Ecker-Racz, L. Laszlo Papers

Director, Tax Advisory Staff, Department of the Treasury, 1949-1953

The papers of L. Laszlo Ecker-Racz consist of seventeen bound volumes of material relating to his service as Director of the Treasury Department's Tax Advisory Staff. The volumes include correspondence (chiefly memoranda), staff studies, speeches, and printed materials pertaining to taxes and federal fiscal policy during the Korean War.

Size: 3 linear feet, 1 linear inch (about 5,600 pages).
Access: Open.
Copyright: The donor gave his copyright interest in this collection, and in any other collection in the custody of the National Archives and Records Administration, to the United States of America. Documents created by U.S. government employees in the course of their official duties are in the public domain. Copyright interest in other documents presumably belongs to the creators of those documents, or their heirs.
Processed by: Dennis E. Bilger (1977).
Updated by: Anne E. Morgan (2018) as part of the Truman Library Internship Program.
Supervising Archivists: Randy Sowell and David Clark.

L. Laszlo Ecker-Racz was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire on November 25, 1906. He emigrated to the United States in 1921. A graduate of Harvard University, he worked for the U.S. government in various offices from the 1930s to the 1960s. During the Truman administration, he served in the Division of Tax Research at the Treasury Department, and later became Director of the Department's Tax Advisory Staff. He died in Silver Spring, Maryland on August 5, 1987.

The papers of L. Laszlo Ecker-Racz consist of seventeen bound volumes of material relating to his service as Director of the Treasury Department's Tax Advisory Staff. The volumes include correspondence (chiefly memoranda), speeches, staff studies, and printed material pertaining to taxes and federal fiscal policy during the Korean War. The collection is arranged in one series, a Subject File.

The bulk of the collection consists of memoranda and staff studies relating to the Truman administration's tax programs. Other materials include a staff study on taxation during the Korean War, "Taxation for Defense"; studies of major taxation legislation enacted during the war, such as the Revenue Act of 1950, the Excess Profits Tax Act of 1950, and the Revenue Act of 1951; and speeches delivered by Harry S. Truman on fiscal policy and the Korean War.

More information about federal tax policy during the Truman administration can be found at the Truman Library in the papers of John W. Snyder, Roy Blough, Thomas J. Lynch, and Edward H. Foley, Jr.