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Militaria that belonged to George Jackson Eder. According to his daughter: 

"My father, George Jackson Eder, was born in 1900 in New York City. His father was a jolly bon vivant, his mother a dignified and rather snooty woman, from a rich Colombian family, raised in England. He had two older sisters, Vera, a fabric designer, and Enid, a manuscript illuminator. My father’s mother was Jewish, and Vera kept a kosher kitchen, but he always denied that the family was Jewish until he was very old.

My dad was a rambunctious, adventurous 16-year-old, very bright, fond of practical jokes, who was in constant conflict with his father. His mother signed the papers for him to join the army (the cavalry) almost as soon as he turned 16, because of this conflict. When the first World War broke out Dad was sent to France, where his job was to take horses to the front, riding in boxcars. After he grew up, he would always say that boys should be the warriors, since for them it was an adventure, whereas older men have better sense. (Or something like that)

Dad had a great zest for life. He loved traveling in Europe and Latin America, dancing, and living high on the hog in Argentina and Bolivia. After he moved to Gainesville in his 80’s he took a tour to China, and then to Russia. Born in 1900, he had old-fashioned views about women, but told me (his youngest daughter) in his later years that he had learned a good deal from his fiercely feminist daughters. He had a generous heart – I particularly remember that when several Black churches were burned in Gainesville, he sent a check to each of them.

Dad spoke fluent French and Spanish, as well as English. He was extraordinarily well-read, loved Shakespeare and many poets of the late 19^th and early 19^th century. He would perform The Charge of the Light Brigade (Tennyson) and The Village Blacksmith (Longfellow) with great gusto. Aside from books about inflation and taxes, he wrote a mildly pornographic novel in his mid-seventies set in Moorish Spain, which sold about 15,000 copies I believe. (The Raptures of Love).

Dad’s work in Bolivia incurred the wrath of the Bolivian labor unions. A few days before we were to leave Bolivia the government received reports that they were going to bomb our house, so we took refuge in the US Embassy. Instead, they bombed the embassy, but no harm done. We were supposed to leave with great hoopla and ceremony, but instead flew on the President’s private plane (a miserable unpressurized DC3) to Panama, where to me and my sister’s delight we took a Grace Lines freight and passenger boat back to NY."

HERE IS DAD’S OBITUARY IN THE NY TIMES: 

George Jackson Eder, 98, Expert On Latin American Economics By Saul Hansell

Jan. 4, 1999. George Jackson Eder, a lawyer and economist active in Latin American affairs, died last Wednesday in Shands Hospital in Gainesville, Fla. He had collapsed the previous evening while Christmas shopping at Wal-Mart, his son Richard said. He was 98.

Born and raised in New York City, Mr. Eder served in the Cavalry during World War I in France. After studying law and accounting, he served as a coffee buyer for several years in Costa Rica.

In 1926, Mr. Eder was appointed to head the Latin section of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce. It was a period in which the United States was superseding Europeans as the leading trading partner of South and Central America.

In the 1930s, Mr. Eder was the Latin American bureau chief in the U.S. Department of Commerce during Hoover's administration.

In 1931, Mr. Eder was dismissed after publishing a feisty attack on British efforts to promote their exports to Argentina. In a 175-page pamphlet published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Mr. Eder wrote that a recent visit by the Prince of Wales to open a British trade fair in Argentina was to ''attack American mercantile supremacy.'' And he wrote that British merchants and diplomats were making ''veiled attacks on Argentine-American friendship.''

After working at an investment firm, Mr. Eder joined the International Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1939 as a deputy counsel. He was sent to work in ITT's Argentine subsidiary in 1940, which operated that country's telephone system. After negotiating the sale of the telephone company to the Argentine Government, he moved back to ITT's New York headquarters in 1947.

In the 1950s, he was Eisenhower's U.S. Agency for International Development director in Bolivia where he led a mission to fight inflation and stabilize the currency. In 1956, he took a leave from ITT to head an economic mission to help the Bolivian Government cope with spiraling inflation. He helped concoct a plan that included balancing the budget and eliminating currency exchange limits, followed by a one-year freeze on wages. A key element of the plan was to repay debt the country owed to the United States.

The plan had critics on the Bolivian left. In June 1957, Nuflo Chaves, the labor-backed Vice President of Bolivia, resigned after a public dispute with Mr. Eder. But in a speech before Congress two months later, President Hernan Siles Zuazo said that the plan created by Mr. Eder had ''saved the country.''

Mr. Eder left ITT in 1961 and spent several years teaching, first at Harvard Law School and then at the business school of the University of Michigan.

After retirement, he was the editor of the Harvard Law School World Tax Series for two years and joined the faculty of the business school at the University of Michigan. He wrote several books on international taxation and inflation.

Mr. Eder's wife, Marceline Gray Eder, died in 1971. He is survived by four children: Donald Eder, a teacher in Norwalk, Conn.; Richard Eder, a book critic in Milton, Mass.; Luli Gray, a writer in Chapel Hill, N.C., and Elizabeth McCulloch, a lawyer in Gainesville. He is also survived by eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

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I also have the text from a number of NY Times articles about Mr Eder's work in Argentina and Bolivia that I will email.  

EM