At the direction of Secretary Hull, the group was formally constituted on September 22, 1943, as the Committee on Coordination of Economic Policy Work. Mr. Hawkins was added at that time to its membership. Mr. Bowman and Mr. Notter attended various of its meetings primarily for coordination with the political side of the preparation. This committee was conceived as a steering and agenda group to serve the Taylor Committee, if and when the main committee reconvened, and otherwise to carry on pending establishment of a more permanent and executive type of interdepartmental organization, which for some weeks had appeared increasingly to be needed.

While regular interdepartmental consideration of current as well as postwar economic problems was essential for adequate integration of foreign economic policy, numerous interdepartmental committees were outside the framework of the Advisory Committee and unattached to any coordinating body. Confusion and divergence of views between agencies operating in the foreign economic field had been illuminated by the Henry Wallace Jesse Jones exchanges and the letter from the President in that connection published in July 1943. The attempt, however, to resolve this particular difficulty through Executive Order 9361 of July 15, 1943, which established the Office of Economic Warfare, had raised several new questions of jurisdiction and responsibility while resolving several old ones. It was clear that questions of domestic policy were unevenly interwoven with those of current and postwar foreign policy and that there was an overlapping of authority and personnel and a multiplication of operations not easily kept in harmony. A recommendation to create a high-level, interdepartmental-coordinating, and policy-recommending committee was therefore initiated by the Committee on Coordination of Economic Policy Work in the autumn of 1943, cleared through the Department, discussed with other agencies, and ultimately approved by the President the following April.10

Coordination of the economic activities of Government departments and wartime agencies dealing with liberated areas and the relating of such operations to United States policies in political and military fields had already been undertaken in the Department, through the establishment on June 24 of an Office of Foreign Economic Coordination in response to a directive from the President dated June 3, 1943. The vast scope of this work, carried on under the direction of Assistant Secretary Acheson, was clear from the representation, subjects, and large interdepartmental committee and subcommittee structure involved in this type of operation. On various important issues, conflicts of view had appeared among the four Departments and three agencies concerned: the State, Treasury, War, and Navy Departments and the Board of Economic Warfare, Office of Lend-Lease Administration, and Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations.

10 See the Executive Committee on Economic Foreign Policy, p. 218.

While action on the recommendation was going forward, the Coordination Committee cleared the documents of the special committees, resolved conflicts in their terms of reference, approved additional membership, and instituted various studies required by the international negotiations of the period. It ceased functioning in January 1944, when clearance for the reports and recommendations of the special committees was provided for through the new machinery established in the course of the reorganization of the Department."

The Taylor Committee, its special committees, and the Committee on Coordination were essentially transitional instruments. They carried through the difficult year beginning with April 1943, serving as the working machinery for economic preparation and at the same time as the bridge between the Advisory Committee structure and the executive structure that was created for the stage of action during 1944. As a December 1943 report observed, the special committees wrote drafts of operating economic instructions and policy directives to military theater commanders-sometimes limited to the execution of surrender terms, sometimes dealing with longer-range matters; formulated policy recommendations of a short-run character having to do with economic operations of the war period, military occupation, and transition; drafted terms and conditions to be incorporated in the peace settlement; prepared proposals relative to the creation and implementation of organizations for international economic cooperation; prepared long-range policy proposals for adoption by more or less formal agreement among nations; and assembled factual data necessary to negotiations.

AD HOC ECONOMIC GROUPS

THERE WERE, in addition to the special committees, several working groups instituted in the summer and fall of 1943 for ad hoc purposes. These groups represented further types of adjustment in the preparation necessitated by participation in international economic negotiations during the period after the recess of the Advisory Committee. The peculiar nature of these adjustments stemmed from the fact that, whereas the technical responsibility for such matters as food and agriculture, labor, and investment and finance lay primarily with other agencies, our international activities in these fields constituted part of United States foreign relations and had no slight impact on foreign political policy. Such interrelationship normally and constantly involves accommodation of views within the government. In the period beginning in 1943, it was particularly important that all steps taken should be within the over-all pattern of postwar

"See the Post-War Programs Committee, p. 208 ff.

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policy being evolved, in which plans for the establishment of a general international organization were predominant. Moreover, the advent of these working groups was another indication of the merging of postwar preparation and current operations already under way.

Following the Hot Springs Conference in the spring of 1943, for example, an Interdivisional Working Group on the projected United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization was informally established in the Department. Its tasks were to formulate the Department's position in regard to the work of the United Nations Interim Commission on Food and Agriculture directed toward the establishment of a permanent organization in this field, and, through the interdepartmental group, referred to above,12 to advise the American member, Paul H. Appleby of the Department of Agriculture, particularly concerning developments regarding general international organization. This interdivisional group was composed of the following members of the Advisory Committee, research staff, and functional divisions: Assistant Secretary Acheson, Chairman, and Messrs. Stinebower, Deputy Chairman, Pasvolsky, Hawkins, Gerig, Tomlinson, Warren Kelchner (Chief of the Division of International Conferences), and Emilio G. Collado. The recommendations of this group were cleared through usual Departmental channels until, at the beginning of 1944, new superior structure for postwar problems was established. The technical responsibilities in this field rested in the Department of Agriculture and were outside the scope of this group.

An Interdivisional Committee on Finance was established at an expert level in the Department in November 1943 to coordinate and prepare recommendations concerning the Department's position on both long-range and current problems in the international financial field, especially with respect to an international bank and fund. These recommendations would guide the State Department representatives on the interdepartmental American Technical Committee, described above,13 which reported to the Treasury Department. Mr. Posvolsky was Chairman of the interdivisional committee, and as in the case of the Food and Agriculture Working Group, its remaining membership reflected both research and operations, being composed of Miss Ruth B. Russell, Paul T. Ellsworth, Leroy D. Stinebower, John P. Young, Mrs. Eleanor L. Dulles, William Adams Brown, Jr., Alexander M. Rosenson, and Miss Julia E. Schairer, secretary, from the research staff, and Harry C. Hawkins, Frederick Livesey, John S. Hooker, Dudley M. Phelps, Emilio G. Collado, Jacques J. Reinstein, and Woodbury Willoughby from the interested functional divisions.

12

The two other special groups established during this period in con

See p. 145.

18 See p. 141 ff.

nection with international economic negotiations were in the labor field. The Special Committee on Labor Standards and Social Security had undertaken the necessary initial exploration of the issues involved in the question of the future status of the International Labor Organization and had recommended the early convocation of a regular conference of the ILO. This recommendation had been accepted by both the American and British Governments in the autumn of 1943. Steps had been taken, though without result, to bring about the participation of the Soviet Union, which was not a member of the ILO, and a meeting of the Governing Body of the Organization had been called for December in anticipation of the proposed conference. To prepare the American position for this preliminary meeting within the framework of the broad postwar policy then being developed, an ad hoc Interdepartmental Group on the ILO was established. This consisted of the following members of the Special Committee on Labor Standards: Assistant Secretary Berle, Carter Goodrich of the ILO, Isador Lubin and A. F. Hinrichs of the Labor Department, and Otis E. Mulliken, then in the Office of the Under Secretary of State. This ad hoc group, in turn, recommended the establishment in the State Department of a working committee to formulate the Department's position on specific problems connected with the forthcoming ILO conference, in order to avoid any steps that might be inconsistent with the projected establishment of an inclusive international organization. In December 1943, therefore, an Interdivisional Committee on the Agenda of the ILO was set up, which is discussed later in connection with the ILO conference of April-May 1944.

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CHAPTER IX

Development of International
Conferences, Autumn 1943

1

́ITH THE series of international conferences that began at Quebec in August 1943, the Department's work on postwar political problems began to move from the exploratory into the negotiating phase. In the economic field, as has been noted, this development had begun much earlier. The Anglo-American discussions of relief and rehabilitation inaugurated in June 1942 had culminated, following consultation with the Soviet and Chinese Governments, in the publication on June 11, 1943, of a draft of the UNRRA agreement 1 that, after further international exchanges of view, was to be concluded by the United and Associated Nations on November 9 of that year. In August 1942, proposals had been exchanged with the British in the monetary and financial field that resulted, after extensive exploratory discussion with Great Britain and other countries during 1943 and early 1944, in the Bretton Woods Agreement of July 22, 1944, for the establishment of an international bank and monetary fund, as described later. The first United Nations Conference, the meeting at Hot Springs, Virginia, May 18-June 3, 1943, discussed above, had already laid the foundation for a permanent international organization in the field of food and agriculture.

In the political field, however, only one problem had reached the negotiations stage, and this was of a technical character primarily. The United Nations were committed individually and collectively to the general policy of punishment of war criminals, and agreement had already been reached on the establishment of a United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes, which held its first meeting in London on October 20, 1943. Prior to the Quebec Conference there had also been certain informal exchanges of views with the British, notably between the President and Prime Minister Churchill in February and May 1943 and between the President, Secretary Hull, and Foreign Secretary Eden in March 1943, on the organization of the peace. With one exception, these exchanges had been concerned

1

1 For text, see Department of State Bulletin, VIII, 524-27.