Learning from the Past: A Small Quibble with Fred Lee’s History of American Radical Economics

Fred Lee’s history of radical economics in America between 1945 and 1970 (RRPE 36, 2) fails to address why the powerful New Deal movement disintegrated so quickly after the war. This article argues that the Soviet Union’s decision to retreat into isolationism split and effectively destroyed the American Left. Progressive but noncommunist economists including Harry White and Lauchlin Currie were isolated and easy targets for McCarthyites. The Bretton Woods institutions they had designed were effectively consigned into the hands of American imperialism.