## Overshadowed Founder

## Source details

**Canonical URL:** [Overshadowed Founder](https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2022/march/ghosh-book.pdf)

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### Biography and early career
- Harry Dexter White began higher education in his late 20s after serving in World War I.
- He attended Columbia, Stanford, and Harvard, where he was awarded the prize for the best PhD dissertation in 1932.
- During the Great Depression, jobs were scarce and White taught at a small college in Wisconsin.
- In the summer of 1934 White interned at the US Treasury for three months after an invitation from Jacob Viner.
- During that internship White produced a 400-page report on what monetary system the United States should have.

### Contributions to the postwar international monetary order
- Boughton credits White with four main insights:
  - The postwar system needed to be designed while war was still being waged.
  - It would need to be designed by all the allied nations, and not just presented as a fait accompli negotiated between Britain and the United States.
  - It should promote multilateral trade and payments.
  - It should be based on the US dollar, rather than some new, artificial international currency.
- The review notes a tension: “one might question the wisdom of basing the international monetary system on the currency of a single country,” but also that White’s instinct likely reflected political realities—Congress would otherwise never ratify the IMF’s Articles of Agreement.

### Espionage charges and Boughton’s defense
- The book addresses charges late in White’s life that he was a Soviet agent—charges that the review suggests likely ended his life.
- Boughton “meticulous[ly]” documents every charge and insinuation to show how flimsy (and often ridiculous) they were.
- Boughton’s concluding assessment: “if White was a spy, he was very bad at it...for a man who was so good at everything he applied himself to doing, to accuse him of such an agency would be the unkindest charge of all.”

### Assessment of Boughton’s book
- The review describes the book as a fine piece of scholarship that “reads like a thriller.”
- Key publication details from the review:
  - Title: Harry White and the American Creed: How a Federal Bureaucrat Created the Modern Global Economy (and Failed to Get the Credit)
  - Author: James M. Boughton
  - Publisher: Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2021
  - Length: 464 pp.
  - Price: $40

### Context and reviewer
- Published in: March 2022 | FINANCE & DEVELOPMENT, page 67.
- Reviewer: ATISH REX GHOSH, IMF historian

*Reviewed by ATISH REX GHOSH, IMF historian*

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_Source: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2022/march/ghosh-book.pdf_