"un-American"

You probably remember Grover Norquist referring to the Greatest Generation's fights against the Depression and the Nazis as all of a piece, and that piece being"un-American". Probably only a few history readers remembered that David Kennedy made the"all of a piece" argument, though not the"un-American" argument, in Freedom from Fear. A new book, by a Kennedy student, takes the argument a step further, looking at the peace arrangements of 1944-45. Here's the start of my review from"Altercation", where you can read the rest:

Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. vi+437 pp., illustrations, notes, and index. USD 35.00, cloth.

Reviewed by Eric Rauchway

Regular readers know that we at Altercation love us some Bretton Woods, or at least, we love those books that say something useful about Bretton Woods. Why? well, to the extent that the world did not fall into chaos after 1945 the way it did after 1918, it’s owing largely to the successful imposition of an international order paid for by the Bretton Woods system. You wouldn’t know it, of course, to pick up a textbook on U.S. history. They barely mention it—because, let’s be honest here, there’s more than a whiff of castor oil about Bretton Woods. It happens in the middle of 1944, and there’s no shootin’ in it. You could be talking about the aftermath of D-Day, the battle for Guam, or at least the Port Chicago explosion, and instead you want to talk about piddling stuff like the management of international economic relations? Please. We prefer the clash of armies to the vaporings of economists and diplomats.

Yet, of course, it’s Bretton Woods that rules after 1945 (or, really, 1947: but more on that below), it’s Bretton Woods that makes for an era of speedy and widely distributed economic growth in the world. It would be stretching only a little to say that it’s Bretton Woods that wins the Cold War. And Elizabeth Borgwardt wants you to know that, and to know why the U.S. backed Bretton Woods, why there was something immensely moral about that choice, and what it means that we don’t want to do things like that anymore.

Read the rest here.