Reading for Information

Thomas Lamont was ubiquitous in Martin’s story. No surprise but good to know.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, a big area where I differed from Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren when I was reading How to Read a Book had to do with my focus, much of the time, on reading for information rather than for what they called “knowledge”, which I took to mean something like instruction at the feet of sages. I’m not against the idea that sometimes the value of a Great Book is that we need to stretch our minds to understand it. But from a purely practical perspective, I spend (and I imagine many others do too) a whole lot more of my time reading books and articles not so much to be instructed or even persuaded, but to gather information and data for my own pursuits. Along these lines, I’ve just been reading in a book published by the Harvard University Press in 2022. I didn’t have the time to read it cover to cover, or honestly even to skim it cover to cover. But I did get some useful information from it.

My tactic in this book was to read over the introduction quickly, so I understood what the author was trying to do. Then I skimmed the first few chapters, mostly looking for names I could either add to my network of Gilded Age characters or, if they were already there, add interesting data to their profiles. I think it’s important to see names and connections in a variety of sources, both academic and popular. It’s like a journalist validating a claim with corroborating sources, and it didn’t hurt that this was a Harvard book. Also, since this was a political history (a genre that typically spends more time focusing on organizations), I figured any people who appeared would probably be important.

Here’s what my notes in Obsidian looked like. Note that I didn’t get to the end of the book, but I got some good info and I can always return. I can follow up on these ideas and historical moments and add these items and references to already-existing notes on these people; or I can add new notes to my database:

The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance

Jamie Martin, 2022

Martin is interested in the growth of extra-national organizations like the IMF and World Bank but seems to believe they are justifiable in a shift to a global governance model.

“The Meddlers tells a history of institutional design alongside one of political struggles over legitimacy, representation, and ideology...What was so novel about these institutions was that their interventionist powers had to be differentiated from the kind of unwanted meddling that empires had long visited on semi-sovereign countries--from North Africa to Asia to the Caribbean. The task of these institutions was to make their powers compatible with the legal fiction of sovereign equality and the mass politics of self-determination.” (9-10)

He goes on to say, "nearly every attempt to reach beyond the barriers of sovereignty resulted in fierce resistance--whether from political elites, bankers, workers, or businesses, who, in fighting their own battles, debated whether these institutions offered a new kind of internationalism or simply an ingenious method for laundering empire." This seems to be very much the point. One man's global harmony may seem to another like imperialism. This reminds me a bit of the argument made by that guy who defended colonialism (Bruce Gilley), saying that it (colonialism defined in a very precise and limited way) proved that the colonizers believed in the colonized and were trying to help them become civilized like they were.

The most famous figures Martin mentions are John Maynard Keynes, French financier Jean Monnet, and Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman. But he promises to name many more "quietly effective technocrats". These are the names I'm seeking, in a quick look through the book. It's a political history, so I shouldn't get my hopes up too much. But maybe the names Martin is forced to mention will thus be even more crucial. Here are some, from the first half of the book.

Bernard Baruch: War Industries Board, 1917

Jean Monnet,

Arthur Salter (UK)

Herbert Hoover (as US Food Administrator)

Winston Churchill (as deputy minister of munitions)

Herbert Gibbs of Anthony Gibbs & Sons (Chilean nitrate, Nitrate and Soda Executive)

Frank Taussig, Harvard professor Wilson brought to Paris, argued for international resource allocation board.

C.K. Leith, geologist at Paris, also favored allocation board

Corrado Gini surveyed global distribution of resources and food

Benjamin Strong, NY Fed, attempted with Norman to restore gold standard in 1920s

Edward Kemmerer proposed appointing foreigners to board of Chile's central bank in 1925

Dawes Plan 1924, reschedule German reparation payments

Seymour Parker Gilbert, US agent general in charge of reparations, later partner at JPM

Thomas Lamont, "one of the most influential propagandists for a nongovernmental international bank" (116).

Jeremiah Smith Jr., JPM partner and BIS (Bank of Int'l Settlements) planner

Charles Addis, Hongkong & Shanghai Bank

Henry Morgenthau, US Ambassador to Ottoman Empire

"Keynes, one of the architects of the Bretton Woods agreements, suggested in his 1930 Treatise on Money, which went to print just as the BIS opened its doors, that the international bank could, with some tweaks, evolve into the kind of supranational agency that he thought was necessary to manage a reformed international monetary standard." (131)

A consortium sponsored by the League of Nations to finance China went into abeyance during WWI but was reconstituted and "reorganized in 1920 as a four-power group, including the United Kingdom, France, Japan, and the United States. Each national banking group was led by a single bank, represented by one person, and was backed by its respective government. In the United States, the banking group was led by J.P. Morgan, led by Thomas Lamont; in Britain, it was the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, represented by its London manage Charles Addis." (162)

In Obsidian, each of these names could be [[double bracketed]] which would link them to a note dedicated to the named person. I’ll be trying to develop a way to do this in Substack, and I’ll also be reproducing my Substack as an Obsidian vault. I’ll share it when it looks like something.