The United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, commonly known as the Bretton Woods Conference, took place in New Hampshire in July 1944. It resulted in the establishment of two organizations: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to facilitate international monetary cooperation; and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, usually called the World Bank), to provide loans to individual nations and to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) for postwar rebuilding and development. The IMF and IBRD were designed to underwrite world peace and prosperity by preventing another global depression and the economic nationalism that many thought had contributed to the coming of World War II.
Several dozen nations met at Bretton Woods, with the United States leading the discussions. The American position reflected long-term concerns of Secretary of State Cordell Hull about the dangers of high tariffs and other forms of economic nationalism. But the principal American figures in creating the Bretton Woods system, with its emphasis on currency convertability, expanded trade, development loans, and a healthy, cooperative world economy, were Secretary of the Treasury Henry T. Mor-GENTHAu, Jr., and his assistant secretary, the economist Harry Dexter White.
The United States emerged from World War II with a large accumulation of gold and credits and a strong industrial economy. This great economic strength, together with American power in wartime and postwar global politics, made it virtually inevitable that the United States would dominate the Bretton Woods conference and the instrumentalities it created. The U. S. Senate approved the Bretton Woods agreements in July 1945, and by December 1945 the required number of governments had ratified the treaties establishing the IMF and the IBRD. The Soviet Union took part in the conference but did not participate in the Bretton Woods system because of worsening Soviet-American relations as the cold war developed.
The main objective of the International Monetary Fund was to prevent the currency devaluations of the 1930s that had seemed so harmful to international economic and political stability. It sought to protect and stabilize short-term foreign exchange rates without jeopardizing a country’s domestic economic goals and production levels, and to standardize international monetary transactions in a smooth, efficient system that would promote free trade, stability, and prosperity. The U. S. plan that emerged from Bretton Woods protected the gold standard and established the dollar as the world’s dominant currency. IMF operations were disappointing in the early postwar period, but the agency did help to establish the principle that currency devaluations not be used in international economic competition.
The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development was to provide loans at reasonable interest rates to underwrite the reconstruction of economies damaged by World War II and to promote investments and growth in developing countries. The goal was a healthy, growing world economy. The United States, as the largest subscriber to the World Bank, had the principal voice in its operations, and in the early postwar period saw that it channeled assistance to European countries whose economic difficulties made them vulnerable to communist inroads. Such assistance was connected to American “containment” policy in the cold war and prefigured the Marshall Plan assistance to Europe. Smaller developing nations did not get the sort of assistance envisioned in the initial agreements.
Like the American leadership in creating and implementing the United Nations, the Bretton Woods system reflected the new role and power of the United States in global affairs and its determination to use its power in pursuing its own interests and principles as well as global peace and prosperity. In the early postwar era, the IMF and IBRD became tied to American containment policy in the cold war, but both would play larger roles in subsequent decades in fostering currency convertability and stability and in providing loans for economic development.
Further reading: Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., A Search for Solvency: Bretton Woods and the International Monetary System, 1944-1971 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979); Richard N. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969).
—Anne Rothfeld
Bridges, Harry (1901-1977) labor activist An Australian-born maritime worker who identified with the radical and militant elements of the labor movement, Harry Bridges played an important role in the resurgence of organized labor in the United States during the Great Depression.
Bridges was born on July 28, 1901, into a middle-class household near Melbourne, Australia, and went by the name Alfred Renton Bridges. A number of experiences and people in his early life exposed him to dissenting ideas, including his uncle Harry, an official of Australia’s main labor party, whose name Bridges adopted. Bridges left home when he was 16 to pursue adventure as a sailor, and journeys to the slums of Bombay and London impressed upon him the degree to which capitalism could materially and spiritually impoverish working people. Bridges also learned of protest tactics and strategies as a participant in the massive 1917 general strike in Australia and as a brief
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Recruit of the International Workers of the World (IWW) while unemployed in New Orleans.
In 1922, Bridges found work as a longshoreman on the San Francisco waterfront and experienced its dreadful working conditions. Longshoremen who did not belong to the company union had to endure the humiliation of the morning “shape-up” in which throngs of men waited on the docks in hopes of gaining temporary employment. Blacklists, kickbacks, and favoritism often influenced hiring decisions, and speedups rendered already dangerous work even more threatening to life and limb. Bridges joined the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), but its conservative leadership refused to seek change. The Great Depression severely aggravated these hardships, leaving Bridges without work and his family on RELIEF and pushing him and many other longshoremen toward unionism and radicalism.
Government sanction of union organizing under the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of the New Deal inspired longshoremen to act. When 12,000 Pacific Coast longshoremen went on strike in May 1934, area seamen and teamsters joined them, as did more than 100,000 San Francisco workers who waged a general strike to protest police violence against unionists. Bridges became an effective union organizer and a major spokesperson for the longshoremen. Despite the use of strikebreakers, the longshoremen won union recognition, a pay increase, a shorter workweek, and an end to the hated shape-up.
The solidarity displayed by various maritime workers during the strike quickly crumbled. Seamen returned to the tradition of craft-oriented and racially discriminatory unionism, while Bridges and his ILA supporters championed industrial unionism. This conflict mirrored larger splits occurring within the labor movement during the 1930s between the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). In 1937, Bridges led an overwhelming majority of Pacific Coast longshoremen into the CIO to form the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU). Emphasizing common economic interests among workers, he welcomed African Americans into the ILWU and helped to organize a multiethnic force of sugar and pineapple plantation workers in Hawaii.
Between 1934 and 1962, Bridges fought a number of attempts on the part of his enemies in business, government, and organized labor to force his deportation on the grounds that he sought to overthrow the government by force. These legal battles intensified considerably with the revival of anticommunism following World War II. Although he apparently joined the Communist Party, according to his biographer, Bridges always denied membership, and he avoided deportation. In any event, he was guided less by communist ideology than by a commitment to addressing the needs and desires of longshoremen.
By the 1960s, rapid technological changes undermined the bargaining power of skilled workers. Bridges accepted mechanization in return for a hefty pension benefit for older longshoremen, an agreement that contributed to high unemployment, unsafe working conditions, and a large temporary workforce on the docks. He died in 1977.
Further reading: Charles P. Larrowe, Harry Bridges: The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in the United States, 2d ed. (Westport, Conn.: L. Hill, 1977); Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
—Theresa Ann Case
World History
