Charles G. Dawes

Charles G. Dawes (born Aug. 27, 1865, Marietta, Ohio, U.S.—died April 23, 1951, Evanston, Ill.) was the 30th vice president of the United States (1925–29) in the Republican administration of President Calvin Coolidge. An ambassador and author of the “Dawes Plan” for managing Germany’s reparations payments after World War I, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace jointly with Sir Austen Chamberlain in 1925.

Dawes was the son of General Rufus R. Dawes, a Union officer during the American Civil War and later a member of Congress, and Mary Beman Gates. Educated at Marietta College in Ohio and Cincinnati Law School, Dawes practiced law in Lincoln, Nebraska (1887–94), and then moved to Evanston, Illinois, which he made his permanent home. He was appointed United States comptroller of the currency in 1897 but resigned to contest (unsuccessfully) the Republican Party nomination for a United States Senate seat in 1901. He then turned to private business and banking and organized the Central Trust Company of Illinois. During World War I, Dawes was head of supply procurement for the American Expeditionary Force in France. After his resignation as a brigadier general in 1919, he was appointed by President Warren G. Harding as the first director of the budget in 1921.

In 1923 Dawes was appointed by the Allied Reparations Commission to plan a solution for the problem of Germany’s inability to pay reparations for its liability for World War I as set forth in the Treaty of Versailles. Dawes presided over a committee of experts that submitted a plan in 1924 providing for a reorganization of German finances with the assistance of loans from American investors. The Dawes Plan saved Europe from economic collapse for a few years, but it proved to be only a partial solution for the dilemma of world economic disorganization.

After he was selected as Coolidge’s vice-presidential running mate in 1924, he campaigned against the Ku Klux Klan and supported limits on the use of the filibuster in the Senate. As vice president he favoured the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which attempted to eliminate war as an instrument of foreign policy. He declined to seek the presidency in 1928 and was appointed ambassador to Great Britain (1929–32) by Herbert Hoover. During the Great Depression he returned to the United States (1932) to direct the Reconstruction Finance Corporation but resigned the same year to reenter the banking business.

Dawes was the author of several works, including A Journal of the Great War (1921), Notes as Vice President (1935), and A Journal of Reparations (1939). A self-taught musician, he composed Melody in A Major (1912), an instrumental piece for violin that, with the addition of lyrics by Carl Sigman, became the pop standard “It’s All in the Game” (1951).