Herbert Feis
Herbert Feis (June 7, 1893 – March 2, 1972) was an American historian, author, and economist who was the Advisor on International Economic Affairs (at that time, the highest-ranking economic official) in the US Department of State during the Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt administrations.
Based on this experience, his subsequent 25-year career was as a leading scholar of the U.S. diplomatic history of the World War II period. He developed that narrative in 11 books and won the annual Pulitzer Prize for History in 1961 for one of them, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton University Press, 1960),[1] which features the Potsdam Conference and the origins of the Cold War.
Early life[edit]
Feis was born in New York City. His parents, Louis Feis and Louise Waterman Feis, were Jewish immigrants from Alsace, France, who came to America in the late 1800s. His uncle invented the Waterman stove. As the family fortunes improved, they moved from the Lower East Side to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Feis' high school education was completed at the Townsend Harris Hall Prep School. He graduated from Harvard College, earned a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard, and married Ruth Stanley-Brown, the granddaughter of US President James Garfield; they had a daughter.[2]
Career[edit]
Feis was an instructor at Harvard University (1920–1921), an associate professor of economics at the University of Kansas (1922–1925), and a professor and department head at the University of Cincinnati (1926–1929). He published a stream of scholarly studies. From 1922 to 1927, he was also an adviser on the American economy to the International Labor Office (ILO) of the League of Nations, in Geneva, Switzerland. He was on the staff of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1930 to 1931. His first major book, Europe, the World's Banker, 1870-1914 (1930), impressed Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, who recruited Feis to the State Department, where Feis remained from 1931 to 1943, advising Stimson and then Secretary of State Cordell Hull.[3] He helped to shape the nation's international economic policies and represented the government at numerous international conferences including the World Economic and Monetary Conference of 1933 in London and the meetings of the Conference of American Republics held in Buenos Aires (1936), Lima (1938), and Panama (1939). As World War II approached, he chaired the government's Interdepartmental Committee to Stockpile Strategic and Critical Raw Materials. From 1943 through 1947, he rejoined Stimson, who was then Secretary of War. After retiring from government service, he spent the next 25 years documenting the U.S, diplomatic history of the Pre-War, World War II, and early Cold War periods. He had access to secret documents as well as his own memories to trace the convoluted course that Washington followed in abandoning its traditional isolationism for a policy of global intervention. His books are sometimes considered to represent the "orthodox" interpretation of history.[4][5] His analysis of the origins of the Cold War was challenged from the left during the Vietnam era, with the allegation that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were designed primarily to stop Soviet expansionism and thus caused the Cold War. However, scholarship since the 1980s has largely vindicated his interpretation of the use of nuclear weapons in 1945 as an effort to end the bloodshed as fast as possible.[6]
Legacy[edit]
The Herbert Feis Award is awarded annually since 1984 by the American Historical Association, a major professional society of historians, to recognize the recent work of public historians or independent scholars.[8]