Historian: Herbert Feis

herbert feisName: Herbert Feis

Lived: 1893-1972

Nationality: American

Profession(s): Historian, economist, political advisor

Books: Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin (1957), Between War and Peace: the Potsdam Conference (1960), Europe, the World’s Banker, 1870-1914 (1964), From Trust to Terror: The Onset of the Cold War (1970).

Perspective: Orthodox

Herbert Feis was an American economist and historian of the Orthodox school. Feis was born in New York City, the son of Jewish-French immigrants. He was educated at Harvard, graduating with an economics degree in 1916.

Feis served in the US Naval Reserve during World War I, later returning to Harvard to complete his doctorate. In 1922 he married Ruth Stanley-Brown, a granddaughter of United States president James Garfield.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Feis worked as an economic advisor to several large corporations, the League of Nations, the US State Department and other government agencies. He returned to academia after World War II, teaching at Harvard and Columbia. Feis penned several books during this period, including his 1961 Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Potsdam conference. He died in retirement in Florida in March 1972.

Feis penned several books on the post-war world but the 1970 text From Trust to Terror is his seminal text on the Cold War. Feis holds an Orthodox perspective of the Cold War, attributing the outbreak of the Cold War to Soviet aggression and imperialism. This has led some of his contemporaries describing Feis as a ‘court historian’, engaged in echoing and justifying US policies.

The title of Feis’ book hints at its central premise: the Cold War was a rapid breakdown in relations between trusting allies, chiefly due to Joseph Stalin‘s treachery at Yalta and Potsdam. Feis does not tread lightly where American leaders are concerned, though he sees their faults as more human. He is particularly critical of Harry Truman, painting the first Cold War president as impatient in negotiations, needlessly belligerent in his objectives and naïve with regard to Stalin.

Feis was keenly aware that the continuation of the Cold War created problems for him and his contemporaries. The need for secrecy and security meant historians were unable to access many government records or sources. This placed Feis and his fellow historians at a disadvantage when it came to understanding the causes and dimensions of the Cold War. He touched on this in a 1967 journal article titled “The Shackled Historian”.

Quotations

“In [the Soviet] book of beliefs about the nature of capitalist countries, the Western allies were likely to act with guile, driven by relentless hatred of any Communist society. Cooperation in the war had not really cleared the minds of those disciples of Communist dogma who ruled the Soviet Union of such ways of thinking and feeling.”

“The British and American governments had decided to let bygones be bygones and had gone to the rescue [of the Soviet Union in 1941]. To Britain, this had been an act of self-preservation. To the United States, it had been a straight development of its current policy of aiding any country fighting the Axis, by all means short of war.”

“Despite [Truman’s] awareness that there was much to learn, he went forward with confidence, seeming seldom to waver. His assurance was perhaps at times a subconscious cover for insecurity. During the crucial first years, he mistook rapidity of decision for firmness. He sometimes did not make enough effort to plumb the depths of the questions which crowded upon him.”

“[At Potsdam] Stalin was courteous to the President [Truman]. As seldom as possible did he enter into direct argument with him. As often as possible he took advantage of Truman’s impatient wish to get business over and done with. Toward Churchill, he [Stalin] was more mettlesome… He did not always refrain from scoffing at the Prime Minister’s views or words. Churchill, the great and courageous leader, he had admired; Churchill, the head of a country and empire left weakened by the war, he felt free to challenge roughly.”

“Negotiations over some questions were becoming set and shrill. The tide of trust that had flowed at Yalta was ebbing fast. Stalin was giving way to suspicion of the American-British conduct of the war and to resentment at their attempts to maintain influence in any region near Soviet frontiers. To the Western Allies, it seemed that under the spell of victory, the Russians were becoming indifferent to their hard-time vows.”

“It was the division over Poland, not genuinely mended at Yalta, that revealed most clearly the Soviet intent. No subject engaged Allied diplomacy more at this time. None has left behind as immense a record of notes and memos written, of words spoken.”

“His knowledge that the [atomic] bomb had been tested [in July 1945] did make Truman firmer in his refusal to cede some of the more grasping Soviet claims at Potsdam and after.”

“Roosevelt and his colleagues were right: the nations needed moral law and freedom. Churchill was right: the nations needed magnanimity and balance of power. Stalin was sullying a right: the Russian people were entitled to the fullest equality and protection against another assault upon them. But under Stalin, they were trying not only to extend their boundaries and their control over neighbouring states but also beginning to revert to their revolutionary effort throughout the world.”


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