Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSC an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearinghouses around the world. And now welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
When the history of World War II is shared in the classroom, the narrative frequently focuses on its most consequential battles. Events of enduring significance such as Pearl Harbor, Midway, D-Day, the liberation of the concentration camps and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki when viewed through the prism of history, leave an indelible mark on our collective memory. They are remembered as pivotal moments in the Allies path to victory. The warriors linked to these moments rank among the most revered and studied names of the past hundred years. Leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower are among those credited with the degradation of the German war machine and the ultimate defeat of Adolf Hitler. While these World War II eminences endure through time, there exists another set of enormously impactful strategists and tacticians whose contributions, though indispensable to the war effort, have been relegated to sort of insignificance in university classes and textbooks.
Well, depending on the major that you study in college. But what about economics? Illuminating the rarely-revealed, but masterfully-conducted economic battle between the Allies and Axis Powers is today's guest, New York Times bestselling author and Academy Award-winning screenwriter, Graham Moore. With the release of his new work of historical fiction, The Wealth of Shadows, Graham penetrates the equally bureaucratic and, for them, dramatic lives of economists and Treasury Department officials facing off against the Nazis, not with bombs from a B-17 over Bremen, but with billions of bullion in the balance. The battles and combatants Graham puts back in the bright lights sometimes lost to memory re-emerge in his 366 taut thrilling pages.
In a minute, Graham Moore joins us Inside the ICE House to unpack his research and his exhaustive efforts to uncover and re-present the lives and work of shadowy wartime figures such as Ansel Luxford, Harry Dexter White, John Maynard Keynes, and many others who ultimately converged at the decisive engagement of World War II, the Battle of Bretton Woods. We're going to explore Graham's earlier work a bit, detail the strategies employed by the US Treasury Department in its efforts to destabilize the German economy. Our conversation with Graham Moore, author of The Wealth of Shadows, is coming up right after this.
Speaker 3:
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Josh King:
Welcome back. Remember, please do subscribe wherever you listen and rate and review us in Apple Podcasts so that other folks know where to find us. Money is a dangerous weapon. So says the tagline like the movie poster it surely will soon be, beneath the title of Graham Moore's newest book, The Wealth of Shadows, now available from Penguin Random House. It's the fourth novel for the New York Times bestselling author of The Sherlockian, Last Days of Night and the Holdout. And his screenplay for 2014's The Imitation Game, based on the life of Alan Turing, which won Graham the Oscar for best adapted screenplay from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Graham, thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.
Graham Moore:
My goodness, thank you so much for that kind introduction. It's my pleasure to be here.
Josh King:
So as you and I are now connected between New York and Los Angeles, in Washington this week, world leaders convening for the 2024 NATO Summit marking 75 years of the Alliance. Given your work, do you tend to watch these gatherings differently imagining the drama that has got to be unfolding behind the scenes, especially given the backdrop of the snap elections in the UK and France, and certainly what's about to go down over the coming days, maybe weeks and months here in the US?
Graham Moore:
I do. I think, certainly researching Wealth of Shadows, I was delighted and fascinated and obsessed frankly, to find that the sheer level of backroom skullduggery going on at these kind of international conferences is even more than I would've imagined. It was certainly the case at Bretton Woods, which plays a big part in this book, but you imagine certainly at every NATO summit now that for every, how do I put it, for every press conference, there is an untold number of secret deals and whatever being made behind the scenes to make that happen.
So it's funny, I think I am very lucky to get to work in historical fiction. To get to look at these sort of events from, in this case, 80 years ago and watch how it unnervingly predicts and reframes the world that we live in today. I think this was a book that I didn't think it was going to be particularly topical when I started writing it in the summer of 2020. One doesn't imagine the sort of real life thriller about economists in the US Treasury Department in 1939 is going to be this extremely topical thing. And it's almost a joke with my colleagues and I in the months since that every month has proven the book to be unnervingly more topical and relevant to what we see in the news, even this week.
Josh King:
A guy we might think of as an ordinary government bureaucrat, Ansel Luxford becomes enmeshed in a secret project within the US Treasury Department aiming to destabilize Nazi Germany and collapse its economy. Thinking back to that time in 2020, what inspired you to follow this one man's obscure storyline rooted in true events to explore the challenges and experiences faced from his, Ansel's perspective?
Graham Moore:
So I would imagine that few of your listeners have heard of Ansel Luxford, which would not make them rare cases because I certainly had not heard of Ansel Luxford in the summer of 2020 when this book started. And frankly, I don't know that anyone ever had heard much about Ansel Luxford. He was a figure...
Josh King:
You go on Google today and you find a couple obits, a few goodbye letters, but beside reviews for The Wealth of Shadows, there's very little about the guy.
Graham Moore:
Yeah, that's one of the things that got me so excited about discovering him in the first place. So in the summer of 2020, it was this first early months of the pandemic, I'm sure you remember them well. I had kind of retreated to this house in Michigan in the woods with my family. I was there with my wife and she was pregnant. We were about to have our first baby and my brother and his wife had just had a baby and they were there and my mother was there. It was sort of, the family had kind of cooped up in this big house in the woods in Michigan, and I felt so, frankly useless. Like I was just sitting there in this house helping my brother take care of his baby, giving my dog haircuts to pass the time. It really, it was such a bleak period. But one thing that it did afford me an opportunity to do was to start going through my list of things I'd always wanted to learn more about.
And high up on that list of things I'd always wanted to learn more about was the Bretton Woods Conference itself. I mean, when you describe the Bretton Woods Conference to a layman like me, someone without an economics background, it seems sort of too wild to have actually existed. You're telling me at the end of the second World War, as allied troops were literally sweeping the beaches in France, the global economy was in tatters to the point of being effectively non-existent. There basically wasn't a global economy in the summer of 1944. And so 700 delegates from all over the world representing every country in the world, were sent to this hotel in New Hampshire for a couple of weeks where their task was to figure out what the global economy should look like. You guys go to this hotel, all 700 of you and come back with an answer for the shape of the global economy. I mean, that just seems so kind of wild to me. And in some ways it felt like this wonderfully 20th century notion that that's how problems were solved.
We trusted experts so much, we would just sort of stick a bunch of experts in a hotel and say, can you just solve the global economy for us for a little bit and come back and let us know what you come up with. But at the same time, it seems, per your first question about these conferences, it seemed like, okay, if the stakes of this conference are the global economy, the sheer level of spycraft that has to be going on behind the scenes at this conference in this hotel in New Hampshire in the summer of 1944 must be off the charts. And that I'm really curious about. I mean, that seems to me like such an ideal setting for an espionage novel. So I started reading about it and honestly, this name just popped up at me, Ansel Luxford, and I think it popped up because it's just sort of an odd name. I've never...
Josh King:
Doesn't sound like an American name easily. When it first popped off the page in the first chapter, I said, what's he doing in Minnesota?
Graham Moore:
Yeah, exactly. And you don't meet a lot of guys named Ansel these days. It just seemed like a funny name. And so I just sort of filed him away in the back of my mind as he was present for this meeting or that at Bretton Woods. And I said, oh, that's a funny, interesting, I've never heard of that guy. Wrote him down in my notebook, Ansel Luxford. Interesting. And then I started getting much more interested in the wartime economic history, the war behind the war during the course of World War II, which was not just this war of armies, but this war of currencies. The fact that from 1939 on, the United States and the UK and France were very much engaged in inventing what we now call economic warfare to thwart the Nazi war machine. And that seemed really fascinating to me.
It felt like there was this kind of secret history of World War II that I'd never heard anything about. And yet this name, Ansel Luxford, just kept popping up. Oh, there he was in this meeting at the White House, and there he was in Havana, and here he is in London. And I kept saying to myself, who is this guy? I've never heard of him. How is he in all these meetings? What's his story? And I started digging and found what you were just saying you found, which is frankly nothing. There's just nothing written about him. No one had ever, I think one brief obituary somewhere when he passed away [inaudible 00:11:56]
Josh King:
An oral history maybe?
Graham Moore:
Yeah, the World Bank has an oral history with an interview with him in their archives. He's just not part of the historical record at all. And this gets me really excited. I think, especially when you're writing about the second World War, there is no more subjects, there's no subject more exhaustively covered over the last 80 years than the second World War. So I feel like one step into writing about the Second World War with a bit of trepidation 'cause you're kind of going, all right, am I really adding something new to this conversation, is there really cultural value to what I'm writing about this? But with Ansel, it felt like, okay, this felt like this strange new lens on the war. And I found his children who are all still very much with us today. And I talked to his daughter for a long time and I finally got to, she put me in touch with his youngest son, Ansel Jr, who is a sheep herder in rural Montana.
The guy lives, it was amazing, it took months to get him on the phone. He lives off the grid. He has no cell phone, no email, nothing like that. He only has a satellite phone to communicate with and he only turns it on once a month. So it was this whole process of scheduling a time to call him and he would have his phone on and he would pick up. So after a couple months of finding him, I finally found him and say, I explained who I was and he says, oh yes, yes, my sister said that you wanted to write a book about my father. And I said, yes. I think there's this fascinating story about him that no one's ever heard, and Ansel Jr. says to me, I've been waiting my whole life for this phone call.
And I said, really? And he says, yes. Do you want to write about how my dad was secretly a spy? And I think I just paused for a long moment before blurting out something like, well, I do now. So why don't you tell me that story? It was amazing. Then I found, frankly, a tale even stranger than I could have imagined about what Ansel Luxford's life is like. Which in a nutshell was that in 1939, as the war in Europe was breaking out, in this period from '39 through '41, where the United States was not just neutral in what we called a matter of European dispute, but we were assiduously passionately neutral.
Josh King:
Yeah.
Graham Moore:
This is a period where if you look at the polling at the time...
Josh King:
Yeah, Charles Lindbergh at Madison Square Garden.
Graham Moore:
Yeah, it's wild how, I think I knew that certainly the United States was neutral in this period, but I think I as I dug further into it was shocked to find just how neutral the United States was. I looked at the polling at the time, and in '39 and '40, 12% of Americans wanted to get involved in any way in what they called this European dispute. The percentage of Americans who wanted to get involved militarily, that was 2%. It was politically toxic for the Roosevelt administration to do anything, not even, much less stop the Germans. I mean, it was politically toxic for them to do anything that could be seen as helping the British or helping the French who were already, had declared war at that point. And yet, Ansel Luxford in 1939 was a tax attorney in St. Paul Minnesota, where he was recruited by a mid-level Treasury department bureaucrat named Harry Dexter White to join this clandestine team of economists on this secret plan to crash the Nazi economy.
Josh King:
We know about the square off between the RAF and the Luftwaffe, we know about the rivalries within the allies between people like Generals Patton and Montgomery. I highlighted Graham in my introduction, your Oscar for best adaptive screenplay for The Imitation Game. And while the details differ, both Alan Turing and Ansel Luxford are focused on undermining the Germans really away from the battlefield. Beyond the obvious casting appeal of Benedict Cumberbatch's Turing, what draws you to these types of narratives beyond the satellite phone conversation, which any creative says, you want to write a book about how my dad was an unknown spy?
Graham Moore:
Right, and you hear a conversation like that and you're sort of going, okay, well I definitely know what I'm going to be doing for the next three years, and that was writing this book. And it was fascinating as well, frankly, 'cause this was a real person so, I've tended to write about people who've been without, for whom I don't have immediate family members to talk about. Certainly writing about Alan Turing, we found when we were doing that film, when we were doing The Imitation Game, we found a couple people who were still with us who had met him, but they didn't know him super well. It wasn't, it wasn't his children as it was in the case of Ansel Luxford who I got to talk to, and certainly you speak to any, if you ask any three children to describe their father to you, you will get three very, very different answers.
And I think that was one of the fascinating bits about getting to dive into Ansel's story as historical fiction to sort of figure out what I thought the story was and to try and recreate Ansel to use historical fiction as a form to sort of recreate the mind of Ansel Luxford. What did it feel like to be him? I think I'm really drawn to these unexpected lenses on stories we sort of think we know. Again, there's been so much written about the second World War, and if I'm going to write anything, the question I'm always asking myself is is this adding to the cultural conversation in some way? Am I providing something of cultural value? You ask someone to watch a film, that's two hours of their life, you ask someone to read a novel that's even more hours of their life, maybe that's eight or 10 hours.
And if I'm asking someone to give that much of their life to this piece of work, I'm saying, okay, I really believe this is going to have some kind of value to the reader or viewer. And so I think these strange lenses on stories, like an interesting sort of person we all, with Turing it was kind of, yes, we've heard a bit about Enigma, we've heard a bit about the kind of photography war, but to get to actually put the viewer inside the head of Alan Turing, which is what we were trying to do in that film and really let you see the war and see that period in history through Turing's eyes was, that felt to me tremendously exciting and a view of this period in history that we hadn't seen before. And the same felt true in Wealth of Shadows as I was describing the war from Ansel Luxford's position.
There's something strange the book does that certainly folks have commented on since it's come out, which is it's a book about World War II that narratively effectively skips the American involvement in World War II. The book covers '39 through Pearl Harbor at the end of '41, and then the book takes this, not to give any spoilers alert, but the book actually sort of skips over the two years of primary American military might in the war. Because from the economist's perspective, by the time Pearl Harbor happened, the US war machine was built, the British War machine was built, and they believed that the German war machine had frankly already been sabotaged to the point that it could not possibly win. And so that felt to me really exciting. Here's a lens on the war and a way of framing what the war was that I just never heard before.
Josh King:
I mean talking about specific years that we can dwell on for a second. Let's go back to February, 2015, and that's when you walked on stage at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles to accept the Oscar from Oprah Winfrey. You used your brief speech window that all award recipients have, the lights are going on, the music is about to go on, you used that time to recall a teenage experience and inspire young creatives to stay weird. I just want to give a quick listen to a clip from that speech.
Graham Moore:
I was 16 years old, I tried to kill myself, because I felt weird and I felt different and I felt like I did not belong. And now I'm standing here. And so I would like for this moment to be for that kid out there who feels like she's weird or she's different or she doesn't fit in anywhere. Yes, you do, I promise you do. You do. Stay weird, stay different, and then when it's your turn and you are standing on this stage, please pass the same message to the next person who comes along. Thank you so much.
Josh King:
Stay weird, stay different. Graham, on that stage in front of the world's greatest on film, I'm curious where that message came from and almost a decade since then, have you been able to continue to stay weird and stay different?
Graham Moore:
That's a great way of phrasing the question. Gosh, I get emotional hearing that now 10 years later. It's so funny. I haven't listened to that in probably, in 10 years since it happened. So it's so strange to hear it. It was, gosh, an overwhelming moment. Yeah, I think, look, one gets to stand on a stage like that and have Oprah Winfrey hand you a gold trophy and you get this sort of 30 seconds to speak to however many, tens of millions of people, if you're lucky, you get to do, I am lucky enough to get through that once in my life, right? It's a moment, even as it was happening, you're sort of thinking, this is wild. This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And it was very strange because I was quite young. I was 33 when that happened. So it was sort of young to be having this kind of wild public moment where again, Oprah's handing me this trophy, and you're sort of going, this is so surreal.
And it felt like, okay, well, if this is the one moment with any degree of statistical probability, this is the only time in my life that I'm going to be live, speaking into a microphone in front of however many tens of millions of people. So if this is the only time in my life when I'm going to have this opportunity, I should use it to say something meaningful. And that, talking about my teenage suicide attempt and pestering depression, and using that sort of tell what was hopefully a kind of inspiring message to folks listening to it seemed like a valuable use of my time. And I do think about staying weird.
It's funny you're asking about the speech because I made one critical error in that thing, which was I didn't tell. I didn't think I was going to win. I just didn't imagine it. So I hadn't told anyone. I hadn't planned it out. I hadn't told my family I was going to talk about that. I hadn't told my friends on the movie, I hadn't told Benedict, I hadn't told Keira Knightley, just everyone was more than stunned. I remember coming off the stage and Benedict was there, and Keira was there, and we were all hugging and everyone was just shocked, like, oh, that's, wow, I hadn't even heard that story before. But you don't imagine you're going to win, so you don't really, at least I'm such a bad planner, I hadn't planned the whole thing out. But it felt like, I will say that in terms of staying weird in the 10 years since, there are many strange things about having someone hand you a gold trophy when you're 33.
One really beneficial thing about it is that it was this huge vote of confidence for me to say, okay, I'm just going to work on the material that I want to work on whenever I want to do it. I have this very lucky career where I get to move back and forth between film and novels, and I joke with one of my agents sometimes. He always says, I'm terrified of the day that you're going to call us up and say, hey, I have this great idea for a puppet show that I want to do next, and I really want to spend a year working on a puppet show because I'm such a sort of omnivorous, multimedia writer where I'm constantly jumping around, which I love, and I feel very lucky to be able to do it. But I think winning that award so early was in so many ways, a nice, it gave me this vote of confidence to be able to say, okay, I've done things that are, hopefully I've done some things that were good.
I've done some things that aren't good, but I can do things that are good, so I'm just going to do the strange, bizarre projects that seem really exciting to me. And hopefully someone out there will like them too, would sort of trust my instinct about what's interesting to me. And certainly, we continue to find this even with the Wealth of Shadows. A book that, when I said to people, hey, I'm going to sort of do a spy thriller about an economist, you could sort of see these blank stares on the looks of the people I would describe that to, because it doesn't sound, the words economist and spy thriller are not usually in the same sentence together.
So telling people that I was going to do that was a bit of an uphill conversation. And then you'd start to go through the actual story of, okay, well, I found this real person and his name was Ansel Luxford, and this is what really happened to him. And then you could sort of watch them go from glazed eyes to their mouths slowly coming agape as they realize how compelling this story really was. And I'm so glad that I had the things like the Oscar gave me this sort of confidence to go and pursue unexpected stories like this one.
Josh King:
You grew up in Chicago, family of lawyers. Mom served as a chief of staff to former First Lady Michelle Obama. My friend, Eli Attie, followed our service in the Clinton administration to carve a path through Hollywood on the TV side. Given your deep-rooted familial ties to both politics and law, you might have ended up in the West Wing, the real one, not President Jed Bartlet's West Wing. What spurred your original interest in writing? How did you get your start?
Graham Moore:
I didn't know you knew Eli. I knew him a little bit too. He's a lovely man.
Josh King:
Great guy.
Graham Moore:
I did lunch with him probably six months ago. Wonderful. I wish, gosh, he's so gifted at being able to go back and forth between obviously his political work, his speech writing, and then his wonderful film and television work. And I wish, I always joke that I wish I could write speeches. People have asked me from time to time, but it's a different thing and it's hard to explain. No, no, no, I can write prose fiction and I can make films that actually...
Josh King:
Dude, you just gave a beautiful speech in front of the Oscars. I think you can write speeches.
Graham Moore:
No, but you have to do it for someone else's voice. That's what's hard is, what Eli and other great speech writers are really good at is writing for Bill Clinton's voice or Barack Obama's voice or whoever it is, you're writing for a politician's voice. And I can write for sort of my voice. I can do these kind of voices, but it's not quite naturalism that I'm doing, I mean, if you look at Imitation or The Outfit, my second film, frankly, these books, it's a little, there's a heightened quality to the speech that's quite intentional. And sometimes I wish I'd gone and worked in DC for a spell. I have a lot of friends who've done it, and it seems such a wonderful thing to get to do because you were asking about how I started writing fiction and working in films, and it was very much accidental.
I mean, I've never had a career plan. I probably should at this point develop something like a career plan, but I haven't. I just have sort of done the things that seemed interesting to me at the time. So in my twenties, I briefly thought I wanted to be a journalist. I'd worked in my college newspaper and like that, and I briefly got this job at Newsweek, which definitely dates this story. But, I tried my hand at journalism very briefly, and found that I was really, really bad at it. It was just a kind of writing I wasn't good at, and I was surrounded by people who were really good at it. So this has been a running theme in my life where you find yourself surrounded by people who are really good at something and you realize you're not, and you sort of go, okay, maybe you folks should go do this thing and I will go do something else.
And I've been very happy to see my friends from those days go on to become quite successful journalists. I'm very glad that they had that and I don't. Then I was really interested in music. So actually my day job for most of my twenties, I worked as a sound engineer. I had a small recording studio on the Lower East Side that I opened up with some friends, and I did a lot of live shows around New York City, and I spent a lot of time working in studios with bands. And I still, I think, I've learned more about collaborative art making from the process of being in a studio with a great bunch of musicians recording a record than any other experience in my life. And that experience of working with musicians, I was not a great musician, but I was around some really great musicians and getting to record them taught me more about art making than a set of skills that I hopefully still use every day in my prose fiction like Wealth of Shadows or in my film work.
Josh King:
I mean, let's talk about some of the other pieces before we really get back to Wealth of Shadows and some of the wonderful things that you bring in front of a reader's eyes. You published your first novel, The Sherlockian in 2010. I'm curious what led you to focus on historical fiction as the genre of choice, and what inspired that initial work from Conan Doyle's literary assassination of Sherlock Holmes to Harold White's own Sherlock Holmes-like quest to uncover both a missing diary and a murderer?
Graham Moore:
It's funny. In hindsight now, I think I've become very aware that not only was there no plan for these things, there was no sort of, oh gosh, here's a kind of genre I want to experiment with. Nor even was there a plan to say, I want to be a novelist. I hadn't even really thought about being a novelist, but what happened was I read this story, my process has really not changed at all from, that book came out in 2010, I probably started it in 2004, 2005. And over the last 20 years, my process really hasn't changed at all for anything, which is I just find some story and I get totally obsessed with it.
And I get, in some ways, I think that my creative work is really just an outlet for me to do something productive with my manifest obsessive compulsive disorder so that I don't just sit around flicking light switches all day, giving me something to really dive into, something to research and to write about, something to obsess over for a period of years is helpfully, my wife would certainly tell you that it's a much more functional use of my OCD, to give me something to dive into that...
Josh King:
Well, you and I could share a lot of stories on good functional uses of OCDs.
Graham Moore:
Well, I think it's so much of a, yeah, thanks. So with that story, you're asking about Sherlockian, I mean, I read about the real story and I couldn't stop thinking about it. And it was about, the Sherlockian is based on the story of the suspicious death of, at the time, the world's leading Sherlock Holmes scholar. In the early 2000s, the world's leading Sherlock Holmes scholar died under mysterious circumstances. And I thought that was the wildest thing I had ever heard. And I kept saying, how come no one has written a novel about this? Someone who writes novels should write a novel about this. And then a year or two went by and just no one seemed to be writing a novel about it. And so I kind of said, well, I never really imagined I'd be a novelist, but this story is so good, and it's so obviously a novel.
I guess I have to learn how to write novels and do it. So I wrote that book and it came out and it did really well. And even with my other books, my three books since, it has never been this process of, oh, I have to go write another novel. It's been, oh, it's the same process. It's I find a story. I get totally and completely obsessed with it. It's all I want to think about. It's all I want to talk about. I drive my wife crazy, I drive everyone around me crazy talking about it, and then I sort of decide, okay, is this a film? Is this a book? Is it, Lord, help us all, is it a puppet show? What do I want to do with this?
And then I start trying to put together that thing. If it's a film, I can start writing a script. If it's a novel, I can start writing a book. And for me, it always starts with a story. And I mean, frankly, even when we were on set for The Imitation Game, I remember saying to everyone that I love the Alan Turing story so much, I would've been a PA on that set. I would've been getting people coffee on that set. I would've been very happy to do that job because I love the story so much, and it's just this bizarre set of circumstances where I happen to be the one to write the film.
Josh King:
Well, if you're Patricia Highsmith, it could be a novel, a movie, and a seven-part Netflix series. You can have all three as a result of some of the things that you're creating, which leads us, Graham, to The Last Days of Night, focusing on two pivotal players in the history of the New York Stock Exchange, George Westinghouse, Thomas Edison. What did you learn from that tale of Wall Street that informed your structure and your dive into business and economics and Ansel Oxford's story in the wealth of Shadows?
Graham Moore:
I think what I was really deeply obsessed with in the story of the deep rivalry between Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla, who is kind of the third leg of that stool, is that these were three people, so the book is about how George Westinghouse, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla each believed that they had invented the light bulb. And they were engaged in this massive legal war over the patent, the light bulb. In 1888, Thomas Edison sued George Westinghouse over the light bulb patent for a billion dollars, which in 1888 was the kind of money really worth going to court over. And George Westinghouse's attorney in this dispute was a young lawyer named Paul Cravath, who some of your listeners may know will go on...
Josh King:
We certainly know Cravath, Swaine and Moore here at the NYSE, one of the major...
Graham Moore:
Yes.
Josh King:
White shoe firms focused on our IPOs and major deals that come in front of us here.
Graham Moore:
So this is that Paul Cravath would later gone on to found that firm. And his first kind of really big case was working for George Westinghouse, challenging Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla for these light bulb patents. And I think it was interesting to me, first of all, it was this amazing story about invention. Again, the book, I was talking about odd lenses on history before and telling the story of the Westinghouse-Tesla-Edison rivalry from Paul Cravath's perspective was really interesting to me. There've been books about Edison, books about Tesla, no one had really written a book about Westinghouse before. I don't know why, someone really should. But the Cravath story was the one that was really fascinating to me.
What's it like to be this young attorney trying to figure out why these guys hate each other so much. I think I was really interested in, it was suddenly this point in my life where Sherlockian had come out. I started that right after Sherlockian had come out, and so suddenly that book had been on the bestseller list, and I didn't have to have a day job anymore. It was this sudden period of, oh gosh, I'm a professional writer. I get to sort of have ideas and write about them for a living now. That's wild. What does it mean to have ideas and write about them or have ideas and have that be your job?
No one had better ideas than Thomas Edison. So he sees this really interesting figure, and at the same time, he's been thinking about, okay, so the light bulb is arguably, I mean, on anyone's short list of the 10 most successful products in history, the light bulb would have to be in your top 10, right? When we talk about ideas, the emoji for I have an idea, is a picture of a light bulb. A light bulb is the sort of symbol that we use to connote a really good idea. And how was it that Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla all believed that they'd sort of had that idea? And what I sort of found digging into it was they each sort of had part of the idea, or they each thought that having an idea about something really different. Thomas Edison was, I'll start with Tesla, I found in Tesla that he was the idea man. Tesla had all these brilliant, groundbreaking ideas, but did not care to actually build functional devices to save his life.
He was this pure, he existed in this realm of pure abstraction, pure ideas. At the same time, George Westinghouse was this endless tinkerer. George Westinghouse didn't sort of come up with the idea for the light bulb, but he made the best ones. All he cared about was building these perfect objects that were pristinely made. George Westinghouse made the best light bulbs. If Tesla had the idea, Westinghouse made the best ones and found a way to sort of work out supply chains. He could make them inexpensively and still of really high quality and sort of get them shipped all around the country and get these different houses wired up for them. He was this amazing manufacturer and tinkerer of technology. Thomas Edison was a great salesman. Thomas Edison did not have the idea for the light bulb, but he sold the most of them. Thomas Edison sold more light bulbs to more people than anyone else alive.
And a public at the time, it was actually quite distrustful of the technology. People were really scared of light bulbs. Here, electricity was really new. You're inviting all this electrical technology into your home, and you're hoping it doesn't just blow up and light the house on fire. And in fact, in the 1880s, quite frequently light bulbs were blowing up and lighting people's houses on fire. Famously, JP Morgan's house was half blown up and lit on fire by one of Thomas Edison's early light bulbs. This kind of kept happening. It was a little scary. People were pretty freaked out, and Edison was the one, as this public figure who went out. I mean, he was the sort of Steve Jobs of his era. He went out and calmed the public and got everyone to buy all these light bulbs and install them in their homes and help build these networks of connections of electrical power to wire up the United States.
And so I think what I found in, and I think this is really applicable to frankly all sorts of, any sort of product launch, is that there's these sort of three fundamental elements. There's the idea person, there's the tinkering manufacturing person and the salesperson. And in the case of the light bulb, what's interesting is they did not all work for the same company. In fact, they had these three rival businesses and utterly hated each other for the entirety of their lives. And yet at the same time, these three guys were, I would argue, engaged in what I would describe as a kind of collaboration from afar which produced electrical light.
Josh King:
From electrical light to a world cast in darkness in the war. Americans think of the US involvement in World War II as starting from the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7th, 1941. Given the strong isolationist views that we've talked about earlier in our conversation in America before Germany invaded Poland in 1939, FDR publicly pushed and advocated neutrality. I just want to hear a listen to it in his words for a second.
Franklin D. Roosevelt:
I have said not once, but many times that I have seen war and that I hate war. I say that again and again. I hope the United States will keep out of this war. I believe that it will, and I give you assurance and reassurance that every effort of your government will be directed toward that end as long as it remains within my power to prevent, there will be no blackout of peace in the United States.
Josh King:
In that 1939 speech, Graham, FDR emphasized our stance to stay out of European conflict or the dispute, as you call it. And despite this, one of his own members of his team, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau pursues this covert involvement in wartime efforts. Why was Morgenthau's department determined to engage in these efforts, really spurning what the president was saying publicly?
Graham Moore:
Yeah, I think the question there is, were they going against the president's wishes or was the president just lying? And I would certainly argue that the president was either lying or maintaining a sort of willful ignorance about what his own Treasury Department under Henry Morgenthau were really doing. So in this period, Morgenthau, first of all, was the only Jewish member of the cabinet, which placed him in really odd position. He was probably the most powerful Jew in the United States at the time, which I think he felt boxed him in this perverse way. He felt like he couldn't be seen to be advocating for anti-Nazi policies because people would then say, oh, well, of course you're advocating for anti-Nazi, for the government to do anti-Nazi stuff. You're the sole Jewish cabinet member, of course, the sole Jewish cabinet member would be advocating for anti-Nazi this and anti-Nazi that.
So I think Morgenthau, in a funny way, also felt really constrained by his position. And so he had, I think, like the president, he felt like he had to not be the voice publicly advocating to do something to stop the Germans. But at the same time, Morgenthau was certainly no fool nor was Roosevelt. And they knew that the war was not going to end with Poland. The war was not going to end, the war had not ended with Czechoslovakia, nor would it end with Poland. And I think what The Wealth of Shadows gets into is that certainly his economists were beginning to do this analysis that if you look at the German war machine, if you look at this amazing buildup of the German war machine between 1933 and 1939, Germany went from kind of bereft economic backwater in the early thirties, it had been the victims of both rampant inflation. And then we forget this, there was actually this massive deflationary spiral.
I think in the German's case, I would argue that the deflationary spiral was worse for them than the inflationary spiral. And in '33, they were this backwater. By '39, the Germans had built the greatest war machine in the world. It dwarfed the British war machine. It dwarfed the French war machine. It certainly dwarfed the American war machine, which was just a mess by the late thirties. And so the economists were looking at this question and saying, okay, how did the Germans build this amazing massive war machine and how do we stop it? And Morgenthau sort of set this team to work and said, look, you're not soldiers, you're not spies, well, not yet, but you're about to be, because you have to figure out how this war machine works. And then we're going to, like what is the secret sauce that powers, what is the secret juice that powers the Nazi war machine? And then how do we light it on fire?
And I think what, part of what they found, and part of certainly what scholarships since has proven, is that the German war machine was crucial to their economic success and vice versa, which is to say that the entire German economy had been reframed around war. It was a machine that produced one thing, that thing was violence. The fuel that power of that machine were frankly slave populations in the form of the Jews living within German control at the time, and the populations of people they'd be able to capture as they conquered new territory. And then the other fuel was frankly the new territory itself, because as they conquered Poland, that was frankly more money, that was more taxable subjects, more slave populations and more raw materials, things they didn't already have in Germany.
Conquest was, the entire German economy was built on conquest. The Germans couldn't stop taking new territory even if they wanted to. Frankly, and it wasn't just '39, I mean, by '38 on, the Germans had put themselves in this position. Hitler had put the German economy in this position where the idea that he couldn't go to war at that point was there would be a massive economic collapse. The recession, if not massive depression, that would happen if the Germans didn't try to take over the rest of Europe would've doomed the country to another 20 years of poverty. So what I think the Americans were realizing and what we've since found to be the case since then was the conquest was the raw material on which the German economy ran. And the idea that it was going to stop at Czechoslovakia or stop at Poland or stop at France or stop the UK was insane because the German military simply had to keep conquering new territory for the entire economy to function.
Josh King:
While the war was raging and the Germans were beginning this march of conquest, here in the US, the government was facing internal conflict between Morgenthau's Treasury Department and a State Department that included a number of Nazi sympathizers, most notably Breckinridge Long while Treasury was actively working to help the allies and European Jews take refuge in the US, the State Department sought to prevent their entry. Ken Burns spent 10 episodes focused on that. How did this dichotomy impact the American war effort, and how did Treasury with Luxford, White and the research team expose state's actions to the White House?
Graham Moore:
It was wild to me in researching this book to learn about the depth of state's infiltration by Nazi sympathizers, although even as I say that sentence, infiltration probably isn't the right word, because they had been longtime State Department employees, long time State Department officials, like Breckinridge Long who found themselves in the 1930s becoming increasingly comfortable with and then outright advocates for fascism in general, and then particularly Italian and German fascism, which was wild to me. And among, The Wealth of Shadows is about these clandestine units, this clandestine unit within the US Treasury department. But I would argue that European fascists effectively had their own clandestine unit within the State Department. That Breckinridge Long, and the people working for him were, as you're saying, they weren't just like, oh, we should support the Germans and the Italians. It was we're going to actively undermine the British and the French from inside the State Department.
So they were actively preventing Jewish refugees from fleeing Europe. They were actively trying to stop the Treasury department from doing anything that would help the Germans. They were concealing evidence of German atrocities. So this is a real story that forms a big section of my novel. Breckinridge Long and his team, there were these Polish spies or American spies in Poland, I think they were Polish nationals, and they were reporting on German atrocities against Jews and against other Polish citizens on behalf of the German military. And they kept sending these cables to the State Department reporting on these atrocities and Breckinridge Long and his team cables that they thought were going to the White House to say, look at what's going on. Look at what the German military is doing to the Jews of Poland. And Breckinridge Long and his team buried them. They hid the cables, stopped them from going to the White House, stopped them from getting passed around.
They made sure that no one could see them. Ansel Luxford and his colleagues at Treasury found out Long and his guys at State were doing this, and they vowed to do something about it. So this forms a whole chapter in the book, and it's a story, and we keep having this thing with this book where every time, because it's historical fiction, the things that people assume were the fictional parts are actually the most sort of historically accurate. Because there was a chapter where Ansel Luxford and his unit have to stage this break-in at the US State Department. That break-in really occurred. I could never have made that up.
So what Ansel Luxford did was he and his colleagues staged this break-in at the State Department to get these cables that Breckinridge Long and his fellow State Department fascists had buried in order to help bring them to the White House to show the White House, hey, you guys have these fascists in state who are hiding evidence of German atrocities from getting to you. They're stopping information from coming to the White House, vital war information. You need to do something about them, which is remarkable. I mean, they were, Ansel Luxford again in 1939 was this tax attorney in St. Paul, Minnesota, and here a few years later, he is physically engaged in a clandestine break-in of the State Department building.
Josh King:
After the break. From that point forward, Graham Moore and I are going to dive further into his novel, The Wealth of Shadows and the journey toward financial victory in World War Two. All that and more is coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Welcome back. If you're enjoying our conversation and want to hear more from guests like New York Times bestselling author and Academy Award-winning writer, Graham Moore, remember to subscribe to Inside the ICE House Podcast wherever you listen to your pods and give us a five star rating if you would, please review us as well, helps people know where to find us. Before the break, Graham and I were diving into his interest in the financial fighting in World War II, his writing process, also the research involved in his newest novel, The Wealth of Shadows, out now from Penguin Random House. It includes finding Ansel Luxford's son somewhere sheep herding in Montana using only a satellite phone.
You can't make this stuff up folks. So let's talk about Ansel a little bit, Graham, a little bit more. He was living this conventional 1930s life as you described. I'm going to quote you here in the book, the middle. Money but not wealth, status but not stature, good work but not if he was being honest, a legacy of good works. What drove him to contribute to the war effort, to listen to the recruitment effort that he got from Harry Dexter White, despite America's neutrality, to uproot his family, move to Washington DC. Help sink the German economy.
Graham Moore:
I'm glad you highlighted that bit. I feel like that was one of my favorite passages in the book, so I'm glad it jumped out at you as well. There's some bits you always are sort of like, could I have phrased that better? But that was a bit that I was really, really proud of. I think Ansel was at this place. He was very comfortably married, living in St. Paul, he had worked for the government before. He had worked for Treasury before right out of law school, and he did what many people did. They worked for the government for a bit, and then they go into private practice. They want to make a little bit more money. They want to sort of live in a nicer house in a better neighborhood. And so Ansel left DC, left the Treasury and went into his private practice in St. Paul, where he found himself in 1939, happily married to his wife, Angela.
They had just had a daughter. I think she was two by the end of 1939, and he was living this really comfortable, successful right life, right? He was a well-to-do tax attorney in St. Paul. And yet I think he woke up every morning looking at the front page of the newspaper and feeling like the world was ending. And I would recommend this exercise, frankly, to any of your listeners who are interested. You can just look at the front page of the New York Times every day from say, January 1st, 1939 to January 1st, 1940, and I've done this. You can go on their website and use their little, it's called the Times Machine to sort of flip through the newspaper and you just read the front page every day for that year. And reading the front page of any newspaper, any American newspaper every day in 1939 gives one this terrifyingly apocalyptic feeling. I've done this exercise, I can feel my whole body just kind of with nerves.
It really felt to, I think, a few people, Ansel being one of them, that this was the end of the world. The Germans were not going to stop anytime soon. This massive calamity and global cataclysm was going to come to effect every living, man, woman, and child on the face of the earth. And the question was, do we get involved in trying to stop the Nazis now, or do we wait a couple years and try to get involved and stop them then after they've only grown in power. And Ansel and Harry Dexter White and their boss, Henry Morgenthau and his boss, President Roosevelt, I think all felt, though they could not say so publicly, that the time to get involved was yesterday. That this waiting around for the Nazis to sort of continue taking territory was not going to work, and it was only going to leave us in sort of a worse position then in a fight that would certainly come to include all of us.
And so I was so moved by the story that Ansel as this kind of idealist. I think he felt this kind of spur of inspiration to do something. But then of course the question is, what's Ansel going to do? Right? He's a tax attorney. And it's funny, I described the book as being about economic warfare as invented by this team of Treasury department economists. But a number of them, like Ansel Luxford kind of weren't even real economists, right? He has no economic training. He certainly had no docker in economics. His degree was in the law. What is a tax attorney in St. Paul, Minnesota, supposed to do in 1939 in the face of the Nazi threat? Well, he did the only thing he could do, which was join this team at Treasury that was engaged in inventing economic warfare.
And while they weren't spies, well yet, they certainly became spies. While they weren't soldiers, while they had no kind of military, much less a state, they certainly had no war department at their back. They, as discussed earlier, had no state department on their back because state was actively working against them. This was a team of economists who said, this is going to get worse and not better, and the time to start fighting was yesterday. And we can't fight with bullets and guns, but we can fight with the economic tools at our disposal. So let's figure out how to do that.
Josh King:
The novel isn't just about Treasury officials versus state officials, Americans versus Nazis. This drama and conflict also plays out within Ansel's own home in many ways. One of the novel's, most unique twists is the conflict between his wife, Angela, who during Ansel's time with the research department, also joins the FBI as a typist for a program that is actively rooting out spies in the US government. How did this impact dinner table dynamics, and how did they manage the numerous secrets they kept or revealed on a daily basis?
Graham Moore:
It's stories like this that make me so excited about the media game of historical fiction because I will tell you that certainly when I learned from Ansel and Angela's children that at the same time their father was part of this clandestine unit. And actually most of the kids didn't quite know about their father's world wartime work. I should go back and say that one of the things that was interesting here was learning as described from one of Ansel's children that he was pretty sure his father was a spy. And then I'd talk to the other two children who would say, oh no, their dad wasn't a spy. That's crazy. And then I'd say, okay, well, your brother was telling me he kept taking all these trips to Cairo. And they go, oh yeah, dad did keep going to Cairo. I wonder why he was doing that.
I'm sort of going, okay. And you'd sort of hear these stories that would kind of quickly not make sense. And I think something that's been fascinating about working on this book was, I've been in such close communication with the Luxford family and I've gotten to know the grandchildren and great-grandchildren now, they've been able to tell me a lot about their parents. And then I have been able to find some things that they hadn't heard about. And so we've all been able to share these stories back and forth. So I hope they've gotten at least as little, as much enjoyment out of this as I have. And this story, it's been a fascinating set of conversations, I think. So this story seems so wild to me that again, you'd think I would've made this up 'cause it says historical fiction on the front of the book, but I did not. That while Ansel was in this unit, his wife Angela was working as a typist for the FBI.
And once the children told me that story, I said, oh gosh, this is wild. Certainly this has to form a huge part of the book. And I think what I love about the medium of historical fiction is that I get to kind of go into their heads. And the children were quite young at the time, as I was saying, Ansel's daughter was two and his two sons hadn't yet been born. So part of what I get to do in the book is sort of try to imagine, okay, what were those dinner table conversations like? What must it have been like for Ansel and Angela to have each, they're in this marriage where they're each involved in clandestine work on behalf of the US government, that they can't talk to each other about. What does that marriage look like? What does that bedroom look like?
And I can also tell you that when I have to call when I've had to call the Luxford children and say, hey, I'm going to write this book, not just about your father, but I want to really dive into what happened behind closed doors in your parents' marriage was a terrifying moment. I can only imagine, yes, what it would be like if someone called me up and said, hey, I want to write this novel about what I imagine the private conversations between your parents and their marriage was like, it was a terrifying thing, I can imagine.
But yeah, I think what I found so compelling about both Angela and Ansel was that they were, I think they were these two idealists. They were both, they chose this wartime work. It wasn't like Ansel certainly did not have to pick up his family and move to DC in a flash when the war broke out in order to start this clandestine work, he could have stayed in Minneapolis. Angela did not have to go work for the FBI during the war, right? She could have found any other number of secretarial jobs if not just stayed home with her daughter. But I think they both really believed in the war effort.
I think they both really believed as these sort of people approaching middle age, that this was their last chance to do something. The world was ending. It really felt to them both the world around them was ending and this was their last chance to do something to stop it. And so what could they do? Ansel could work for his team at Treasury. He could use his economic skills. Angela found this job at the FBI where she could type up letters and as to exactly how much she was able to learn there and what she was able to overhear at the FBI and what that looked like. I mean, that was one of the most fun parts of the book to get to imagine, to read about what the FBI was doing, looking for spies in the US government at the time.
I think it's no secret that J. Edgar Hoover devoted quite a bit of resources to rooting out foreign spies in the US from the thirties and forties on, getting sort of inside those operations. And to realize how right he was. That as we were just talking about State Department, there really were a lot of spies in the US government in that period. And we talk about the Soviet spies who he was trying to work out, root out after the war. But certainly during the war, there were, as discussed, full-on Nazi agents in the US government who he was looking for as well.
Josh King:
I mean, talking about people who looked at the front pages of the broadsheets and saw a world that they thought might be ending, John Maynard Keynes is one of the most influential economists of modern times. Yet Keynes sort of plays the antagonist to Luxford and White in the battle to establish the world's post-war currency. And that debate centers on the US dollar and the British pound. But at the beginning of each of the first chapters, Graham, you include a quote from Satoshi Nakamoto, who's the pseudonyminous inventor of Bitcoin in 2008, stating as you quote Satoshi, it might make sense just to get some Bitcoin in case it catches on. If enough people think the same way, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Graham, your chosen quotes at the start of many of your 69 chapters from the likes of Satoshi, Warren Buffett, Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher among others, stand in contrast to the late-thirties and early-forties action in the chapters themselves. Do you see these contemporary parallels between the dollar versus the sterling debate at the time and the current discourse on the value and future of cryptocurrency?
Graham Moore:
Those parallels that you're describing between the debates in the 1930s and 40s about what money is, what currency is, what should money be, what should currency be? And the debates we're having today around those very same questions. The connections between those debates are exactly why I sort of included those chapters, those quotes at the beginning of every chapter. Writing the book felt so strangely topical today for many reasons. Certainly the war in Ukraine comes to mind. But even besides that, there was this, how do I put this? That these questions about the nature of money that were being asked in the 1930s are exactly the set of questions that are being asked by cryptocurrency supporters and opponents today, that I found it deeply fascinating to think that this question of can we reinvent what money is and what money looks like? Should we do that?
Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin maximalists in the last decade have been advocating one method for this reinvention of money. But I would argue that John Maynard Keynes was advocating for another one 80 years ago. Cryptocurrency and the cryptocurrency community's attempt to redefine what money is is not the only time someone has tried to do that. In fact, it's just the most recent of a long list of times when people tried to define what money is. And in terms of thinking about this book, one of the things that was really fascinating to me was that the questions being asked in the debate between Ansel Luxford and John Maynard Keynes about what should the global economy look like? What should money look like? So these are questions that on one level could seem like airy dorm room philosophizing. They were asking themselves these questions such as, where does money come from?
When was money invented? How was money invented? Was it invented? What are the roots of money? And how did it come to form this role that it does in society? This is a question that dates back to the dawn of human civilization. That people have been, for as long as there have been human beings, people have been trying to figure out what money is and where it comes from and how it was invented and if anyone invented it. And so looking at this, I kept thinking, gosh, these are these really needy 5,000 year old philosophical questions being asked by John Maynard Keynes on behalf of the British exchequer and Ansel Luxford on behalf of the US Treasury in 1939 and 1940. And the different answers to the question of where money comes from actually created really different practical, suggested different practical plans for how the war against the Germans could be waged.
So what might seem like airy dorm room philosophizing in fact became these really life or death questions that these people had to deal with. Where money comes from and what you want money to do and how money works. How you answer that question really does affect what Keynes or Luxford thought should be done to stop the Germans in the early part of the war. And at the same time, these are the same questions being asked by Bitcoin maximalists today. And so I think something I really wanted to do in the book was to tease out those connections and tease out that these are not, the questions being asked by cryptocurrency enthusiasts, they're not new questions. In fact, they're maybe the oldest questions in civilization.
Josh King:
To bring our conversation full circle Graham, we started talking about you being up in Michigan during COVID and finding something that initially fascinated you and then obsessed you, and that all centered on the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, which I've been to, and I can imagine in my mind's eye right now. Still stands there like the beauty that she is. So the climax of The Wealth of the Shadows takes place at the Mount Washington Hotel includes, as you write it, intricate details such as White and Luxford's unitas, tricking Keynes into signing the agreement, room placement, even Keynes' wife swimming nude in the hotel pool. How did you sort of recreate all this imagery and color of the Mount Washington Hotel? Did you get to Bretton Woods to walk the same hallways that these guys walked 80 years ago?
Graham Moore:
I'm hoping by the time of your question that this suggests that I got it right, 'cause you have been to the Mount Washington Hotel and I have not. Does it still look like that now?
Josh King:
Oh yeah. I mean, it's like, Mount Washington Hotel could be like the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. It's one of the grand dames of American architecture that, thank the Lord, has not been consumed by fire. It's a beautiful place and a beautiful place to visit.
Graham Moore:
This is a great commercial for the Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire, which everyone should go to because I will confess that I haven't been able to go there. I have two small children, a three-year-old and 1-year-old, and going anywhere at this point is a whole kind of procedure, and especially I've found this with my historical pieces in the past. Especially when you're working on something, sometimes if you look at the space today, it ends up sending you off in the wrong direction a bit because it's changed, especially in the last 80 years. We went through that on Imitation Game. We certainly went through that on Sherlockian, my first book. I was using a lot of historical photographs. Helpfully, the Bretton Woods Conference was pretty well documented at the time. Certainly you can find a lot of photographs of Bretton Woods at the time. There had been some great non-fiction published about Bretton Woods.
There's a great book called The Battle of Bretton Woods by a historian named Ben Stahl, which I cannot recommend more highly. It was a huge source for my novel. And he had a lot of photographs and he was able to find as well. So yeah, it was a lot of recreations of stuff and looking through minutes, they published a lot of the minutes for the meetings and the schedules of the meetings and the lists of attendees and this and that. Of course, the fun part of this is getting to say, okay, let's look through the minutes. Let's look through all the official records, the Bretton Woods Conference. Now what are they not telling us? Let's figure out what was really going on behind the scenes that they were not saying publicly at the time. And when Ansel Luxford is giving a press conference or something and telling the press what the Americans were doing at Bretton Woods, he was, how shall I put this? Lying, and very obviously lying from looking at the historical records we have today.
So that's part of the fun of it too. And I always have this sort of funny thing when I do bits like this in these historical pieces where I get to kind of look through, you read the newspaper reports of the period, and they seem kind of comically inaccurate for going, oh wait, oh my gosh, we know now that none of this is true. And especially about what the Roosevelt administration was doing. All their kind of anti-Nazi schemes during the war. I mean, love my friends in the press, but they were eating up what was coming out of that White House hook, line, and sinker. I just mixed metaphors there. But they were eating everything the White House was feeding them in regards to what the White House was doing against the Germans, and then at Bretton Woods what the White House was doing against the British. So it's fun to get to look at what was actually going on behind the scenes and what they weren't able to say at the time.
Josh King:
In the author's note, at the end of The Wealth of Shadows you write, what you've just read is a work of historical fiction. That truth in advertising contains quite a bit of both history and fiction. It often tumbles back and forth between the two within the span of a single sentence. So as we wrap up, Graham, I think our listeners want to know, is this story headed for adaptation and presentation on the screen? And if you've been able to make The Wealth of Shadows out of the Battle of Bretton Woods, what project are you going to tackle next?
Graham Moore:
Oh, very good questions. We've started, I will say [inaudible 01:11:00] we've started talking about a film version of Wealth of Shadows. I'm still trying to figure out what it would look like. When I wanted to write the book, it felt so much like a novel. I knew I wanted, I was so interested in the economic history, all the things we've been talking about. It felt like sort of a deep dive into that material felt just like an ideal use of a novel as a form. So I really wanted to write the book. And I always say, I can't start thinking about the adaptation until the novel's done. Let's make this the best possible novel. Let's just make it really work as a novel, and then we can talk about whether there's another version of telling the story. So now the book is finally out. I've started to be able to talk to some of my friends here in Los Angeles about, okay, is there a film version?
What might that look like? It would be really different. I want it to, you never wanted to do an adaptation to do it, you want to do it because you feel like there's something else. What could we do in a film that we couldn't do in a novel. When we were doing Imitation Game, that was built based on a great work of non-fiction. But that was something where we were looking at the cultural landscape and saying there's been great, there've been great books published about Alan Turing, many of them. There's been great plays written about Alan Turing. What there hadn't been was a two-hour feature film. And so it felt like, all right, what can we do in a two-hour feature film about Alan Turing that one couldn't do in another medium? And I think the same is true for any Wealth of Shadows adaptation.
If we're going to do a film, what about it is fundamentally filmic that we couldn't do on the page. So I think I'm starting, perhaps a dissatisfying answer, but I'm starting to have some ideas for things that I could not do on the page that I can only do in a film, and those are the things that I'm getting really excited about. And yeah, that's my process. It's so funny, my guess is sort of reading through that stuff is going to sort of suggest the next topic for the next book. Because that's sort of what seems to happen is I have these subjects. Reading about one of them inspires something about the other.
I could say this to you, I don't know that anyone else has noticed this, but we were talking about my second book, The Last Days of Night, about the invention of the light bulb. And my first book, The Sherlockian, it's a small part of it, but the last chapter of The Sherlockian includes this little bit about these two workmen installing electric lights on Baker Street in London, and it's about the physical process of removing this gas lamp and replacing it with an electric street light.
And it's just this little couple paragraphs at the end of my first book. But in researching that, I started to read a lot about how electrical lights work and the process of removing gas lamps and making them electric and outdoor light bulbs versus indoor light bulbs, and I started reading a lot about light bulbs. And sure enough, then six years later, we get The Last Days of Night, my second book about the invention of the light bulb. So I would suggest that any clues about what the next book or film will be about are probably contained within the end of The Wealth of Shadows.
Josh King:
Well, from Baker Street in London where I once lived to Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC where I once worked, what you have provided in your books and novels and screenplays gives so many readers and viewers pleasure, including the one that you've been talking to for the last hour or so. Graham Moore, thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.
Graham Moore:
Goodness, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Josh King:
Well, that's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Graham Moore, New York Times bestselling novelist, Academy award-winning screenwriter and author of The Wealth of Shadows out now from Penguin Random House. If you like what you heard, please rate us on Apple Podcast so other folks know where to find us. If you've got a comment or question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show or to hear from people like Graham Moore, make sure to leave us a review. Email us at [email protected] or tweet at us, @icehousepodcast. Our show is produced by Lance Glynn with production assistance, editing, engineering from Ken Abell. Pete Ash is the Director of Programming and Production at ICE. And I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next week.
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