At the time, Europe was still a shattered mess. Old alliances were buried in the rubble, and established countries were trying to reassemble themselves. Moreover, an empowered imperial Russia, long reconstituted as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, had swallowed up all of eastern Europe and had designs on the West, too. Germany was divided up into spheres of influence. The first heavy frost of the Cold War was spreading itself over everything.
Marshall chose the Harvard speech to propose the most sweeping change in American foreign policy since nobody knew when. The Monroe Doctrine, maybe, or the Louisiana Purchase. From the Harvard Gazette:
Marshall's premise was straightforward: Economic crisis, he observed, produced social dissatisfaction, and social dissatisfaction generated political instability. The dislocations of World War II posed this challenge on a massive scale. European national debts were astronomical; currencies and banks were weak. The railroad and shipping industries were barely functional. Mines and factories were falling apart. The average farmer, unable to procure "the goods for sale which he desires to purchase," had "withdrawn many fields from crop cultivation," creating food scarcity in European cities.
To safeguard their political future, European democracies needed, above all, to restore hope in their economic prospects. "The remedy," Marshall offered, was a partnership between the United States and its European allies to rehabilitate "the entire fabric" of their economies. To address the most immediate crisis, America would send its friends food and fuel. Later, it would subsidize modernizing and expanding industrial centers and transportation systems.
It has become known to history as the Marshall Plan, and it represented a sea change in America's attitude toward the rest of the world. Foreign aid, which always was misunderstood and, therefore, never popular, was repurposed as a weapon against godless, atheistic communism. Was America buying allies with grain and medicines? Well, yes. They were for sale… and at a bargain, too.
Giving a speech at Harvard was the easy part. Congress was quite another story, even with Truman pitching it in a special message to Congress that December.
The United States has taken the lead in world-wide efforts to promote industrial and agricultural reconstruction and a revival of world commerce, for we know that enduring peace must be based upon increased production and an expanding flow of goods and materials among nations for the benefit of all.
Since the surrender of the Axis powers, we have provided more than $15 billion, in the form of grants and loans, for aid to victims of the war, to prevent starvation, disease, and suffering; to aid in the restoration of transportation and communications; and to assist in rebuilding war-devastated economies. This assistance has averted stark tragedy and has aided progress toward recovery in many areas of the world.
In these and many other ways, the people of the United States have abundantly demonstrated their desire for world peace and the freedom and well-being of all nations.
We must now make a grave and significant decision relating to our further efforts to create the conditions of peace. We must decide whether or not we will complete the job of helping the free nations of Europe to recover from the devastation of the war. Our decision will determine in large part the future of the people of that continent. It will also determine in large part whether the free nations of the world can look forward with hope to a peaceful and prosperous future as independent states, or whether they must live in poverty and in fear of selfish totalitarian aggression.
Our deepest concern with European recovery, however, is that it is essential to the maintenance of the civilization in which the American way of life is rooted. It is the only assurance of the continued independence and integrity of a group of nations who constitute a bulwark for the principles of freedom, justice and the dignity of the individual.
The economic plight in which Europe now finds itself has intensified a political struggle between those who wish to remain free men living under the rule of law and those who would use economic distress as a pretext for the establishment of a totalitarian state.
The debate on the Marshall Plan ran for months in 1948. Historian Harold Hitchens described the debate as being "marked by a variety of arguments on all sides." Among other things, the plan splintered the Republicans in Congress. Hitchens quotes a speech from Rep. John Vorys of Ohio, who had been an opponent of military aid to the combatants before the U.S. had entered the war.
I want to speak to my Republican colleagues. Brethren, this is it. For years we have thundered against the piecemeal, stopgap foreign policy of the New Deal. We have demanded a long-range, world-wide policy, and we have got it, here, now formally set down, carefully framed and limited, and largely written by Republicans; and what happens? We find Republicans on this floor who want to go back to the New Deal emergency stopgap year-to-year relief plan.
It was the congressional Republicans who were critical to the passage of the plan, partly because their party's history of isolationism ran deeper and because memories of it in Congress were still fairly fresh. Again, from Hitchens:
In the case of the Marshall Plan, as James Reston has written, the Republicans were originally in a dilemma—how could they maintain the interests of the United States abroad without hampering the political interests of the Republican party at home? It was necessary to achieve peace and prosperity, but they could not support the Administration in everything. Therefore, said Reston, "... partly because they had sincere reservations about some aspects of the Administration's foreign policy and partly because they wanted to avoid becoming tagged with the "me-too" label... they have found ways of changing programs without killing them, and of supporting the Administration without being tied to it."
Opponents of the plan found themselves buried by a national campaign to gin up popular support and to prompt a media blitz so powerful that opposing the Marshall Plan was seen as un-American, with all that entailed in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Congressman Howard Buffett of Nebraska, whose son, Warren, became very rich, complained that the campaign to pass the plan had employed all the "… tricks of political terrorism." Zowie. The plan passed, and President Truman signed it, in April 1948. Marshall himself stated its purpose:
An essential part of any successful action on the part of the United States is an understanding on the part of the people of America of the character of the problem and the remedies to be applied.
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