John Foster Dulles

Michael A. Guhin, John Foster Dulles: A Statesman and His Times (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972).

Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1973).

Richard H. Immerman, ed. John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

Richard H. Immerman, John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in US Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press,1998).

Frederick W. Marks III, Power and Peace: The Diplomacy of John Foster Dulles (Westport: Praeger, 1993).

Ronald W. Pruessen, John Foster Dulles: The Road to Power (New York: Free Press/McMillan, 1982).

Mark G. Toulouse, The Transformation of John Foster Dulles: From Prophet of Realism to Priest of Nationalism (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1985).

Chris Tudda, The Truth Is Our Weapon: The Rhetorical Diplomacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006).

John Foster Dulles is a towering figure in American diplomacy. Not only did he serve as secretary of state under President Dwight Eisenhower, but he also had a full half century of experience in international politics and business. Dulles also came from a family with deep ties to policymaking within the United States. He shares a name with his grandfather, John Watson Foster, who was secretary of state under President Benjamin Harrison. His uncle, Robert Lansing, was secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson. Not to be outdone, Dulles’s younger brother Allen was also director of the Central Intelligence Agency. His sister, Eleanor, was a prolific writer and policy analyst. Their father, Allen Macy Dulles (not to be confused with his brother’s son, who shares the same name) was a prominent Presbyterian minister.

Coming from a diplomatic dynasty, John Foster Dulles would seem to be destined for a role in government; however, the major portion of his life was dedicated to the service of some of the largest and most powerful corporations. This role was fulfilled through his long career as the senior partner at the Wall Street law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell. Political experience and business went hand in hand for Dulles. He was present at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, was a major figure in Republican Party Politics during the 1940s, served as foreign policy adviser to the Truman administration, and was a particpant in the formulation of momentous matters such as the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, and the Japanese Peace Treaty at the end of World War II. Likewise, during his life he also served as legal counsel for some of the world’s largest banks: J.P. Morgan & Company, the National City Company; Kuhn, Loeb & Company, Dillon, Read & Company; Harris, Forbes & Company; Brown Brothers, Harriman; Goldman, Sachs; and the First National Banking Corporation, Schroeders, and the Bank for International Settlements, among others. Under his management, Sullivan & Cromwell also served the legal interests of major industrial businesses such as Ford Motor Company, General Motors, General Electric, International Business Machines, International Telephone and Telegraph, Standard Oil, and I.G. Farben.

Being at the locus of wealth and power makes Dulles a very interesting biographical subject. Numerous books have been written about him, and even more include Dulles as an important supporting character. For instance, Dulles is at the center of a historiographical controversy over whether he or Eisenhower had more influence over the direction of foreign policy during his years as secretary of state. Naturally, Dulles also shows up in the copious number of books written that concern the exploits of his younger brother as head of the CIA. Additionally, because Dulles was a major diplomatic personality during the onset of the Cold War, he makes appearances in a far larger volume of literature on that subject as well.

In order to approach a better understanding of this very significant and highly complex personality, this essay will consider eight relatively recent biographies of Dulles in an attempt to identify common themes, methodological differences, and frequently used sources. To make this essay manageable, there is a “first wave” of biographies that will not be considered here: These are John Robinson Beal’s John Foster Dulles: A Biography (1957), Mildred H. Comforts’ John Foster Dulles: Peacemaker (1960), and Louis Gerson’s John Foster Dulles. Making up for the absence of these books are Michael Guhin’s John Foster Dulles: A Statesman and His Times (1972) and Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (1973), which capture the contrasting interpretations and scholarship of the earlier biographies. Dulles was then recast in the 1980s by Ronald Pruessen in John Foster Dulles: Road to Power (1982), followed by Mark Toulouse with The Transformation of John Foster Dulles (1985). The 1990s saw another handful of biographies. Diplomatic historian Richard H. Immerman edited a volume of essays collected in John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War (1990) and then followed it up with his own study of the man in John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in US Foreign Policy (1998). During this period, Frederick W. Marks III also published Power and Peace: The Diplomacy of John Foster Dulles (1993). The most recent edition to this large body of scholarship is represented in Chris Tudda’s The Truth Is Our Weapon: The Rhetorical Diplomacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles (2006).

Some themes are worth noting before delving into this diverse collection of texts. The first theme involves the acceptance or rejection of the revisionist challenge to the Eisenhower administration. As we will see, the various biographers acknowledge this historiographical debate over influence in policymaking during this period. The second theme also involves Dulles’s role as secretary of state. Many of the biographies focus on this period of his life, perceiving it as the most impactful. To a degree, this has to do with the vigorous field of diplomatic history, which churns out controversy and contention among its practitioners, as well as a great deal of scholarly material. Likewise, this has led some biographers to focus on other aspects of Dulles’s life in order to add dimension to the scholarship. This bifurcation is interesting because it has spurred some writers to argue that Dulles’s views changed dramatically in the last years of his life in public office. This has added a secondary itinerant theme for those that study his career in the Eisenhower administration versus other aspects of his life: Dulles’s religious convictions. This is also an aspect explored in a majority of the books reviewed here.

Michael Guhin’s John Foster Dulles: A Statesman and His Times falls into the category of texts that focus on Dulles’s life as secretary of state. Adapted from Guhin’s doctoral thesis at the University of London, the author himself was a Cold Warrior like his subject, working as an aide to Kissinger in the early 1970s when his book was published. Like many biographers before him, Guhin was attempting to make sense out of early Cold War policy formulations and utilized Dulles as a lens to study their development.

Guhin’s main argument strikes upon a common theme present in many of the texts on Dulles: That is, that the man, while a seemingly one-dimensional, hawkish anti-communist, was actually a complex and nuanced personality. This view portrays Dulles as a someone whose opinions were informed by a liftetime of experience in international business and diplomacy. Guhin contends that “an inaccurate image of Dulles continues to be commonly accepted in both academic communities and general publics at home and abroad” (2). This led the author to examine more closely Dulles’s writings, including those on his religious faith, to help produce a more detailed picture of his subject.

To that end, Guhin organizes his text around a loose thematic framework. The author makes prodigious use of the Dulles collections at Princeton University, with particular focus on personal correspondence, in order to tease out his subject’s complexity. Guhin singles out certain events, and Dulles’s role in them, to be utilized as a case studies. Because of Guhin’s focus on Dulles’s role in the Eisenhower administration, these sketches mainly involve diplomatic problems, such as the negotiations surrounding the Suez Crisis.

The picture that emerges is a man who consciously made broad hawkish statements in public, but was a tough-minded pragmatist in behind-the-scenes dealings with Congress, other diplomats, and foreign leaders. Guhin continually characterizes Dulles as calculating and complex, with a healthy respect for realism and pragamatic negotiation. This view is buttressed by Guhin’s constant referral to Dulles’s religious convictions as a primary roadmap for his morality. Guhin concludes that despite his underlying pragmatism, Dulles comes off as dogmatic and inflexible, conceding that “It can fairly be said that some of Dulles’ own rhetoric and style of presenting policies, as distinct from the actual content of the policies themselves, oftentimes…unintentionally served to encourage such an impression” (295).

Guhin’s portrait has led some reviewers to identify the author’s study as “revisionist,” although a closer inspection reveals Guhin’s affinity with Dulles, rather than sustained critique.¹ Despite Guhin’s attempts to paint Dulles as an old-style liberal internationalist, the bellicose, moralizing side repeteadly emerges. Guhin’s attempt to “explain” this away reads more as apologizing than it does an acurate portrayal. This impression is only intensified by the authors choice to gloss over much of the rest of Dulles’s life beyond his role in the Eisenhower administration. Like earlier, more traditional biographies, Guhin descends into hagiographic territory, essentially excusing Dulles as a product of Cold War brinksmanship, rather than an archetect of it. Ultimately, it is difficult for the reader to come to a conclusion about Dulles in Guhin’s text, due to the frenetic change in topics and lack of concrete arrangement to support the author’s thesis.

In dramatic contrast to Guhin, Townsend Hoopes’s The Devil and John Foster Dulles is useful in providing a different impression of Dulles from the same period in the early 1970s. Hoopes also had an extensive career in government, working in the Department of Defense and later serving as co-chairman for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). As far as his work on Dulles is concerned, Hoopes won a Bancroft Prize for the book under review. Hoopes’s experience working as under-secretary of the Air Force during the height of the Vietnam War left him critical of American Cold War strategy. This view inspired him to write and publish The Limits of Intervention (1969), which continues to be his most well known book. Like Guhin, Hoopes endeavored to take a closer look at the origins of the Cold War, which later brought him to study John Foster Dulles.

Unlike Guhin, Hoopes work more accurately represents the orthodox view, rather than a revisionist one. Hoopes is critical of nearly every policy intitative Dulles was involved in, from the crises of Quemoy-Matsu and Suez, to strategies involving Vietnam. In Hoopes’s view, despite his worldly experience, Dulles was an inflexible anti-communist, who developed a taste for political partisanship and imposed his moralistic view on his subordinates. Rather than possessing an ability to engage a multitude of perspectives, Hoopes portrays Dulles as possessing a firm worldview, but with a keen sense of tactics. Hoopes states, “ Dulles was far more a tactitician than a systematic strategist and planner, but also a tactitican who operated on a fixed moral or religious premises” (488). To that end, Hoopes lays his most grave criticism on Dulles’s influence over Eisenhower’s Vietnam strategy, which he argues left a lasting legacy on what would be the tragic consequences of American military involvement there. Hoopes argues that Dulles’s anti-communist brinksmanship set the tone for the following decade, concluding that his views were “embedded in the very bone structure of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s inaugural address” and policies (505).

In order to support his arguments, Hoopes makes use of the Dulles oral history project at Columbia University, which houses hundreds of recorded interviews. Beyond this, Hoopes also utilizes the Dulles collections at Princeton. Structurally, Hoopes builds a more chronological account of Dulles’s life, which he then uses to highlight particular thematic events that he believes capture his thinking. For instance, in an interview with fellow diplomat Oliver Franks, who worked with Dulles in the earlier part of his life in the mid 1920s, he stated that Dulles was “locked into his own structural process” (39). Hoopes makes good use of the sources to help tease out his subject’s views in this regard.

Although Hoopes presents a significantly wider view, the author still falls into the trap of magnifying Dulles’s State Department experience over the rest of his life. Dulles’s lengthy career as a corporate lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell are given very brief treatments, where a more detailed view might have been appropriate. Hoopes is one of the first biographers, for example, to deal with Dulles’s business arrangements with the Nazis, but only provides limited treatment of the subject matter. Instead, Hoopes presents this information under the larger, more common theme of Dulles’s religious convictions, which is an odd choice. Like other books reviewed in this essay, Hoopes holds that Dulles became more religious over time, which informed his self righteous anti-communism.

Furthermore, the clichéd view of Dulles at times seems overly simplistic. Just like with Guhin’s work, because we do not have a detailed background, we have no basis for the accuracy of whether Dulles actually did change his views over time, or remained rigidly dogmatic. The Devil and John Foster Dulles also seems to fall under the category of works that ascribe more influence to Dulles under the Eisenhower administration. Again, it is difficult to determine the veracity of this view, not only because of the author’s closeness to Vietnam policy and a professed desire to assign blame, but also because Hoopes does not reference the Eisenhower library collection to either support or contradict this view.

What is perhaps most dissappointing is Hoopes’s failure to tie Dulles’s career at Sullivan & Cromwell and the interests of some of its biggest clients, from J.P. Morgan to United Fruit, to the policy decisions he made later in his life. While Hoopes is not alone in this scholarly blind spot, not drawing the connection between corporate policy and diplomatic policy when studying a character who so thoroughly embodied it is a fairly significant ommission. Instead, we get an image that resembles the more typical one-dimensional Cold Warrior common to earlier descriptions of Dulles.

Thankfully, reassessments of Dulles continued to appear throught the following decades. In 1982, Ronald Pruessen published John Foster Dulles: The Road to Power, which significantly expanded the detail and scope of Dulles. Pruessen is a professor at the University of Toronto who specializes in globalization, particularly the relationships between private institutions and diplomatic history. As such, Pruessen is well suited to examine Dulles, who, as noted above, straddles both of these worlds. Indeed, Pruessen notes that “a strong econcomic strain has not usually been associated with Dulles, but…necessitates placing it alongside images of ideological impulses, religious proclivities, annd vigorous partisanship” (xiv). The author characterizes Dulles as a microcasm for political, ideological, and religious currents that have shaped U.S. history, with a special emphasis on economic preoccupations.

As for an overriding argument, Pruessen contends that Dulles was far more complex than earlier representations have let on. Pruessen subtly chastises other writers for focusing intently on Dulles’s State Deparment experience: “Dulles was, after all, sixty-four years old when Dwight Eisenhower appointed him secretary of state…He would spend less than 10 percent of his life as the primary formulator of American foreign policy – after having spent 90 percent of it in many other roles” (xii-xiii). Pruessen envisioned a two-volume project in order to make this project workable; thus, Road to Power is the first part of a biography that concsciously avoids an analysis of Dulles as secretary of state and focuses on the remainder of his life. This allows the author to provide a more detailed view of Dulles’s early life and background, his career as a lawyer and businesseman, initial experiences in government and foreign policy during World War I, his formal political associations and religious activities, and his diplomatic experience during the Truman administration.

Unsurprisingly, Pruessen takes a chronological approach, providing a detailed narrative of Dulles’s life. Pruessen mines the Dulles collections at Princeton as well as the Columbia University Oral History Project. Beyond these, the author has also examined the State Department files at the National Archives extensively and demonstrates that he is also conversant in the secondary literature, as well. The only conspicuous absence in documentation are those at the Eisenhower libarary, though the author has made it clear that he is omitting this portion of Dulles’s career.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the text is his subject’s experience as an international lawyer during the middle years of his life. Pruessen is interested in multinational cartels, and describes at length some of these business arangements and how Dulles was involved. Without going deeply into detail, Pruessen lends credence to the view that Dulles did, in fact, facilitate the businesses of many companies operating within Nazi Germany. Several of the other works reviewed take at face value Dulles’s supposed disgust with the Hitler regime; however, Pruessen contends that there is stark distinction between his subject’s actions and his words in this regard. Other texts have picked up on the ground breaking research done by Pruessen on this subject, particularly Nancy Lisagor and Frank Lipsius’s study of Sullivan & Cromwell in A Law Unto Itself (1988).²

Beyond this tidbit, Pruessen reinforces the view of Dulles as a nuanced and complicated personality, qualifying his work as more overtly “revisionist.” The author demonstrates that Dulles’s views did change over time, and he was not as inflexible as earlier scholarship has suggested. That said, Pruessen is highly critical of Dulles, concluding that there was an inherent shallowness to his subject that increased as he approached the end of his years. Pruessen states, “The clear strengths of Dulles’s intellect deserve recognition. So do the weakenesses. If there was some breadth of experience and vision, if there was capacity for percipient analysis of significant issues, there were also serious limitations. They were in evidence at all stages of his life, but took their toll increasingly as time went on” (502). This gives some credence to the view present in other works that Dulles changed his opinions significantly by the time he became secretary of state. By 1952, Pruessen calls Dulles’s position as one obssessed with “intellectual brinksmanship” (508). Although Dulles had shown earlier more bipartisan impulses during the Truman administration, Pruessen argues that his growing hawkishness continued unabated.

It is clear that Pruessen extended the scope of scholarship on John Foster Dulles beyond either Guhin or Hoopes, though the framework is still limited. Unfortunately, this may have more to do with the fact that the second planned volume was never released, leaving Pruessen’s vision of Dulles incomplete. Pruessen’s work is also lengthy and repetitive at times, particularly when dealing with more abstract pronouncements about Dulles’s religiosity. Despite the author’s criticism, Pruessen also has admiration for his subject, though this reviewer considers his comparisons to John Quincy Adams an overstatement. By and large, Pruessen’s work was the most comprehensive to date, and set the standard for future research.

Not long after Pruessen, Mark Toulouse continued the theme of Dulles’s evolving views with The Transformation of John Foster Dulles in 1985. Toulouse is a specialist in the history of Christianity and pays special attention to Dulles’s religious convictions. Like several other authors, Toulouse contends that Dulles went through a significant change in philosophy in the years immediately prior to becoming secretary of state. The study itself is an interesting contrast to Pruessen’s work, as Toulouse focuses specifically on Dulles’s years in the Eisenhower administration.

Essentially, Toulouse is fixed almost exclusively on Dulles’s religious side, contending that diplomatic historians often do not pay enough attention to the faith of policymakers and how it informs their decisions. This religiosity, acording to Toulouse, is particularly true of Dulles, which the author argues is the prime motivator for the moralism in his policy formulations and his incresingly Manichean view of the Cold War. Toulouse states, “Dulles’s shift of his setting from formulating polices in primarily religious circles to formulating policies in primarily political circles, contributed to this transformation” (xxiii). In order to argue that Dulles’s views evolved, Toulouse spends a majority of the text analyzing Dulles’s writing and speeches. Toulouse contends that after 1945, Dulles experienced a religious awakening that transformed his concept of moral law.

Toulouse’s text is organized in a somewhat chronological sequence. Although other authors have focued on Dulles’s religious upbringing in detail, Toulouse spends a majority of the text exploring Dulles’s faith after 1937. In fact, all but the introductory and concluding chapters deal with Dulles’s activities within the Federal Council of Churches. Within these chapters, Toulouse primarily consults Dulles’s own writings. The text also includes a very short selected bibliography and a longer one of primary sources, almost all from the Dulles collection at Princeton.

Despite its academic trappings, Toulouse’s text is openly polemical. The forward by Akira Iryie leaves this reviewer to wonder if Iryie actually read the text, or was simply lending support to a former student when he was a professor at the University of Chicago. From the outset, the tone of the book is partisan, as Toulouse spends more space in the text writing in admiration of Ronald Reagan than actually writing about John Foster Dulles. Repeatedly, Toulouse makes simplistic and value laden judgements without much citation of secondary literature. This choice to omit or ignore earlier history is particularly problematic in the context of Toulouse’s vigorous attack on diplomatic historians in general in his introduction. Ironically, in place of demonstrating his own understanding of the diplomatic context of the period, Toulouse fills his text with metaphors which confuse, rather than enlighten. For example, Toulouse writes about Dulles’s view of the League of Nations: “Dulles, for his part, could not see the good in simply chopping gaway the sickest branches (Germany, Italy, and Japan) of a diseased and contagious tree while leaving the roots and trunk (an international system committed to the maintenance of the status quo) intact” (127).

Not only is the text almost completely bereft of any criticism of Dulles’s bellicose sabre rattling, but Toulouse replaces contrary evidence with shallow platitudes that further undermine the author’s argument. Toulouse is clearly aware of other studies of Dulles but utilizes them only when he agrees with their assessments. Among other sections, this is clearly apparent in Toulouse’s very brief discussion of Dulles’s views on Nazism. Toulouse writes, “Hitler stood for everything he opposed…He knew that Germany’s actions constituted a great evil, an evil that could not safely be ignored” (103-4). It was not as if Pruessen was the only individual to write about Dulles’s problematic, extensive businesss relationships with Nazi Germany. There were defenses written for Dulles in the religious tracts that Toulouse used to write his book. Toulouse cites Pruessen several times, but completely avoids doing so in the context of Dulles’s employment.

Toulouse’s text is a frustrating read. Beyond the ommissions, simplifications, and sometimes blatant cheerleading of the most hawkish aspects of American Cold War ideology, Toulouse’s argument comes off as somewhat incoherent. At times it seems he is arguing that Dulles became more religious and moralistic later in life, and at others he argues that in a new role as secretary of state, he had to put aside his religiosity and promote policy from a realist perspective. Toulouse’s book is also more than a bit disorganized. Headings that do not match the subject matter interrupt the text at irregular intervals, and his narrative meanders from writings about Dulles to the politics of Toulouse’s time in 1985 without much of a transition. Any use of the scholarship in The Transformation of John Foster Dulles beyond an examination of Dulles’s writing on religion is compromised by the polemical nature of the work.

Fortunately, scholarship on Dulles was beginning to yield a more diverse range of opinions as the century came to a close. In 1990, the well known diplomatic historian Richard Immerman facilitated the production of a collection of essays on Dulles. This was appropriately sponsored by Princeton University Press as one of the chief stewards of documentation on the famous polarizing personality. Although it is difficult to judge a work with such a large diversity of opinions, the scholarship is served well by those with extensive knowledge of diplomatic history, such as John Lewis Gaddis and Richard Immerman, as well as by individuals like Ronald Pruessen who have already demonstrated a nuanced understanding of Dulles.

Four general themes can be discerned from the essays. First, most of the authors, whether overtly or not, have taken the revisionist view of the Eisenhower administration into account and place Dulles as key in the formulation of policy, but not the ultimate decision maker. This they leave to Eisenhower himself. Second, the scholars also tend to agree that Dulles is a more complex character than earlier accounts, particularly in his views when he held office. The third theme is a bit more contentious, which involves an assesment of Dulles’s policies as secretary of state. Gaddis is the most positive, while Stephen G. Rabe is the most critical. Most of the other essays fall between these two extremes. The fourth theme involves the bifurcation between scholars that study Dulles’s life before he was secretary of state, and those that focus on his years in the Eisenhower administration.

The unifying impression, if one can be articulated, is that Dulles was a subtle thinker, but still succumbed to hawkishness as America’s chief diplomat. Gaddis explores the “transformation” thesis of Dulles and sees him adjusting his views once head of the State Department. George C. Herring credits Dulles as a master of tactical strategy in his dealing with Dien Bien Phu. Nancy Bernkopf Tucker teases out the nuanced side of Dulles’s “Two Chinas” policy. Wm. Roger Louis argues that both tactical genius and hypocrisy guided Dulles’s approach during the Suez Crisis. Stephen Rabe rips Dulles for imperialist policies in Latin America, but concedes that Dulles laid the groundwork for strategy that extended well beyond his lifetime. In each example, the bellicose nature of the Eisenhower adminstration’s Cold War orientation is obvious, but Dulles’s responses no longer appear as uniform.

Immerman does a decent job of corralling the work into a coherent whole. In the opening he notes that Dulles’s “rehetoric haunts is reputation” arguing for a need to analyze the man’s actions more closely (3). Additionally, Immerman argues that an “archivally based reassessment of Dulles is evident” (9). This reviewer strongly agrees with both of these sentiments. In conclusion, Immerman is equally as lucid; he notes, “Dulles was no Dr. Strangelove. However, he appeared so: to the Washington community, to the attentive public, to allied leaders. Even those with whom he worked closely in the State Deparment suspected him of being too much the nuclear enthusiast” (271). Immerman notes, as many of the essayists do, that Dulles was more nuanced and strategic; this leads the editor to call for further study of achival materials that are still out of reach to researchers. Again, this reviewer agrees.

It is a shame that Frederick Marks III was not a contributor to the above collection of essays, as it might have preempted the release of another controversial work akin to Toulouse’s hagiographic account. From the beginning of Marks’s Power and Peace, Dulles is portrayed as an incorruptable Cold Warrior. Marks writes, “John Foster Dulles had been in the van of a world-wide coalition against communism…During the final words of benediction, pronounced over the remains of the man regarded by virtually all listeners as a fallen hero” (ix). Marks is not shy about deifying Dulles, and represents himself as a staunch critic of earlier, less than savory accounts. Marks clearly states his central contention: “[Marks] seeks to redress a long-standing imbalance in historical works dealing with the period under review. Dulles has never received as much recognition as he deserves” (1).

As far as the structural arrangement of the text, Marks is not interested in Dulles’s early life, utilizing the majority of the book to examine his career as secretary of state almost exclusively. To that end, most of Mark’s chapters are designed around what he views as incorrect conclusions resulting from earlier scholarship on the reactions to various crises and policy formulations. In this regard, Marks’s pays special attention to coup in Guatemala in 1954 as a centerpiece for his argument.

Marks contends that Dulles should be lauded for a “peace record” rather than hawkishness. Overarching themes of Dulles negotiating peace in Korea and avoiding war in Vietnam and Berlin pervade the text. Marks again invokes the “complexity” theme, using it to argue that Dulles deserves chief credit for the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization, the Austrian State Treaty, and bringing West Germany into NATO. Some contortions are more difficult for Marks, who also attempts to credit Dulles with the overthrow of Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh and Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz, while still trying to attribute these events to the citizens of their respective countries, rather than the CIA.

In order to support his arguments, Marks has displayed an impressive array of source materials. Not only does he include archival documentation present in earlier studies, such as the collections at Princeton and the Oral History Project at Columbia, Marks has also included sources from Britain, China, and Guatemala. Unfortunately, Marks does so in a less than transparent fashion, with ponderously long end notes that confuse, rather than signify what sources he is pointing to. A scholar attempting to piece together documentation correlating to specific arguments would have likely have to redo Marks’s research, rather than verify it.

Ultimately, Marks goes against the grain of much of the scholarship presented in this essay. He seeks to place Dulles as the ultimate arbiter of policy in the Eisenhower administration. He also endeavors to rewrite the history of US policy in Korea, the events of the Suez crisis, and of the CIA led coups in Guatemala and Iran. This revisionism is particularly stark in the case of Guatemala, where Marks produces interviews of Guatemalans to argue that the CIA was not involved in overthrowing the popularly elected president Arbenz Guzmán. Conspiciously, Marks avoids mentioning that Dulles had been the lawyer of the United Fruit Company, who had a substantial interest in Guatemala, for many years. Considering the massive footnotes in other sections, Marks’s terse dismissals of CIA involvement and Dulles’s obvious conflicts of interest are highly suspect.

Marks’s work invited a chorus of criticisms from other scholars. Immerman took issue with his depiction of the Guatemala Coup, of which he had specific expertise in, and Stephen Ambrose needled Marks’s on his characterization of power dynamics within the Eisenhower administration.³ Anna K. Nelson also chastised Marks for delving into hagiographic territory noting, “Unfortunately, in his effort to prove his point, Marksweakens his case by not allowing Dulles a single policy error.”⁴ Considering the vehemence in which Marks insists on his heroic narrative of Dulles, accusations of a less than scholarly approach appear justified.

Immerman subsequently added to the growing body of scholarship on Dulles in 1998, producing a volume for the Biographies in American Foreign Policy series. This book was released in tandem with a lengthy study of the Eisenhower administration, Waging Peace (1998), bringing substantial contextual weight to the field. In stating his objective in this particular text, Immerman argues that Dulles left an “impressive yet contradictory legacy” that still necessitated unraveling (196). As noted earlier, Immerman subscribes to the overriding theme of complexity in describing Dulles, and as evidenced from the subtitle of this book, piety and pragmatism continue to be a lens into which this controversial personality can be studied.

As with Pruessen’s Road to Power, Immerman’s work appears, on the surface, to be more of a traditional biography. It is arranged chronologically, though it is also is more compact than the former work. An opening chapter examines Dulles’s early life, but the remainder of the book involves his position as secretary of state. Thus, the book is really more of a thematic examination of various policies during the Eisenhower administration, rather than a true biography.

Immerman’s major contribution here, though it is not clear if this is a reaction to Marks or not, is to resestablish the primacy of Eisenhower in the relationship between he and Dulles, as the major historiographical trend. The author is good a detailing the complexity of the arrangement, but he ultimately falls on the side of the President. The reader is treated to a study of this power dynamic in chapters specific to the New Look defense procurments and strategy involving Dien Bien Phu, as well as formulating Latin America policy.

Unsurprisingly, Immerman’s depth of knowledge is much more specific to the Eisenhower administration than Dulles himself. Much of the source material presented is a foray into Eisenhower scholarship, rather than a deep analysis of materials on Dulles. That said, there is virtue in brevity, and the text is good at quickly getting to the heart of various policy crises without getting too bogged down in minutia. Additionally, there is a very useful bibliographic essay at the end of the book, which is essential reading for Dulles scholars.

Immerman’s view of Dulles is mixed; he buys into the general postivist idea of the U.S. as a beacon of freedom in the Cold War, without giving Dulles, or Eisenhower, too much credit. The author keeps a scholarly distance between himself and his subjects, unlike Toulouse and Marks. Immerman concludes, “Dulles left an impressive yet controdictory legacy. He has been legitimately criticized for exaggerating the Communist threat…Dulles demonstrated a sophisticated and enlightened understanding of the problems inherent in an international system…however, he promoted policies [as secretary of state] antithetical to those he had previously advocated” (196). Moving into a new century of scholarship, Immerman appears to be articulating an updated, mainstream view of Dulles.

In the light of current scholarship, Chris Tudda’s The Truth is Our Weapon looms large. Tudda’s book is adapted from a 2002 dissertation at American University and is more representative of recent trends in diplomatic scholarship. In this case, Tudda utilizes the “cultural turn” evident in other segments of historical analysis to produce a close examination of rhetoric and discourse. Utilizing this methodology, Tudda builds upon earlier works that explore similar themes, but is more explicitly systematic.

Tudda’s research is not built entirely around John Foster Dulles; rather, it is a comparison between the rhetoric and policy of the Eisenhower administration more generally. While this necessarily involves Dulles, there is less material on the individual and more on the adminstration he served. Like several other scholars’ work reviewed here, Tudda concludes that the legacy of the Eisenhower administration is mixed. Tudda notes, “The evidence suggests that the administration failed to understand the power of words in a climate of insecurity brought about by the Cold War. Their confidential decision to ease world tensions failed because Eisenhower and Dulles could not reconcile this with their determination to pursue rhetorical diplomacy” (15). In this regard, Tudda’s choice to utilize textual analysis in examining the rhetoric of Dulles and Eisenhower is useful in building a more nuanced portrayal of the diplomacy of the era.

Structually, Tudda organizes his text in a more abstract thematic arrangement. Rather than a chronological account of foreign policy, the author jumps between different crises and responses to marshall evidence for his argument, rather than producing an overarching representation of the period. Three case studies emerge: the formulation of the European Defense Community Treaty, Cold War policy toward the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, and the Berlin Crisis of 1958-9. In order to engage these subjects, Tudda utilizes the sources typical to these fields, including those in the Dulles collection at Princeton and the Eisenhower library. Other sources of documentary evidence are less obvious, such as those from the newer Cold War International History Project and the Macmillan papers from the British Public Records Office.

Tudda’s scholarship helps reveal the essence of these diplomatic interactions. In engaging textual analysis of various speeches and policy pronouncements, it becomes clear that the use of rhetoric is perhaps just as essential in managing perception within international politics as action itself. While this is certainly a well known feature of recent politics, Tudda is good at demonstrating that this was still a new idea in the mid-twentieth century. Tudda contends, “Dulles and Eisenhower relied on bellicose rhetoric in order to push their vision of a new dynamic foreign policy, [but] they failed to understand their words could be so powerful” (79). Tudda also provides examples of successful uses of rhetoric. As far as the European Defense Community Treaty (EDC) is concerned, Tudda’s tight analysis suggests that Dulles’s threats to withdraw U.S. troops from Western Europe had the desired effect of muting criticism of rearming West Germany.

While it is difficult to provide full treatment of the often esoteric examinations here, Tudda is generally successful at providing evidence for his arguments. Among other works reviewed here, the book is more explicit in its use of textual analysis in order to get at the contradictions evident in the Eisenhower administration that have bedeviled previous scholars. Obviously, the examination of Dulles himself is quite limited, and the scholarship is specialized to a degree that limits a more broad view of the period. The organization of the various themes will also be unclear to non-specialists, limiting the work’s audience.

In sum, how can one evaluate such a diverse and varied collection of scholarship? A few observations are immediately apparent. As noted earlier, some themes continue to play a powerful role in the studies of Dulles. He emerges as a strategist, tactitican, complex, nuanced, and difficult to read. Textual analysis has pulled forward contradictory impulses informed by both pragmatism and piety. His religious, diplomatic, and business backgrounds continually come up as common themes. Meanwhile, his forceful rhetoric has shaped perceptions of the Eisenhower administration, which only have more recently been revised to produce a more heterogenous portrayal. Other themes have yet to reach resolution; it is, for instance, still unclear to what degree Dulles actually altered his views as secretary of state versus other roles he played earlier in his life.

Some works do appear more useful than others. Both the Marks and Toulouse books evidence a deep-seated partisanship that limits their usefulness as scholarly texts. Other books, such as the collection of essays edited by Immerman are good for demonstrating a diversity of opinion and showcasing the variety of sources available. As far as a detailed picture of Dulles’s entire life is concerned, the work by Pruessen remains the standard. Authors seeking to examine the man beyond his role in the Eisenhower adminstration are well served by this path breaking work.

Important questions about Dulles remain. Although examinations of rhetoric are useful, what about the influence of business clients? Other than Pruessen, most of the authors take for granted the relationship between multinational corporations and diplomatic policy. Relative to this subject, Dulles embodies one of the most prominent examples of this phenomenon. How much should scholars be concerned with the connection between entities that exist only to enhance their bottom line and interests of momentous topics such as national security, self determination of indiginous populations, and competing visions of governance? All of these issues are explored, but not from the perspective of the businesses. How much was United Fruit involved in Dulles’s policy positions on Guatemala? How about Standard Oil and Suez? These questions remain to be answered by future scholarship. This is partially a problem of sources. Despite the usefulness of the collections at Princeton and Columbia, what sort of materials exist elsewhere? For instance, if the vaults of Sullivan & Cromwell were to be thrown open, what new insights might be gained into Dulles’s thinking? This remains to be seen.

Do you identify with any of the movement’s sentiments? If so, which ones and why?

I think some of the roots of this current movement actually go back in February to the occupation of the capitol building in Madison to resist Scott Walker’s plan to curtail union rights. Here, people were expressing two sentiments: upholding the right of workers to organize and collectively bargain, and expressing the disgust in the exercise of arbitrary, non-democratic power, behind which people saw private, corporate interests as major forces. In the most general terms, the Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWS) represents a call to reform American democracy. Huge corporations have far too much leverage over our politics, economy, and culture.

I identify deeply with this sentiment. In 2000, I was an art school dropout looking for a “real job” to support my creative ambitions. I was doing well, working for Sony PlayStation as a graphic designer, but when the dot-com bubble burst, my company went under. I was subsequently hired for my computer experience by a large multinational bank to process mortgages for their whole U.S. market. Little did I know, the next economic bubble was already forming in the mortgage business.

My personal experience in banking encompasses the worst aspects of corporate hubris: flagrant violations of financial regulations and labor laws and a repressive and relentless push toward further profits above anything else.

By the time I had personally processed over 3.5 billion dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities, I realized that this activity would probably have a major impact on the economy and politics of the U.S. and the rest of the world. I had to get out of there. I reported what was going on to Eliot Spitzer’s office—which basically blew me off—and quit.

(There’s more to this story. I went on to work for other banks in the interim. I dealt with other big financial institutions that had a complete disregard for regulations, and I had to tell both Katrina victims and disabled Iraq veterans that they were being foreclosed on. I’ll leave it there for now.)

When I saw people protesting large banks in Zuccotti Park in those first weeks in September for violations of financial regulations, subverting the law and the political process, and causing economic turmoil with rampant, greedy speculation, this was not an abstraction for me. I had a clear picture of what this looked like from the inside.

My experience has led me to this opinion, and one that is shared by the OWS movement: The owners of the largest corporations (and more specifically, their biggest shareholders) consider themselves above the law. Human rights and democracy stand in the way of their enormous profits. They have tilted the political system to give themselves more control over the U.S. in the form of financial industry deregulation, tax loopholes that can be exploited by wealthy individuals and corporations, and laws that affect how money can be used in elections.

In response to this reality, the sentiments expressed by the OWS have crystallized into a few claims, all of which I identify with:

• Taking private money out of the political process
• An end to corporate personhood and its right to political “speech” in the form of financial contributions
• Breaking up the “too big to fail” banks
• Increasing oversight and regulation on all banks (including the Federal Reserve), particularly the speculative part of their business
• Closing tax loopholes for wealthy individuals and businesses
•  Prosecuting the most egregious offenders of the recent economic turmoil

These are the most generally expressed sentiments I have seen after closely following this movement from September to the present. There are plenty of others, though, as well. But I believe a majority of OWS supporters want to see reform, not a complete reshaping of our system.

Many that support the OWS movement, myself included, also want to support a new, robust jobs program, on the scale of the New Deal. Many also see OWS as a means to open up a dialog about systemic problems that have been going on much longer than 2008, such as pervasive poverty and inequality as a result of racism and misogyny, and the exploitative nature of the American empire on the rest of the world’s politics and economies. I believe this is also a crucially important development.

Also, many have started a dialog on the role of capitalism in American society in general. On one side, we have staunch anti-capitalists, who would like all businesses in the U.S. to be worker owned. On the other side, we have hardline libertarians who want to see all services privatized. For my part, I think most fall in between these two extreme camps. This is quite a range of sentiments expressed within the OWS. For this reason, I tend to take offense when media organizations attempt to characterize OWS as having a particular stance toward capitalism in general.

Remember: This is a young movement. It is also informed by many protest movements that came before it.

Why are so many protestors students? Do they have valid concerns?

Young people are often the catalysts for movements like this for a few reasons. They tend to be the most idealistic slice of the population. They are still forming their worldviews, their plans for life, and surveying how they are going to respond to the world around them. Students also tend to have more flexible schedules and more energy than other segments of the population.

They also have many valid concerns. First and foremost, they are inheriting the current political, economic, and cultural situation. They have a right to respond. This is the world they are joining and will be participating in for the rest of their lives, for better or for worse. Also, as students, by their very nature, they are (or should be) taught to question their reality. I think it is natural for students to respond to serious problems they see in the world around them.

More specifically, many students (myself included) have been saddled with an enormous amount of debt. This phenomenon has everything to do with the control that powerful economic interests have over our political, economic, and cultural systems. A majority of students in the U.S. are compelled to take on this debt due to cultural expectations. Costs have increased so much that only a wealthy minority are able to fully self finance their educations. This is a major frustration to many students, like myself, who see other countries subsidizing education, while the U.S. spends huge amounts of money on wars and tax breaks to wealthy individuals and corporations.

To be fair, the news media focuses on student protestors because they are easy to marginalize. They do not have as much perceived clout. Nearly every other segment of the population has involvement in OWS. For my part, I have seen many middle-aged workers, families, and older folks at these rallies—and not just a handful; they’re at least half of the participants. Yes, some of the most dramatic clashes have occurred between young people and police, but this isn’t the whole story by any stretch of the imagination.

I fully realize that students are already entering the workforce and feel the need to conform in many ways in order to feel like they are securing their future. Also, conformity begets more conformity. I don’t think they realize how much power they have to change the narrative so they don’t question how the ways they exhibit themselves showcase what is going on in their heads. They can change both and have a right and an opportunity to do so.

Have you visited the Occupy DC encampments? If so, can you describe the atmosphere there, both physical and emotional?

I’ve gone down to both the DC and Baltimore Occupy sites. I wanted to see for myself what the situation was like and compare it to news reports.

In both cases, the atmosphere was festive. People were upbeat, inclined to chat, and generally in good spirits about the direction of the movement. Physically, the spaces were generally well organized, as much as a loosely governed tent city could be. In both Baltimore and DC, there were medical personnel on site and food and water available. I did not utilize any sanitary services, although I did not see any evidence of the stories that I’ve heard on the news of people going to the bathroom outside. Again, it was a generally clean and organized situation. It reminded me of festivals I’ve been to in the past.

I found that there was some degree of responsible authority continually present, and that people generally managed themselves well in dealing with the police, media, tourists, and the homeless population.

In sum, things were calm and friendly. In my visits, I met Iraq War veterans, retired nurses, small business owners, a Holocaust survivor, a documentarian, curious teens, out of work musicians, baby-boomer tourists, and one or two begrudgers.

I did notice the massive police presence in DC (in Baltimore not so much). They were standing off to the side, but it did worry me that so much money was being spent monitoring what was a fairly benign situation. I personally didn’t feel threatened in the least. To be fair, I’m a white guy, albeit kind of a short, bookish type, but I have privilege when it comes to situations like this. I was there during the day and I witnessed many age groups, genders, and ethnicities, all seemingly getting along and discussing a wide range of issues.

What do you think will come of the protests? What can protestors do to keep the movement active?

For all the talk of the OWS movement coming up with a “message,” I find that line of questioning more enlightening as a way to discern the intentions of big media organizations, rather than the protesters themselves. In my opinion, the most important thing protestors can do is stay visible. In many movements, it wasn’t as much an articulated set of demands as it was consistent pressure informed by general sentiments that affected change.

Look at 1848, for example. We call today’s movements in the Middle East the Arab Spring. This label stems from the European “Spring of Nations” protest movements for more democratic rights. It started in Italy in January 1848, moved to France by February, in March it was in the German states, and by the late spring it was all over the Habsburg Empire in central Europe. Authorities crushed these movements; however, the upswell of democratic consciousness had a permanent effect. If you study the histories of the creation of Italy and Germany in the 1860s and 1870s, they look back to 1848 as a crucial turning point.

Many historians also compare 1848 to 1968. Again, protest was occurring worldwide. Some of it was centered on the war in Vietnam, but just as many (if not more) people were interested in civil rights, women’s rights, student rights, and worker’s rights. Again, these protests were seen as a “failure.” People didn’t change the world in the ways they had hoped; however, lasting change was made. In the U.S., civil rights legislation was passed. Overt racism and segregation ended. Women gained more recognition and autonomy over their bodies. The LGBT community gained more protections against discrimination. This wasn’t just in the U.S.; in China, the Cultural Revolution led to some economic reproachment that began to happen in the 1980s.

Ironically, many repressive tactics have a way of fueling movements like this. Every time police officers attack non-violent protestors, they give the movement more strength and visibility.

If the OWS can keep up the energy, visibility, and pressure, lasting change could be made. In the U.S., this could take the form of a change in the role money plays in our politics, a reform of our financial system, changes in tax legislation, a break up of the “too big to fail” banks, or a new, robust New Deal. I can tell you that, no matter what, there will be some that consider the OWS movement a “failure” when this is all over. But again, failure is relative. In history, no group achieves everything they want—I think it is important to be realistic about short-term and long-term goals. In the short term, there are people suffering who need help now. Debt relief, both on an individual and state level would help. Jobs programs would also help. In the long term, changes in the way private money influences our political system are, in my opinion, extremely important. Wealth inequality resulting from tax structures that benefit the rich also need long term attention.

Even at two months old, OWS has helped elevate these issues. Imagine what the next year will bring.

Here is the link for the article on the AU website: http://www.american.edu/cas/news/jay-weixelbaum-occupy-wall-street.cfm

This review, in particular, is both challenging and frustrating for me to write. Not only is it difficult for me to address all the details Richard Breitman’s Official Secrets that I find noteworthy, but I also simply do not have the time at this stage of the semester to closely investigate his sources and findings in a way that is remotely satisfying to me. As many of my peers are aware, my research into corporate culpability in the Holocaust is related to what Dr. Breitman has presented here and has a direct effect on the future implications of my work.

But allow me to back up – what, exactly, is presented in Official Secrets? Breitman utilizes recently declassified documentary evidence on the German Order Police’s involvement in the Holocaust via messages intercepted and decoded by British intelligence between 1939 and 1941. In the process of investigating these sources, he isolates three major controversies: The degree of official Nazi planning and improvisation, the attitudes and participation of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust, and the Western Allies’ knowledge of and reaction to the killings. The first two controversies are related and are central to the historiography of the Holocaust, which I will detail in a moment; but the third is also tantalizing. With several critical caveats, Breitman notes that British and American officials could not know more than the Nazi officials themselves, had reason for skepticism after the fiasco of faked German “atrocity” stories during World War I, and had a certain level of distraction with World War II itself – all of which contributed to inaction in light of the intercepted information about the unfolding genocide. Nevertheless, Breitman demonstrates that British and American officials not only had more information about the mass killings than was previously known, but also failed to utilize this information to prosecute former Nazis after the war.

As someone who was raised Jewish, the Shoah (Holocaust) is an intensely personal subject to me. Before I was familiar with the historiography, I found it easy to judge the Nazis, particularly high officials from Hitler on down, for their responsibility in perpetrating the genocide against the Jews; however, once I ventured into the world of Holocaust scholarship, I realized that there were profound disagreements between scholars about where responsibility lay. Without getting into too much detail, the major debate centers around two groups: The “functionalists,” who argue that Nazi officials were not in control of the day to day perpetration of the Holocaust and left the job to subordinates, who jockeyed for power, continually taking more extreme interpretations of anti-Semitic policy, and the “intentionalists,” who contend that Hitler and his inner circle were explicit in their intentions for mass murder of Jewish populations.[1] I personally became sympathetic to historians who attempted to synthesize the two groups,  such as Hans Mommsen, who argued that Nazi regime was a chaotic mess of competing bureaucracies, which I found useful in explaining the phenomenon of innocuous yet extensive penetration by U.S. corporations seeking profits within Nazi Germany.[2]

On the surface, I see Official Secrets taking the intentionalist position, but Breitman’s qualifiers, which come out in the course of his study, suggest a more synthetic approach. He notes that there was a significant gap between the willingness to commit genocide on the part of Nazi officials versus the German police and military. Critically, he also underlines the importance of orders, deception and secrecy in handling the opinion of the German public’s reaction to the unfolding Holocaust. Although the implications of his work are still sinking in for me, I find his moderated intentionalist leanings compelling.

I do have one significant criticism worth mentioning. Breitman isolates Allen Dulles as an example of how governments might react to knowledge of mass killings. He notes that Dulles passed on information about the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Poland to murder them in the camps to Washington and London to “publicize this fact in radio broadcasts, warning that those who planned or carried out the deportations would be included as war criminals” (232). I take issue with this statement based on my own research. I find it difficult to believe that Dulles was naïve about killings when he also worked for the law firm that represented IBM, who organized the deportations, the BIS which helped pay for them, and IG Farben, which often carried out the killings and/or produced the lethal chemicals for such purposes. Additionally, Dulles purposefully sheltered the infamous Nazi, General Karl Wolff, who personally oversaw the shootings of thousands of Jews, from war crimes trials.[3]

Due to my research interests, I found the implications in the epilogue of Official Secrets tremendously interesting and illuminating. Breitman has the understandably harsh historians’ indignation about the continued withholding of classified documents related to the Holocaust. He states, “Governments that withhold critical information from the historical record and the public long after the events do their countries and the world no service…No democratic politician or official can in the end control future assessments of him or her by historians, but the longer critical sources are kept secret, the longer such control is possible” (246). Without delving into conspiracy theory, the connections I have laid out above may be a possible reason why so many documents from the World War II era continue to be withheld by the U.S. government. I wonder if Dr. Breitman agrees.

As an aside, I was working on a presentation of Umut Özkirmili’s Theories of Nationalism (2010) and Anthony Smith’s The Nation in History (2000) right around this very time last year. After putting the books down in frustration trying to chart the various schools of thought on nationalism, from the primordialists to the post-modernists, I decided the best thing to do was to go buy a bottle of alcohol to “help” me get through the process. On my way to the liquor store, a group of fellow Boston College students passed me in the street. They were laughing, obviously enjoying themselves, and my curious ears caught a snippet of their conversation: “We ought to burn all the mosques here. That ought to show them where they belong.” After struggling for the previous several hours, days actually, conceptualizing nationalism and figuring out how I would present the various exegeses of it, this exchange hit me like a bolt of lightning. For the young men who I had just overheard, their sense of who they were and who they weren’t was not a challenging prospect; it was a deeply ingrained, unmediated concept. All of a sudden, the theories I had just been working through became all too real. The primordial sense of racialized nationhood came out in their blind hatred. And yet, the violence in their words was also informed by their experience of 9/11, as children, marinated in the environment of turbocharged post-modern nationalism, quick to define who and what was American (and what wasn’t), even as this conception itself became muddied in the endeavor of wars and imperial “nation building” that followed.

Of course the conception of nationality is anything but new. The history of nations and nationalism, while debated, extends far back through the human experience. While Anderson and others aptly focus on the “long” nineteenth century as the cradle of modern nationhood as we know it, others such as Elie Kadourie and Clifford Geertz argue that conceptions of nationality go back to antiquity and further.[1] Still others eschew both the primordial and the modernist interpretations and embrace Anthony Smith’s “ethnosymbolist” approach, contending that symbols, memories, values, and traditions can transcend and endure through overlapping political structures and experiences.[2]

For Anderson’s part, his socio-cultural approach is a bit easier to understand. Essentially, he focuses on the standardization of culture in industrialized societies, which centers around language. Anderson notes that particularly with the advent of print culture, this allowed groups of people to form “imagined communities” that helped them conceptualize their kinship with others in a shared cultural, political, and economic space. Benedict lucidly states, “even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even know them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of communion” (p. 6).  To that end, I was pleased to see that Anderson referenced the work of Elizabeth Eisenstein on the development of print culture in early modern Europe, in order to tease out and exemplify the transition of vernacular languages into standard modes of expression of nationalist sentiment (p. 44).[3]

Although Anderson utilizes this novel interpretation to refreshingly focus on non-European experiences, such as Southeast Asia, and Creole communities of the New World, Central and South America, there are some serious deficiencies worth noting in his method. First off, despite the brief mentions of the darker side of nationalism in Europe, Benedict gives far too short a treatment of fascism and its itinerant racism in the twentieth century. When held in contrast to Donald Bloxham’s The Final Solution (2009), which recounts European nationalist formulations, reactions, and ultimately purges of the “other,” mainly Jews, from the late nineteenth century through the aftermath of World War II, Imagined Communities appears dramatically incomplete.[4] Even within the framework of dealing with polities outside of Europe, I was puzzled that Anderson utilized the Western-styled Wade-Giles system for expressing Chinese words. Considering his particular focus on language and the existence of pinyin, a newer, more accurate, and most importantly, Chinese-developed system in use since the late 1950s, I was taken aback by Anderson’s insistence on using this more antiquated approach. For me this choice rubbed particularly raw against his frequent use of un-translated French to illustrate his points, which contained an air of pretension I have not witnessed in other texts of similar subject matter.

All criticisms aside, Imagined Communities, has a resonance due to its fairly lucid premise and decidedly poetic execution. The breadth and depth of Anderson’s knowledge is obvious and permeates his prose. His preface in the newer edition also a strikes a humble tone from the outset, which humanizes the author and allows some leeway for the aforementioned problems.

So what does Said actually say in this book? Essentially, he argues that historical representation has been used in the West as a vehicle to exert power over groups of people. Although the terms “the Orient” and “Orientalism” reference many regions in the East including Japan, China, and India, Said focuses primarily on representations of the Middle East for the purposes of his argument. Using a wide set of historical examples, Said contends that the Western intellectual tradition contains inherent biases against the East, which could then be employed to justify colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation. Furthermore, Said lucidly notes that, in order to differentiate itself from the Orient, the Occident (the West) had to construct an intellectual framework in which it was separate from the “other.”

More specifically, Said is concerned that inherent biases in Western history writing create problems for both the “other” and the West: “My hope is to illustrate the formidable structure of cultural domination and, specifically for formerly colonized peoples, the dangers and temptations of employing this structure upon themselves or upon others” (p 25). Likewise, Said spends a significant portion of his text concerned with “Orientalists,” or Western students of the East, who he worries are unconsciously fetishizing and disempowering the peoples of these regions: “despite attempts to draw subtle distinctions between Orientalism as an innocent scholarly endeavor and Orientalism as an accomplice to empire, can never unilaterally be detached from the general imperial context that begins its modern global phase with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798” (p 333).

While Said’s point is insightful, his historical reference point is problematic, since he does not provide other examples of Orientalism as it relates to say, Marco Polo’s journeys, British colonialism in India, or even early intellectual representations of Native Americans in the New World.[1] Hence this oversight highlights one of the main deficiencies of Said’s text, in which it is not nearly comprehensive enough to encompass his sweeping critique of the Western intellectual tradition.[2] That being said, the importance of Orientalism is the degree to which it brought these ideas to the fore, given its wide exposure since its initial publication.

Indeed, one of the most valuable intellectual contributions Said makes is the concept of “othering,” which takes place within many modes of socio-political discourse. Said lucidly notes, “It is enough for ‘us’ to set up these boundaries in our own minds; ‘they’ become ‘they’ accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from ‘ours’” (54). Thus, argues Said, once this imaginary geography has been constructed, it can be used to justify imperialism, exploitation, and domination.

Said’s work is also important because it predicted a wave of history writing on the subaltern, or postcolonial areas outside hegemonic power structures. Works like Dipesh Chakraburty’s Provincializing Europe demonstrate the problem of peoples who do not submit to the standards of truth and value utilized in the West to historicize them; thus the experience of colonial areas can and do exist independently of Western notions of the historical present.[3] Chakraburty’s observation that Western modernity (or perhaps modernity itself) created a problematic framework for discussing representations of “others.” This was not just an abstraction, but a very real challenge for Said. Near the end of his life, Said noted that despite his best efforts to transcend exploitative intellectual frameworks, “he never felt more undervalued than among his own people.”[4] It is likely that many Palestinians, particularly given a state of ongoing political crisis, daily violence, and long-term exploitation, felt a distance between themselves and Said. As Chakraburty’s argument implies, Said was bound to communicating his ideas through the lens of the Western intellectual tradition, of which he himself was educated.

Despite this conundrum, Said’s unwavering search for a universal humanism beyond the biases he saw as inherent in Western histories is admirable. Author Benita Perry incisively noted, “We can hear his own late utterances not as the voice of retreat from persistent and unresolved contradictions, but as that of righteous indignation at a disgraceful world.”[5] The continued popularity and wide dissemination of Said’s work provides a bit of comfort that this discussion has only just begun and is likely to continue onward into the future.

Linden T. and pet graduate student, Jason Weixelbaum, at the Boston College Commencement, 2011. Now on to American University in Washington DC with a fellowship to write a book and obtain a PhD!

Where academia and college radio meet. Fear the results.

Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York: Harcourt, 1968)

Alfred Chandler, Jr., and Mark Mazlish. Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Sanford M. Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997)

Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Sicilia, Constructing Corporate America: History Politics, Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

Charles Perrow, Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002)

Harland Prechel, Big Business and the State: Historical Transitions and Corporate Transformation, 1880s-1990s (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000)

Warren J. Samuels and Arthur S. Miller, Corporations and Society: Power and Responsibility (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987)

Understanding the history of corporate development in the United States is a tricky business. Due to the sprawling and interconnected nature of these organizations, studying their history necessarily requires a large scale approach that encompasses many facets of modern life: economics, politics, law, labor, organizational structures, and culture. Evidence of the influence of corporations is present in many of the well-known histories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when corporate power began to seriously compete, and some cases eclipse, other forms of power within the U.S. Matthew Josephson gave a face and a name to the apprehension people felt about these new sprawling behemoths in The Robber Barons (1934). Likewise, Gabriel Kolko wrote in The Triumph of Conservatism (1963) that by the turn of the twentieth century, it was the corporate leaders, not the reformers, who advocated and pushed through policies of federal intervention and regulation to serve their profit-seeking ends in the Progressive Era. Subsequently, Historian Robert Wiebe noted that by the 1920s, transformations that had been occurring since the Reconstruction era had made America into an unrecognizable, new type of society – driven by the rise of rationalized bureaucratic structures that populations hoped would bring order and stability.[1] Behind all of these histories, the rise of corporate power plays an essential role.

While these and many other histories touch upon this influential, albeit confusing, phenomenon, much of this scholarship takes place from outside these institutions. Business history itself requires advanced knowledge of economic, organizational and legal structures that create challenges in explaining clearly what actually occurs within these businesses and how they operate. Thankfully, many business historians have risen to the task to help us understand the complex dynamics involved. In this paper, I will present a handful of texts that are representative to this field in an attempt to evaluate their usefulness in understanding the growth and activities of American corporations.

Before we turn to more recent endeavors, it makes sense to look at work that has created a foundation for this scholarship. Thus, a fitting book to start with is Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1968). Berle and Means have produced a now classic repository of statistical data, which situates the corporation at the center of modern U.S. business activity, focusing specifically on property law. The authors argue that industry has become increasingly concentrated and that the ownership of these organizations has been separated from their management structures, creating unique problems in discerning the motivations and development of corporate structures. Beyond this, Berle and Means do not ignore the growing imbalance of corporate power relative to the rest of society. Along with several other of the authors reviewed here, they recommend constitutional checks and controls on corporate power.

To that end, the volume is divided into four books; book one showcases the authors’ argument in demonstrating the divergence between corporate ownership and management structures. Book two provides a history of the evolution of the modern corporate structure both from the perspective of financial markets and in the development of American contract law. Book three expands upon the dynamics of the modern stock exchange and book four returns to the tension between corporate power and society. In each section, Berle and Means marshal statistical data to build a socio-economic framework for their arguments.

The Modern Corporation and Private Property is rightly considered an important work. The authors demonstrate the unequivocal tendency for corporations to strive toward increasingly larger scales of capital consolidation. That being said, the Berle and Means also concede that there is incontrovertible proof of the growing participation of smaller investors, which helps to stave off any overtly Marxist interpretation. The deluge of statistical data creates a substantial learning curve in teasing out the authors’ arguments, yet the argument that the traditional linkage between investing, making decisions, and reaping profits has been dissolved is clear, compelling and powerful.

Next, we turn to Alfred Chandler, Jr., and Mark Mazlish’s Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History (2005). Chandler’s participation is noteworthy due to the continuing influence of his landmark book, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977), in which he provides a highly detailed history of the development of corporate models of mass production and the associated development of modern management structures.[2] In the collection of essays that constitute Leviathans, we fast-forward to corporate development in the latter half of the twentieth century, in which predominantly American corporations have become multinational. The authors concede that the global balance of power has decidedly tilted toward multinational corporations; however, they reject the notion that globalization entails an inevitable de-emphasis of the state. The editors, Chandler and Mazlish, take the opportunity to emphasize the need for further research to illuminate the ways these institutions both undermine, as well as support, the sovereignty and power of states.

The text is separated into nine essays divided into two sections; the first on the growth and scope of multinationals and the second on their socio-cultural effects. The essays themselves consider three interrelated themes: descriptive accounts of corporate development in the twentieth century, generalized discussions of the social and cultural implications of their global dominance, and challenges related to their regulation and governance. The initial chapter by the editors and two later ones by Bruce Mazlish and Elliott Morss, and Stephen Kobrin respectively, concerning the rise of global elites and anti-globalization movements stand out among the others.

The text is not without significant shortcomings. Like several other books reviewed here, it is a collection of essays; while this is not necessarily a problem in and of itself, the challenge of adhering to an overriding theme is where Leviathans falls short. Likewise, the essays exhibit an overridingly relativistic tone about the more negative effects of globalized corporate activity such as worker exploitation, environmental damage, and the domination of public spaces. While these problems are acknowledged in the essays, analysis of these subjects are given only passing treatment or purposefully avoided.

In another collection of essays, Constructing Corporate America: History Politics, Culture (2004), Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Sicilia also seek to explain the development of the corporation as America’s predominant form of business organization. The editors show their colors in their critical approach; they question the rationality of managerial decision making, the focus on efficiency and profits, and the purported distance between the corporate world and the political. The bias of Lipartito and Sicilia aside, the collective aim is to offer a more complex alternative to the narrative of American corporate development.

Within the context of each other, the essays are quite good due to their diverse orientations. Colleen Dunlavy provides an interesting sketch of the corporation as a plutocratic democracy with its “one share one vote” rule. Naomi Lamoreaux explores the legal interpretation of the corporation and argues that the corporate form, far from being inevitable, rests on historically contingent legal phenomena. In other legal perspectives, Gerald Berk explains the relationship between Justice Louis Brandeis’ support for scientifically managed bureaucracy and market regulation. David Hart also adds an important contribution on the relationship between the U.S. government and corporate development, arguing that business history tends to take an overwhelmingly internalist approach, which ignores the enormous effect of corporate activity upon society.

Like Leviathans, Constructing Corporate America has similar problems with continuity. To be fair, most of the essays strike a revisionist approach, intent on moving beyond the Chandlerian business history paradigm; however, the results are mixed. The later chapters on corporate identity politics seem out of place and undeveloped. Additionally, the functionalist approach championed by Chandler, which the authors purport to call into question, is still readily apparent.

In order to further address the inward-looking nature of business history and its functionalist roots, it is worth looking at text that exemplifies these qualities. Such is Sanford M. Jacoby’s Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal (1997). Jacoby looks specifically at American corporate-styled welfare capitalism as a historically and geographically specific phenomenon. Reading from more of the positivist school of thought, Jacoby sees corporate projections of power to be an impressive if imperfect system, one whose notions of order, community, and paternal responsibility recalled the preindustrial household economy. Jacoby contends that the firms pursuing welfare capitalism were, in effect, industrial manors.

The author utilizes three separate case studies of corporate firms to illustrate a wider picture of the evolution of industrial and governmental relations throughout the twentieth century. Jacoby concedes that this type of corporate domination of the American workforce was not entirely positive, noting that workers have increasingly been split between the affluent and the poor. The most interesting portion of the text deals with how major industries united to exert the greatest possible influence on labor policy in the 1920s and 1930s. Under the Special Conference Committee (SCC), executives from ten of America’s leading companies formed a committee to coordinate labor relations and responses to changes in legislation in order to maintain continual growth and maintenance of profit.

The success of Jacoby’s text is mixed; it fits well within a functionalist framework and provides a detailed snapshot of the internal calculus of managers in dealing with labor. That said, his primary source analysis only extends to the early 1960s making his examination of corporate welfare into the later part of the twentieth century limited in its usefulness. More problematically, Jacoby falls victim to the relativistic tunnel-vision of many other business histories; he fails to acknowledge the underlying imbalance of power between management and workers, or corporations’ role in exacerbating this problem due to increasingly extreme drives toward capital consolidation. Jacoby notes that this has led to the weakening of unions, but provides little insight on how the situation might be remedied beyond tepid calls for “market individualism.”[3]

Drawing inspiration from Chandler, Harland Prechel also seeks to explain corporate development in America in Big Business and the State: Historical Transitions and Corporate Transformation, 1880s-1990s (2000). Prechel, however, is more critical of this trajectory than his predecessor. His main argument is that, over time, corporations’ ability to influence the state has grown considerably. Prechel employs what he calls “capital dependence” theory to explain this phenomenon. Prechel argues, via this theory, that corporations were impelled to transform from trusts to holding companies in the nineteenth century, to multidivisional, multilayered subsidiary forms in the twentieth century in order to maintain their abilities to consolidate capital. The author explains that it was the influence of top corporate managers, rather than bureaucratic processes, in reshaping corporate forms in order maintain liquidity of capital.

Structurally, Prechel periodizes his text into three sections: In the first period, the 1870s through the 1890s, the author explains that business leaders utilized federalist legal arguments to secure legal protections for corporations, which ultimately led to the development of the holding company. In the second period, the 1920s and 1930s, rampant capital accumulation culminated in economic distress, which led corporations to reform their structures into multidivisional formations. In the final period, the 1970s to the 1990s, corporations developed multilayered subsidiary forms to globalize consolidation of capital and avoid labor and tax regulations.

A key deficiency in Prechel’s text is the absence of labor. Unlike Jacoby, Prechel ignores the influence of workers on the formulation of corporate policy in the eras he analyzes. As with other business history texts examined here, Prechel’s socio-economic approach utilizes methodology and models as a replacement for broad-based historical analysis. The resulting effect is akin to the other limited, functionalist approaches we have seen so far; Prechel is good at articulating policy out of large data sets (most notably the American steel industry in this case) but falters in making larger claims about the relationships between corporations and the historical environments in which they operate.

While larger-scoped studies are helpful in demonstrating historical change over time, it is also useful to more closely analyze key historical moments for corporate development. Likewise, in Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism (2002), Charles Perrow specifically traces the concentration of economic power in the U.S. in its crucial beginning stage in the nineteenth-century. Perrow lucidly notes that the ubiquity of bureaucracies has created a unique problem for historians and requires deeper analysis in order to expose their historical significance. Perrow argues that in many accounts of social change, wealth and power are “not associated with organizations; wealth is resident in an individual, a family or a class, and power is resident in persons or ideologies.”[4] Thus, Perrow states, organizations are at best unproblematic resources for other expressions of wealth and power.

Perrow’s main contention is that the development of the corporate form was neither necessary nor inevitable, but rather, influenced by small groups of capitalists interested in greater organizational flexibility. In order to support his argument, Perrow divides his study into two parts: the first examining the American textile industry, and the second focused on railroads. The author utilizes a comparative framework, first contrasting the Philadelphia and New England textile industries, and then evaluating the American railroad industry against its French and British counterparts. In both sections, Perrow stresses the historically contingent nature of American corporate development, demonstrating that alternatives could be just as efficient, and with more regulatory oversight, than they turned out to be.

As with many other texts we have seen, the sociological method plays a primary role in explaining the phenomena discussed. The synthetic, over-reliance on secondary works to build methodological models lends itself to an often confusing and convoluted narrative. Perrow would have done well to ground this work by referencing more broad historical studies to provide context. Nevertheless, his contention that the rise of corporate power was due to a purposeful effort pushed by capitalists and investment houses, is compelling and important. Likewise, Perrow exposes that the trajectory of these corporate leaders push for capital consolidation often included corrupt financial dealings rife with bribery, flagrant violations of regulatory statutes, and deceptive financial dealings, which provide an important historical lesson.

Continuing down the path in the study of historically critical moments for corporate development, the work by Warren J. Samuels and Arthur S. Miller in Corporations and Society: Power and Responsibility (1987) has special significance. These authors specifically take on the phenomenon known as “corporate personhood,” which developed out of a particular interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in the case Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad.[5] In yet another collection of essays by legal historians Martin J. Sklar, Morton Horwitz, Aviam Soifer, Samuel Loescher, and others, the balance of the formulation and development of this concept is juxtaposed with an exploration of its moral implications.

Following a dedication to Berle and Means, the thirteen essays that constitute Corporations and Society are broken up into four themes: the doctrinal origins of corporate personhood, development of legal precedents relative to social control and economic planning, policy consequences, and the tension between democracy and corporate power. The Santa Clara case looms large in the text, directly referenced in nine of the essays. Morton Horwitz’s first and longest chapter stands out in tying this legal precedent to the accelerated capital consolidation by corporations in the late nineteenth century and beyond. Martin Sklar expands this theme by demonstrating how the Sherman Anti-trust Act was basically a failure due to the legal protections for corporations already in place. Martin Benjamin and Daniel Bronstein cut through technical ambiguities, arguing that corporations are entirely goal-oriented and incapable of understanding the moral consequences of their actions, which creates a serious problem in their legal designation – as only natural persons can be incarcerated for criminal violations of the law. In sum, the threat of corporations to democracy is an overriding motif of the text.

There is little to criticize here. The editors have done a better job than most in keeping the essays in conversation with one another. Additionally, each piece is well argued and has prodigious documentation. To be sure, the authors are fixated on the concept of corporate personhood, and it is worth noting that other developments, such as the holding company, play at least as important a role in corporate gigantism.[6] This text is also the most revisionist of the works reviewed in this paper thus far; business historians used to a more relativistic tone may be taken aback by the frank assertions the authors make about American-styled oligarchy and the subversion of democracy.

Indeed, staunch revisionism of corporate power is much more common outside the realm of business history. In order to emphasize this feature, the final book reviewed here is Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America (2001) by Jack Beatty. Beatty is not a business historian; he is a journalist and editor for the Atlantic magazine. It is clear from his introduction, however, that he is familiar with the territory explored in this essay. He drops references to Chandler, Berle and Means, and John Kenneth Galbraith, who also shares Beatty’s critical attitudes toward a corporate dominated society.[7]

Despite a difference in methodology, which we will deal with in a moment, Beatty’s argument is similar to many of the other authors reviewed here: that constitutional power must be exerted to check the power of corporations, who have subverted democracy both in the U.S.and elsewhere. To support this claim, Beatty breaks up his text thematically and along vague chronological lines, dealing with diverse issues of production, consumption, legal precedents, labor, and culture. The author picks out various corporations for case studies, such as Standard Oil and AT&T. Beatty also brings in literary voices such as John Steinbeck, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Joseph Heller to add cultural context.

While entertaining and clearly meant for a general audience, this scattershot approach has grave problems. First of all, Colossus does not contain an index, almost immediately excluding it as a useful academic source. The footnoting is quite limited, as is its bibliography. While the iconoclastic tone is likely to garner a sympathetic readership, the narrative is disjointed and is seriously lacking in continuity. The textbook-styled case studies that interrupt the main body of the chapters are distracting and unnecessary. One reviewer suggested the work be utilized by college students.[8] I strenuously disagree; the tone of the book is mismatched by its lack of academic rigor and provides a misleading example of literature on the topic. There is no doubt that Beatty’s claims have merit, but his methodology is severely lacking.

Collectively, the texts reviewed here present a conundrum: books that offer deep technical analyses tend to present a formalist, relativistic stance that ignores the social consequences of corporate power. Alternatively, there are plenty of books like Beatty’s Colossus that address these consequences, but lack a disciplined, empirical approach needed to more fully address the topic. Samuels and Miller’s Corporations and Society strikes a good balance here, yet a high learning curve is still required in the arenas of business and legal history to fully understand the empirical data being presented. This creates a barrier – not only between historians and this valuable information, but also effectively keeps the public out of the conversation as well.

A more comprehensive approach is likely needed. While it is clear that many of the editors took this idea to heart by cobbling together diverse groups of essays, what is more accurately required is historical context. As noted earlier, the inward-looking nature of business history is quite good at producing texts that supply enormous amounts of technical information and discerning the organizational trajectories of individual firms; however without being situated in their environment, these books are limited in their usefulness to both historians and the public. Given that there is widespread consensus regarding the importance in understanding the corporation’s place within society, business historians have an important responsibility to fulfill. This task would be best accomplished with more historical representation and sensitivity toward the individuals, populations, states, and environments that are affected, often adversely, by corporate activity. This proposed approach does not necessarily have to be revisionist; it is quite likely that there are some scholars who feel that corporate consolidation of political power and capital is a good thing, however, such a task must be done openly, clearly, and independent of corporate influence.

The contentious issue of corporate collaboration between Nazi Germany and businesses in the United States has been fermenting ever since the end of World War II. Although historical analysis of this phenomenon has continued ever since, in recent years there has been significant growth of scholarship that deals with this subject. This has been due in part to revelations that have emerged in lawsuits from the former victims of the Nazi regime against American corporations, which has also produced correspondent histories sponsored by the organizations to defend, legitimize, or obscure their activities.[1] Additionally, particularly since the end of the Cold War, there has been a steady declassification of documentation that exposes this activity both in the U.S. and elsewhere, which has provided fresh source material for new historical investigations.

The study of this subject matter is challenging for several reasons. First, the field itself is quite diverse. Historical investigations have involved a multitude of different types of organizations, from automotive firms to financial institutions. Second, primary source materials often reside behind the closed doors of large corporations and law firms. Privileged access to this documentation and corporate funding of historical studies further complicates this already controversial issue. Third, national narratives from the World War II period tend to obscure, rather than illuminate the highly complex transnational phenomena of cross-border corporate activity, capital flows, and wartime industrial development.

In the face of these difficulties, the implications of this field of research are profound. Several major narratives could be called into question. For Americans, the notion of the “Good War,” in which the U.S.plays the incorruptible good guy in a Manichean struggle against Nazi Germany is still used as a moral standard for U.S. foreign policy, which often intimately affects the rest of the world. For Europeans, particularly German historians, the inclusion of outside actors in the culpability of the horrors of the Holocaust and Nazi militarism further complicate an already expansive, diverse, and deeply emotional subject matter. Finally, in the realm of research on globalization, transnational history, and international diplomacy in the twentieth century, this field presents a challenge, not only for the study of the relationships between multinational corporations and international relations, but also for the study of the Cold War, which naturally involves all of these aspects.

It is not surprising then, given all of these complicating factors, that the emerging standpoints in this study of American business collaboration with Nazi Germany have engaged in a “dialog of the deaf,” writing past each other in an effort to seize hold of the narrative. For lack of better terms, I have labeled these two dominant groups the “collaborationists” and the “corporatists.” For their part, the corporatists argue that business relationships between American corporations and the Hitler regime were sparse, small scale, uncoordinated, and had no relationship with U.S.policymakers. Furthermore, this group contends that American parent companies lost control of their European subsidiaries when these businesses were seized by the Nazis and retooled for war. The collaborationists argue the opposite: that these business interactions were widespread, large scale, coordinated, and had connections to influential American personalities.

If there is insight to be gained from this historiographical controversy, a more accurate portrayal of these events lies between these two camps. Despite unknown amounts of corporate funding and avid public interest in the subject, neither side has taken into account the infinitely large volumes of historical research that can help provide context for American businesses’ alleged Nazi ties. Thus, the goal of this paper is to evaluate the representative literature on both sides of this debate and then explore the larger history of economics across social boundaries during World War II by bringing into context historical works in multiple fields in order to approach a more nuanced and solid foundation for future research.

The Collaborationists

There are not many defining features of this group of literature other than the notion that, as mentioned earlier, many of the writers argue that corporate collaboration between American firms and the Nazis was more widespread and more coordinated than originally thought, and control of German subsidiaries were actually retained by their U.S. based parent companies through the use of lawyers, intermediaries, and managers loyal to the organizations. Additionally, many of the texts in this group involve single businesses or industries rather than the topic of business collaboration as a whole. Problematically, sensationalism also tends to be a common theme that undermines their empirical value. With titles like America’s Nazi Secret by John Loftus and American Swastika by Charles Higham, these books are specifically marketed to the conspiracy crowd. Finally, one problematic feature of this collection is that many, but not all, of the works have been produced by journalists rather than academics, which has caused this field of research to be glossed over or dismissed by specialists.

It is worth noting that this field has deep roots going back to World War II itself. For instance, formal inquiries into U.S.business collaboration with both Japan and Germany started near the war’s end with a congressional committee established by U.S. Senator Harley Kilgore to oversee war production efforts and investigate the relationship of monopolies and international chemical cartels. This committee reported that patent agreements, specifically between American and German firms to produce materials essential to building armaments such as synthetic rubber, beryllium, tungsten carbide, optical glass and plastics, were monopolistic in nature and designed to keep all competitors out of the market. The revelations of the Kilgore committee prompted writers Joseph Borkin, Charles A. Welsh, Richard Sasuly, and Josiah DuBois to argue that these business relationships were essential to Nazi war production both before and after the U.S.and Germany were at war.[2]

Moving forward several decades, one of the more comprehensive books on the subject of corporate collaboration with Nazi Germany is Charles Higham’s Trading with the Enemy (1983). Oddly enough, Higham is an author who writes tabloid-style accounts of Hollywood personalities.[3] In Trading with the Enemy Higham identifies a group he calls “the Fraternity,” a collection of prominent and wealthy Americans who lent their fortunes and their businesses to the Nazi cause. Of all the individuals he discusses, Higham pays special attention to German lawyer Gerhard Westrick, who helped companies like International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) keep their subsidiaries in American hands both before and after a state of war existed between Germany and the U.S. Another innovative aspect to his study is Higham’s treatment of the activities of American banker Thomas H. McKittrick, who utilized his presidency at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) to launder stolen gold for the Nazis.[4]

Because it is written in a highly dramatic and colorful style with very little documentation other than a selected bibliography, scholars have mostly ignored this text; however, Higham states that he was responsible for taking out the initial Freedom of Information Act requests to get information in the book released – including particular documents related to the BIS, other banks (including Chase Bank and JP Morgan), and Gerhard Westrick. My own inspection of his archive at the University of Southern California demonstrates that the author did collect copious documentation from the National Archives to support his claims.[5] These sources include detailed, declassified investigations of Chase Bank, JP Morgan, and the BIS by the offices of U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. Higham’s documentation also includes postwar interrogations by Allied intelligence agents of Gerhard Westrick and Baron Kurt Freiherr von Shröder, who acted as intermediaries for several of the businesses named above. It is unfortunate that his overwrought writing style and lack of references do not serve his cause.

Higham’s work draws inspiration from another more comprehensive book, Anthony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (1976). Sutton argues that multiple financial organizations in the U.S., many of which already had global reach, helped provide finances to the Nazis throughout the twelve-year Reich. Sutton’s argument closely resembles Higham’s, except with more references to primary source documentation. Sutton’s work also suffers from a dramatic retelling of the events and has been subsequently reposted in many places on internet conspiracy websites. Like Higham, Sutton pays particular attention to the BIS, Ford Motor Company, ITT, and Standard Oil. This work has also been ignored by the academic community for its overly conspiratorial overtones, even though later works have established the veracity of a few of his claims. Unfortunately for Sutton, no comprehensive analysis of his work and sources has occurred as of yet; his text remains unreliable for future research until such a review has been done.

One of the books that lend credence to the claims of Sutton and Higham’s work is Working for the Enemy (2004). The argument of this text, encapsulated in a series of essays by historians Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings, Anita Kugler, and Nicholas Levis, revolves around the premise that Ford and General Motors (GM) controlled a majority of Third Reich armaments industries through their subsidiaries, Ford-Werke & Adam Opel AG, and maintained in contact and control of them throughout the war via managers loyal to the companies. The text also contains oral histories from former forced laborers who worked at the Opel and Ford-Werke plants. These testimonies, including those by Elsa Iwanowa, were published in tandem with Holocaust restitution lawsuits that were brought against both Ford and GM during this period. This text is much more copiously sourced and the language is considerably more measured than the aforementioned books; however, the writers admit that the documentation regarding GM’s German subsidiary is particularly thin, given that their main plant Russelheim was bombed repeatedly by the Allies toward the end of the war.

In the category of “collaborationists” author Edwin Black stands out as one of the most significant contributors. Black has also written similar material about Ford and GM for his book Internal Combustion (2006), a conspiratorially-toned text about the American auto industry’s resistance to the development of the electric car. His main contributions to the study of collaboration with the Nazis are The Transfer Agreement (1986), War Against the Weak (2003), and IBM and the Holocaust (2001) – the latter being the most well known. He also produced an anthology, Nazi Nexus (2009), which contains excerpts from all of these works. The Transfer Agreement, Black’s first book and the one that earned him the most notoriety, involves backroom deals between German Zionists and Nazi officials, who agreed to allow Jews to escape Germany and emigrate to Palestine in exchange for assistance in stymieing Jewish-led boycotts. War Against the Weak describes the work of American eugenicists who both influenced, financed, and worked for Nazi eugenics programs.

IBM and the Holocaust deserves closer scrutiny. Like Working for the Enemy the book was intended for release at the same time as Holocaust era lawsuits were being brought against International Business Machines (IBM). Black argues that the corporation’s biggest client was Germany during the 1930s and 40s and forcefully maintained control of its subsidiary, Dehomag, through the use of lawyers, loyal managers, and Swiss holding companies. Furthermore, Black argues that IBM’s information services were critical to perpetrating the Holocaust by seeking out Jews and organizing their detainment, forced labor, and execution. As a secondary argument, Black also notes that IBM’s organizational services were greatly useful for German war production. Black assembled a large team of researchers to assemble the prodigious source material for the book. He also had it reviewed in its preproduction stage by a few specialists, including Robert Wolfe, a key consultant for the Nazi War Crimes Interagency Working Group (IWG) at the U.S. National Archives, adding credibility to the project.

Black’s sensationalist tone pervades the text, which elicited criticisms in the academic press. Although some made claims of shoddy footnoting, his critics have not elaborated on specific problems. The IBM case itself was dropped, with the insistence of the U.S. State Department, in part due to its late timing with other Holocaust restitution cases that were about to be settled. IBM remained silent on the allegations and agreed to open its archives to historians at a future, undetermined date.[6] Like the other books in the “collaborationist” set, future historians will have to check up on the author’s sources to verify their veracity. Regardless, IBM and the Holocaust remains the most well known text on the subject due to its popularity.

In a positive development, historical commissions designed to address Nazi war crimes are also useful in expanding the scope of the field of research on alleged American/Nazi business ties. One such text to come out of these commissions is Richard Breitman’s U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis (2005). The book itself is the work of four independent historians, Richard Breitman, Norman Goda, Timothy Naftali, and Robert Wolfe, all consultants to the IWG, who actually did the declassification work. What has resulted is a commentary and sampling from some of the eight million declassified pages organized around three basic questions: What did American intelligence agencies know about the Holocaust? Did American corporations benefit from Nazi activities? And finally, which American agencies used former Nazis during the Cold War? The authors make several general conclusions in their survey of this collection of documents: There was a war on, and the Final Solution and its components were known by Allied intelligence agencies but never actively studied. Additionally, they add credence to the collaborationist school by noting that some American corporations did benefit from Nazi activities. Finally, the authors note that substantial numbers of Nazi intelligence and policy officials remade their reputations late in the war or immediately thereafter and worked for western intelligence agencies during the Cold War. Brief mentions are made of IBM, Chase and JP Morgan bank, although the emphasis is on intelligence agents and their Nazi counterparts, rather than corporate collaboration.

As a final addition to this survey of the so-called collaborationist historiography, The Myth of the Good War (2003) by Jacques Pauwels may represent a future direction for the field. Pauwels argues that despite the view espoused by American popular history, media, and politicians, U.S. corporate involvement in World War II was primarily for materialistic rather than ideological aims. Drawing influences from the revisionist school of U.S foreign policy that grew up around the questioning America’s motives in the Cold War, Pauwels demonstrates that the major concern of U.S. business leadership during World War II were markets for their products and political leverage over as much territory as could be gained. Pauwels selectively integrates material from Working for the Enemy and Edwin Black’s books to show how various corporations acted in concert, rather than separately, in order to support the funneling of profits from neutral Switzerland back to the U.S. Although this final claim is tenuous, Pauwels backs up this argument with numerous references to secondary literature. Unlike Black, Higham, and Sutton, Pauwels tempers his argument with a more measured and careful tenor.

Despite the revelations that have come out of this body of research, there are significant shortcomings worth addressing. Many of the works presented here are dramatically toned and not academically rigorous, making the job of separating fact from conjecture challenging. While some claims have been identified as factual, many others still require close and careful scrutiny. Scrupulous sourcing also continues to be problematic and primary source documentation needs be clearly identified. Finally, few of the books engage the larger context of scholarship that has been done on the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, or World War II in general. This tendency isolates the field from other scholars and academia more generally, where more scrutiny could strengthen their claims.

The Corporatists

Like the collaborationists, the corporatists are a diverse group; however, their work also shares a handful of common themes worth mentioning. First, several of the monographs have either been commissioned directly by corporations indicted in Holocaust-era business exploitation, or have provided funds directly to the historian to produce the works in this category. Second, many of the authors in this group argue that the businesses they study lost managerial control to the Nazis. Third, some of the works suggest that only individuals can be guilty of genocide, not institutions. Whether or not this is a convenient argument for businesses accused of collaboration with the Nazis remains to be seen; suffice it to say that it is a common contention among the works reviewed here.

Regarding commissions, Gerald Feldman was hired by the Allianz insurance company to look into its own role in Nazi Germany while it was being sued by Holocaust victim groups. Because of the company’s historic ties other insurance agencies, particularly within the U.S., this work is worth looking closely at. The result of Feldman’s commission was Allianz and the German Insurance Business (2001). As with other histories in this section, the author contends that companies do not commit crimes; their directors do. Feldman also argues that the insurance company’s managers did their best to honor their policyholders’ contracts while adhering to Nazi policies. He notes that Allianz insured Nazi military hardware, expropriated assets in occupied territories, and underwrote concentration camp-related machinery. Feldman focuses on the psychology of survival of the managers in their business dealings with the Nazis. In the process, he affirms a more general thesis about group behavior, particularly within businesses, stating that they are heavily affected by the external institutional incentives in which these groups operate, and that these incentives are to a great degree the product of political processes. Thus, whether or not the narrowly rational pursuit by businesses and their material interests lead to a socially beneficial or destructive outcome, they are contingent on the environment in which they operate.

While nearly all the books discussed here involve American parent companies, it is worth noting the work by Neil Forbes, Doing Business with the Nazis (2000) for comparison. Forbes sees Britain’s economic interconnections with Germany during the interwar period as a larger problem involving Britain’s soul searching as a declining imperial power intent on preserving the fidelity of its markets while simultaneously wrestling with the growing concern that these connections were contributing to grave external threats. The author’s main sources are parliamentary debates, the pronouncements of industry leaders, and major media responses. Forbes’ fairly terse explanation that British multinational corporations collaborating with German armaments industry was that they were “largely left to decide for themselves whether to exercise self-restraint.”[7] Thus, the author’s text is remarkably free of judgment. Forbes also does not explain the activities of the corporations he explores, such as Dunlop, after the war begins. Although Forbes does not note any ancillary connection to the corporations he discusses, his uncritical assessment of Unilever belies a fairly pronounced pro-business standpoint.[8] As with the other corporations he looks at, Forbes is convinced it was self-interest and political naiveté, rather than capriciousness, which drove British corporations to operate against their home country’s self-interest.

Another exemplary work in the corporatist category is Peter Hayes’ Industry and Ideology (1987). In this case the company under investigation is IG Farben, which constructed the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp. Although this was primarily a German company, the organization shared a cartel with other large American chemical producers, managed American subsidiaries, and retained the legal advice of American corporate lawyer and policymaker, John Foster Dulles. For his part, Hayes argues that throughout the twelve years of Hitler’s rule, IG attempted to influence German state policy on multiple levels. Hayes demonstrates that these endeavors basically failed; however, the corporation benefited greatly from its relationship with the Nazis: it enjoyed low labor overhead, courtesy of “leased” slave labor, monopolistic protection, huge government contracts, and opportunities to expand into conquered nations.

Hayes concedes that the managers of IG Farben were hardly innocent. He notes that after the war, several directors were tried for war crimes, albeit most served short prison sentences. Nevertheless, Hayes demonstrates that Nazi society was structured so that individuals within organizations could perpetrate heinous acts without particularly malevolent motives. Such was the case of IG Farben. Likewise, much of the book is dedicated to revealing the political impotence of the corporation’s managers. Hayes concedes that the company did prosper significantly under the Nazi regime, which stretches the credulity of its supposedly passive role; however, with a reasonable amount of qualification, this is the type of argument that Hayes makes. Jay Weinstein, another scholar reviewing Hayes work noted, “One can imagine that another analyst, given the same material, might successfully ‘prove’ that the Nazi’s were a bit more inclined to follow the lead of IG, and that IG played a more important policymaking role than the book would lead us to believe.”[9] Thus, more research may be required to determine IG Farben’s precise role within Nazi Germany, not to mention its relationship to American companies like DuPont, who shared a cartel arrangement with the German company.

The defining factor of this work may be in the acknowledgements. Hayes states that he received undefined “ancillary support” from IG Farben to produce the text.[10] This fact raises questions about the conclusions Hayes comes to in this work. Although respected historian Hans Mommsen has supported the objectivity of Hayes research, author Edwin Black has drawn similarities between Hayes and other authors that have been hired by corporations specifically to produce histories that could be used as plausible legal defenses against further Holocaust restitution lawsuits.[11] Whatever the case may be, Industry and Ideology, represents an openly pro-business orientation.

This orientation may be due to Hayes’ mentor, the late Henry Ashby Turner, who presided over Hayes’ doctoral studies at Yale. Turner produced two books worth mentioning here: German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (1987) and General Motors and the Nazis (2005). Turner argues that businesses played a minor part of Hitler’s ascension compared to the sway of right-wing ideology. Furthermore, he contends that business executives only came on board and subscribed to the Nazis’ political agenda once it was clear that they would become the dominant political force in Germany. Turner contends that businessmen initially took Nazi anticapitalist rhetoric seriously, a view opposed by several later historians.[12] Rather than analyze business activity within Germany once the Nazis took power, Turner takes the opportunity to promote Knut Borchardt’s controversial thesis that the preceding Weimar Republic’s excessively generous welfare policies were the main cause of Germany’s economic problems.

While German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler stakes out Turner’s pro-business standpoint, General Motors and the Nazis is more controversial. Turner claims that GM’s German subsidiary, Opel, was drawn into the German armaments industry against the wishes of the parent company’s managers and efforts were made to pull American board members back to camouflage its involvement. The author argues that there was no real alternative for American managers but to allow this collaboration to continue. Turner notes that Opel was designated as enemy property even though it was not confiscated by the Nazis.

At the end of his career, Turner may have softened a bit – conceding that Opel was liable for compensation of surviving victims of forced labor. That being said, his methods and conclusions raise questions worth further consideration. GM provided Turner exclusive access to their archives in order to produce the text. When author Edwin Black tried to access the same material, which was moved to the Yale University Sterling library, he claims he was denied access and was forced to threaten to sue in order to obtain it.[13] Subsequently, he found the material in an unusable computer database that none of the Yale librarians knew how to operate. Furthermore, Turners’ conclusions of GM’s misgivings are contradicted by overseas manager James Mooney’s own memoirs, which praised the partnership.[14] Finally, and most controversially, Turner clearly and unequivocally states at the beginning of General Motors and the Nazis that he was not sponsored by GM in any way to produce the book.[15] When Turner died three years later, it came out that he had been hired by the company to do exactly that.[16] Despite these shocking revelations, his former student, Hayes, has asserted that Turner was not commissioned by GM to produce his last work in an obituary on the American Historical Association website.[17]

Another book that does not strictly deal with World War II business but is worth mention here is Michael Salter’s Nazi War Crimes, US Intelligence and Selective Prosecution at Nuremberg (2007). Salter offers a detailed examination in his study of the role played by United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of today’s CIA, in the pursuit of Nazi war criminals. A central figure in Salter’s investigation is SS General Karl Wolff, a notorious Nazi who oversaw the murder of thousands of Jews. Salter argues that Wolff and his associates surrendered to Allen Dulles, a high level OSS agent, who sheltered them in order to gain intelligence that could shorten the war and limit Allied casualties. The first part of the book focuses on Dulles’ violation of Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals as well as treaties made with the Soviets by granting Wolff immunity from prosecution. In the second half, Salter presents a defense of the OSS and Dulles’ actions. Salter makes a blanket argument that the rule of law is often subverted by pragmatic, geo-political considerations; however the legal normality which Salter grounds much of his analysis of the Wolff/Dulles bargain is more problematic than the author expresses in the text. Salter concludes that we should “discard the mainstream reaction of one-sided and partisan outrage at the existence of such deals.”[18] Likewise, Salter’s relativism puts him more into the orbit of the corporatist camp. Critically, Salter fails to mention that Dulles and his older brother were also the corporate lawyers for Chase, JP Morgan, Ford, GM, IG Farben, the BIS, Standard Oil, IBM, and ITT – all companies that had alleged ties to the Nazis.

As this group of representative works demonstrates, there is a significant divide in opinion about the implications of transnational business activity during World War II. Although it is quite likely that the historians featured here had a pro-business orientations prior to producing the works in question, the influence of corporate money and privileged access to sources casts a shadow over their scholarship. Allowing access to their source materials for further investigation would help allay some of these concerns. Like the collaborationists, the corporatists tend to be myopic in their focus and ignore the wider scope of the transnational business activities in question. While the selection of books reviewed here is quite limited, many historians share a dismissive attitude toward further research in this field. For instance, Richard Evans concludes in the final pages of his extensive trilogy on the Third Reich, “…the businesses and companies that profited from the Nazi regime and its policies have opened their archives and admitted their complicity.”[19] Such an unequivocal statement denies the complexity of the issue.

Contextualizing the Field

In order to widen the scope of alleged American business collaboration with Nazi Germany, it is worth looking at a few selected works outside the realm of these two fields. In the interest of providing empirical insights, it is important to note that direct connections to collaborative business relationships are not explored by these works; the purpose of this section is to highlight other historical contexts that are missing from the aforementioned schools of thought in order to provide a more holistic perspective to the field.

One useful place to look is at the historiography of Holocaust restitution, where many of the businesses in question are also discussed. This literature also necessarily involves some aspects of American business ties to the Nazis as individuals have brought suit against these organizations for multiple reasons, including forced labor, appropriated bank accounts, and unfulfilled insurance claims. Additionally, these books be can be useful in exposing the way information on the topic is presented in legal frameworks, political action groups, and corporate public relations.

In Some Measure of Justice (2009) by Michael Marrus and William Schabas, there are some similarities to the corporatist school. For his part, Marrus is critical of the restitution cases, and worries that “monetizing justice” has more negative outcomes than positive ones. Thus, the book promotes an overriding ambivalence to the possibility of justice for the crimes of the Holocaust. One distinctive element of his argument is his dismissal that corporations should be included in the list of perpetrators. As observed earlier with the corporatists, Marrus argues that only people can be guilty of perpetrating genocide. This argument stands in direct opposition to much of the litigation against banks and industrial concerns, verging on reproducing their own legal defenses. Problematically, Marrus announces in his acknowledgement that he was funded in part by the Ford Foundation, a charitable organization linked to a corporation that has been subject to a Holocaust reparation lawsuit in the forced labor case of Iwanowa v. Ford Motor Company. Whether or not this represents a conflict of interest for the authors, this work demonstrates that scholars are still formulating policy positions relative to the topic.

More useful historical context is found in the collection of essays edited by Roger P. Alford and Michael Bazyler in the book Holocaust Restitution (2007). Bazyler, who specializes in the history of Holocaust restitution, argues that the legal actions against corporations were justified and that most businesses involved received fairly light penalties in the amount of restitution they were forced to pay in comparison with their crimes. Many in Europe considered Holocaust restitution blackmail, and in response Bazyler produces balanced indictments for the individual companies’ behavior. Elsewhere, Bazyler has noted, in a somewhat bitter fashion, that claimants attorneys were often shut out of restitution agreements between corporations and governments.[20]

Peter Hayes also has contributed an essay for Holocaust Restitution. Hayes argues that Holocaust restitution groups have a “fixation” on corporate profits and that penalizing corporations after the fact is simply “collateral damage.” Hayes contends that corporate profits derived by the Nazis had been consumed by the war effort and the destruction that followed. Hayes comes to this conclusion by citing his own research on the company Degussa – which manufactured the poison Zyklon B, used in the Nazi gas chambers. This reasoning is questionable, as Hayes characterizes all companies that collaborated with Nazis like Degussa, when in fact, many corporations’ parent companies were overseas and were not only free from war damage, but were able to repatriate profits after the war.

Oliver Rathkolb’s Revisiting the National Socialist Legacy (2004) is also worth looking at for insight in the realm of Holocaust restitution. This collection of essays is derived from the 2001 conference hosted by the Bruno Kreisky Archives Foundation on Holocaust-Era Assets. Edited by Rathkolb, the essays provide a thorough and scholarly discussion on the role and limits of national historical commissions, in both their political and social compositions, which form a kind of contemporary debate over the Nazi Past. These discussions are highlighted by the tensions described between historical scholarship, media coverage and politics surrounding the resolution of Holocaust restitution suits. One interesting feature of the text is the essay by Jean-Francoise Bergier, for whom the commission to investigate the activities of Swiss banks was named.[21] Bergier has reservations about the contradictory nature of the word “neutrality” and how it was used by Switzerland and other places during World War II. Although he does not specifically name American corporations, the commission concludes that there is more to be learned from the declassification of American intelligence documents related to the topic.  In his essay, Bergier also laments the public perception of historians as the ultimate arbiters of historical judgment for Holocaust-related crimes, exposing a frustration with irreconcilable scholarship that has, in part, been explored in this paper.

Business histories can also be useful in filling out the picture in this contentious field of research. The learning curve for this material can be steep in understanding the legal and financial terminology as well as making sense of the large volumes of statistical data, but some of the findings related to the context of studies involved in this paper can help provide a foundation for further scholarship. Business history is also useful in describing how multinational corporations operate, which can help educate future researchers attempting to provide a clearer picture of cross border capital movements during the World War II era.

Visions of Modernity (1994) by Mary Nolan endeavors to explore how the discourses of efficacy in American corporate models shaped economic and social transformations in Germany. Furthermore, she describes how the process of economic restructuring and related political struggles subverted both the assumptions and expectations regarding their results. Nolan demonstrates that at the beginning of the Weimar era, there was great interest in Germany for American economic models. German industrialists traveled to America to investigate rationalized business methods and created lasting ties with U.S. corporate leaders. Likewise, many American corporations expanded their operations in German markets. Nolan describes that German business rationalization efforts did not keep up with political reforms and ended up exacerbating wage, consumption, and unemployment problems. The Depression did not destroy the belief in rationalization, but severely limited its ideological appeal. Elements of American-styled business rationalization were kept into the Nazi era, but crucially, were divorced from their political implications.

Another recent text that addresses Nazi era business is The Wages of Destruction (2006) by Adam Tooze. According to Tooze, Hitler considered his real enemy to be the “Jewish-dominated” United States, a large nation that Germany could only compete with if it acquired a comparable amount of farmland or “living space.” Tooze also contends, as Nolan does, that Hitler wanted Germany to adopt Americanized advanced production methods to develop a bigger consumer economy. Most importantly, the author argues that every major policy initiative of the Nazis reflected Hitler’s efforts to improve economic competitiveness – from the invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union, to the mass murder of Jews. While Tooze ignores the American corporate presence in Germany and tends to fixate on military statistics, his emphasis on economic concerns as a primary driving force behind Nazi expansionism helps to explain the Nazi desire for collaborative interaction between U.S. business leaders and German policymakers.

A significant book that helps tie together some of the disparate studies that have been reviewed so far is Nancy Lisagor and Frank Lipsius’ The Untold Story of Sullivan & Cromwell (1988). Lisagor and Lipsius demonstrate that the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell was centrally involved in helping American corporate leaders consolidate economic and political power in the late nineteenth century.[22] They then explain that under the direction of John Foster Dulles from the early 1920s through the end of World War II, the firm helped create a network of holding companies, corporate managers, and lawyers, to facilitate corporate development within Germany.

Although Lisagor and Lipsius meant to simply produce a history of the firm from its inception to the 1980s, this work inadvertently presents a significant challenge to historians who would argue that American corporate cooperation with the Third Reich was uncoordinated and small scale. The authors demonstrate that Sullivan & Cromwell specialized in both maintaining managerial control and obscuring overseas corporate operations in providing legal representation for nearly all the businesses discussed here: Ford, GM, IBM, the BIS, IG Farben, ITT, Chase Bank, JP Morgan, and Standard Oil. Additionally, the authors show that influential policymakers, John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles on the American side, and Heinrich Albert and Gerhard Westrick on the German side, were intimately involved in these business relationships – dispelling the notion that their respective governments were completely uninvolved in these collaborative activities. Lisagor and Lipsius have called attention to a crucially important organization involved in these events, exposing the need for more research into the role they played in facilitating Nazi war aims.

Finally, some selected works from U.S. diplomatic history can also help provide some tentative context to the landscape of U.S.business relations with Germany during the World War II era. Because some of these works deal with the cross-over between American corporate leaders and policymakers, this body of literature has the advantage of exposing the complex linkage between U.S. business activity and its foreign policy.

In order to study the phenomenon of corporative collaboration more closely, American historian Michael J. Hogan founded a school of thought aptly named “corporatism.”[23] In describing this methodology, Hogan emphasizes the importance of examining the role of non-state actors, not only in shaping policy, but also the part they play in creating the international environment in which policy is operated. Hogan notes, as he does in his book The Marshall Plan, that American leaders have tried to build a world order along lines comparable to the economic order domestically. Hogan also contends that a corporatist perspective is useful when doing comparative and transnational history. Referencing Akira Iriye’s work on transnational economics and culture, Hogan stresses that the corporatist approach adds a needed dimension to any study rooted in the relationship between American business and politics.[24]

Eschewing the most controversial implications that American policymakers may have purposefully promoted business with the Nazis for geopolitical reasons, Hogan’s school of thought does allow room for some interesting insights. If, in fact, some policymakers were involved in corporate activity with the Nazis, this may help to explain why many businesses did not have their activities exposed until decades later. For instance, Joseph Borkin notes in his book, The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben, that future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ principle expertise was obscuring American subsidiaries in European holding companies in order to avoid regulatory oversight.[25] In another example, Bradford Snell, an attorney hired by the U.S. Senate in 1974 to inquire into anti-competitive practices of Ford and General Motors, lamented that policymakers’ relationship with the automotive corporations were exacerbating the problem.[26] As a surprise to his congressional colleagues, Snell’s report also contained detailed evidence that both of these businesses had also been an integral part of Nazi military production, monopolizing the manufacture of the Third Reich’s planes, tanks, and trucks. Snell’s research was later used as a foundation for scholarship in Working for the Enemy, which was reviewed earlier. Although there were plenty of American policy makers who were staunchly anti-Nazi, further study of individuals like John Foster Dulles may be helpful in illuminating the nature of the relationship between policymakers and corporate managers as is applies to the study of American/Nazi business ties.

Conclusion

So what have we learned here after this long procession of diverse and detailed texts? For one thing, many histories outside the realm of alleged corporate collaboration with the Nazis underscore the historical importance of business institutions and markets. The allusion to the growing importance of non-state actors, particularly in the twentieth century, is a recurring theme. These actors, primarily represented by transnational corporations, have yet to be clearly nailed down in an interpretive framework. Many authors introduce the issue and underscore its importance, but avoid engaging it directly. For this reason, it is perhaps unsurprising that the so-called corporatists and the collaborationists cannot find common ground on which to debate their differing interpretations of American business activity in Europe during World War II.

Given the work that remains to be done, the field of corporate collaboration between American businesses and Germany under the Nazis prior to and during World War II is only just beginning. As noted earlier, neither the corporatists nor the collaborationists have made significant efforts to contextualize their research in other historiographies. Authors who avoid this scholarship are likely to extend the “dialog of the deaf” into the future.

Partially, this is a problem of marketing. For their part, the collaborationists benefit from emphasizing the drama and sensationalism of their accounts, which sell books in the already crowded field of popular World War II histories. On the other side, corporatist historians are supported by a more conservative audience that encourages a skeptical, relativistic, and even reactionary approach to the controversy.

Regardless, most of the works presented here miss the opportunity to shed light on instrumental actors that have yet to receive thorough historical treatment. A good example of this is the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. Here we find a nexus of many industrial and financial concerns with significant reach into European economics: Ford, GM, IBM, ITT, Chase Bank, JP Morgan, Standard Oil, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and IG Farben. Their principle contacts were the Dulles brothers, who, as mentioned earlier both played significant political roles during the war and after. It is imperative that more research be done on institutions like this one in order to break the stalemate between scholars and reach a more detailed understanding of exactly what occurred behind the closed doors of powerful corporate interests.

In another respect, the work of understanding the historical dynamics of this business activity is likely to continue. This current period now represents a “first wave” of history writing since the aftermath of restitution lawsuits that occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s. An opportunity now exists to further analyze and evaluate past studies and break new ground on sources that have been languishing for decades. Future historical analysis of recently compiled archival sources, such as those catalogued by the Nazi War Crimes Interagency Working Group (IWG) at the National Archives in Washington D.C., The Independent Commission of Experts on Swiss Banks (also known as the Bergier Commission), and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Bad Arolsen files, which is in the process of digitizing more than forty-six million documents currently archived in Germany, has the potential to reveal new and interesting insights. Allegations of corporate collusion with Nazis are a not to be taken lightly, particularly for businesses that continue to be patronized today. If evidence of war crimes do emerge, they deserve to be scrutinized carefully both in the academic and public spheres. It is imperative that researchers examine past forays into this topic critically and incorporate their most useful elements in future research.

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Abstract

Historians have long noted that late nineteenth-century America witnessed an “organizational revolution,” which led to an unprecedented concentration of wealth and political power due to the business activity of its growing number of corporations. Thus, a closer look at key organizations that played a role in this process of corporate consolidation can explain the historical dynamics at play. This paper will reveal that the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell was one of these important actors for at least four reasons: It had a major influence in the invention of the “holding company,” which allowed the large trusts to evolve into companies that could evade regulation designed to limit their growing size and leverage; it facilitated the monopolization of America’s railroad industry, which led to some of the most violent labor struggles in the nation’s history; it oversaw an enormous increase of international investment, particularly from Germany, which added major momentum to the growth of certain industrial syndicates like General Electric; and it helped drive major American foreign policy initiatives designed to benefit its commercial clients – for example, by securing investment and legal authorization of the construction of the Panama Canal. Little has been written about Sullivan & Cromwell, and it has produced no comprehensive history of its own, despite the fact that it continues to serve the interests of some of the most powerful corporations today. This paper will argue that, under the direction of William Nelson Cromwell at the end of the nineteenth century, the firm pushed itself into a privileged position among American business and governmental elites, thereby setting a precedent for its influence in later eras.

The explosive growth of corporate business in late nineteenth-century America in many ways defines the period. Terms like “the Gilded Age” or “Robber Barons” symbolize the enormous consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of the few.[1] These expansive corporate conglomerates set precedents for labor relations, national politics, and business practices. Today, we live in a world shaped in part by the actions of, and responses to corporate business. Therefore, it is imperative that we continue to study the development of these activities in order to better understand the present.

If we are to assume that corporate expansion was among the most important features of late nineteenth-century America, who were the central actors in this period? While corporations may have been busy building and buying up factories and railroads, who facilitated this process? One key group worth a closer examination are lawyers. Not only were they the envoys between powerful interests, governmental organizations, and citizens, they were also often times the directors and managers of the corporations themselves. According to legal scholar Walter Werner, the battle for control of the American business landscape was every bit as profound as the worker struggles that were spawned by it. Werner states, “Corporate control is a topic dear to the hearts of lawyers. They are the generals – and courts often the battlegrounds – in struggles for the control of economic empires.”[2] In an appraisal of the most important and influential of these “generals,” the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell looms large.

From its humble beginnings interpreting wills and mortgages in the late nineteenth-century from its offices in New York City, Sullivan & Cromwell’s client list has grown into a veritable “who’s who” of the most influential corporations in American history. The firm has a long standing historical relationship with many major banks, including JP Morgan and the Chase Bank. Sullivan & Cromwell has also served the interests of several large industrial conglomerates, including Standard Oil, General Motors, and Ford Motor Company. As of November 2010, the firm has been working with its longtime client, British Petroleum, to offset the costs associated with the enormous oil spill the energy company caused in the Gulf of Mexico earlier in the year.[3] The question then remains: How did Sullivan & Cromwell come into a position of collaborating with such powerful business interests?

Late nineteenth-century America was a crucial time for Sullivan & Cromwell, and for corporations and lawyers more generally, who experienced a dual revolution: an organizational revolution and a corresponding legal revolution. The legal revolution manifested itself in legislative attempts, both at the state and federal level, to control the tremendous growth of corporate capitalism. These efforts were challenged in America’s courts by corporations seeking to circumvent regulation, which led to the creation of new legal protections for monopolistic business practices by business-friendly judges.[4] On the other side, the organizational revolution was more subtle; one of the most widely influential human technologies, the bureaucracy, created wide-ranging, efficient new structures that were able to dramatically expand the capabilities of business institutions. Legal historian Charles Perrow noted that the ubiquity of bureaucracies has created a unique problem for historians and requires some digging in order to expose their historical significance: “In many accounts of social change, wealth and power are not associated with organizations; wealth is resident in an individual, a family or a class, and power is resident in persons or ideologies. Organizations are at best unproblematic resources for other expressions of wealth and power.”[5] In other words, bureaucratic structures are embedded in our everyday experiences, and special attention is needed by historians to tease out their activities in relation to larger historical dynamics. Little has been written about Sullivan & Cromwell for precisely this reason; significant effects of the law firm’s activities fall mostly within the purview of its clients’ businesses, rather than demonstrating the significance of the firm’s role in both of these revolutions.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the importance of Sullivan & Cromwell, despite its relatively light historical treatment, as an instrumental organization in driving government policy, legal precedents, and business practices in late nineteenth-century America. Through its business activities, this paper will argue that the firm came to occupy a privileged position among governmental and corporate elites, setting a precedent for its influence in later years. Three aspects of Sullivan & Cromwell’s work distinguished it from its peers by the turn of the twentieth century: The legal invention of the “holding company,” which encouraged tremendous corporate growth; the consolidation of industries, as with the Northern Pacific Railroad as a case study; and the firm’s cooperation with the U.S. government to secure investment and diplomacy in the development of the Panama Canal. In all three cases it will be demonstrated that Sullivan & Cromwell, under the purposeful management of William Nelson Cromwell, became a uniquely powerful player in this process, well beyond any comparable institutions.

A brief analysis of the relevant historiography will help lay the groundwork for this argument. Texts that reference Sullivan & Cromwell directly are few. The only detailed (and unauthorized) history is A Law Unto Itself: The Untold Story of Sullivan & Cromwell by legal scholars Nancy Lisagor and Frank Lipsius.[6] Lisagor and Lipsius have charted out a somewhat comprehensive history of Sullivan & Cromwell, attempting to position the firm among other venerable American legal institutions in the 1980s. For this reason, brief analysis is given to the firm’s early years in the late nineteenth-century in favor of its twentieth-century activities. Additionally, this paper will provide some contrast to Lisagor and Lipsius’ work by isolating the voice of William Nelson Cromwell in order to provide some critical analysis of his personal intentions for the early course of the firm. Sullivan & Cromwell itself has provided a handful of self-published material, including a biography of Cromwell, which understandably portrays him and the firm in a positive light.[7]

Other texts are useful in providing the legal, business, and political contexts of the period. Works of legal history, which argue for the significance of innovation and effects of corporate law are quite numerous and varied.[8] Corporations and Society: Power and Responsibility, a collection of essays by legal historians such as Martin J. Sklar, Michael Horwitz, Aviam Soifer, and Samuel Loescher is a useful text for explaining the legal development of the corporate business model and exploring the moral implications of this structure.  The main drawback of the work, and others like it, is that its focus is on court cases and legal precedents, rather than on the law firms themselves as significant historical actors.

Legal history intersects haphazardly with business history as well, producing a diverse backdrop for the study located here. One of the classic texts associated with American business history is The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.[9] Chandler provides a highly detailed history of the development of corporate models of mass production and the associated development of modern management structures. Problematically, critiques of the socio-political effects of this activity are almost completely absent in the text. Drawing inspiration from Chandler, Big Business and the State by Harland Prechel and Constructing Corporate America: History Politics, Culture, which is another collection of essays edited by Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Sicilia, both provide a more revisionist approach to the field of American corporate law, but also do little to isolate law firms as instrumental participants.[10]

American nineteenth-century political history has a rich and varied historiography that can help elucidate the political climate in late nineteenth-century America and are worthy of integrating into the argument presented in this paper.[11] Recent histories have helped provide agency to workers in response to employer abuses, such as Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago: 1864-1897, by Richard Schneirov, is a detailed account of the relationship between party politics, labor, and political machines.[12] A recent useful work that attempts to create a synthesis of earlier histories and provide a socio-political overview for the period is A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of national Authority in Nineteenth–Century America by Brian Balogh.[13] While neither of these texts mentions Sullivan & Cromwell directly, both analyze important industries, popular movements, and prominent politicians that will be described here. Therefore, the task of this paper is to integrate Sullivan & Cromwell into these larger historical narratives.

Who were Sullivan & Cromwell?

Algernon Sydney Sullivan was born in Madison, Indiana in 1826 and, following in his father’s footsteps, became a lawyer and was admitted to the bar in 1848.[14] Looking for an opportunity to satisfy his ambition to become more involved in public politics, he moved to New York City to start a legal practice there. With a reputation for honesty and eloquent oration, Sullivan volunteered to represent the crew of the Savannah, the first vessel to be captured during the Civil War.[15] Charged as pirates, the Confederate prisoners were in danger of being executed. Because Sullivan had some sympathy for the Southern Confederacy, in part because his wife was southern, he passionately argued that the accused men be considered prisoners of war, and be treated more humanely.[16] Public passions were enflamed by the case, and Sullivan was arrested and imprisoned for treason by Secretary of State William H. Seward.[17] Luckily, Seward changed his mind about Sullivan and had him released after an oath of allegiance to the Union. Sullivan passionately argued the case and ultimately the defendants were exchanged as prisoners of war.[18] After the war, lingering anger over Sullivan’s sympathy for the south was matched by praise for his courage and bravery in the face of public outcry. Sullivan worked his way up in New York city politics fighting the Tweed ring, eventually becoming assistant district attorney in 1870.[19] Sullivan also ran a successful firm, Sullivan, Kobbe & Fowler, which handled real estate cases, specializing in assisting southern clients who had moved to New York City. At the height of his popularity, Sullivan was proposed as a candidate for Mayor of New York City in 1873, but humbly declined.[20]

In 1870 Sullivan noticed an ambitious man, William Nelson Cromwell, who had been working for his firm as an accountant. Sullivan decided to support this man’s education at Columbia law school and made him a junior partner.[21] Cromwell was born in Brooklyn in 1854 to a large, working class family. After graduating high school, he worked as an accountant in a railroad office to support his family before joining the law firm of Sullivan, Kobbe & Fowler.[22] In 1879, Herman Kobbe and Robert Ludlow Fowler decided to move on to other institutions, leaving Sullivan to invite Cromwell into a full partnership to create the firm Sullivan & Cromwell.[23] Sullivan’s social contacts helped bring in big clients, such as Lennox family, which hired the firm in 1882 to split up one of the largest and most sought-after real estate plots in New York City.[24] Sullivan, who was advanced in age and in poor health after the Confederate piracy case, left much of the work to Cromwell.

Cromwell proved himself to be a driven and industrious partner for Sullivan. Helping to develop corporate clients, Cromwell developed skills in corporate consolidation even as his partner Sullivan had misgivings about the emerging business strategies that Cromwell would eventually become known for. For instance, when a mining business in Colorado retained the firm in 1879, Cromwell gained experience filing articles of incorporation in multiple states, which was a new business practice at the time.[25] When this practice became more widespread in the following decade, this meant that Sullivan & Cromwell was ahead of the curve. In the era of cutthroat corporate competition, speed and efficiency gave the firm’s clients an edge over their rivals. As Sullivan became less involved in the firm, Cromwell pressed ahead with his corporate clients, many of whom were constructing trusts to consolidate their holdings. Essentially trusts were monopolies, in which shareholders of various companies in the same industry were convinced (or coerced) by a board of trustees to exchange their shares for dividend-payment certificates. The board of trustees, which usually represented the most powerful people in a particular industry, would often use their majority control in order to restrain competition and fix prices.[26] Two years before Sullivan died in 1889, he noted to a client that “I expect to express some opinions about the combination of ‘trusts’ at a public meeting…I regard them with apprehension. I think it is good public policy to restrict and regulate them and I shall so speak.”[27] His partner Cromwell had a different attitude. Once Sullivan was gone, Cromwell’s vision of the firm as a leader in corporate consolidation could be realized.

The Holding Company: A Legal Revolution and Catalyst for Monopoly

While the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century pushed innovation in manufacturing, transportation, and communication, a legal revolution was occurring in tandem as businesses organized themselves to deal with the explosive growth associated with these developments. Sullivan & Cromwell would play an important role in this process through its direct involvement in writing some of this corporate law. In order to explain this, some historical context of how these changes came about is needed.

One of the first crucial legal innovations to facilitate business growth in America in the latter half of the nineteenth century was the formulation of “corporate personhood.” The idea behind this concept was that a business could be constituted as a single entity representing the interests and aspirations of its shareholders. The implications of this idea were, however, more far reaching than a mere organizational strategy. Essentially, “corporate personhood” meant that corporations were considered to have the same rights as flesh and blood persons: the right to own property, the right to free speech, including political campaigning, and perhaps most importantly, the right to due process in court proceedings.[28]

Ironically, this crucial corporate legal precedent stems from the 14^th amendment to the Constitution, which was adopted on July 9, 1868, primarily to prevent the Supreme Court from declaring the Civil Rights act of 1866 unconstitutional and as a response to violence against newly freed slaves in the southern states in the wake of the Union victory of the Civil War. The amendment further underpinned political enfranchisement of all males within the United States of 21 years and older; key groups left out of the provision were women and Native Americans.[29] The linkage between corporations and the 14^th amendment first occurred during the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific R.R. case of 1886, which concerned the right of California to tax the railroad as a single entity. While the subject of this litigation seems fairly banal, during the proceedings the justices came to the profound conclusion that corporations constituted “legal persons,” and were subject to the same rights and responsibilities.[30]

Corporations seeking to expand their businesses zeroed in on the right to due process, specifically in the protection of private contracts, as an important legal mechanism to do so.[31] The well known 1819 case, Dartmouth College v. Woodward, focused on the binding nature of contracts, which provided an important legal precedent for corporations wishing to defend their business arrangements.[32] The Santa Clara decision built upon this legal foundation and dramatically increased the scope of liberty and freedom for corporate property and operations. Corporations could already own property, such as land, infrastructure, such as roads and bridges, and other companies, but now they could also more easily defend these contractual arrangements in court. According to historian Martin J. Sklar, “The Court thereby set limits on the reach of the law while extending the reach of the corporation.”[33]

Combined with the products of the industrial revolution, such as faster travel, communication, and new industrial products like steel and electricity, the floodgates for corporate consolidation opened. Huge trusts were formed by some of the richest and most powerful members of American society such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, William H. Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and John Pierpont Morgan.[34] The trust structure allowed these owners to buy up most of the competing businesses and combine them into a single monopoly. This activity had a profound effect on the nation’s inhabitants, particularly its working people. Corporate growth led to inhumane and brutal treatment, which spawned violent labor struggles and the formation of unions, as well as fomenting a general transformation of the country with rapid urbanization.[35] Popular sentiment and anger over anticompetitive practices led to legal attacks on railroad, steamship, and manufacturing companies in several states such as New York and Ohio, and culminated with the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which attempted to regulate corporate capitalism.[36] Meanwhile, corporate leaders testing the limits of horizontal consolidation by monopolizing individual industries saw a weakness in their strategy: Effective control of industries required some degree of vertical consolidation, such as the buying up of distribution and marketing firms.[37] A new legal formation was needed.

Where corporate leaders saw attempts to block business growth, William Nelson Cromwell saw opportunity. He came up with a new legal mechanism, “the holding company,” which would both help trusts avoid legal attacks and provide them more leverage to invest in multiple industries. The main feature of this legal innovation, as Cromwell envisioned it, would be a law that would allow one corporation to own the stocks and bonds of others. Cromwell had his junior partner William J. Curtis convince the New Jersey legislature to have Sullivan & Cromwell write their state’s new corporation law to include this new provision. Cromwell’s inducement for New Jersey was that it would bring new business and tax revenue to the state.[38] For Cromwell, the financial benefits were immediate: Sullivan & Cromwell’s helped its client, the Southern Cotton Oil Trust, transform into the first New Jersey corporation literally overnight. Sullivan & Cromwell lawyers drew up 175 agreements in one evening and reaped a profit of at least $50,000 in 1892.[39] This allowed the new corporation, now named the Southern Cotton Oil Company, to both skirt the Sherman Antitrust Act and fully integrate into its markets by buying up marketing and distribution companies without fear of legal reprisals.[40]

The rewriting of New Jersey corporation law had a tremendous and rapid effect. The business historian Alfred D. Chandler noted that “Immediately the ‘New Jersey holding company’ took the place of the trust as the legal form used to merge a number of single-unit enterprises operating facilities in several states into a single, large consolidated enterprise.”[41] This type of legal maneuvering was perfectly suited to Sullivan & Cromwell, which had invented the process of multiple simultaneous filings of corporate paperwork for various businesses, such as the Consolidated Bonanza and Union Tunnel and Mining Co.[42] New Jersey became the national epicenter of mergers and monopolies, as the old trusts transformed themselves into New Jersey corporations, and new businesses jumped in to be part of the action.[43]

But what, exactly, were these businesses taking part in? Although the obvious advantage for most companies was avoiding the Sherman Act, there were also other benefits. Most importantly, the holding company extended the idea of corporate personhood, in the sense that it allowed one corporation to buy the shares of another, reopening the door to a cartelization of various industries.[44] Insidiously, holding companies also allowed their activities to be obscured from the public and competitors. Aside from hiding their potentially anticompetitive or predatory practices that might elicit complaints, holding companies also created a liability firewall, which created a legal separation from the company’s subsidiaries in case of lawsuits. Among other advantages, the holding company model also allowed corporations to control other firms in geographically disparate areas, another aspect to New Jersey law that was well suited to monopolies.[45]

Sullivan & Cromwell’s contribution to the wave of mergers that brought so many corporations to New Jersey was profound. According to the statistics compiled by legal scholar Charles Yanblon, 2,186 companies were incorporated in New Jersey by 1899; of those, 354 had capitalized stock of $1 million dollars, and fifty of these were capitalized at over $20 million dollars.[46] Sullivan & Cromwell bragged that the value of all the corporations doing business in New Jersey in the decade after Cromwell wrote the idea of the holding company into the state’s corporate laws was over $1 billion dollars.[47] Others looking at the wave of mergers saw it as a less than positive development as Lawyer William W. Cook observed, “[T]he relation of the state toward the corporations resembles that between a feudal baron and the burghers of old, who paid for protection.”[48] Meanwhile, journalist Lincoln Steffens dubbed New Jersey “the traitor state.”[49] Neither man noticed that it was Cromwell who wrote the law. Other states, such as Delaware, copied Cromwell’s legislation in order to attract business as well. Ultimately, the legal innovation of the holding company put Sullivan & Cromwell in a class of its own. Sullivan & Cromwell did not simply assist its corporate clients to monopolize their own industries; it fundamentally altered the law to benefit all monopolies.

Northern Pacific Railroad: A Case Study in Corporate Consolidation

Railroads were at the center of corporate consolidation in America in the latter half of the nineteenth-century. They unified regional markets into a national economy, set precedents for labor relations, and revolutionized management structures.[50] While a summary of the growth of railroads and the various results of this process in the U.S. is beyond the scope of this paper, we can look more closely at specific examples involving Sullivan & Cromwell as an instrumental partner in this process. It is also worth noting that outside of railroads, the firm also organized and consolidated U.S. Steel and General Electric in the same time period, both of which have a large body of literature written about them.[51] The story of the Northern Pacific Railroad is less well known. It started innocuously, but ended up at the center of major conflicts between the great investment houses, the government, and the public.

Any discussion of the Northern Pacific Railroad is incomplete without a description of Henry Villard, the most prominent investor and manager of this institution.[52] Born Heinrich Gustav Hilgard in 1835, Villard was raised in a prominent aristocratic family in western Bavaria. He emigrated to the U.S. following a major disagreement with his father, a conservative justice on the Bavarian Supreme Court, over Villard’s sympathy for the 1848 revolution in Germany. Working his way up as a journalist covering the American Civil War, he took on the name Villard to conceal any identification with his family. After the war, gaining some wealth and prominence for himself due to his work, he married Fanny Garrison, the daughter of famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and returned to Germany. Utilizing his family contacts, Villard joined the committees of several German bondholders, who were keenly interested in investing in American railroads following the financial panic of 1873, which left many of the institutions bankrupt and in need of new capital.[53]

Villard’s financiers were poised to purchase a significant amount of infrastructure in America’s booming northwest. Organized as the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Co., this institution, under Villard’s management, they purchased a number of steamships and small railroads lines being developed between Oregon, Washington, and California.[54] This company came to national prominence when its bondholders clashed with the infamous railroad speculator Jay Gould over its right to connect this growing rail network to those in Kansas. After this victory, Villard’s reputation in leading American financial circles became well known.[55] This emboldened Villard to expand his business empire.

In 1883, Cromwell entered the picture as Villard’s attorney. With Cromwell’s help, Villard reorganized his companies into the Oregon and Transcontinental Company, in order to buy a majority interest in Northern Pacific, thus joining the two together in a huge transportation network.[56] Villard saw the promise of the Northern Pacific, even though it had been left bankrupt and incomplete, and endeavored to have the railroad completed on an ambitious schedule. When Villard had assumed the presidency in 1881, the gap between the finished portions of the railroad was still 800 miles apart. The most difficult portion had to be built through the Belt Range of the Rocky Mountains and eventually necessitated the construction of two large tunnels. Over 20,000 men were utilized to complete this job.[57]

Financial problems would eventually lead Villard to rely heavily on Cromwell. It slowly became evident to Villard that the engineer’s accounting reports had been grossly understated. Borrowing millions of dollars to remain afloat, Villard finally completed the rail line to much fanfare in the fall of 1883. The stock of Northern Pacific railroad crashed almost immediately afterward as it became evident that not only was the company hopelessly in debt, but also that the line’s terminus, Portland, Oregon was woefully underdeveloped. [58] Villard staked much of his own personal fortune in the Northern Pacific venture and creditors eyed his opulent Madison Avenue home for possible seizure. Cromwell frustrated Villard’s creditors by securing a $1.125 million dollar loan from Drexel, Morgan & Co., cleverly taken out in Villard’s wife’s name, in order to protect his property. In response to investor anger at Cromwell’s action, Cromwell stated, “That will not be regarded as tricky…[Northern Pacific and its related companies] had the benefit of Mr.s V’s generous action.”[59] Villard was impressed with Cromwell’s deft legal maneuvering and left him in charge of Northern Pacific.

Cromwell had more than just the interest of his client Villard at heart. It had not been lost on Cromwell that Villard had access to deep pockets in Germany. As Villard resigned the presidency of Northern Pacific and left again for Germany to rest after a nervous breakdown, Cromwell and Drexel, Morgan & Co. worked to consolidate their control of Northern Pacific.[60] After Villard recovered, he began another attempt to corral investors in order to rebuild his business portfolio. Cromwell took notice of Villard’s ability to bring in new investment and heaped praise upon him: “…I was imbued with an abiding faith in your future…Your desire for a continuance of my connection with your affairs…is appreciated. I could not carry you and your affairs over in my mind for a year, without catching fire and becoming so interested in them…”[61] Cromwell was true to his word on bringing Villard, and his investors, back into business with Northern Pacific. This time, however, Cromwell would remain fully in control. Cromwell wanted direct access to Villard’s prized contact, George Siemens, the president of Deutsche Bank.

Armed with managerial control and new investment capital for Northern Pacific, Cromwell turned to the new mechanism he had personally tailored to expand this business empire, the New Jersey holding company model. In 1890, Cromwell incorporated Oregon & Transcontinental and Co. as a holding company, so that it could consolidate control over Northern Pacific and then continue to spread out into the Midwest.[62] Meanwhile, the press lauded Villard for his return to prominence.[63] Ironically, it was Cromwell, not Villard, who was clearly in control of the business. Behind the scenes, Cromwell forcefully justified his management: “What we needed most was a leader…through whom alone negotiations could be conducted… I had my own methods of working…in carrying out my own views and plans…I must be allowed my own way of working it out.”[64] Cromwell’s statement demonstrates that he was no ordinary lawyer, content to simply facilitate his clients’ business. Both in word and deed, Cromwell was the central actor in these events, shaping them according to his own agenda. Villard needed Cromwell more than ever, as Northern Pacific was now dealing with its first major competition, the Great Northern Railway, to connect its rail lines with Chicago, the all-important transportation hub.[65]

In the chaotic and rapidly changing environment of industrial and financial competition, the financial panic of 1893 caught Villard by surprise. Dealing with cost overruns, this time due to its building of new parallel railroad lines to compete with the Great Northern Railway, Northern Pacific declared bankruptcy again. This time, Villard decided he wanted nothing more to do with managing railroads. In a personal letter to another director, on March 1, 1893 Villard stated, “my connection with Northern Pacific has been a misfortune to me from the beginning to end…Had I never had anything to do with the company…I certainly would have enjoyed far greater peace of mind.”[66] Luckily for Villard, Cromwell made sure he was taken care of, helping Villard sell a large amount of stock. Suspicion arose immediately that Villard had advanced knowledge of the railroad’s demise and sold off all his shares right before it collapsed.[67] Mounting an unassailable legal defense, Cromwell protected Villard from angry investors seeking damages for their losses. Even though Villard escaped the repercussions for his alleged misdeeds, even his brother-in-law William Garrison, Jr. suspected Villard of fraud.[68]

Although the story ends here for Villard, Cromwell’s involvement in the Northern Pacific Railroad continued. Cromwell succeeded in gaining direct access to George Siemens, the director of Deutsche Bank, whose investment in the railroad now fell to Cromwell’s management. Armed with this investment capital, Cromwell busied himself with centralizing his control of Northern Pacific and preparing the ground for further expansion. Cromwell’s first order of business was to remove all managerial rivalries within Northern Pacific. In a duplicitous move, Cromwell argued that due to the other directors’ previous associations with Villard, whom the shareholders now regarded negatively, they could no longer be trusted and should be removed.[69] By directly lobbying shareholder groups, Cromwell outflanked the more recalcitrant managers. In a remarkably lucid letter to Siemens, Cromwell noted about one such manager, “I succeeded in having each of these [shareholder] Committees…serve notice [to the manager] of their withdrawal of their support from him. This left him in a helpless and, I may say, ridiculous position, so that he was forced to withdraw his own motion without argument.”[70] In this way, Cromwell ruthlessly removed any potential competitors for leadership within the corporation.

Cromwell was aware, as many were in the face of widespread unrest, that railroad consolidation and boom-bust cycles were having a negative effect on workers and common people by disrupting prices, causing mass layoffs, and creating unfair labor practices.[71] Whether Cromwell made the connection between his own involvement in monopolizing the railroad industry or not, he was clearly unsympathetic to the plight of the people that were harmed by this activity. In response to the Pullman strike that was affecting much of the railway industry at the time Cromwell was communicating with Siemens in 1894, Cromwell expressed his sentiments in no uncertain terms: “…the Government has been instructed to institute vigorous proceedings to enforce the law and protect mail and commerce…there is no such thing as a lawful strike…I have not the least confidence, however, that the outcome will give fresh evidence of the supremacy of the law…”[72] Although the strike signaled a sea change in American popular politics, Cromwell was clearly disgusted with any attempt for labor to assert itself.

The major results of Cromwell’s involvement in the Northern Pacific Railroad are threefold: First, Cromwell revolutionized corporate bankruptcy procedures, which he called the “Cromwell Plan.” Cromwell’s method was to threaten to liquidate the company knowing that its creditors would back off, viewing financial downturns as the worst time to sell off assets due to their diminished returns. Second, Cromwell set a precedent for efficient multi-state communications in order to outmaneuver his corporate rivals. According to writers Nancy Lisagor and Frank Lipsius, “Cromwell developed the reputation of being a clever lawyer ‘who taught the robber barons how to rob.’”[73] When Northern Pacific declared bankruptcy in 1893, Cromwell sent lawyers to every state the railroad operated in and had them all file bankruptcy papers simultaneously via telegraph, further frustrating the railroad’s creditors.[74] Third, and perhaps most ironically, the entire Northern Pacific Railroad Company would end up in the hands of J.P. Morgan, who had originally lent Villard the money to survive the first bankruptcy via Drexel, Morgan & Co. The Northern Pacific Railroad would end up part of the Great Northern Securities Company, the largest holding company in U.S. history, which would be forced to break up in 1904 by the Supreme Court.[75] Historian Mathew Josepshson insinuates that Sullivan & Cromwell had been the client of J.P. Morgan all along.[76] Conspiracy or not, this case study demonstrates that Cromwell was an independent and capable actor in the business world, who utilized his firm to lead the way in innovating the practice of corporate law. The case of Northern Pacific also shows that the forceful manager of Sullivan & Cromwell was not above duplicity and ruthlessness in order to achieve his goals.

From National Business to International Diplomacy: The Panama Canal

As a result of his involvement with developing the Panama Canal, Cromwell was portrayed as an enlightened leader, who simply wanted what was best for America. Here it will be demonstrated that his involvement was highly profitable to him, and his firm, both monetarily and politically. While we cannot be certain of Cromwell’s motivations in how he directed his firm, we can examine the chain of events.

It was the railroad business that helped capture Cromwell’s interest in the Panama Canal. One of his clients was C.P. Huntington, who owned a majority of stock in the Panama Railroad. When the Panama Railroad was reorganized, Cromwell became a director in the new organization, called the New Panama Canal Company.[77] In Cromwell’s management of the Central American Railroad, he learned that a French company had gone bankrupt attempting to build a canal in Panama and decided to travel to Paris to investigate the matter. What Cromwell found was that the Compagnie Nouvelle, the French Panama Canal firm in Paris, had been floundering. This company, managed by the engineer Ferdinand Lesseps, had tried to reproduce its success in building the Suez Canal in 1869. Unfortunately for Lesseps and his team, the Panama project was a disaster, leading to the deaths of over 4,000 French workers due to malaria.[78] After spending more than $260 million dollars on the project, the company halted the project and funding dried up. Cromwell sensed an opportunity for an enormous amount of money to be made and began devising a plan to sell the company, and more importantly, the large amount of land it owned in Panama, to the U.S. Working with the new chief of the syndicate, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, Cromwell endeavored to expand his business expertise into the realm of government lobbying.[79]

The major problem for Cromwell was that the U.S. was already in the process of planning its own canal project in Nicaragua. Cromwell set to work lobbying Senator Marc Hanna, who was already known for his influence on McKinley.[80] Cromwell elicited the help of junior partner William Curtis, and journalist Roger Farnham to convince Hanna to look into the Panama Canal project. Previously, Curtis had helped Cromwell persuade the New Jersey legislature to write the state’s corporation law and again proved his usefulness to Cromwell and the firm.[81] Cromwell’s most tangible achievement in these matters was the Isthmian Canal Commission. Cromwell made sure that three engineers that could be influenced by him would be placed on the commission, including railroad engineer George S. Morrison.[82] This produced complaints from the Army corps of engineers, a majority of which supported the Nicaragua plan, releasing a statement that Cromwell’s influence on McKinley was “too powerful for ordinary mortals to counteract.”[83] Cromwell used his leverage on the McKinley administration to insure that the Commission would go to Paris, rather than Central America, to conduct their study.[84] This episode evidences Cromwell’s growing influence beyond the business world into the U.S. government itself.

The Isthmian Canal Commission was sent to Paris to look at the Compagnie Nouvelle’s plans and determine if its project was still feasible. Cromwell had cleverly already been busy for months putting together maps, engineers’ reports, hydrographic studies, geologic profiles, projected dam and lock sites, reports on excavation expenses, and inventories of equipment.[85] As a result, the commission gained a positive impression of the Panama plan in the public relations coup Cromwell had put together. Interestingly, the commission’s final report makes no mention of Cromwell. It only states that the officers at the Compagnie Nouvelle “received the commissioners with great courtesy and were ready at all times to assist them in making a study of this [Panama] route in all its aspects.”[86]

A major challenge for Cromwell was to negotiate the price for the excavation. Admiral John Walker, the head of the Isthmian Commission, recommended a price of $40 million, which was only a fraction of the money the original French canal company had spent. At the first shareholders’ meeting in Paris January of 1902, police had to break up a riot that broke out when stockholders were informed of the price Cromwell was offering. In the end, a deeply disappointed Bunau-Varilla, who had already invested $200,000 in the project, relented and agreed to Cromwell’s terms.[87]

The battle for the canal, however, was not over. Debate on the Nicaragua plan continued, even as Cromwell utilized his firm to delay it. Cromwell decided to use a direct measure on Senator Hanna, “donating” $60,000 to the Republican Party campaign fund, which Hanna personally managed.[88] Disaster struck for Cromwell and Bunau-Varilla when McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo in September, 1901. Neither Cromwell nor Hanna, for that matter, knew how Roosevelt would fall on the issue of the canal. As it turned out, Roosevelt was interested in continuing the canal project and wanted it done quickly. The problem for Cromwell was that Roosevelt quickly appropriated $140 million for the canal in Nicaragua.[89]

Cromwell and Hanna devised a new strategy. Deriving inspiration from increased volcanic activity in the Caribbean in 1902, they decided to attempt to dissuade Congress by convincing them that the proposed Nicaragua canal path was rife with volcanic activity.[90] Hanna made deeply impassioned speeches on the subject. When debate in Congress finally ended in June of 1902, the Panama side won by just eight votes.

Emboldened by victory, Cromwell was set to the task of working with Roosevelt and Secretary of State John Hay in providing the diplomatic framework for the transfer of sovereignty. According to journalist Mark Sullivan, Cromwell gained the confidence of Roosevelt through Senator Hanna’s recommendation: “this is very ticklish business. You had better be guided by Cromwell; he knows all about the subject and all about those people down there.” Roosevelt supposedly replied, “The trouble with Cromwell is he overestimates his relation to [the] cosmos.” “Cosmos?” said Hanna, “I don’t know him-I don’t know any of those South Americans; but Cromwell knows them all; you stick close to Cromwell.”[91] Whether or not Mark Sullivan’s account of this conversation was accurate, Roosevelt did follow Cromwell’s lead. In the end it was Cromwell that drafted the treaty with Secretary Hay’s Columbian counterpart Thomás Herrán.[92] However, there remained the significant problem of dealing with a Columbia that did not want to give up Panama without a cut of the $40 million that was paid for the excavation. Cromwell decided that the only way to deal with the situation was to have Panama secede and he met with both Roosevelt and Panamanian revolutionary Dr. Manuel Amador to discuss this political strategy.[93] Although there was some brief political maneuvering when the Panamanian rebels threatened to revolt against Amador and Cromwell’s plans, in the end Cromwell’s treaty was adopted and Amador became Panama’s first president. On November 3, 1903 American warships provided support for a bloodless Panamanian coup. Secretary Hay signed the final treaty with Bunau-Varilla shortly thereafter. Neither of Cromwell’s meetings with Roosevelt nor Amador has ever been published. Amador’s son hosted a celebration at the Waldor-Astoria hotel in New York for the Panama Railroad officials and Sullivan & Cromwell. He gave the first Panamanian flag to Cromwell to present to Roosevelt.

What was the final outcome? According to Sullivan & Cromwell lawyer and biographer Arthur Dean, Cromwell’s work on the Panama Canal was “unselfish and patriotic.”[94] There were, however, important benefits to Cromwell: First of all, Cromwell billed his French client $800,000. Utilizing Raymond Poincaré, lawyer and future French president, to represent Sullivan & Cromwell in France, the company eventually settled on $200,000.[95] More importantly, Sullivan & Cromwell now had access to the highest offices in the U.S., as well as significant political connections in France. Legal historian Nancy Lisagor noted that Washington “blossom[ed] as a lobbyists’ delight, where determination and contacts could do wonders for clients. [Cromwell] was half a century ahead of his time, and so had the field to himself.”[96] The Panama chapter not only speaks to Sullivan & Cromwell’s growing influence, but also the expanding link between corporate policy and foreign policy in America. Through Cromwell’s leadership, the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell had gained access to the highest offices in the U.S. This meant that the firm’s clients stood to benefit from this significant influence left by Cromwell’s legacy going forward into the following century.

Conclusion

Where did the aforementioned events leave this little-noticed, yet highly influential law firm at the beginning of the twentieth century? Sullivan & Cromwell was now in a position to work with whomever it wanted. Starting with local business in New York City in the 1880s, to the national scene in the wave of mergers in the 1890s, and finally on a global scale with the Panama Canal affair, Sullivan & Cromwell’s rise to prominence was both rapid and profound. Although William Nelson Cromwell would play an active role for years afterwards, his involvement in day-to-day affairs peaked with his work on the Panama Canal. Cromwell started hunting for new blood to lead the group of nearly two dozen lawyers working for the firm in the first decade of the twentieth century. Corporate power in America continued to expand as automotive, telecommunication, and radio industries entered the scene. Sullivan & Cromwell’s place as one of the most influential arbiters of corporate activity in America was assured.

Cromwell eventually chose John Foster Dulles to be his successor in 1911. Just like Cromwell before him, Dulles showed tremendous ambition and drive for both business and diplomacy. Not long after, John Foster Dulles’ younger brother Allen would become a partner as well. In the proceeding three decades, the Dulles brothers would make clients of the world’s most powerful corporations and financial institutions, including Ford Motor Company, General Motors, International Business Machines, Chase Bank, International Telephone and Telegraph, Brown Brothers Harriman, IG Farben, Standard Oil, and the Bank for International Settlements. The reach of these businesses into the realm of U.S. foreign policy would have a significant global impact during World War II and beyond under Sullivan & Cromwell’s stewardship.[97] After World War II, John Foster Dulles would hold a forceful position in the Eisenhower administration as the Secretary of State, while his brother Allen would become the longest serving director of the Central Intelligence Agency, respectively. The Dulles brothers’ tremendous influence on twentieth-century U.S. diplomacy and geopolitical strategy further blurred the line between the corporate policy of Sullivan & Cromwell, its clients, and U.S. foreign policy itself. In a sense, William Nelson Cromwell’s dream of working to serve the interests of the most dominant corporations while expanding Sullivan & Cromwell’s influence to the highest offices in America was fulfilled.

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Schneirov, Richard. Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern

Liberalism in Chicago: 1864-1897.Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998.

Weitz, Mark A. The Confederacy on Trial: The Piracy and Sequestration Cases of 1861

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Reevaluating Shoah: Contemporary Responses to Holocaust Restitution Lawsuits

Itamar Levin and Natasha Dornberg, The Last Deposit: Swiss Banks and Holocaust Victims’ Accounts (Santa Barbara: Praeger Trade, 1999).

Michael Bazyler, Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America’s Courts (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

John Authers and Richard Wolffe, The Victim’s Fortune: Inside the Epic Battle Over the Debts of the Holocaust. (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).

Ronald W. Zweig, German Reparations and The Jewish World: A History of the Claims Conference. By Ronald W. Zweig. (Kentucky: Routledge, 2001. 248 pages.)

Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Michael R. Marrus and William A. Schabas, Some Measure of Justice: The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).

Roger P. Alford and Michael Bazyler, Holocaust Restitution: Perspectives on the Litigation and Its Legacy (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings, Anita Kugler, and Nicholas Levis, Working For The Enemy: Ford, General Motors, And Forced Labor In Germany During the Second World War (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004).

Oliver Rathkolb, Revisiting the National Socialist Legacy: Coming to Terms with Forced Labor, Expropriation, Compensation, and Restitution (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2004).

Martin Dean, Constantin Goschler, Philipp Ther, eds., Robbery and Restitution: The Conflict over Jewish Property in Europe. By Martin Dean, Constantin Goschler, Philipp Ther, eds. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008).

John K. Roth, Holocaust Politics (Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001).

Elazar Barkan.The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

Konrad Kwiet and Jürgen Matthaus, eds., Contemporary Responses to the Holocaust (Santa Barbara: Praeger Press, 2004).

David Patterson and John K. Roth, eds., After-Words: Post-Holocaust Struggles with Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Justice (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2004).

Stutthof, the last Nazi concentration camp left in operation located in a wooded area east of the Polish port city of Gdańsk, was finally liberated by the Allies in early May of 1945. As the final survivors left this camp, few had any inkling that over sixty-five years later, individuals and organizations would continue to debate how to bring justice for the crimes that would become known as Shoah, or the Holocaust, an event so dramatically horrific that it would continue to cause deep divisions among people as they attempted to process, conceptualize, and understand it.

For their part, the triumphant Allies faced tremendous obstacles to this task. In the aftermath of the Second World War and the near immediate emergence of the Cold War, the United States, in particular, never explicitly stated where restitution stood as part of their postwar policies. The goal of rebuilding Germany’s government took immediate precedence, and by encouraging Aryanizers to be part of early efforts in the restitution process, they failed to address the obvious conflict of interest that emerged.[1] Aside from the geopolitical considerations, the sheer number of Jews murdered and the degree of willingness for individual countries to forget their role in the robbery of assets also created significant impediments to reparations efforts.

Although attempts at reparations went on through the Cold War era, the fall of communism allowed some survivors and their heirs new opportunities to seek restitution, despite the long delay. Around this same time period in the early 1990s, Western European societies also reexamined their roles in the destruction of European Jewry with the release of Cold War archival documentation. What followed were an ambitious number of legal and political negotiations, culminating in settlements with Swiss Banks, German industrial companies, European insurance agencies, French and Austrian banks, and the creation of several historical commissions. In the aftermath of this flurry of activity, numerous books have been published attempting to chronicle it and draw out lessons.

One key issue surrounding this literature is the targeting of corporations as the object of reparations for past crimes of theft and genocide.  Clearly, many lawsuits are aimed at organizations, rather than people, simply because most of the remaining individual Nazis that perpetrated the war crimes are deceased. From a methodological standpoint, the problem that emerges is that many of the corporations the Nazis used in order to perpetrate the Holocaust are considered substitutes or surrogates to which recompense can be extracted, instead of legitimate actors that are guilty of war crimes themselves. Initially, this may have been done out of expedience, as Holocaust lawsuits necessitated at least a baseline cooperation between the accused organizations, lawyers, survivor groups, and the courts. In the literature, however, this idea of the corporation as an actor that can be responsible for war crimes, surfaces repeatedly. Although it is not explicitly mentioned, this concept is particularly compelling when it comes to dealing with American corporations’ alleged ties to genocide, as the legal status of such organizations constitutes a “legal person” with, at least theoretically, the same rights and responsibilities as their human counterparts.[2] Therefore, the argument can be made that several of the corporations accused, whose parent companies are American in origin, do not share the same statute of limitations that human beings do and are still subject to lawsuits involving war crimes. The texts reviewed in this essay demonstrate that the related lawsuits do not address the issue of “corporate personhood” even though the legal strategy of extracting justice via financial compensation from an institution, like a bank, when the majority of the perpetrators of genocide are now deceased, naturally lends itself to this particular argument. To put this point another way, the authors of these texts have missed an opportunity to look at the legal framework that allows an organizational perpetrator to continue to operate without reproach long after the human perpetrators that instrumentalized it are gone. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, some corporations continue to behave in similar patterns as they have during the Holocaust. Armaments manufacturing corporations, for example, can easily flood weapons into many unstable parts of the world, keeping the specter of genocide close at hand.

Informed by a variety of different methodological and ideological orientations, the field of Holocaust restitution history has yet to find an organizational coherence; however, one can discern some common features and influences. This essay will attempt to extrapolate these features while simultaneously drawing out and examining the problem posed by corporate actors. In the group of texts detailed here, two rough categories emerge: First, several texts deal with Holocaust restitution from a journalistic point of view, chronicling the individual cases, involved personalities, and circumstances. The second group is concerned with theoretical interpretations and debates over how to deal with Holocaust-related crimes. Before diving into this second group, which lends itself to a foray into the realm of thorny legal arguments and even less clear philosophical debates, we will examine the more straightforward accounts of the first category.

In this group, The Last Deposit by Itamar Levin and Natasha Dornberg details the story of Jewish Swiss bank accounts that were either expropriated by the Nazis or kept in Switzerland after victims of the Holocaust failed to claim them. When the authors wrote this book in the late 1990s, negotiations between Swiss banks and various Jewish claimant groups were still ongoing and Levin argued that more pressure was needed in order to bring resolution to Holocaust restitution claims. Books of this type were often used as boosters for the various suits, providing a detailed chronological (though less empirical) account of the struggles for restitution and end with an appeal for support for the continuing claims. Because of their vested interest in arousing sympathy for the restitution suits, books like The Last Deposit not only contain highly judgmental language, but unconsciously place themselves in the “uniqueness of the Holocaust” school identified by A. Dirk Moses and exemplified by the work of Steven T. Katz and Yehuda Bauer.[3] This approach is utilized in order to elevate the importance of the Holocaust to argue the importance of the successful resolution of the restitution suits.

In Holocaust Justice, Michael Bazyler has written a similar account to the Last Deposit, tracking the various lawsuits by Holocaust claimants through the late 1990s and into the first few years of the twenty-first century. Essentially, Bazyler argues that the actions were justified and that the various corporations involved received fairly light penalties in the amount of restitution they were forced to pay in comparison with their crimes. Many in Europe considered Holocaust restitution blackmail, and in response Bazyler produces balanced indictments for the individual companies’ behavior. Bazyler credits the swift action by lawyers who prosecuted the various forced labor cases with Germany, and various Austrian and French banks for the Holocaust survivors, which he contrasts with the ongoing and slow process of settling the Swiss bank accounts and life insurance claims. In the latter case, Bazyler argues, in a somewhat bitter fashion, that attorneys were excluded from the process.

Aside from the trial lawyers, Bazyler makes the innovative argument that the American legal system was the main positive force in the Holocaust restitution, providing “the best-and often the only viable- forum in which such claims can be litigated” (251). Bazyler’s work is more far reaching than simply retelling the story of Holocaust litigation; he convincingly argues that the lawsuits were instrumental in the creation of historical commissions, which provided a strategic framework for other restitution movements. As a concluding theme, Bazyler argues that the Holocaust restitution movement has, in part, inspired these other movements. In sum, Bazyler comes closer than Levin and Dornberg in indicting corporations themselves for Holocaust-era war crimes, but still falls short in looking at their behavior as a historical phenomenon in and of themselves.

Largely bereft of historical analysis, John Authers and Richard Wolffe in their book, The Victim’s Fortune, have produced a highly detailed narrative account of the restitution proceedings. This is more of a work of journalism than history, which has the potential to be a useful primary source in the future but does little to ground the reader in the larger histories of Nazi plunder or reparations for the Holocaust. Its over-wrought style threatens to backfire and lend credence to the argument that reparation attempts resulted in opportunism, chaos, and ultimately unsatisfying results for the survivors of the Holocaust. Much like The Last Deposit, the text blurs the line between contemporary history and journalism to such a degree that it renders most of its conclusions of recent events contingent on a much longer view, which will only be obtained well into the future.

German Reparations and The Jewish World by Ronald W. Zweig, also falls into the category of “activist” literature, mainly presenting a narrative account in order to argue for resolution of various lawsuits. Although this text only covers reparation efforts immediately following World War II through the mid-1960s, the timing of its publication at the turn of the twenty first century when interest in Holocaust restitution peaked was precipitous. Zweig’s account is overwhelmingly positivist in tone, and despite his established aim to examine the actual effects of reparations on Jewish communities, Zweig does more to detail interagency cooperation than examine the actual resulting application of the aid money.

Because the text is acutely preoccupied with numerous and varied dollar values of reparations, Zweig’s text risks becoming far more useful to opponents of future Holocaust restitution claims, rather than demonstrating the successes of earlier reparation efforts. For instance, Peter Hayes has rebutted the targeting of corporations for Holocaust restitution arguing, “Billions and billions of dollars have already been extracted from Germany…Now that these victories have been won, however, the time has come to take stock of the collateral damage.”[4] Hayes rightly isolates a “fixation on corporate profits.” A casual read of Zweig’s text would seem to indicate Hayes assertion by the figures that permeate the text; however, one of the facts that neither Hayes nor Zweig prefers to accentuate gets only a brief mention: 70 percent of the initial postwar “payments” to Israel in these early settlements came in the form of West German-made goods, which both provided a boost to the West-German economy and helped rehabilitate its image (79).[5]

Although Zweig demonstrates that reparations negotiations in the 1950s between the Conference on Jewish Material Claims and the German government were difficult and often contentious, they were by no means crippling to Germany. Large sums were paid, but the story is more complicated than Zweig lets on or that Hayes repeats. The danger is that in less discerning hands, Zweig’s preoccupation with dollar values could be damaging to future claims against corporate perpetrators, whose involvement is still being debated.

The final text in this group of narrative accounts is Divided Memory by Jeffrey Herf. The author constructs a political history comparing Holocaust memory in West Germany to East Germany. For West Germany, Herf focuses on the rehabilitation of Nazis as a mixed blessing of both avoiding a right-wing resurgence but also as an act of burying the past. Meanwhile, Herf argues that East Germany clamped down on Holocaust remembrance. Additionally, he demonstrates, as John K. Roth does in Holocaust Politics, which will be examined in the latter category, that Holocaust memory both added to external support for Israel in the West German case, and ideological blindness in the East German support of Palestinian causes. While Herf’s work comes closer to historical analysis akin to the Bazyler text detailed earlier, these are essentially geopolitical histories that gloss over the involvement of transnational corporations in the Holocaust. Even though they are constant protagonists in this collection of texts, the authors never make the jump to analyzing their own significance in collaborating with the Nazis to perpetrate war, theft, and genocide.

The category of theoretical interpretations of Holocaust restitution, in turn, is a much larger group and contains more widely varied approaches. As far as organization is concerned, the one conspicuous detail that becomes apparent is that a majority of the books in this category are collections of essays. Considering the wide range of opinions on Holocaust restitution, this organizational strategy makes sense; however, it also makes the texts challenging to review as a whole or classify within larger literary groupings.

In a more recent work, Some Measure of Justice by Michael Marrus, provides a sharp counterpoint to the positive view of financial awards resulting from Holocaust restitution cases examined in the previous texts. While Bazyler, for example, applauds Holocaust restitution litigation and the attorneys that were involved in this process, Michael Marrus stands at the opposite end of the spectrum. Marrus is highly critical of the restitution cases, and worries that “monetizing justice” has more negative outcomes than positive ones. Marrus concludes with an overriding ambivalence to the possibility of undoing historical wrongs, putting him at odds with many of the other authors discussed here. One distinctive element to his argument that stands in particularly stark contrast to the other texts is his dismissal that corporations should be included in the list of perpetrators. For Marrus, only people can be guilty of perpetrating genocide. This argument stands in direct opposition to much of the litigation against banks and industrial concerns, verging on reproducing their own legal defenses.

Among other people, Edwin Black, a journalist that has written several books about corporate collusion with Nazi Germany, has attacked Marrus for this line of reasoning, questioning Marrus’ motives in an environment where many corporations were hiring historians to defend their past actions.[6] Even more problematically for Marrus and giving some credence to Black’s claims, Marrus announced in his acknowledgement that Some Measure of Justice was funded in part by the Ford Foundation, a charitable organization linked specifically to a corporation that was subject to a Holocaust reparation lawsuit in the forced labor case of Iwanowa v. Ford Motor Company. While the Ford Foundation has had many critics espousing the charity’s various alleged agendas since its founding in 1936, it is safe to assume that the organization exists in part to create a positive and philanthropic image for Ford Motor Company, which exposes a troublesome conflict of interest for Dr. Marrus.

Holocaust Restitution, edited by Roger P. Alford and Michael Bazyler, is a large collection of essays typical of this category. Its division is similar to other works, separating its themes based on the various types of restitution cases: forced labor claims, disgorgement of Holocaust-era accounts from various banks, insurance claims, and recovering looted art. While these themes have become familiar in the historiography, two unique elements from this book are worth mentioning. First is the contribution of an essay by Stuart Eizenstat, who was one of the more directly involved participants in the lawsuits as a State Department envoy during the Clinton administration. Eizenstat’s job was to seek resolution to a variety of long-standing Holocaust restitution cases, which provides an insider account to balance out many of the other claimant-oriented arguments in the text.[7]

The other unique contribution to the text is an argument against restitution by historian Peter Hayes. The premises for Hayes’ claim, as detailed earlier, is that corporate profits during the Holocaust were fairly limited and restitution lawsuits only confuse Holocaust history by hyping corporate malfeasance. As with Michael Marrus, Hayes argument is problematized by claims that he has received funding from an organization on the list of the accused corporations.[8]

While receiving support from an organization in order to access its archives is uncontroversial, in the context of Hayes assertion that corporations were wrongly accused in general because of their supposedly modest profit margins directly contradicts other recent historical work, such as Working for the Enemy by Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings, Anita Kugler, and Nicholas Levis. The argument regarding compensation for forced labor is best exemplified in this collection of essays, in which a substantial portion of the text is dedicated to the personal testimony and experiences of former forced laborers working for Ford and General Motor’s German subsidiaries. The authors argue that American management of its subsidiaries was continuous throughout Nazi rule and post-war profit recovery was maximized. In one of the more shocking passages in the text that stand in stark contrast to Hayes’ argument that Nazi-era corporate profits were limited, Anita Kugler demonstrates that not only did GM recover its profits from its German subsidiary, Opel, after the war, but it also billed the U.S. government over $100 million dollars for damages caused by the Allies during the war (75). In judgment of the collaborative activities detailed in this book, historian Hans Momsen noted, “securing the growth of the respective companies was reached at an intolerably high moral price.”[9] As mentioned earlier, former forced laborers sued Ford in the U.S., who in turn had their lawsuits dismissed because they were outside the purview of national restitution settlement efforts.

In contrast to Working for the Enemy, the text Revisiting the National Socialist Legacy is presented in a more traditional academic format. This collection of essays is derived from the 2001 conference hosted by the Bruno Kreisky Archives Foundation on Holocaust-Era Assets. Edited by Oliver Rathkolb, the essays provide a thorough and scholarly discussion of the role and limits of national historical commissions, in both their political and social compositions, which form a kind of contemporary debate over the Nazi Past. These discussions are highlighted by the tensions described between historical scholarship, media coverage and politics surrounding the resolution of Holocaust restitution suits.

One interesting feature Revisiting the National Socialist Legacy is the essay by Jean-Francoise Bergier, for whom the commission to investigate the activities of Swiss banks was named after. Bergier has reservations about the contradictory nature of the word “neutrality” and how it was used by Switzerland and other places during World War II. Although he does not specifically name American corporations, a read of the commission’s finding hints that there is more to be learned from the declassification of American intelligence documents related to them.[10] In his essay, Bergier also laments the public perception of historians as the ultimate arbiters of historical judgment for Holocaust-related crimes (48).

Robbery and Restitution, edited by Martin Dean, Constantin Goschler, and Philipp Ther, is another collection of essays that focuses mainly on creating a comparative framework in order to analyze the theft of Jewish property in various European locales. In the group of essays that deal with restitution in the final section of the book, the essayists, such as Gerard Feldman and Jürgen Lillteicher, do a decent job of guiding the reader to the main factors that led to the impetus for settlement: the end of the Cold War, litigants utilizing the American legal system, and the self-examination of Western European societies of their own role in the Holocaust via historical commissions. The more forceful calls for further research are focused on the impersonal mechanisms that deprived Jews of their property, rather than the restitution litigation (262-3). In this framework of expanding beyond the Nazis into the transnational organizations they utilized to plunder Jewish assets, Robbery and Restitution comes a bit closer to the original problem posed by this essay in integrating corporations into the framework of Holocaust-era war crimes.

Moving away from academic discussions and into the theoretical sphere, John K. Roth seeks to create a philosophical framework in his monograph, Holocaust politics. Roth’s philosophical questions revolve around the historical interpretation as it relates to the memory of the Holocaust. While Roth is in the “uniqueness of the Holocaust” camp, he concludes that education about the event can have a constructive conscious-raising effect and create awareness of future injustice (284). How this process would actually work is left fairly vague in the text. In the same vein, Roth allows the text to meander with very little framework. Memory is an understandably difficult subject to nail down, but Roth attempts this subject without much evidence of an organizing methodology.

Coming closer to overarching framework in which memory of the Holocaust could lead to the development of human rights is Elazar Barkan’s The Guilt of Nations.

Barkan’s book utilizes a purposefully wide scope, taking the idea of Holocaust restitution as a possible settlement for historical injustices and transforming it into a political model of “ethical globalization” (88). Barkan explores the typologies of apology, reparation, and restitution with a dose of cynicism, noting that these could be seen as an inexpensive way for the powerful to project the image of just governance while maintaining their hegemony (347-9). This admission sets the Barkan text apart from those like John Roth’s Holocaust Politics, who puts a much more idealistic spin on the positive effects of Holocaust restitution.

In yet another collection of essays, Konrad Kwiet and Jürgen Matthaus in Contemporary Responses to the Holocaust have sought to uncover the inadequacies in explanations for the Holocaust, which they argue has limited the development of historical memory of the event. This standpoint is exemplified by the essay written by Yehuda Bauer, who argues for the uniqueness of the Holocaust compared to other genocides, citing the limitations of language skills by historians in investigating and describing the depth of the tragedy (12-13). Several other contentious issues are addressed by various authors in the text, such as Peter Novick and Norman Finkelstein’s contention that the Holocaust is negatively instrumentalized in contemporary politics. Other unique features not found in other aforementioned texts include a comparative analysis of Holocaust-related films.

What is conspicuously missing from this text aiming to collect contemporary responses to the Holocaust are accounts of the restitution lawsuits of the 1990s. Although an essay from Ronald Zweig is included, who has contributed to the literature on contemporary Holocaust restitution efforts, the work chosen for this collection is focused solely on restitution efforts that followed in the immediate years after the conclusion of World War II.

As with many other books discussed here, After-Words, edited by David Patterson and John K. Roth, is a collection of essays that deals with various responses to Holocaust memory. Rather than focusing specifically on restitution, the authors look at contemporary views within the Jewish community of processing Holocaust grief, anger, and dysphoria. By far the most theoretical of the works presented here, After-Words is much more akin to other recent histories utilizing the “memory turn,” such as the World War I history on bereavement, 14-18: Understanding the Great War by Stephanie Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker. Presented in a point-counterpoint format, After-Words debates the relationship of the Holocaust to Jewish identity. While the text does not go into detail on any particular restitution case, the overall exploration of Jewish reconciliation and forgiveness for the Holocaust resonates strongly with the other material on restitution presented here.

In the realm of what could be considered the end point to the prosecution of Holocaust-era crimes and the beginning of a post-Holocaust era, Lawrence Douglas aptly posed this question in Holocaust Justice: “If the greatest achievement of the restitution effort was the precedent it created for future movements, how salutary is this legacy? Is the check-book the most efficacious tool for settling historical wrongs and reckoning with traumas of the past?” Considering the nearness of the restitution suits from the perspective of history writing, more time is needed to fully assess the implications of Douglas’ question; however a few observations can be made: First, the lack of coherence in the field, far from being negative, demonstrates a great diversity in responses to draw upon, both inside and outside the Jewish community. Second, the consensus that recent Holocaust lawsuits have brought to the fore a new flowering of Holocaust scholarship is self-evident; as an emerging historiography, the field shows great potential for growth. Third, the growth of human rights scholarship is a highly positive development to which the Holocaust history, by extension, helped in part to bring about.

But how does the historiography presented here measure up to the initial question posed by this essay? Are corporations actually being included as valid actors in Holocaust scholarship? Based on the group of works here, there is little evidence to suggest the growth of such a model of scholarships; however, there are a few exceptions. Working for the Enemy provides a good example, both by laying responsibility at the feet of the organizations in question on a functional level, as well as using the contemporary device of oral history to provide a human-scale view to the story of corporate collaboration with the Nazis. Robbery and Restitution also approaches this framework, albeit on a more theoretical level.

Why is the focus on corporations so important? Access to weapons manufacturing, bureaucracy, and capital can easily increase the likelihood of genocide in tyrannical regimes. As this body of Holocaust-era history has taught us, these events can happen quickly and with unprecedented brutality. Behind the tanks, planes, gas, and bullets lie rationally planned businesses. On the other side of this coin lie financial corporations, who, within the context of the literature presented here, have shown every bit as much duplicity, capriciousness, and recalcitrance as their industrial counterparts. Once these organizations have been provided agency as independent actors in their own right, perhaps a more holistic view of the Holocaust can be obtained.