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Just Like Adam Smith. Not long after ist Lieut. White came home from the war in 1919, he packed up and went to New York to become director of a settlement house. Once there, he decided to get a college education. He enrolled at Columbia University in February 1922, moved across the country to Leland Stanford as a junior three semesters later. The mature and married White was a different kind of student. He graduated (A.B.) from Stanford in 1924, "with great distinction" and also with a Phi Beta Kappa key. A year later, also at Stanford, he got his master's degree in economics. Despite his excellence as a student, he was never mentioned in any student publication.
After Stanford, White went to Harvard, where he worked toward his philosophy doctorate. Not until he got it, apparently, did Harry Dexter White become proud of his record. The listing he prepared for Who's Who starts with the Harvard degree, ignoring all of his life before that. He is remembered as a brilliant, bumptious student and instructor at Harvard, assertive and quick to argue. After he got his doctorate in 1930, he continued teaching economics at Harvard and also taught at Boston's Simmons College. But he felt he was not going any place at Harvard, and he could find no other teaching job in the East. In 1932 he took the best job available—associate professor of economics at Lawrence College, Appleton, Wis. (the home town of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy).
At Appleton, White felt, and said he felt, marooned, and that his job was beneath his talents. He is remembered there as an excellent instructor but a distant, arrogant man who "thought the White opinion was the only opinion." No Marxist, he taught economics "as conservatively as Adam Smith," said one of his superiors. 'While there, he published his Harvard thesis, The French International Accounts 1880-1913, in book form. Its most interesting lines are in the acknowledgments. There is one to Dr. L. (for Lauchlin) B. (for Bernard) Currie, who read the manuscript, and one to Dr. A. (for Abraham) G. (for George) Silverman, who clarified certain points. Both Currie and Silverman later were linked with White in testimony about espionage rings.
"The Waterbug." Harry Dexter White was plucked out of Appleton and taken to Washington in June 1934 by Professor Jacob Viner, the internationally known economist, then a Treasury official. White went to the capital only for a summer assignment: to study the gold standard and international trade. By fall he had settled down to a long career in the Treasury—and an interesting career it was. He was not a great economist. His specialty was international payments, which does not require much theoretical ability but does pose intricate problems, as chess does. In the 1930s, White wrote some rather original memoranda on the modified gold standard, but he published only one book in his life: his Harvard thesis. His consuming interest was not in economics for its own sake but as a path to political power. He once told a friend that he had originally planned to study government, "but pretty soon I realized that most governmental problems are economic, so I stayed with economics."