Too Partisan to be Real History
UC Davis history professor Eric Rauchway
let his rabid partisanship get in the way of some of the real history that is
in his book. His cheer-leading is obvious in the subtitle and that should
clearly warn less biased readers. It is not so much what Rauchway left in, but
rather what he left out and in doing that he did a real disservice to his
readers.
What Rauchway leaves out is as follows:
1.
Although he
rightly blames the operation of the gold standard as one of the predominant causes
of the Great Depression, he fails to discuss how successful it was in spurring growth
in the five decades up to World War I.
2.
He fails to
emphasize the fact that it was the imbalances caused by the financing of World
War I that was the key element in the demise of the gold standard.
3.
He completely ignores
the “forgotten depression’ of 1920-21 where recovery was rapid absent most of
the Keynesian remedies that came later and he ignores the great prosperity of
the 1920s.
4.
He hails
President Roosevelt in his “blowing up” of the World Economic Conference in
1933, but fails to mention that far from being an internationalist, Roosevelt
was an isolationist. The fascists in Europe took note of America’s withdrawal
from the world.
5.
He characterizes
the 1936 Tri-Partite Agreement to stabilize the French Franc as the start of an
anti-Nazi coalition. Wrong! Although France was lost some gold following the
German reoccupation of the Rhineland, the real cause of the Franc’s collapse
was the popular front policies of Leon Blum which scared the living daylights
out of French Capital.
6.
He completely
ignores the fact that after all of the New Deal spending programs and the
Federal Reserve money printing, the economy remained mired in depression as
late as 1939.
7.
He makes way too
a big deal out of the congressional vote to join the IMF. The measure passed
both houses of Congress easily.
8.
Although he notes
that Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White, Keynes' negotiating partner at Bretton Woods, was a Soviet spy, he doesn’t
take seriously the Soviet penetration into the highest circles in the New Deal.
9.
In his
glorification of managed currencies he fails to note the debacle that came
after Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. Further if you want a date to start
when the United States economy became “financialized” you can do a lot worse
than 1971. Whatever the real problems of the gold standard, it would certainly
have acted as a very real constraint on what we call “the shadow banking system”.
For readers who want a better
understanding of the Great Depression I would recommend much of the works of
Barry Eichengreen, Ben Bernanke and Peter Temin.
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