Herbert Feis was an American historian, author, and economist. He was the Economic Advisor for International Affairs to the U.S. Department of State in the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations. Feis wrote at least 13 published books and won the annual Pulitzer Prize for History in 1961 for one of them, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference. It features the Potsdam Conference and the origins of the Cold War.
Youth
Feis was born in New York City and raised on the Lower East Side. His parents, Louis Feis and Louise Waterman Feis, were Jewish immigrants from Alsace, France that came to America in the late 1800s. His uncle invented the Waterman stove. He graduated from Harvard College and went on to marry Ruth Stanley-Brown, the granddaughter of James Garfield, the president of the US in 1881. They had a daughter.
Career
Feis was an instructor at Harvard, associate professor of economics at the University of Kansas, and professor and department head at the University of Cincinnati. He published a stream of scholarly studies. From 1922 to 1927 he also was an adviser on the American economy to the International Labor Office, of the League of Nations, in Geneva, Switzerland. He was on the staff of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1930–1931. His first major book, Europe, the World's Banker, 1870-1914 impressed Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson. He recruited Feis to the State Department, where he was an economic advisor 1931 to 1943. Feis helped shape the nation's international economic policies and represented his government at numerous international conferences including the World Economic and Monetary Conference of 1933 in London and the meetings of the Conference of American Republics held in Buenos Aires, Lima, and Panama. He served as a senior advisor in the War Department 1943-1947. Leaving government service he wrote eleven major monographs over the next twenty-five years. They provide a comprehensive history of American foreign policy from 1933 to 1950. He had access to secret document--as well as his own memories--to trace the convoluted course Washington followed in abandoning its traditional isolationism for a policy of global intervention. His books comprised the "orthodox" interpretation of history. His analysis of the origins of the Cold War was challenged from the left during the Vietnam era, with the allegation that Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were primarily designed to stop Soviet expansion and thus caused the Cold War. However, scholarship since the 1980s has largely vindicated his interpretations of the use of nuclear weapons in 1945 as an effort to end the bloodshed as fast as possible.
Criticism
According to the Dictionary of American Biography: He died in Winter Park, Florida.
