Tuesday Evening. Outside the Yorkville Casino, 210 East 86th Street, Manhattan, New York
Ben spots the throng through the dusky light: pedestrians, wrapped in heavy overcoats and neck scarves against the chill, emanating a somber air. His breath catches when he remembers the bread lines every New Yorker witnessed a scant few years ago, before the Depression began to ease. He’s grateful these people are not hungry, not unemployed and homeless. They stand upright and carry signs. “Drive the Nazis Out of New York.” “Stop Anti-Semitism.” They walk in a slow, orderly procession outside the Yorkville Casino. He scans the faces of the women who pass by, but Jean and Bessie are nowhere to be seen.
Men in military-style uniforms—swastika patches displayed on their sleeves and chests—arrive on foot, by taxi, and in private cars that pull to the curb long enough to let out their passengers. The succulent smell of pork sausage reaches Ben’s nostrils just as he spots the old-fashioned horse-drawn cart parked outside the casino’s open doors.
The arriving members of the German-American Bund—Ben hates to think of them as Nazis—stop to pluck sausages from steaming crocks with tongs and fill glass steins with frothy beer drawn from barrels before filing into the hall.
Ben salivates, suddenly aware of how hungry he is. He left his family’s dinner before he could eat more than a few bites. He’s not a Jew who abstains from pork; under different circumstances, he would gladly accept a sausage. Not here.
He wishes Jean and Bessie would arrive. They’re late.
A curious sight catches his eye: A slight girl with bobbed dark hair and flashing eyes throws herself into the arms of a tall, broad-shouldered Nazi in uniform, his flaxen hair catching the light spilling from the hall doors. They kiss with undisguised passion, he tall and muscled, she lithe and sculpted, their entwined bodies silhouetted against the bright entrance. No one takes any notice of them except the horse. The animal tosses its head and jerks the cart a few inches forward. Around them, Bund members continue helping themselves to sausages and beer.
“Goddammit,” Bessie says.
Ben’s head whips around. Bessie is here, glaring furiously at the kissing couple.
At her side, Jean shakes her head in dismay. A short, pale-skinned woman has hold of Jean’s arm. Ben recognizes her as Jean’s friend from the Abyssinian church—the one in the flat hat who called out “Hear, hear!” when the reverend spoke about the labor protests on 125th Street.
“Anna, cut it out!” Bessie cries. Jean tries to restrain her, but Bessie breaks free.
Anna—presumably the girl’s name—sees Bessie coming. She turns her head, whispers something into her partner’s ear, then slips from his embrace.
“You can’t do that,” Bessie tells Anna. “No. Absolutely not.”
“Oh, really?” Anna says. “I left home, remember? Nobody tells me what to do.”
“Girls,” Jean says, her voice firm. “We have a serious situation to deal with tonight.”
“Isn’t what she did serious?” Bessie demands.
Jean shoots her a warning look. “Nobody threatened her life.”
“They might, when Hans finds out—” Bessie breaks off.
Jean huffs and exchanges a look with Ben and her friend. “This is Effa Manley,” she says. “Effa, this is Ben Graham, Bessie’s guardian. He’s agreed to watch her tonight.”
Ben and Effa shake hands. He can’t tell whether she’s Black or white. There’s something unusual about her, whatever her color: a self-assurance in her manner, a firm grip that meets his hand without hesitation.
“Effa was kind enough to keep us company,” Jean says. “She’s heading home, and I’m off to my employer’s. It’s not far. Bessie knows the way. You two come there when you’re done, and I’ll accompany her home.”
“Thank you,” Ben says, grateful he won’t be the one riding the subway to Harlem.
Jean and Effa duck out of the line and disappear from sight.
Ben falls in step with the slow-moving protesters, following behind Bessie and Anna. What kind of threat might Bessie face tonight? He can stay close to her, ready to protect her, but he has no idea how.
At least she’s talking with Anna. Anyone who tried to harm Bessie would have a witness—or two. Why does Anna protest when her beau is a Bund member?
Ben takes in Bessie’s stark sign: NAZIS MURDERED MY PARENTS.
Anna’s sign conveys a very different message: PEACE IN EUROPE, PEACE AT HOME.
“Why not?” Ben overhears Anna say.
“Because he’ll find out,” Bessie says.
“So? He’ll still like me,” Anna says.
“He’ll hate you. Don’t you listen to their speeches? They blame Jews for everything. Jews want to control allthe banks, all the money. We’re evil, don’t you know?”
“I’m a pacifist. I think we can all get along.”
“Hans won’t get along with you when he finds out you were bat mitzvahed.”
Listening, Ben watches closely, his eyes accustomed to the murky light.
“All lovers have secrets,” Anna insists. “He doesn’t need to know.”
Bessie stops short. “Lovers? Anna, no. You’re not—?”
“No, we’re not. But, oh, Bessie—he’s the greatest kisser.”
“Stop.”
“Those honey lips—they make my legs go all aquiver—”
“Shut up.”
“Have you ever kissed a boy? It’s—it’s incredible.”
“Thank God, I haven’t. You just like his looks. Have you ever even talked to him?”
“We talk a lot. About the horses I love, how he came here from Ohio because he was a star camper and they gave him the chance to go to Camp Siegfried, where he gets training.”
“Training in what?” Bessie’s leery tone rings out.
Ben detects a commotion in their path.
A dark figure stumbles, blocking Bessie’s way. Flailing, the man grabs Bessie’s arm. In a sickening rush of adrenaline, Ben leaps forward—imagining a blade finding Bessie’s flesh.
Bessie intones to the fallen man: “Joseph, I’m here. You’re okay.”
She knows the man’s name. While she attends to him, Ben is overwhelmed by his helplessness in the face of a real threat. How naked he feels, with no weapon and no idea how to defend his ward. He has no experience with his fists, not since he was an undersized, skinny-armed kid who lost nearly every fight with his brothers and the neighborhood bullies.
“You’re doing fine,” Bessie murmurs. She and Anna flank the old man and help him to his feet. Another protester picks up his cane.
“Can you walk?” Bessie asks, waving other protesters ahead.
The man takes a tentative step, leaning on Bessie while Anna steadies the cane.
Relief floods through Ben. The old man is harmless.
Someone retrieves Joseph’s sign from the gutter. Ben reads the words “War Veteran for Peace. No War in Europe.” Joseph can’t take it, so Ben holds it for him.
“See?” Anna says. “I’m not the only one against war.”
“Young lady,” Joseph says. “I lost my leg in the Great War.”
“That’s terrible,” Anna says.
“If Europe goes to war—and if America joins the fight—thousands more young men will lose their limbs and lives,” Joseph says.
“We can’t let that happen,” Anna says.
“We’re here to protest the Nazis,” Bessie says. “Not determine foreign policy.”
“True.” The old man nods. “These American Nazis—they’re very dangerous.”
“Dangerous how?” Ben asks.
“The worst ones obey Hitler like he’s their god,” Bessie says. “If Hitler says kill our leaders, our mayor, our president—if he tells them to take over America—they’ll do it.”
“We have police protecting our mayor. We have Secret Service protecting our president,” Ben objects.
“We can’t let these Nazi louses win more followers,” Bessie says. “We can’t let them grow stronger.”
“Hans is no louse,” Anna protests.
“He’s a heel who’s going to hate you,” Bessie says.
“You just don’t want me to have a boyfriend,” Anna says.
Ben follows close behind, still clutching Joseph’s sign. The friends, each supporting Joseph by an arm, continue to quarrel. Ben hears voices around him but can’t make out a word. The bitter night air has penetrated his coat. Every protester in the plodding line has companions to talk with, exchanging quiet remarks as they walk. Ben, alone, has no one.
What a singular place to find himself: an amiable man, regarded as quite the success on Wall Street, surrounded by friendly acquaintances and grateful clients, yet without a close friend to his name. He had worked relentlessly through high school and college, leaving no time for a social life. While others were forming friendships that would last a lifetime, Ben spent every waking hour outside the classroom earning money for Mother. The habit of solitude followed him into adulthood. His family is the exception—Hazel, his wife, with whom he rarely speaks except to argue after the children are in bed, and his children, with whom he exchanges superficial conversation—piano lessons, the pet rabbit—over dinner.
Jean arrived here tonight with her friend, Effa, the petite woman who strikes Ben as a spitfire. Yet Ben couldn’t imagine asking anyone—anyone in the world—to accompany him on this errand, this duty to protect Bessie from an unknown assassin. The assignment suits his talents about as well as catching a circus performer after she’s just flipped from a high wire.
The presence of a stranger interrupts this reflection on his existential loneliness: Ben notices that a man has joined him. The stranger, face concealed beneath a low fedora and a scarf wrapped thickly around his neck, sports a well-cut overcoat with its collar turned up against the cold. He walks at the same slow pace as Ben and the others, yet his gait suggests a young man, as though he were restraining a boyish, nervous energy.
“Mr. Graham? I’m Max Kroeber.” The stranger reaches out a leather-gloved hand.
“Hello.” Taken aback, Ben shakes it, stealing a glance at Bessie. The stranger’s other hand is empty of weapons. “How do you know my name?”
“I heard you speak at the Economic Forum, at the New School for Social Research. You presented a brilliant idea—the Commodity Reserve Currency Plan.” Kroeber speaks with unconcealed enthusiasm. “I kept your mimeographed sheet.”
Ben flushes with pride. “That was four years ago. Thank you for remembering my plan.”
“Your plan could have prevented the Depression,” Kroeber declares, “if only it had been adopted before the Crash.”
“Very kind of you to say.” Ben nods. “I still think the idea has merit. Members of President Roosevelt’s administration thought so, too, though ultimately decided not to adopt it.”
“How unfortunate they failed to recognize its genius,” Kroeber says. His dark eyes gleam above his bulky neck scarf.
The flattery gives Ben a stab of unease. Is the stranger trying to lower his guard? Ben glances ahead at Bessie. She’s just ahead, one hand on Joseph’s arm. Safe.
Ben casts his mind back to the night he presented his plan. He sees the room: clumps of people disputing in adamant voices, himself weaving among them as he passed out his mimeographed sheets. There hadn’t been enough chairs—or enough copies. People crowded around the tables, leaning over one another’s shoulders to read the pages.
He remembers William Martin and the other Wall Street men, Joe Mead and a bevy of economists, financiers, and businessmen, all of them there to improve “the sorry scheme of things”—Omar Khayyam’s phrase that had become their shorthand for the economic mess.
Ben is quite sure everyone in that room had been older than this young man. He turns toward his companion. “I don’t recall seeing you at the New School.”
Kroeber emits a jovial laugh. “Yes, I had a rotten head cold and didn’t want my hacking to interrupt your presentation. I listened from outside the door. An older man—beard, mustache”—he makes vehement gestures to illustrate—“spoke with you. That was my father.”
Kroeber waits to see how Ben takes his lie. It was Kroeber himself who spoke with Ben, disguised as the senior Kroeber with silver-streaked facial hair and that sorry suit he wore at the courthouse. Would Graham remember him as Old Man Kroeber?
“I do recall the man. I took him for a Jewish scholar, newly arrived from the Weimar Republic, an economist with a keen interest in solving Germany’s economic woes. He tried to enlist my help.” Ben expels an uneasy laugh.
He remembers me, Kroeber silently crows. That alone justified stooping to impersonate a Jew—bile rises in his throat at the memory. Soon afterward, he shunned the New School, which had sullied itself with its “University in Exile,” harboring the vilest Jews of all: intellectuals who opposed Herr Hitler’s principles, his glorious Weltanschauung, and deserved to be detained, interrogated, interned in camps back in the Fatherland.
Why had he posed as a Jew? Because the scant few scholars present that night were Jews.
Kroeber affects a regretful voice. “I’m sorry to inform you, my father passed away last year.”
“My condolences,” Ben says, still immersed in memories of the night he presented his Currency Plan. He remembers his excitement, followed by the disappointment of seeing the plan repeatedly rejected. The old scholar had recognized its strengths, only to veer off into his own preoccupation.
“I couldn’t help him with his question about the German economy,” Ben says. “Far outside my area of expertise.”
“Having read your article on the Currency Plan, ‘Stabilized Reflation,’ I beg to differ. If you”—a Jew, Kroeber reminds himself, awed and disgusted—“could devise an ingenious solution to prevent future depression in America, you could solve every problem Germany faces—”
“Absolutely not,” Ben interrupts. “I’m no economist.”
The barrage of praise makes Ben wary. Seeing that the girls appear safe, he decides to test the man.
“You read the article. Do you think the Commodity Reserve Currency Plan would help Germany?”
“Not at all,” the stranger replies. “Yours is a price-stabilization and monetary-reform mechanism, designed to reduce the kind of volatility that leads to depression. What Germany is facing now is severe shortages of foreign currency and raw materials. The problem isn’t commodity-price volatility—it’s physical scarcity and a trade imbalance.”
Beneath the fervor, Ben detects a formidable intelligence. “Then what makes you so interested in my plan?”
“German officials are trapped by old European ways of thinking,” Kroeber says. “You’re not.”
Kroeber sees his dream unfolding: Ben’s intellect his instrument, the two of them generating original ideas that astonish Hitler—ideas so bold and unexpected that the führer can’t help but recognize Kroeber’s worth.
“Your mind breaks new ground,” Kroeber says. “You invent daring ideas.”
“Daring,” Ben concedes wryly.
Without warning, the two girls and Joseph veer into the street and reverse course, heading back toward the hall entrance. Ben follows close behind, but Kroeber has disappeared into the murk between the streetlamps.
The protesters disperse, more hastily than Ben would have expected. The old man, Joseph, now walks on his own steam, holding his cane and sign. The girls beeline for the horse, harnessed to the wooden cart, huffing plumes of vapor into the frigid air. Anna clips a leather rein to the horse’s bridle, murmurs into its ear, and leads horse and cart away from the hall doors. Bessie walks beside her friend, with Ben her faithful Sancho Panza, following behind.
Ben’s mind drifts to Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Sancho Panza, peaceful by nature and no warrior, follows Quixote into danger, more useful at pulling him from ditches and tending his wounds than defending him against a mob of irate muleteers. Ben recognizes something of himself in Sancho—and hopes, for the hundredth time, that he won’t be called upon to defend Bessie against anyone wielding a club, or worse.
“Don’t you want to see your boyfriend after the meeting?” Bessie’s tone is peevish.
“Hans told me to not to wait,” Anna says. “He wants to be chosen as one of Kuhn’s personal guards—the ‘O.D.’—and I’d distract him.”
“Sounds like he’s got his priorities straight,” Bessie says, with a sarcastic inflection. “You’re number two, or is it three?”
“Shut up,” Anna says. “Anyway, we have to leave in a hurry.”
“Why?” Bessie says.
“Egilhard,” Anna says. “He’ll arrest anyone blocking the doors.” She glances back. “Everyone knows.”
“Who’s Egilhard?” Ben asks.
“Cop in Fritz Kuhn’s pocket,” Anna says. “Wears the NYPD uniform but loves the Bund more.”
“Let’s go,” Ben says. “I’ll walk you to Jean’s house.”
“Not Jean’s house,” Bessie snaps. “It belongs to her boss, Kroeber.”
“Kroeber? Max Kroeber?” Ben is flummoxed. “I was just speaking with him.”
“No, you weren’t. He’s a Nazi,” Bessie says.
“That’s the name he gave me,” Ben says, baffled.
“The guy you were talking to?” Bessie gives him a hard look. “In the hat?”
“He told me his name was Max Kroeber,” Ben says.
A scratchy male voice crackles from the radio of a passing black-and-white police car. Its tires hiss as it cruises by, headlights sweeping the dark facades of a beauty parlor and a bowling alley.
“Egilhard,” Bessie sighs. “Poor guy, no protesters left to kick around. Just Nazis heading to the beer gardens.”
Anna eases the horse to a halt. “We’re home,” she says. The animal releases a long, moist snort.
“Some home,” Bessie says, eyeing Anna muscling open the massive creaking door, wide enough to swallow a team of shires pulling a carriage back in a grander era. A streetlamp illuminates flakes of ox-blood-red paint clinging to door’s ancient timbers. The lower reaches of the door appear wet and spongy, marred by decades of splashing mud.
“Can you manage on your own?” Ben asks.
“Every day of my life,” Anna declares, her confidence betraying a note of misgiving.
Bessie pulls her friend into a quick hug. “See you.”
The cavernous doorway gapes like a black, hungry mouth, swallowing Anna, the horse, and the cart whole. Its rusty hinges groan as the door swings shut behind them.
Ben and Bessie continue along the shadowy sidewalk beneath a low, starless sky.
“The man who spoke with me,” Ben says. “Kroeber. Doesn’t he know you?”
Sure,” Bessie says. “I come to his house Tuesday nights, to ride the subway home with Jean.” She gestures toward the dim window of a steamship agency advertising crossings to Hamburg. “Wish he’d sail away.”
“Odd he didn’t say hello to you,” Ben says.
“He wouldn’t,” Bessie says. “A Black boy like Ray’s good enough to shine his shoes. But a Black girl whose Jewish dad called his buddy Fritz Kuhn ‘a phony facsimile of a Führer, all Hitlerian swagger and hemorrhoidal stutter.’” She breaks off. “I’m a reeking piece of—”
She stops herself. “He hates Jews.”
“He didn’t seem biased against me,” Ben says. “In fact, he was quite complimentary.”
“He won’t be so complimentary when he finds out you’re Jewish,” Bessie says.
They pass a music shop displaying phonograph records. Portraits of Richard Wagner and Ludwig Beethoven stare out from the window.
“He said I spoke with his father four years ago. I mentioned that I believed his father was a Jewish scholar.”
“I remember the old greybeard. He didn’t correct you?” Bessie says.
“No.” Ben is enjoying this—the first real conversation he and Bessie have ever had.
“That’s weird.” Bessie stops short. “The weirdest part? Why would a Nazi join an anti-Nazi protest? Tuesdays, Kroeber goes to the Bund meetings. He pals around with Fritz Kuhn, the ‘Bundführer.’ We saw Kuhn and Kroeber together at Cowan’s, with my parents. The night my mom sang.” Her voice cracks.
“I’m so sorry about your parents,” Ben says, quite sure he failed to say so before. “What happened to them—to you—was horrible.”
“Yes,” she says, quietly tearful.
Ben has never been good at comforting women. “I know what your parents would want. We have to make sure nothing happens to you.”
“Right,” she manages.
In the uneasy silence, Ben ponders the “weirdness.” Kroeber—an American Nazi—joined the protesters, apparently intent on drawing Ben into a discussion of Germany’s economic woes, much as his father had four years before.
“Kroeber seemed quite keen to talk with me.”
Like his father, the son seemed unwilling to accept Ben’s insistence that he was no economist and had no solutions. He regarded Ben with an almost embarrassing hero worship.
“You said Kroeber never gives you the courtesy of a greeting,” Ben says. “Does he greet Jean?”
“Never,” Bessie says. “Just ‘clean this, cook that.’ He always wants her to make stew.”
He doesn’t treat Jean with respect either, Ben thinks. Hardly surprising in a white supremacist. He despises Black people and Jews.
Bessie is both.
“Bessie,” Ben says, “do you think Kroeber could be the one who threatened you?”
“The one who wrote ‘You’re Next’?” Bessie shrugs. “Maybe. But he didn’t try to kill me tonight. Must’ve been thwarted by my trusty bodyguard.”
She touches Ben’s arm.
Ben’s lifelong mistrust of intimacy makes him want to pull away, but he holds himself still.
“You’re most welcome.” Not that she’d thanked him.
“This is it.” Bessie thrusts her chin at a brownstone occupying the corner lot.
“Is Kroeber home yet?” Ben sees that they’re in the heart of residential Yorkville.
“No,” Bessie says. “He goes in the back entrance and turns on the den lights.”
She reaches into a pocket and pulls out a hand-rolled cigarette. “You go in. I’m dying for a gasper.”
“No, I can’t have you alone out here while your trusty bodyguard talks with your aunt.”
“Jean’d lose her job if he smelled smoke in the house.” Bessie lights her cigarette and takes a drag. “She can see me fine.”
Jean waves at them from a window, brandishing a spatula.
Bessie exhales smoke. “You really think he could be the one who wrote that awful note?”
“We’ll have to find out, won’t we?” Ben says.
A Black boy of about twelve bursts through the kitchen door and races toward them. “Mr. Graham? My mom said to give you this—for Blonda.”
Ben opens his hand. The boy places a square of meat in his palm.
A Few Minutes Later. Kitchen of Kroeber’s Brownstone, East 87 Street, Yorkville, Manhattan
Ben follows the boy into the kitchen. The mouthwatering smell of beef stew greets him, along with a large German shepherd dog who eyes him warily.
“Jus’ hold out your hand,” the boy instructs.
The dog presses its warm muzzle into Ben’s palm. A pink tongue flicks gently across his skin, gathers the morsel, and draws it into the creature’s mouth. Blonda studies Ben with soft, trusting eyes, then lowers herself into a peaceful sprawl.
“You’ve met Blonda,” Jean says, with audible affection, even as she scrubs a skillet with steel wool. She turns to meet Ben’s eyes. “This is Raymond, my son.”
“Pleased to meet you, Raymond,” Ben says, offering his hand to the boy, then pulling it back.
“Better wash first.” He moves to the sink and does just that.
“Nice to meet you, sir,” Raymond says, with a polite nod.
Seven wide-mouth quart mason jars stand in neat rows on the counter, each one filled with beef stew. On the stove, a pressure canner squats over a low burner, its heavy aluminum sides dulled with use, a small metal gauge and hissing valve jutting from the lid. The tantalizing aroma makes Ben’s stomach rumble.
“Now sit, Mr. Graham,” Jean says, gesturing toward the kitchen table, where three spoons and forks lie beside tumblers of water. “You too, Raymond.”
Ben looks out the window at Bessie, puffing on her cigarette by the wrought iron gate. “I should be out there, guarding her.”
“She smokes out there every Tuesday,” Jean says. “We can watch her from here. “
“I need to tell you what happened tonight,” Ben says, his legs suddenly hollow with hunger.
“I’ll come to your office in the morning, and we’ll talk. Now sit. I can see you’re famished.”
Ben obeys, sinking gratefully into the chair.
Jean sets down two steaming soup plates, one for Ben and one for Raymond.
The flavors of onion, carrot, and tender beef meld on Ben’s tongue, and for a moment he’s nine again, watching his mother coax dinner from a half-rotten onion and a few gristly scraps of day-old meat. She made do with whatever she had—whatever he could scrape up at the butcher’s with the coins she gave him. “Won’t Mr. Kroeber be home any minute?” Ben fears what Jean will pay for feeding him.
“He always detours to his shop first,” Jean says.
“You won’t be in trouble for giving me this stew?” No one ever mothers him like this—not his wife, not his mother.
“I take home two quarts as part of my wages,” Jean says.
“Never taste nothing like it before she start cookin’ for Kroeber,” Raymond says. “That’s why we don’t let her get fired. Best grub in the world.”
“The boy’s right. We can’t let you get fired,” Ben says, spooning the exquisite mouthfuls faster into his mouth.
“Hush,” Jean says. “You left your own family tonight to help mine—to help my Bessie.”
Together they look out at the girl, leaning on an iron post, gazing silently into the darkness.
“She’s awful strong,” Jean says, as if she and Ben were Bessie’s proud parents. “Stronger than I ever knew.”
A Moment Later. Outside the Back Door to the Kroeber Residence.
Kroeber watches her too, his lips curling into a contemptuous smile. He can make her melt into thin air whenever he wants. That’s the beauty of it.
Keep the self-appointed guardians off balance. Keep them guilty, divided, one blaming the other.
When I’m done with Bessie, Graham will be soft as gold beneath the torch. He’ll bend to my will. I’ll shape him how I please.
The end.
Appendix: Historical Notes
The German-American Bund
The German-American Bund was formed in 1936 by Fritz Kuhn and had its headquarters in Yorkville, Manhattan. They held their meetings at The Yorkville Casino. Bund members swore loyalty to Hitler, purchased copies of Hitler’s treatise Mein Kampf, and dedicated themselves to fighting “for Germany against Jewish enemies.” The Bund’s ideology included “establishing white Christian supremacy in the United States” and “expelling Jews from labor unions and government positions.” Protesters demonstrated outside their meetings and sometimes threw eggs and vegetables at the Bund members, many of whom dressed in SS-like uniforms with swastikas on their sleeves.
The O.D. or Ordnungsdienst
According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, “The most dedicated members of the Bund belonged to an armed wing known as the Ordnungsdienst (OD). The OD was modeled on the Nazi Party’s paramilitary organization, the Sturmabteilung (SA). The Bund’s OD conducted militaristic activities and wore Nazi-style uniforms.” Some members of the OD served as Fritz Kuhn’s personal bodyguards when he appeared in public at pro-fascist gatherings.
The New School for Social Research
Benjamin Graham joined a group called “the Economic Forum” at the New School that really did meet to exchange ideas about “the sorry scheme of things,” which Ben reveals in his Memoirs to be a quote from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In 1932, Ben Graham actually did present his Commodity Reserve Currency Plan to the group, utilizing mimeographed sheets. He later published his plan in their magazine, The Economic Forum. Fictional Ben mentions the magazine’s editors, Bill Martin and Joseph Mead. In 1933, the New School opened its “University in Exile” and welcomed European scholars, most of them Jews, who were threatened by Nazism.
Benjamin Graham’s Commodity Reserve Currency Plan
Benjamin Graham developed his Commodity Reserve Currency Plan during the depression of 1921–22, seeking a way to prevent what he called “poverty in the midst of plenty.” He refined the idea during the Great Depression of the 1930s, a catastrophe that devastated millions of Americans and in which Graham himself suffered severe financial losses.
In 1932, Graham presented his proposal at the New School in New York. His purpose was practical and ambitious: to devise a monetary system that could help prevent another depression.
Graham proposed giving roughly thirty basic raw materials—including wheat, wool, copper, and tin—a monetary status “equivalent to that which has always been accorded to gold.” By making these commodities part of the monetary system, he hoped to stabilize their prices and thereby provide the broader economy with a powerful safeguard against what he called “severe destabilization.”
Graham regarded it as one of his most important intellectual contributions. I invite you to read more about it in my blog article, “Benjamin Graham’s Daring Plan to Save the Economy.”
It is striking that Graham’s plan so impresses the fictional Max Kroeber in this episode. Kroeber sees it as a genuinely powerful idea—one that, in his eyes, marks Graham as an economic thinker of uncommon originality.
His plan received sympathetic reviews. Building on the ideas of Keynes, ancient Sumer, Graham, and others, economist Joseph Potvin has developed a modern-day “Earth Reserve Currency Standard.” Graham himself attached considerable importance to the plan. In his Memoirs, he wrote:
“If my name has any chance of being remembered by future generations—assuming there will be future generations—it will be as the inventor of the Commodity Reserve Currency Plan.”