Morgenthau, Henry, Jr. (1891–1967), secretary of the treasury, 1934–45.This former Dutchess County gentleman farmer and member of a prominent New York German Jewish family was a close personal friend and political confidant of President
Franklin D. Roosevelt. Morgenthau was an important figure in the Roosevelt administration.
Responsible for U.S. financing of World War II, Morgenthau, as head of the Treasury Department, advocated relying on increases in the income tax to dampen inflationary pressures while raising revenue. Although he prevented a regressive national sales tax advocated by conservatives, Morgenthau faced a series of defeats in Congress over fiscal policies, especially on the income tax. He did, however, organize several highly publicized bond drives.
When the Roosevelt administration, especially the State Department, proved unresponsive to reports of systematic extermination of European Jewry by the Nazi regime of
Adolf Hitler in 1940–43, Morgenthau and the Treasury Department proved to be one of the few federal agencies pressing for the United States to take decisive action against the Holocaust. On 16 January 1944, Morgenthau directly confronted Roosevelt with evidence of the Holocaust as well as the reluctance of the State Department to provide visas to Jewish refugees or facilitate rescue efforts by Jewish organizations in Europe. Shortly after this meeting, Roosevelt established the U.S. War Refugee Board by executive order. This body, with Morgenthau an active member, undertook a series of relief efforts, albeit limited, to aid Jewish refugees.
In 1944, Morgenthau—over the objections of the State and War Departments—forcefully advocated a harsh peace settlement. His plan called for stripping Germany of all heavy industry and partitioning the country into a series of demilitarized agricultural states. Attending the Quebec Conference in September 1944, Morgenthau prodded Roosevelt and Prime Minister
Winston S. Churchill to initial a memorandum of agreement supporting his plan. This was later reversed by Roosevelt and his successor,
Harry S. Truman, after intense lobbying by the State and War Departments, which denounced the plan as both unrealistic and detrimental to U.S. interests, given the need for a European counterweight to the expanded power of the Soviet Union.
Morgenthau proved more successful in shaping the postwar international monetary system. Relying heavily on expertise of Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, Morgenthau organized the Bretton Woods Conference of June–July 1944, which established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Shortly after Truman assumed the presidency in April 1945, Morgenthau resigned as Treasury secretary. In retirement, he became an ardent supporter of the state of Israel and active in a number of Jewish philanthropic causes.
[See also
Holocaust, U.S. War Effort and the;
Public Financing and Budgeting for War;
World War II: Domestic Course.]
Bibliography
John Morton Blum , From the Morgenthau Diaries, 3 vols., 1959–67.
David S. Wyman , The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945, 1984.
Henry Morgenthau III , Mostly Morgenthaus: A Family History, 1991.
G. Kurt Piehler
