Charles Gates Dawes . An American lawyer, businessman and politician, he held various positions in the United States government in the field of finance and became vice president during the Calvin Coolidge administration ( 1925 – 1929 ). In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize .
Biográgic synthesis
He was born in Marietta, Ohio in 1865 , where he spent his childhood and graduated from Marietta College, then studied law at Cincinnati Law School graduating in 1886
After practicing law for several years, he entered the gas business with great success beginning in 1894 . From business to politics, always with the Republicans: in 1897 – 1902 President William McKinley commissioned him to reorganize the American banking system to prevent a recurrence of panic crises such as the one that occurred four years earlier; and in 1921-24 he was the first director of the Budget Office created by Warren G. Harding .
Already specialized in questions of public economy, he was sent to Paris in 1924 to represent the United States in a commission that was to re-examine the question of economic reparations imposed on Germany by the victors in the First World War (1914-18); the increased volume of compensation demanded by French revanchism in the Treaty of Versailles ( 1919 ) threatened to ruin the German economy and drag that of the rest of the world.
The Dawes Plan established a realistic system of gradual payments, accompanied by additional measures to facilitate the economic recovery of Germany (loans, aid and return to the gold standard). This plan, which helped to open in Europe some years of prosperity and international understanding, gave Dawes such prestige that in that same year he was elected vice president with Calvin Coolidge (1924) and a year later he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize , shared with Joseph Austen Chamberlain ( 1925 ).
He held multiple public positions of a financial and diplomatic nature until he retired from politics in 1932 , coinciding with the end of an era of political hegemony of the Republicans and the big capitalists.
He died of a coronary thrombosis at his home in Evanston on April 23 , 1951 .
