Since 1929, there have been many important monetary developments all over the world. However, most of the emphasis tonight will be on those in my country — the United States. Its monetary and economic situation is extremely important for other countries, because capitalism reached its highest development there, and the values of so many other currencies depend upon the value of the dollar.

Altschul, Frank, 222

Anderson, Benjamin M., 181-182, 201n., 203n., 204n., 211

Aquinas, (Saint) Thomas, 29

Aristotle, 28

Benegas Lynch, Alberto, viii, xi, 1, 16

Böhm Bawerk, Eugen von, 16, 35-38, 41, 45, 75-86

Burgess, William Randolph, 221

Chandler, Lester V., 193, 197n., 204, 207n., 229-230

Churchill, Winston, 214

Coolidge, Calvin, 204, 206, 214, 216, 224-226

Advertising, 24-25

Agriculture, 199, 251-255

A priori postulates, 10-13

Argentina, 288-289, 290

Austrian school of economics, 40-41, 76

Banks/banking: central, 188, 278-279, 292-293; development of, 183-187, 278-279, 281-282, 286-287. See also Federal Reserve System

Barter. See Exchange, direct

Bimetallism, 149-153

Capitalism, development of, ii

The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy

Percy L. Greaves

Pearl Harbor

The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy

Percy L. Greaves, Jr.

Bettina B. Greaves, ed.

Foreword by John Chamberlain

LvMI

MISES INSTITUTE

ISBN: 978-1-933550-33-6

Copyright © 2010 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute and published under the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0.

No one can plan history. Every one of us—rich and poor, powerful and not so powerful, famous and infamous, important and unimportant—plans his or her actions in the hope of accomplishing some goal. History is the outcome of countless such purposive actions, intertwined, interconnected, interrelated. Although each action is planned by the individual actor in the hope of achieving some end, history itself is not only not planned, but unplannable. And so it is with the Pearl Harbor disaster which launched the United States into World War II.

When the attack on Pearl Harbor was announced on the radio, my sister phoned. I was outdoors playing touch football with my nine-year-old boy and some of his friends. I went inside immediately and turned on the radio. From that moment on I have followed Pearl Harbor developments closely.

At that party, a loquacious colonel, assuming apparently that he was speaking “off the record,” confided that the United States had decrypted the Japanese diplomatic code a year or so before the attack on Pearl Harbor. From that time on, the top U.S. administration and military officials had been intercepting and reading many of the confidential messages that passed between the Japanese government in Tokyo and her emissaries in the United States and other countries.