President Harry S. Truman signs off on legislation establishing the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948, more popularly known as the Marshall Plan. The act eventually provided over $12 billion of assistance to aid in the economic recovery of Western Europe.
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In the first years following the end of World War II, the economies of the various nations of Western Europe limped along. Unemployment was high, money was scarce, and homelessness and starvation were not unknown in the war-ravaged countries. U.S. policymakers considered the situation fraught with danger. In the developing Cold War era, some felt that economic privation in Western Europe made for a fertile breeding ground for communist propaganda.
A key element of America’s policy to contain the influence of the Soviet Union was the recovery of Western Germany (Eastern Germany was occupied by Soviet troops), and that recovery required the revitalization of Germany’s natural markets in Western Europe. In addition, strengthening the economies of other Western European countries would better equip them to fight the threat of communism, either from Soviet expansion or from domestic communist parties.
In June 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall made a dramatic call for a massive economic recovery program, one that would provide billions for the stagnant economies of Western Europe. The result of Marshall’s call to action was the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948, which was passed by wide margins in Congress. In signing the act, President Truman declared that it represented “perhaps the greatest venture in constructive statesmanship that any nation has undertaken.” Secretary Marshall congratulated Congress for having “faced a great crisis with courage and wisdom.”
The act provided an initial grant of $4 billion for Western Europe. By the time the program came to an end in late 1951 over $12 billion had been expended. Although the Marshall Plan was not an absolute success (the large influx of American dollars led to rampant inflation in some areas), it did stabilize and revitalize the economies of Western Europe. British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin declared that it had been “a lifeline to sinking men.”
The greatest generation. No accountability whatsoever.
” In late 1945 Washington’s formal position on Vietnam was vague, however by early 1947 the US was tacitly supporting France. Later that year US president Harry Truman authorised a moderate amount of funding ($160 million) to assist the French war effort. American administrators also turned a blind eye when Paris diverted some Marshall Plan funds to supply the war in Indochina. By 1951 US military aid to the French had tripled to $450 million; by 1953 it was up to $785 million. French forces in Vietnam were using ships and aircraft on loan from the US. CIA agents were conducting covert operations in Vietnam in support of the French, like carrying out 700 supply drops to CEFEO troops trapped at Dien Bien Phu (1954). By the time French forces surrendered to the Viet Minh in mid 1954, Washington had invested almost $3 billion in ‘saving’ Indochina from the spectre of communism. ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-6YX-aceOk
$12B? Fucking pikers.
That was in the days when making $12,000 a year was a wild dream for most common men, the ones that worked and supported their families on their income alone without their wife working too.