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"If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?" T.S. Eliot wasn't speaking of the Bretton Woods Agreement when he penned those words to a friend, yet, the phraseology seems apropos as the world's economies are perched perilously close to the abyss of financial disaster. Why is it that in all things physical and metaphysical, the most obtuse element in the realm of understanding, is that which is in the jurisdiction of Mammon? The world's greatest minds - from Solomon to Chaucer, from John Stuart Mill to Milton Friedman - all have had a go at describing society's craving for wealth. In their own ways each of these sages made a point of prescribing time-tested strategies for avoiding the pit reserved for those whose sin is avarice.

The finger pointers in our time are stepping up their denunciation of America's role in the global financial meltdown. Harsh critics, such as World Bank president Robert Zoellick, have recently (Friday, Nov. 11) "called for a return to a gold anchor in the global financial system." On the other hand, staunch defenders of the present global market and banking system such as "Keynesian Brad DeLong [anoint] Zoellick the "Stupidest Man Alive." Robert P. Murphy, Ph.D., president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, publishes an on-line blog where he champions the "Austrian School" of economic theory popularized by former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the late President Ronald Reagan. Austrian school economists hold dear the theories of Ludwig von Mises and Nobel Prize winning economist, Friedrich Hayek. Most Austrian school disciples desire the abolition of the central bank concept and its fractional reserve system and recommend, instead, a return to the gold standard.

As confusing as all of this debate is to us, the citizens of an economically illiterate, consumption-oriented society, we can draw comfort in the fact that President Truman, himself, was confused. Harry Truman once remarked, "Give me a one-handed economist; all of my economists are always saying, 'On the other hand.... .' " What we do not know about economics can come back to hurt us.

After World War II it was clear that the Western world was locked in an ideological struggle between the lovers of the free market and the proponents of collectivist thought. Even with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the ideological struggle continues. As the world's population edged past seven billion souls a couple of weeks ago, a less published statistic is the idea of "middle class" spreading to its highest ever level in world history. The middle class "mind set" drives consumerism, and consumerism drives the free world's great economic engines. Therefore, traditional banking systems operating along individualist and nationalistic assumptions are no longer viable.

That leads us all to the debate about the viability of continuing to print paper money as a means of bailing out failed corporations and insolvent governments. Is a country that is admittedly untutored in competing economic ideas capable of solving this issue through assemblies of elected officials - officials, who, themselves, are often poorly versed in the pros and cons of economic theories? Perhaps that reason explains the success of Robert P. Murphy's book entitled "Chaos Theory (2002) and the Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism" (2007).

As we Americans are about to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, few know, that before three weeks had passed after the devastating attack Assistant U.S. Treasurer, Harry Dexter White began work on a top-secret project in the United States Treasury Department. White's mission was to "internationalize" the economies of the Allies immediately following the successful conclusion of the World War. The word "Globalism" was not a common term then. White's secret project, undertaken as the United States frantically prepared for a two-front war, became the 28,000-word draft known as the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. That pact has critics these days claiming that it was what set the free world on a collision path with economic collapse.

Harry Dexter White wrote the broad outline of the Bretton Woods Agreement; however, he worked under the close supervision of his superior, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the secretary of the Treasury for Franklin Roosevelt's administration. That Dexter White wrote the entire economic draft that created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank is not a consideration any longer. He had collaboration from John Maynard Keynes of Britain, who styled himself John Maynard, Lord Keynes in the 1940s. An economist from Australia named Sir Leslie Melville crafted a portion of the remake of the western world's finance and trade policies, as did India's Sir Chint<0x0101>man Dw<0x0101>rak<0x0101>n<0x0101>th Deshmukh and China's H.H. Kung. Mexico sent Victor Urquidi. These men were the leading central bank proponents in the free world. Opponents to central banking were missing at the elite gathering at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. With these men were large delegations of number crunchers and fact finders, and for three weeks in July of 1944 intellectuals worked night and day inside the posh Mount Washington Hotel in the quaint New Hampshire ski resort of Bretton Woods.

The grand architect of the agreement is thought to have been Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., White's superior in Washington, yet some scholars are not so certain. Some of the papers relating to the world-changing agreement have only recently been made public. What is certain is that the American people were told little except that sweeping changes were being worked out for the postwar era.

Details were highly classified, and who would have understood? How much Congress was told is debatable.

During wartime it was necessary to work quickly with committee chairmen and to beg tacit consent of the rank and file for security reasons. South Carolina was represented in the Senate by Burnett Rhett Maybank and Ellison D. "Cotton Ed" Smith. At that time we had Mendel Rivers, Hamp Fulmer, Butler Hare, Joe Bryson, James Richards and John McMillan in the House. What these men actually knew about the vast changes being brought to our nation's economy and that of the world is uncertain. Fellow South Carolinian Jimmy Byrnes was the director of the all-powerful War Mobilization Board. He was the most astute of the South Carolina men in Washington, and he had daily contact with Roosevelt, yet Byrnes' autobiography "Speaking Frankly" (1947) makes just passing reference to the whole affair.

A question that scholars have posed in recent years deals with whether the complete reorganization of international finances was the logical outgrowth of lessons learned from the Great Depression and the five financial panics of the 19th century or whether the dramatic agreement constituted a radical departure from tradition due to the outcome of Russia's Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Economists argue in one direction and diplomats in the other. Academics straddle the fence and the American public flips to the sports page. The general public has been confused for nearly 70 years following the Bretton Woods Agreement.

To throw more confusion upon the already puzzling history of the agreement that thrust us into financial globalism is the postwar discovery that Harry Dexter White was secretly feeding Joseph Stalin's spies details on American postwar plans. A top secret network of counter espionage agents known as "code Verona" watched the movements and monitored the communication of key American government employees during World War II. The extent of White's breach of trust is not fully known today, but it adds fuel to the anti-central bank argument - even though we do know that Stalin viewed the World Bank and the IMF as agencies whose clandestine purpose was to advance capitalism and frustrate communism in war-torn and developing areas.

The debate of more central banking versus gold as a standard continues, and, to date, our schools do as little to educate the citizenry in the great economic dilemmas as they did in the 1930s. Maybe the ones who have wrestled with that bear of a problem should be given the benefit of the doubt.

Theodore Roosevelt once shot back at a critic, "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds . . . etc."

(Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant. See more columns online at www.moultrienews.com. Visit his Web site at www.historyslostmoments.com).