Time Essay: The Marshall Plan: A Memory, a Beacon

Britain’s Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin called it “the most unsordid act of history.” To Willy Brandt, speaking later as Chancellor of West Germany, it was “one of the strokes of providence of this century, a century that has not so very ‘often been illuminated by the light of reason.” It was launched upon the world in Harvard Yard just 30 years ago this week —in what was surely one of the most momentous commencement day speeches ever made. Sunshine tattered through the decorous elms as Harvard staged its first normal graduation exercises since the end of World War II. The morning ceremonies that spotlighted the new graduates concluded with the awarding of honorary degrees. T.S. Eliot was among the recipients. Another was a white-haired man in a plain gray suit who rose in response to President James Bryant Conant’s swift and eloquent citation: “An American to whom freedom owes an enduring debt of gratitude, a soldier and statesman whose ability and character brook only one comparison in the history of the nation.”

As the assemblage surged to its feet in a warm ovation, Secretary of State George Catlett Marshall, who had commanded all of America’s military forces during the war, bowed, accepted his doctor of laws degree and sat down again. In his pocket, ticking off the day like a hidden bomb, was a speech whose content would shape a new world era and dwarf by its magnitude all the fame that Marshall had so far won. That afternoon, when his turn came to make a “few remarks” during the traditional alumni ceremonies in front of Memorial Church, Marshall quietly took out his speech and read it to his audience. Thus was born the Marshall Plan, an epochal —and magnanimous—undertaking unmatched in all of history. Through it, in the space of four years, the U.S. would spend an unheard-of $13.6 billion to underwrite the economic —and in a sense, the social and political—recovery of war-torn Western Europe, defeated enemies included.

When Marshall rose to read his speech, the war had long since been won, but not the peace. By early 1947 Soviet adventurism had inspired the Truman Doctrine, with its pledge of military help to any free people threatened by Communist aggression. By April, after a long and fruitless foreign ministers’ conference in Moscow, the U.S. Government abandoned all expectations of obtaining cooperation from the Russians—even in balming the wounds of war let alone in fashioning a new world order. In Asia, China was on the verge of falling to Mao. Of most concern to Americans, however, was Europe, which teetered on the brink of a general economic collapse that seemed beyond the capacity of her ever divided nations to forestall.

Marshall’s words that day in June 1947 not only gave desperate Europe a reason to hope but also snatched the initiative in the cold war away from Russia. Marshall wrought a revolutionary departure in American foreign policy, wrenching the nation out of an isolationist disposition that tracked back to George Washington. The European recovery plan that bore Marshall’s name—Harry Truman insisted it be so titled—set the stage for the primary defense arrangements in use today by the Atlantic community. Without the economic and political base created by the Marshall Plan, NATO could not have come into being. Nor, likely, would the capacity of European nations for cooperation today ever have blossomed. The ideas that Marshall set forth are, in fact, still making history. At least an echo of his spirit of innovation could be heard last week in President Carter’s promise at Notre Dame to “create a wider framework of international cooperation suited to the new historical circumstances.”

As far as Marshall’s audience knew before he spoke, the Secretary of State would merely add his bit to the usual commencement pieties. No ballyhoo had preceded him; no Washington flacks had scurried about alerting the press that a “major” statement would be forthcoming. In fact, say some who were there, neither Marshall’s typically spare language nor his earnest but dry delivery awakened that gathering fully to a realization that here history was being made.

“I need not tell you, gentlemen, that the world situation is very serious,” the speech blandly began. “That must be apparent to all intelligent people.” Then Marshall sketched Europe’s devastation and economic disruption:

“The town and city industries are not producing adequate goods to exchange with the food-producing farmer . . . People in the cities are short of food and fuel. .. The division of labor upon which the exchange of products is based is in danger of breaking down.”

Europe, in short, was broke, shattered—and desperate.

In April, Marshall had come back from Moscow convinced that the Russians had every intention of exploiting Europe’s misery. Then in May, Will Clayton, his Under Secretary for Economic Affairs, reported a rapidly worsening situation. Immediately, Marshall had given George F. Kennan and his policy planning staff two weeks to draft a plan to save Europe. Under Secretary Dean Acheson, as well as Clayton, contributed heavily to the proposals that were boiled down into the 950-word speech. Now Marshall came to the meat of it:

“The truth of the matter is that Europe’s requirements for the next three or four years … 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 … Aside from the demoralizing effect on the world at large and the possibilities of disturbances arising as a result of the desperation of the people concerned, the consequences to the economy of the United States should be apparent to all. 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.”

And then to the heart of it:

“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. Such assistance, I am convinced, must not be on a piecemeal basis … Any assistance that this government may render in the future should provide a cure rather than a mere palliative.”

One final crucial point grew out of a wish to force European nations to cease their eternal bickering and begin working together toward a longer-range goal of integration:

“The initiative, I think, must come from Europe. “

Afterward, Marshall wondered whether his message had really got across. Had Under Secretary Acheson been right in advising against using the commencement as a forum on the ground that speeches there were “a ritual to be endured without hearing”? The audience had received him warmly, at start and finish, but had broken in with applause only once —and not at the most significant place. Marshall, as he had confided to associates, had hoped that the speech would trigger an “explosive” effect.

In fact, it did so—not in the U.S., although it soon got behind the idea, but in Europe, where the response was instant. That same night, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Bevin began arranging the conferences in which Europe’s nations would assess their needs as a region and go to the U.S. with a program in hand. As Marshall intended, all of Europe—Russia included—was invited to take part. But Russia, after the first conference, refused—and declared war on the plan as another example of U.S. efforts to enslave Europe. Finally 16 nations joined in developing a program.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Democratic Administration and G.O.P.-run Congress began hammering out enabling legislation in a bi partisan mood fostered mainly by Re publican Senator Arthur Vandenburg. Congress doubtless saw the plan in terms of cold war designs, and its passage was helped substantially by Stalin’s hostility to it. President Harry Truman himself considered the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan “two halves of the same walnut.” He signed the law on April 3, 1948. Two weeks after that the freighter John H. Quick left Galveston, Texas, with 9,000 long tons of wheat for France — the first item of a vast outpouring of aid that would eventually include machine tools, farm equipment and raw materials of almost every sort.

The Marshall Plan worked faster than anyone had thought possible. By 1951, Western Europe’s industrial production had soared to 40% above prewar levels, and its farm output was bigger than ever. Western Europe’s current status as a vigorous economic competitor of the U.S. testifies to the plan’s effectiveness.

Today the Marshall Plan is only a bright memory. But the very act of recalling its historic impact raises the question: Would the U.S. ever again give itself to an undertaking of such boldness and magnitude? Surely some of the world’s conspicuous difficulties — the food and energy shortages, to name but two glaring ones — seem deserving of comparable heroic efforts. Such problems so far, however, have inspired occasional grand rhetoric without matching action. So perhaps a better question is: Could the U.S. today even muster the combination of generosity, self-sacrifice and determined will that it dedicated to the rescue of Western Europe? Does the national character remain capable of that spirit?

Beyond doubt the American temper is strikingly different today from what it was then. After World War II, the nation enjoyed an almost cocky belief that it could do anything — and everything. Had not the U.S. just saved civilization? Did not the U.S. own the Bomb? Most Americans were eager to proclaim their nation the greatest. And they turned out to be perfectly willing to prove it — once they had been asked to. Americans of Marshall’s day, of course, also had trust in their Government — and a certitude about their power to prevail that had not been crumpled by Viet Nam.

The loss of trust and certainty are major differences in post-Watergate America. The nation also, more than in the past, nurses cynical doubts about the Government’s capacity to solve any social problems — those at home or abroad. More over, Americans of 1977 often seem confused, in the words of one scholar, “as to where and in what way American power and intelligence can be most usefully applied.” The words are those of a man who happened to direct the Marshall Plan in Europe in 1950-51 — Professor Milton Katz, now director of international legal studies at Harvard Law School. Katz nonetheless believes that granted the recovery of trust and some clear sense of national purpose, the country could still match the great deeds of the postwar era.

Most thoughtful Americans — particularly those old enough to have seen the nation at its best — are likely to agree. That adviser to many Presidents, Lawyer Clark Clifford, does. “I don’t think there’s been any radical change in the American character,” he says. And ever buoyant Hubert Humphrey, mulling the Marshall Plan days last week, ventured a feeling that seems typical in Washington: “I think we would do it over again — if the same circumstances existed.”

There, of course, is the crux of the matter. History never quite repeats itself. The Marshall Plan arose out of a specific juncture of event, public mood and leadership. And who could possibly guess when and how such an impelling convergence might occur again? Nobody. But it would nonetheless be hazardous to assume, if it did occur, that the American people would fail to yield their best once more.