The Marshall Plan

A New Deal For Europe

Michael Holm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317426042
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Between 1948 and 1951, the Marshall Plan delivered an unprecedented $12.3 billion in U.S. aid to help Western European countries recover from the destruction of the Second World War, and forestall Communist influence in that region. The Marshall Plan: A New Deal for Europe examines the aid program, its ideological origins and explores how ideas about an Americanized world order inspired and influenced the Marshall Plan's creation and execution. The book provides a much-needed re-examination of the Plan, enabling students to understand its immediate impact and its political, social, and cultural legacy. Including essential primary documents, this concise book will be a key resource for students of America's role in the world at mid-century.

CHAPTER 1
A New Deal for the World

American Plans for the Post-World War Two Order

The Marshall Plan was never a singular endeavor created solely for the purpose of European Reconstruction. It had its origins in America’s recent past and a powerfully shared belief that the United States possessed a responsibility to uplift a world in desperate need of guidance. As one State Department speaker explained it to an incoming class of Foreign Service Officers in the 1920s, even if others did not always appreciate the significance of the American role and contribution, this was only to be expected in a world

where gratitude is rarely accorded to the teacher, the doctor, or the policeman, and we have been all three. But it may be that in time they will come to see the United States with different eyes, and to have for her something of the respect and affection with which a man regards the instructor of his youth and a child looks upon the parent who has molded his character.¹

It was in this mindset that the Marshall Plan was conceived, as part of an overall interpretation of global developments. It began not in the spring of 1947 as most scholars insist. Its short-term origins, went back at least to the spring of 1919.

For the first six months of that year, Paris was the center of the world. Here, in the aftermath of the Great War, the leaders of the victorious powers joined to design the new world order. They arrived with very different ambitions in mind. France, Great Britain, and Italy sought reparations from Berlin. They wanted compensation for destroyed territory and lost generations. The French were particularly concerned with the permanent removal of Germany as a continental threat to European peace. American president Woodrow Wilson, in contrast, demanded no reparations and no territory. Treated like a deity upon his arrival in Paris, Wilson wanted to give the world something better: a League of Nations to make the world safe for democracy. The story of Wilson’s failure is well documented. Unable to persuade the United States Senate to surrender influence to the Executive branch in foreign affairs and too much of an ideologue to compromise on his ideals, he lost the fight for ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. Instead of global unity, the result was an uncompromising and fractured new international order marred by economic and political chaos.

In popular memory and much scholarship, Wilson often appears as the lone voice of what we now call Wilsonianism. We identify him with the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, but in actuality, Wilson was a latecomer to the ideals that bear his name. Among American progressives, the call for the United States to remake the world arose instantaneously as war broke out in Europe in 1914. It was Wilson who resisted, imploring his countrymen instead to remain “impartial in thought as well as in deed.”² The young New Republic reporter, Walter Lippmann, was one of many American intellectuals who considered Wilson’s approach to the war far too timid. Lippmann was no jingoist; he wrote in the spirit of the progressive movement. It “has been more than a century since Thomas Paine proposed to secure the world’s peace forever in a league,” Lippmann lamented. Americans were being summoned. The Great War presented an opportunity “to make the interests of America coincident with the interest of mankind,” he insisted. When Wilson finally came out in favor of such a league of peace in May of 1916, the New Republic considered the President’s endorsement a “decisive turning point in the history of the modern world” and a “portent in human history.” Americans, Lippmann boasted, would shed their neutrality “not to engage in diplomatic intrigue but to internationalize world politics.” The league was only the first step. Its real service, he concluded, “may well be that it will establish the first rallying point of a world citizenship.” “Democracy is infectious,” he asserted after Wilson finally declared war in April 1917, “[T]he entrance of the Russian and American democracies is sure to be a stimulus to Democracies everywhere.” Like Paine after 1789, Lippmann expected that the war would “dissolve into democratic revolution the world over.” The editorial board of the New York Times concurred, adding that the quest for “freedom and civilization” was being launched “with the full sanction and support of the American people.”³

Wilson’s dismissal of the Europeans’ traditions of diplomacy drew progressive intellectuals such as Lippmann’s editor, Herbert Croly, and Columbia University professor John Dewey to the cause.⁴ Dewey enthusiastically endorsed the President’s new world order, contending that the U.S. must ensure that other nations “accept and are influenced by the American idea.” A “world federation, a concert of nations, a supreme tribunal, [and] a league of nations” were, he insisted, “peculiarly American contributions.” Lippmann shared this jubilance. “The moral basis for our part in the war is a startling perplexing novelty,” he privately told a friend. “We should avoid all the tricky and sinister aspects of what is now called propaganda,” he stated, “and should aim to create the impression that here is something new and infinitely hopeful in the affairs of mankind.”⁵

Despite the passionate emphasis on American principles, these men were not imperialists. They were not imagining access to foreign markets and they were not worried about American security. In their view, civilization hung in the balance. The Great War, Dewey maintained, presented mankind with the “unique opportunity to reorganize the world into a democratic social order, guaranteeing a future of peace.”⁶ Consequently, this could not be on behalf of the Europeans. Americans would fight “only for another democracy and another civilization.” He decreed that the U.S. had solved problems of nationalism by separating “nationality from citizenship.” At the center stood, instead, ideas of “language, literature,” and “national culture,” which he considered “social rather than political, human rather than national interest. Let this idea fly abroad; it bears healing

in its wings.”⁷

Many progressives genuinely believed that Americans had a special mission in the world to spread liberty. “Good democrats have always believed that the common interests of men were greater than their special interest, that ruling classes can be enemies, but that nations must be partners,” Lippmann declared. He called for a “World Federation,” a “union of peoples determined to end forever that intriguing adventurous nationalism which has torn the world for three centuries.” Democracies had to lead, he insisted. “[N]o machinery we can suggest, no rule of international law is likely to survive, unless the liberal world represents a sufficient union … to make it a shield for human’s protection, and a standard to which the people can rally.” Upon completion of the armistice in November 1918, Lippmann wrote to Wilson’s confidante, Colonel House, that he and the President “more than justified the faith of those who insisted that your leadership was a turning point in modern history.”⁸

The 1919 Paris Peace Conference, of course, fulfilled none of this excitement. The ideals and the mission that these intellectuals, journalists, and policymakers so fervently promoted lost their energy as the negotiations at Versailles began. There were many causes of the failure in Paris, but the New Republic reserved particular scorn for the nationalists in Great

Britain and France. So, too, did John Maynard Keynes, the British economist and financial negotiator at Versailles who resigned from the Treasury in protest over the agreement. Lippmann deemed the European demands of reparations entirely out of touch with the ideological ends that the war should have been about. Perhaps the European opposition was unavoidable; after all, the Wilsonian world order was unlike any system the imperial Europeans recognized or accepted. According to Henry Kissinger’s scornful verdict, the “world Wilson envisaged would be based on principle, not power; on law not interest … in other words, a complete reversal of the historical experience and method of operation of the Great Powers.”⁹ The plan had come a war too soon.

The combination of European obstinacy against the League’s Wilsonian principles and the absence of American postwar leadership unsurprisingly ensured that the new organization lived up to none of Wilson’s dreams. The later President Harry Truman believed that the failure of U.S. and membership and leadership sowed the seeds for the next world war. In 1942, then a Senator, he lamented the idea that the Second World War could be allowed to simply be the Great War by extension. In 1919, “the victors of that war had the opportunity to compel a peace that would protect us from war. … They missed that opportunity.”¹⁰ Like many others, Truman would come to see the next chance to remake the world not as an opportunity distinct from Versailles, but as atonement for the American failure in Paris.

* * *

The dramatically different level of leadership demonstrated by Americans following each of the two world wars has ensured that the interwar period is viewed as the highlight of American isolationism in national memory. Despite persistent efforts and considerable evidence to the contrary, historians have found it difficult to extinguish this myth. Those who promote the isolationist thesis often emphasize how leading intellectuals, such as Harry Elmer Barnes and Charles Beard, called for Americans to turn their back on Europe. Similar evidence is found in the voices of conservatives who became increasingly vociferous as another military conflict loomed in Europe in the 1930s. Epitomized in the Nye Committee hearings over the U.S. entry into the Great War, in Republican rhetoric in opposition to the Roosevelt Administration during the 1930s, and in the forceful voices of men like Charles Lindbergh, isolationism is often described as the sole American perspective on global affairs during this period. Its sentiment can be summed up in the words of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.—grandson of the Senator Lodge who had fought Wilson over the League in 1919—who, when campaigning for a Massachusetts Senate seat, insisted that:

We have been waddling too long in war infested Europe. It began when the international theorists wanted this country to experiment with the League of Nations. … Europe wanted us when she needed our manpower to finance her affairs. … Oh Europe will welcome us to her World Court, she will welcome us to her League of Nations and to her conferences—because there she knows she can outsmart us. But I say—if Europe must have her hates—let her have them. We want no part of it. If Europe wants her wars—let her have them. We want no part of it. If Europe wants to go broke—that’s her business.¹¹

The routine insistence that this sentiment captures the national attitude toward the world leads to the questionable conclusion that 1945 was the comprehensive turning point in modern American history. While much undoubtedly changed as a result of the war, a great deal remained the same. The ideological beliefs that emerged after the war certainly correlated to the world that preceded it. The American belief that their freedoms were central to the human experience and to humanity’s progress was endemic to the national historical and cultural consciousness. The visions of the League of Nations did not vanish after 1919 in the United States. Rather, they survived and thrived in Americans’ thinking about the global order. American internationalism, in other words, was not a product of the Second World War, but an idea that was central to their ideology. To insist otherwise is to overlook the continuum of American ideas and how central they were to the post-Second World War planning and, eventually, to how Americans approached the Cold War, including the Marshall Plan.

The evidence is overwhelming that in spite of the failure to make the world safe for democracy in 1919, believers in the global spread of democracy and World Federalism remained vocal and influential. They came from all walks of life. Even Republicans, including Elihu Root, Charles Evan Hughes, Frank Kellogg, and Henry Stimson, pressed for American involvement in the world. In the 1922 inaugural issue of Foreign Affairs, Root charted a very Wilsonian vision. Outlining a global American agenda, he insisted that the “control of foreign relations by democracies creates a new and pressing demand for popular education in foreign affairs.” By implication, being a mere exemplar was insufficient. Hughes went further in a speech to the American Bar Association. Convinced that Americans stood on the side of international justice, he insisted that the creation of permanent international courts should be “a distinct feature” of U.S. foreign policy. A similar internationalism was evident in policies on arms control, international drug trafficking, health and disease prevention, and in the greater support for global economic responsibility, the latter lasting at least until October 1929.¹²

The belief in an American global role extended well beyond Washington. As historian David Ekbladh powerfully demonstrates, ideas of global economic and socio-political modernization were widespread during the interwar period. Pushing initiatives that would inspire the modernization policies of the 1950s and 1960s, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) often took the lead particularly in famine relief. In China, for example, American observers concluded that “the chronic state of famine in China was not the result of natural disasters.” Instead, they believed that the problems were products of “society and culture.” They began “to promote a new and extensive agenda of reform activities.” Similar to what would occur in Europe during the Marshall Plan, Americans singled out ways to provide “economic improvement, improved agricultural techniques, [and] infrastructural improvements.” The Great Depression, unsurprisingly, checked some of this enthusiasm, but not for long. Many came to the conclusion that the New Deal vision transferred quite easily beyond America’s shores. If it could be done in the Tennessee Valley, it could be done in China and elsewhere. By the 1930s, the earliest development efforts aimed to provide less advanced nations the ability to develop socially, politically, and economically. These programs drew inspiration from global political developments, including the rise of fascism and Communism. As these dictatorial regimes grew in strength during the Depression, American observers reached the conclusion that, as Ekbladh aptly puts it, “all societies carried a latent bacillus for totalitarianism that was easily made virulent by the forces of modernity.” Poor and underdeveloped nations appeared especially susceptible, further supporting the perceived need for American-led international development.¹³ Liberals such as Arthur E. Morgan (Roosevelt’s head of the TVA), Eugene Staley (who later became influential in the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA))...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Introduction
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Timeline
• Introduction
• 1 A New Deal for the World: American Plans for the Post-World War Two Order
• 2 The World America Made: Towards the Marshall Plan, 1945–1947
• 3 Creating the European Recovery Program, 1947–1948
• 4 The Marshall Plan in Action and the Emergence of European Unity, 1948–1951
• 5 Epilogue: The Marshall Plan and Memory
• Documents
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index