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Author Description U.S. Secretary of the Treasury during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He played a major role in designing and financing the New Deal. After 1937, while still in charge of the Treasury, he played the central role in financing US participation in World War II. He also played an increasingly major role in shaping foreign policy, especially with respect to Lend Lease, support for China, helping Jewish refugees, and proposing (in the "Morgenthau Plan") to prevent Germany from again being a military threat by wrecking its industry and mines.<br />Morgenthau was born into a prominent Jewish family in New York City, the son of Henry Morgenthau, Sr., a real estate mogul and diplomat, and Josephine Sykes. Morgenthau was the father of Robert M. Morgenthau, District Attorney of Manhattan for 35 years.<br />In 1929, Roosevelt, as Governor of New York, appointed him chair of the New York State Agricultural Advisory Committee and to the state Conservation Commission. In 1933, Roosevelt became President and appointed Morgenthau governor of the Federal Farm Board.In 1934, when William H. Woodin resigned because of poor health, Roosevelt appointed Morgenthau Secretary of the Treasury (an act that enraged conservatives). Morgenthau was an orthodox economist who opposed Keynesian economics and disapproved of some elements of Roosevelt's New Deal. To finance World War II, he initiated an elaborate system of marketing war bonds.<br />Morgenthau used his position as Treasury chief to investigate organized crime and government corruption. Treasury Intelligence and other agencies (the notoriously fragmented US federal law enforcement system had five in the Treasury Department alone) were uncoordinated in their efforts; efforts to create a super-agency were stalled by J. Edgar Hoover, who feared his FBI would be overshadowed. Nevertheless, Morgenthau created a coordinator for the Treasury agencies; although the coordinator could not control them, he could move them to some cooperation.<br />In 1944, Morgenthau proposed the Morgenthau Plan for postwar Germany, calling for Germany to lose the heavy industry, and the Ruhr area "should not only be stripped of all presently existing industries but so weakened and controlled that it can not in the foreseeable future become an industrial area". Germany would keep its rich farmlands in the east. However Stalin insisted on the Oder-Neisse border, which moved those farming areas out of Germany. Therefore, the original Morgenthau plan had to be dropped, Weinberg argues, because it was "too soft on the Germans, not too hard as some still imagine."

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