Seymour Parker Gilbert

Seymour Parker Gilbert, 1931

Seymour Parker Gilbert (born October 13, 1892 in Bloomfield , New Jersey , † February 23, 1938 in New York ) was an American lawyer, banker, politician and diplomat. He gained notoriety as the person responsible for the German reparation payments , an office that he held from October 1924 to May 1930.

Life

Seymour Parker Gilbert was educated at Rutgers College and received an LL.B. in 1915. -Degree from Harvard Law School . He then joined the New York law firm Cravath & Henderson. From 1918 to 1920 he was a war loan advisor with the United States Treasury Department. At the age of 27 years, a cabinet post in him was Wilson administration offered: Succeeding Russell Cornell Leffingwell he was assistive State Secretary for Tax Affairs at the Ministry of Finance ( Assistant Secretary of the Treasury ). Under Wilson's successor, Warren G. Harding , he was then from 1921 to 1923 Deputy Secretary of the Treasury ( Under Secretary of the Treasury ).

Gilbert was an advisor to the government under three US presidents. The New York Times described him as "the outstanding brilliant young man in government service." Gilbert was known to work half nights and was nicknamed "The Thinking Machine" in Washington circles for this.

General agent for reparations payments

In the 1924 contract of the Dawes Plan , a transfer committee and at its head the general agent for reparations payments was provided. From the Reparation Parker Gilbert was appointed reparations. His official seat was Berlin and as a general agent for reparations payments he had a Reichsbank account to which the reparations payments were to be made in Reichsmarks .

The Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht , who was in office from November 1923 to March 1930, was strictly against investments from public debt and fully agreed with Gilbert on this point: From 1926, the reparations agent Parker Gilbert regularly complained about the lack of frugality in public budgets and suggested budget and spending cuts.

On March 10, 1927, Reich Chancellor Wilhelm Marx complained to Gilbert that he was concerned “that the economic situation of Germany abroad was viewed far too favorably and therefore Germany's productivity was significantly overestimated. The Reich government is still not in a position to meet all the wishes that are brought to it from the various distressed sections of the population. ” Stresemann also expressed foreign policy concerns in this context in the autumn of 1927.

presumably image montage from the daily press

On October 20, 1927, Gilbert again and again urged a thrifty spending policy (again supported by Schacht). When the reparations agent's warning (including justification from the government) was published on November 6, 1927, the Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie (Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie) joined the demands for state austerity and put the government under massive pressure with regard to spending policy. The risks of transfer protection, which were included in the Dawes Plan, were too high for Parker Gilbert ( Gilbert had already been warned of a German credit crisis by FED President Benjamin Strong), and so from December 1927 he sat down for a revision of the Dawes Plan a. He worked out important cornerstones of the reparations plan to be renewed ( Young Plan ) before the commissions met. In the background, Parker Gilbert continued to support the implementation (relevant conditions vis-à-vis the Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht, who was taking part in the negotiations) of the Young Plan.

For the right wing of the bourgeois camp, Gilbert was the embodiment of the injustice against post-war Germany. They saw in him an instrument of the Versailles treaties and of foreign countries, which the German Reich wanted to "bleed" because of the lost World War. In a mass event on January 27, 1928, the birthday of the former emperor, the future Gauleiter of Brandenburg, Wilhelm Kube , mocked Gilbert, who was responsible for compliance with the reparation payments, by declaring him the actual Emperor of Germany in his inflammatory speech. The New York Times reported it on its front page a day later.

Head of JPMorgan

With the adoption of the Young Plan and the creation of the Bank for International Settlements in 1930, Gilbert's post in the German Reich was abolished. Gilbert returned to the USA with several awards from European governments and in 1931 became a partner in the management of the JPMorgan bank . In numerous specialist articles he criticized the American credit and tax system, including as "the worst in the world". Seymour Parker Gilbert died of a heart attack at the age of 45 after suffering from a heart condition . He left a wife and three children. The eldest son Seymour Parker Gilbert III. was a managing director at Morgan Stanley in the 1980s . Under his leadership (until 1990) this financial group experienced the greatest boom in its history.

Web links

• Parker Gilbert on the cover of Time magazine
• Newspaper article about Seymour Parker Gilbert in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ In this obituary dated February 24, 1938, the New York Times mentions the expression " Brain Trust ", which would ideally have applied to Gilbert, but which was not yet common in Washington during his time.
2. ^ Hans Gestrich: The Young Plan. Leipzig 1930. S. 118f: “The transfer, d. H. The conversion of the Reichsmark amounts into foreign currency, according to the needs of the reparation creditors, was the responsibility of the so-called transfer committee, whose chairman was the well-known agent for reparation payments. "
3. ^ Helmut Coing: Dawes Plan. In: Dictionary of International Law. Aachen congress to the Hussar case. Volume 1. (Ed. Hans-Jürgen Schlochauer) Berlin 1960. S. 316. ( online )
4. ↑ Eberhard Kolb: Germany 1918–1933. A history of the Weimar Republic. Munich 2010. p. 100. ( online )
5. ↑ Bernhard Spangenberg : The future of reparations. Berlin 1931. p. 32. ( online )
6. ↑ Ursula Büttner : Weimar. The overwhelmed republic 1918–1933. Stuttgart 2002. pp. 252 f. ( online )
7. ↑ Michael Wala: Weimar and America. Ambassador Friedrich von Prittwitz and Gaffron and German-American relations from 1927 to 1933. Stuttgart 2001. S. 161. ( online )
8. ^ Minutes of the meeting of March 10, 1927. In: Files of the Reich Chancellery. The Marx III / IV cabinet. Volume 1. pp. 615-617. (The complete minutes of the meeting are in the Federal Archives and can be read here ( RTF ; 16 kB).)
9. ^ Johannes Bühler: German history. From the Bismarck Empire to a divided Germany. Volume 6 . Berlin 2013. p. 585. ( online )
10. ^ Christian Berringer: Social Policy in the Great Depression . Berlin 1999. p. 116. ( online )
11. ^ Karl Dietrich Erdmann (Ed.): Files of the Reich Chancellery: Weimar Republic. Die Kabinette Marx III and IV. Volume 2. Boppard 1988. p. 1094 ff. ( Online ( memento of the original from October 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and Archive link according to instructions and then remove this note. ) 
12. ↑ Federal Agency for Civic Education: German Stories. Dawes Plan :
    "When converting the annual rates into the currencies of the recipient countries, the actual payments could be lower if Germany had too little foreign currency due to a negative trade balance (" transfer protection ")."
13. ↑ Michael Wala: Weimar and America. Ambassador Friedrich von Prittwitz and Gaffron and German-American relations from 1927 to 1933. Stuttgart 2001. S. 123. ( online )
14. ↑ Ralph Blessing: The possible peace. The modernization of foreign policy and Franco-German relations 1923–1929. Munich 2008. p. 361 ff, ( online ) especially from p. 370.
15. ^ Hans Gestrich: The Young Plan. Leipzig 1930. p. 122:
    “During the Paris Youngplan negotiations, such a situation arose as a result of the complete cessation of foreign credit inflows and even foreign credit outflows. The reparations agent has ruthlessly bought on [foreign currency]. The Reichsbank had to intervene, but a discount increase and credit restriction were enough to restore the situation on the foreign exchange market. "
16. ^ Federal Agency for Political Education: Versailles and Weimar. Great Depression. P. 6:
    “From a domestic political point of view, however, a process in the context of the Young Plan was more important. The NSDAP, still a splinter party in the Reichstag election of 1928, teamed up with the right-wing DNVP and launched a referendum against the Young Plan, which resulted in the tearing of the Versailles Treaty. The fact that in the end only 13.8 percent of those eligible to vote concealed the meaning: With this action, the NSDAP managed to work its way into the right wing of the bourgeois camp and to present itself as the vanguard of the “national camp”. Radical agitation against the Versailles Treaty had become socially acceptable. "
17. ^ New York Times, January 28, 1928: Reich Fascisti Hail Gilbert as "Kaiser". Page 1. (translated from the American):
    “There were some boos when Mr. Kube named Mr. Gilbert an employee of international bankers who drew his annual income of 190,000 marks from the pockets of the Germans and who had a staff of 103 employees that are similarly overpaid. But the ridicule turned to laughter when Mr Kube added: 'Gilbert, a young man of 32 years, is the German Emperor as of today. It is no less than appropriate to pay our respects to him as obedient subjects. Personally, we don't care about him, we have nothing against him. ' He held up a copy of Mr. Gilbert's latest report, which he called the 'Dawes Bible', and recommended that the book be given to every graduate student: it was a surefire way of a nationwide uprising against Germany's instant slavery to tear off the fence. "
18. ↑ See the New York Times of May 18, 1990