The Visionaries: Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan and the Making of the Post-World War II Order

Historian Holland (Normandy ’44) opens this probing study of the political economy of WWII by analyzing the conflict’s financial roots: the harsh reparations imposed on Germany after WWI, the 1920s tariff wars that tanked the global economy, and the Great Depression, which turned Germany and Japan toward extremism. Drawing useful lessons from this turmoil, President Franklin Roosevelt put global economic development at the heart of his vision for the postwar world, and his ideas bore fruit in the Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade—that stabilized the postwar financial order, and in the 1948 Marshall Plan that funneled American aid to shattered European economies. These “radical” initiatives led to soaring postwar standards of living, Holland notes; however, his narrative focuses less on the postwar economy and more on the economic dimensions of the war itself, along the way making a potent case that Allied victory was due less to Soviet manpower than to American and British weapons production and bombing. Above all, the book is a somewhat over-the-top homage to FDR—“a man of destiny” with “deeply felt Christian values” who providentially maneuvered America onto the global stage. It makes for a sketchy treatment of the postwar order but an insightful take on how money and arms factories won the war. (May)