By Thomas F. Schwartz
Guido Jung is not a name that brings immediate recognition. He is best known as the Italian Minister of Finance from 1932 to 1935 and a vocal supporter of Benito Mussolini. His Italian family were wealthy Orthodox Jewish merchants and bankers. Jung served in World War I and was decorated for valor. He also was part of the Italian delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 where he met Lewis Strauss, a protégé of Herbert Hoover with the United States Food Administration. Strauss kept in touch with Jung and penned the following letter to Hoover around May 8, 1933 detailing Jung’s comments about his meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt leading up to the 1933 London Economic Conference, as well as the new Hitler regime in Germany:
On Sunday morning I breakfasted with Guido Jung the Italian Minister of Finance. He had just arrived from Washington and left after breakfast for Boston to sail for Rome. He was, as you know, the Delegate sent by Mussolini to the series of conferences in which Roosevelt has recently indulged. Jung had sent me word from Washington that he wanted to see me before he left to renew old acquaintances. You may recall him from Paris days where he was one of the Italian Attachés at the Peace Conference and subsequently became a sort of Financial Agent for Caetani. We have kept in touch, he and I, ever since 1919 and I have seen him on my visits to Italy. We are friends, and he spoke completely without reserve.
The burden of what he had to say was that he had been completely mystified by the entire performance. No one that he had met in Washington from the President and the Secretary of the Treasury down seemed to have the least idea of what it was all about. As he described it they were even unfamiliar with the most elementary financial parlance. At first he thought they were simply being very astute in an attempt to draw him out but he reached the final conclusion that what he had mistaken for profundity was the most complete superficiality. Taking his metaphor from the fact that Secretary Woodin is a musician, Jung stated that as his opinion it was very likely that he would attempt to run the Treasury by ear.
With reference to Hitler I asked Jung whether he could tell me how Mussolini regarded his Germanic imitator. He thinks that Mussolini detests him as a weakling and a bully and sees no parallel between Fascism in Italy and in Germany.
William H. Woodin served in 1933 as Franklin Roosevelt’s first Secretary of the Treasury. A serious collector of gold coins, Woodin provided an exemption for coin collectors in returning gold to the Treasury. He was also a musician whose compositions included the “Franklin D. Roosevelt March.” Musicians who play “by ear” do not use musical scores but ad lib, a reference to the improvised character of New Deal policies.