The day Cordell Hull put one over on Dean Acheson

Cordell Hull was FDR's Secretary of State from 1933 to 1944, an ardent advocate of liberal trading rules, and the man most responsible for the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 - landmark trade legislation leading to lower tariffs (Happy Birthday RTAA!, Ben Muse, June 12, 2006).

In late 1933, Dean Acheson, the future Secretary of State, was a Treasury Undersecretary. 

In the fall of 1933, Hull put one over on Acheson and the Treasury.  The occasion was a negotiation with the British over the disposition of World War I debts.  Michael Butler tells the story:

Hull did act to eliminate one source of political threat: war debts.  Although the secretary could do little to address the diplomatic problem, he could reduce the department's exposure to political criticism.  He understood that a diplomatic solution to the issue was highly unlikely, that any reasonable solution might prove politically devastating to the administration, and that the State Department had nothing to gain, at least in Washington, from efforts to resolve the issue.  He thus chose to cede the State Department's authority on the issue to the Treasury Department, in the person of Under Secretary Dean Acheson.  As the administration prepared to receive a British mission coming to Washington to discuss a settlement, Hull decided that his department would be represented on Acheson's group by a deputy to Economic Advisor Feis [Herbert Feis, see below - Ben], a minor official for such an important issue.

Feis resisted the slippage of authority on debt issues to the Treasury Department and was deeply depressed personally by the designation of his assistant, rather than himself, as the department's representative to the talks.  Acheson, however, fully recognized that "wily old Cordell Hull" had engineered the transfer of a wildly unpopular issue from the State Department to Treasury.  When Feis complained directly to the secretary that Frederick Livesey's designation had cast doubt on the economic adviser's authority, Hull "asked whether I did not think he had suffered similarly" and added that "in a few months we would be glad not to have been in it."  When on 17 October Feis informed the secretary that there had been no progress in the talks with the British, Hull's eyes reflected what Feis considered triumphal vindication.  "I knew nothing could be done," the secretary declared.  "I needed no report to know that."  Hull understood war debts to be a hopeless issue that did not merit risking his prestige.  There were more important issues to fight.

Feis cheered up later:

Overcoming his depression, Feis came to see the political reasoning in Hull's desire to pass responsibility to the Treasury Department.  Feis wrote to his mentor Felix Frankfurter in November that "the discussions were still born," a fact "grasped from the beginning" by the secretary of state.  Hull, Feis noted, had "gently removed me from the negotiations, which were hopeless from the start"...

More important issues, like the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, which he would see enacted the following spring.

Source: Cautious Visionary. Cordell Hull and Trade Reform, 1933-1937 , Michael A. Butler, Kent State University Press, 1998.

Herbert Feis was an economic advisor in the State Department during the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations.  After leaving he became a distinguished historian of American diplomacy, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.  The late David Walley has posted a biography - a work apparently in progress at the time of his death this past August - to the web, here: The Shackled Historian: The Life And Times Of Herbert Feis .  The text on the web takes the Feis story up to the early 1930s.  The foreward suggests that he had planned to cover the entire life.

Comments

[bancor]

What a fascinating story!

Is anyone going to complete the late David Walley's biography of Herbert Feis?

Anyone interested in this may also be interested in a new historical study in which Hull, Acheson, and Frankfurter, and trade, war debts and other issues all feature - 'John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace', by Donald Markwell, just out from Oxford University Press in Britain, and soon to be published in the US.

It is important to remind ourselves of some of the history in thinking about current issues, such as the battle between economic nationalism and free trade.

[Dave]

I read your blog often and am curious whether you are a professor and if so, where?