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LINK Letters From An American 06/04/2022

Heather Cox Richardson

The Gettysburg Address it wasn’t.

Seventy-five years ago, on June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who had been a five-star general in World War II, gave a commencement speech at Harvard University.

Rather than stirring, the speech was bland. Its long sentences were hard to follow. It was vague. And yet, in just under eleven minutes on a sunny afternoon, Marshall laid out a plan that would shape the modern world.

“The truth of the matter is that Europe’s requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products—principally from America—are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help or face economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character,” he said. “It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”

In his short speech, Marshall outlined the principles of what came to be known as the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe in the wake of the devastation of World War II. The speech challenged European governments to work together to make a plan for recovery and suggested that the U.S. would provide the money. European countries did so, forming the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) in 1948. From 1948 to 1952, the U.S. would donate about $17 billion to European countries to rebuild, promote economic cooperation, and modernize economies. By the end of the four-year program, economic output in each of the countries participating in the Marshall Plan had increased by at least 35%.

This investment helped to avoid another depression like the one that had hit the world in the 1930s, enabling Europe to afford goods from the U.S. and keeping low the tariff walls that had helped to choke trade in the crisis years of the 1930s. Marshall later recalled that his primary motivation was economic recovery, that he had been shocked by the devastation he saw in Europe and felt that “[i]f Europe was to be salvaged, economic aid was essential.”

But there was more to the Marshall Plan than money.

The economic rubble after the war had sparked political chaos that fed the communist movement. No one wanted to go back to the prewar years of the depression, and in the wake of fascism, communism looked attractive to many Europeans.

“Marshall was acutely aware that this was a plan to stabilize Western Europe politically because the administration was worried about the impact of communism, especially on labor unions,” historian Charles Maier told Colleen Walsh of the Harvard Gazette in 2017. “In effect, it was a plan designed to keep Western Europe safely in the liberal Western camp.”

It worked. American investment in Europe helped to turn European nations away from communism as well as the nationalism that had fed World War II, creating a cooperative and stable Europe.

The Marshall Plan also helped Europe and the U.S. to articulate a powerful set of shared values. The U.S. invited not just Europe but also the Soviet Union to participate in the plan, but Soviet leaders refused, recognizing that accepting such aid would weaken the idea that communism was a superior form of government and give the U.S. influence. They blocked satellite countries from participating, as well. Forcing the USSR either to join Europe or to divide the allies of World War II put Soviet leaders in a difficult position and at a psychological disadvantage.

With a clear ideological line dividing the USSR and Europe, Europeans, Americans, and their allies coalesced around a concept of government based on equality before the law, secularism, civil rights, economic and political freedom, and a market economy: the tenets of liberal democracy. As Otto Zausmer, who had worked for the U.S. Office of War Information to swing Americans behind the war, put it in 1955: “America’s gift to the world is not money, but the Democratic idea, democracy.”

In the years after the Marshall Plan, European countries expanded their cooperative organizations. The OEEC became the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1961 and still operates with 37 member countries that account for three fifths of world trade. And the U.S. abandoned its prewar isolationism to engage with the rest of the world. The Marshall Plan helped to create a liberal international order, based on the rule of law, that lasted for decades.

In his commencement speech on June 5, 1947, Marshall apologized that “I’ve been forced by the necessities of the case to enter into rather technical discussions.” But on the ten-year anniversary of the speech, the Norwegian foreign minister had a longer perspective, saying: “this initiative taken by Marshall and by the American Government marked the beginning of a new epoch in western Europe, an epoch of wider, and above all more binding, cooperation between the countries than ever before.”

Not bad for an eleven-minute speech.

HippieChick58 9 June 5
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5 comments

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3

Living in Europe and actually having products build in Germany under the Marshall Plan I understood the concept. The one sore point was that some of our allies did not or even want to. After WWI Wilson wanted to go easy on the Axis Powers but the European allies wanted to throw the book at them. This only created the scenario for WWII and many later wars (including Viet Nam). So now it was our turn. Under lend lease we had already helped our allies win so now we had to prevent WWIII and the plan worked.

Unfortunately, reality always wins and the high population density of Europe is creating more issues and the energy and food shortages are just two. When I left Germany, in 1989, the gas pipeline from Russia was started and contentious. Germany has a population of some 85 million and is the size of Washington State and Oregon which, combined has fewer than 12 million. Germany is much more mountainous and has less, per capita, land for agriculture. The worlds needs are becoming more and more desperately short and, in the end, will be our undoing.

My question, what speech was this address referring to? Biden is not a strong speaker which is a problem. People, wrongly, gravitate toward a messenger rather than a message. This too will be our undoing.

6

It's important to remember that small "d" democracy is a liberal ideal. When today's Republicans talk about "owning the libs," when members of their extremist wing fantasize about turning the USA in theocratic dictatorship, they should remember that libs won the Civil War AND the two World Wars. We liberals don't like to play with guns; we don't don't don military gear to play soldier on our weekends. But if forced to, we will take up arms to fight for democracy. We are going to try and snuff out the current anti-democratic project of the Done Cheato and his minions through our institutions and legal system. If that should fail, and force of arms becomes the next necessary step, we will take it. And woe to thee who opposes us. The silent majority will roar.

5

Even though a military man by background, Marshall was a brilliant and caring man.

7

I'll confess this is the best explanation I've ever read of the Marshall Plan! Thanks, HC!

5

The only reason the U.S was a powerhouse after W.W.II was the fact we had the Only intact economy..

And we only had an economy capable of prosecuting the war because of the leadership of FDR, a Democrat whose liberal policies pulled the country up out of a deep, deep depression.

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