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Essay on The Marshall Plan
In a 1947 address at the Harvard University Commencement, Secretary of State George C. Marshall outlined the idea, later enshrined in the Truman Administration's European Recovery Program, of reconstructing a devastated Europe only just emerging from World War II through the infusion of US aid on a massive scale. The Marshall Plan would eventually cost between 12 and 13 billion dollars before being subsumed by US defense spending on NATO and support for a variety of bilateral aid programs in the early 1950s.
The Marshall Plan was indeed by many measures a successful international aid program, which like most such programs had more than purely philanthropic aims. Among other things, a devastated Europe was an invitation to Soviet political meddling, an opportunity for rebuilding export markets for US businesses, and a chance to experiment with creating an open world economy that would not experience repetition of the economic and political disasters of the previous twenty years.
Evocative speeches at timely moments played a major role in defining and reorienting 'Europe' after World War II. One was Winston Churchill's 'iron curtain' speech at Westminster College in Missouri in 1946. Another was George Marshall's speech at Harvard in 1947 offering American aid and advice in rebuilding a shattered continent. A third was Robert Schuman's speech in Paris in 1950 proposing common European control over coal and steel resources. These speeches, perhaps because they were relatively short and eloquent, captured the popular imagination of the time. They shifted thinking by creating a new conventional wisdom. With hindsight they seem like founding moments of what has happened since. The fact that two were given in the United States points to both American centrality to Europe's future and the interweaving of destinies that was already under way.Scholars have long debated the extent to which the Marshall Plan of 1947 actually contributed to the postwar growth and prosperity of western.......
