Bretton Woods, The Mountain Hotel That Rewired the World

In the first days of July nineteen forty-four, seven hundred and thirty delegates from forty-four Allied nations arrived at a Victorian resort hotel in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and proceeded to negotiate the financial architecture of the modern world. The Mount Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods had been built in nineteen oh two by a New Hampshire industrialist named Joseph Stickney, who had made his fortune in Pennsylvania coal and wanted a grand hotel visible for miles in every direction. He built it in white stucco with a red roof, the most conspicuous building in the notch.

He died the year after it opened. His widow remarried a French prince and moved to Europe, and the hotel passed through various hands until the summer of forty-four, when the United States Treasury commandeered it for the most consequential economic conference in history. The meeting's formal name was the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference.

The two dominant personalities were Harry Dexter White, the chief American negotiator and assistant to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, and John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the century, representing Britain. They were not friendly. They disagreed on nearly everything.

But the catastrophe of the nineteen thirties, trade wars, currency collapses, competitive devaluations, bank failures, had made the cost of inaction clear to everyone in the room. Over twenty-two days in the July heat, the delegates hammered out agreements that created the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the institution now known as the World Bank. They pegged national currencies to the dollar and the dollar to gold.

They established rules meant to prevent the beggar-thy-neighbor monetary chaos of the Depression decade. The Bretton Woods system governed global finance for nearly thirty years. When it finally came apart in nineteen seventy-one, when President Nixon severed the dollar's link to gold, the institutions it had created remained.

The IMF and World Bank still operate, still headquartered in Washington. Their founding address was a hotel in the New Hampshire mountains.