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Stationed in France in training and supply camps, White had an uneventful war and returned home in November 1918. However, no longer satisfied by the life of a small businessman, he set his sights on an academic career and enrolled at Columbia University in 1922 to study government. He transferred the following year to Stanford, from which he graduated ‘with great distinction’ in economics.ssss1 From Stanford, he moved on to pursue a PhD at Harvard and it was there that he appeared to develop a fascination for the relationship between the workings of the international monetary system and the performance of the real economy. He taught for six years at Harvard but, aged 40 and unable to secure a tenured position, he took up an assistant professorship at Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin in 1933.

Harry White's path from Wisconsin to the US Treasury came via an invitation in the summer of 1934 from Jacob Viner, a respected University of Chicago economics professor. Viner was at the time advising Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and asked White to assist him on a three-month study of monetary and banking legislation and institutions. Once in Washington, White never looked back. Following completion of the Viner study, he took another temporary position with the US Tariff Commission but returned to the Treasury just three weeks later when a position as principle economic analyst in the Division of Research and Statistics opened up. This was again a temporary position paid for, fatefully, out of profits from an emergency fund set up to stabilise the dollar's exchange rate. Remarkably, White's employment at the Treasury would continue on this tenuous ad hoc basis for another 12 years until he was finally made a fully-fledged civil servant in 1945.ssss1