History and irony

calendars change but not everything else

I have no idea who coined the phrase ‘delicious irony’ but sometimes nothing can be more appropriate. On this date in 1948, Harry Truman (the president rather than our ever larger orange tomcat) signed the bill to enact the Marshall Plan, the enormous investment we made in the post-World War II world. How ironic considering our current House of Representatives’ paralysis on Ukraine.

Named after the World War II leader and Secretary of State who unveiled the objectives and concept during his 1947 Harvard commencement speech, the European Recovery Program authorised the U.S. government to spend $13.3 billion ($173 billion in current dollars)—or about 5% of our gross domestic product—to invest in sixteen allies desperately awash in debt and post-conflict nation rebuilding. Without the funds, American leaders feared that Communist parties assumed to be under Moscow’s control would win freely held elections across the continent. The British Labour Party, a Socialist-based party, garnered a 239 seat increase Parliament during the July 1945 general election, dramatically shifting the course of social spending and administration of the British state; the likelihood of similar leftwing gains, if not outright Communist victories, haunted those who feared a chain reaction elsewhere. Marshall had witnessed the deprivation in China while serving as Truman’s 1945-46 envoy to the Kuomindang versus CCP civil war. He understood that people were drawn to voices who offered them peace even when it was a false hope with ideological strings attached.

Conditions in Europe were ripe for anyone promising a better life. Food rationing remained the norm in the mid-1940s. Rubble remained all over from the war’s devastation with no prospect of indigenous financing to reconstruct infrastructure needed to support post-war economic growth. Health conditions were poor as a baby boom swept the continent. Unemployment levels for troops returning home were high. For most Europeans, the bullets stopped flying but day-to-day conditions improved not a bit.

The United States, on the other hand, was in a post-war boom. We had excess capacity and investment we could share. More relevant, the victors over the Nazis were charting a path thought to preclude war in the future, this time against Stalin’s Red Army on those same plains of western Europe where Allied armies so recently fought and where the overwhelmed societies sought to recreate functioning democracies. The Marshall Plan paid for a four year investment in the future to create jobs, to build infrastructure, to sustain industries which actually would compete with our own in the long run, and more to assure Europe would embrace democracy for the post-war world rather than turning to authoritarianism in one form or another as it did in the 1920s and 30s.

The Marshall Plan alone did not alter Europe. That work was indegenously done but this was unlike thirty years earlier when Yanks came to the war but turned out backs on how the peace developed. The Recovery Plan assured we had our stake in that rebuilding.

The Plan has had its share of critics over the decades. As a student in London more than forty years ago, one of my professors cynically damned the intent of assuring German, Dutch, British, French, and other western European supported the U.S. economic behemouth resulting from the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944. Indeed, Bretton Woods monetary system has dominated the post-1945 world as Churchill, Roosevelt, and the other 43 signatories envisioned when they signed it. The Marshall Plan only reinforced that by pumping cash into European economies to assure consumer confidence would gradually support regimes aligned with our anti-Communist ideology as the Iron Curtain gradually fell in the late 1940s.

Coming the year before the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which celebrates its diamond anniversary this week, the Marshall Plan evidenced both a reversal in U.S. isolationism as well as a message for unquestioned leadership in the new era. It’s arguable whether the Plan drove Stalin to act more aggressively in Eastern Europe or whether Washington was responding to Churchill’s 5 March 1946 ‘Iron Curtain’ remarks at Westminster College. The interplay between historic events was crucial but the Plan did coincide with the division of Europe into pro-U.S. and pro-Soviet blocs the same year that Truman signed the legislation.

Our leaders in the Executive and Legislative branches saw the Marshall Plan as a prudent investment to protect the United States against an ultimate Soviet move to destabilise democratic peoples. That was 1948 through 1952.

The irony, of course, is that the U.S. House of Representatives seventy-five years later refuses to fund military assistance to Ukraine facing a Russian invasion of two years’ duration thus far. U.S. lawmakers see the Soviet-turned-Russo Orthodox nationalist authoritarian leader trying to disestablish Ukraine similarly to the actions of Soviet imperialism so feared three quarters of a century ago.

Americans, including many in or aspiring to elected office, know little history, preferring to believe they can ignore a menace seeming so far away and so unwilling to tangle with American strength once it is invoked. These folks do fear a different threat in a different part of the world but their wishful thinking about a malevolent Russia certainly differs from that of their predecessor generation viewing Soviet Russia in the late 1940s. We never cease to be surprised, it seems, when our assumptions were proven wrong because we chose not to test them.

The Marshall Plan did rebuilt Europe. It had multiple objectives as does much of human behaviour; Americans were hardly unique in using the Plan to bolster democratic allies and the U.S. economic prowess in the world. Trade between Europe and America remains crucial to both sides of the Atlantic seventy-five years later. I would not argue the Plan was cost free, either, as the years following implementation saw the U.S. government attempt many unsuccessful actions to remake the world in our image, believing we could replicate the desired European outcome.

But the Europe receiving the recovery investment needed it for the daily lives of millions. The investment helped governments provide food, health care, homes, and jobs in devastated economies that would have taken a generation to accrue the capital for these actions. Americans forget that Britain still rationed sugar, meat, fish, wheat, butter, cheese, and other foods, petrol, and other basics well into the 1950s. Without the assistance, it’s hard to fathom anything but markedly worse conditions for the generation that fought the war abroad and on the front. Multiply Britain’s experience to the other nations included in the Plan to see real benefits for average people.

I suspect the aid for Ukraine will result eventually, although I am not sure the Russian victory can be prevented. The current czar shows no indication he will retreat, crushing a generation of his own youth in the process. But how differently we see our role in the world today versus 3 April 1948. We were uncertain of victory but made the commitment because that was what great powers do.

Harry Truman was an American president who truly acted upon the buck stopping here.

Thank you for reading my thoughts on the Marshall Plan. I welcome your reactions to this and all other columns. I thank those who support this endeavour financially as it helps me a great deal.

The attached clip was as I was writing about three quarters of an hour ago. We are expecting the Ark any time.

Be well and be safe. FIN

History.com editors, ‘The Marshall Plan’, history.com, 1 November 2022, retrieved at https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/marshall-plan-1