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THE COMMITTEE
FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
In 1941, Paul Gray Hoffman, President of the Studebaker Company, and a
Trustee of the University of Chicago; along with Robert Maynard
Hutchins, and William Benton, the University's President and Vice
President; organized the American Policy Commission to apply the work of
the University's scholars and economists to government policy. They
later merged with an organization established in 1939 by Fortune
magazine, called Fortune Round Table.
Starting out as a group of business, labor, agricultural, and religious
leaders, they soon evolved into an Establishment organization, with such
members as: Ralph McCabe (head of Scott Paper Co.), Henry Luce
(Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines),
Ralph Flanders (a Boston banker), Marshall Field (Chicago newspaper
publisher) , Clarence Francis (head of General Foods), Ray Rubicam (an
advertising representative), and Beardsley Ruml (treasurer of Macy's
Department Store in New York City, former Dean of Social Sciences at the
University of Chicago, and Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve
Bank, whose idea it was to deduct taxes from your paycheck).
At the beginning of World War II, Hoffman and Benton approached Jesse
Jones, the Secretary of Commerce, with an idea for an "American Policy
Commission" to "analyze, criticize, and challenge the thinking and
policies of business, labor, agriculture, and government," which Jones
accepted, and began to organize, with their help. On September 3, 1942,
the Committee for Economic Development was incorporated in Washington,
D.C., "to foster, promote, conduct, encourage, and finance scientific
research, education, training, and publication in the broad field of
economics in order that industry and commerce may be in a position, in
the postwar period, to make their full contribution to high and secure
standards of living for people in all walks of life through maximum
employment and high productivity in our domestic economy; to promote and
carry out these objects, purposes, and principles in a free society
without regard to, and independently of the special interests of any
group in the body politic, either political, social, or economic."
A 1944 CED Report, International Trade and Domestic Employment, by Duke
University Professor Calvin B. Hoover, helped push the United States
into the International Monetary Fund, which was laid out at the Bretton
Woods Conference in June, 1944, by chief negotiators Harry Dexter
White(of the CFR) and John Maynard Keynes (of the Fabian Society); and
the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank);
which both became part of the United Nations. It also helped motivate
Establishment backing for what later emerged as the General Agreement on
Trade and Tariffs.
After the War, while Hoover was on leave from Duke, he worked with
Hoffman to develop what eventually became known as the Marshall Plan.
The group's later work laid the groundwork for regional government in
the United States.
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