgenthau Plan for postwar Germany, which called for the deindustrialization of the country in order to remove Germany’s ability to wage future wars. White’s significant role was to assemble a book, Germany Is Our Problem: A Plan for Germany (1945), by Morgenthau, that tried to sell the ultimately unsuccessful plan to the American public.

White was a key figure in the Treasury Department’s planning for the postwar world. He was one of the principal architects of the Bretton Woods agreement on postwar currency stability. From 1941 to 1943, he drafted his White Plan to restore international stability after the war. In this plan, a “United Nations Stabilization Fund” and a “Bank for Reconstruction” would be established. The fund would promote the balanced growth of international trade while preserving the role of the U.S. dollar in international finance, centering the international monetary system on the United States dollar and its relation to gold. In the contrasting Keynes Plan, formulated by economist John Maynard Keynes, the “International Clearing Union,” more favorable to British interests than the White Plan, would function as a world central bank to regulate the flow of credit and to act as an independent balance to American economic power. A joint statement, a compromise between the two plans that favored White’s ideas, was presented for debate and amendment at the Bretton Woods Conference, held in New Hampshire in July, 1944. The conference adopted a broad program on international finance, including many of the provisions recommended by White, which resulted in the establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), largely reflecting Keynes’s influence and White’s conception, and the World Bank (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) that was to operate with ten billion dollars in capital.

In early 1946, White was appointed U.S. executive director of the IMF by President Harry S. Truman before he learned that White was the subject of charges implicating him in a Soviet espionage plot, based on charges made by former Communist agent Elizabeth Bentley, and White maintained a highly influential role during the fund’s first year. Because of his health, White was forced to resign in 1947, but, soon after his retirement, he was subpoenaed by a New York grand jury that was investigating Communist infiltration; he was not indicted. Then, in the summer of 1948, he was denounced by both Bentley and Whittaker Chambers before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Both claimed that, although White was not a member of the Communist Party, he had given secret information and aid to a wartime Soviet spy ring and assisted Communist agents in obtaining positions in the U.S. government.

White testified before HUAC on August 13, 1948, where he fervently denied the allegations of his accusers. He died three days later of a heart attack. In 1953, attorney general Herbert Brownell, Jr,. reopened the case, based on the discovery of new files and the concern that Truman knew about the accusations when he appointed White to the IMF. In 1995, the National Security Agency released copies of decrypted Soviet cables, which American intelligence had intercepted during World War II as part of the Venona Project, that seemed to confirm the charge that White (code name RICHARD) passed on information to Soviet agents.

Significance

White played a central role in the founding of the United Nations’ twin financial institutions, the World Bank and the IMF, yet he became the highest-ranking figure in both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations to be accused by congressional investigators of being a Communist agent who was involved in espionage activities. For years after his death, he was a target of Communist Red-baiting by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s J. Edgar Hoover and President Dwight Eisenhower’s attorney general Brownell as well as two Republican-controlled Senate committees who blamed White for formulating the “pro-Russian” Morgenthau Plan for postwar Germany and for orchestrating the loss of Mainland China to the Communists.

Bibliography

Craig, R. Bruce. Treasonable Doubt: The Harry Dexter White Spy Case. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. Craig attempts to defend White and to set the record straight on White’s still debated role as a Communist. The author suggests that the charges by White’s detractors were misplaced and that White’s actions can be explained by his belief in a Franklin D. Roosevelt-inspired internationalism that depended on continued Soviet-American cooperation.

Rees, David. Harry Dexter White: A Study in Paradox. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1973. Important work in which author reaches no definitive conclusion about White’s possible role as a Soviet agent but he acknowledges the possibility of the charge.

White, Nathan I. Harry Dexter White, Loyal American. Waban, Mass.: B. W. Bloom, 1956. Sympathetic account of his brother’s life that is a defense of his reputation. The book was privately published by White’s sister Bessie after both men were dead.