ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR ★^911The Marshall Plan
The language of the Truman Doctrine and the future it sketched of open- ended
worldwide responsibilities for the United States alarmed many Americans.
“Are we to shoulder the mantle of nineteenth- century British imperialism?”
asked the San Francisco Chronicle. “Are we asking for a third world war?” But the
threat of Amer ican military action overseas formed only one pillar of contain-
ment. Secretary of State George C. Marshall spelled out the other in a speech at
Harvard University in June 1947. Marshall pledged the United States to contrib-
ute billions of dollars to finance the economic recovery of Europe. Two years
after the end of the war, much of the continent still lay in ruins. Food shortages
were widespread, and inflation rampant. The economic chaos, exacerbated by
the unusually severe winter of 1946–1947, had strengthened the communist
parties of France and Italy. American policymakers feared that these countries
might fall into the Soviet orbit.
The Marshall Plan offered a positive vision to go along with containment.
It aimed to combat the idea, widespread since the Great Depression, that cap-
italism was in decline and communism the wave of the future. It defined the
threat to American security not so much as Soviet military power but as eco-
nomic and political instability, which could be breeding grounds for commu-
nism. Avoiding Truman’s language of a world divided between free and unfree
blocs, Marshall insisted, “Our policy is directed not against any country or
doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.” Freedom meant
more than simply anticommunism— it required the emergence of the “polit-
ical and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.” In effect, the
Marshall Plan envisioned a New Deal for Europe, an extension to that conti-
nent of Roosevelt’s wartime Four Freedoms. As a booklet explaining the idea to
Europeans put it, the aim was “a higher standard of living for the entire nation;
maximum employment for workers and farmers; greater production.” Or, in
the words of a slogan used to popularize the Marshall Plan, “Prosperity Makes
You Free.”
The Marshall Plan proved to be one of the most successful foreign aid pro-
grams in history. By 1950, western European production exceeded prewar lev-
els and the region was poised to follow the United States down the road to a
mass- consumption society. Since the Soviet Union refused to participate, fear-
ing American control over the economies of eastern Europe, the Marshall Plan
further solidified the division of the continent. At the same time, the United
States worked out with twenty- three other Western nations the General Agree-
ment on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which proposed to stimulate freer trade
among the participants, creating an enormous market for American goods and
investment.
What series of events and ideological conflicts prompted the Cold War?