In 1948, Congress voted to provide $12 billion
in economic aid for Europe’s recovery from World War II. That would be about $120 billion today, pal. The vote in the Senate
was 71-19, and in the House it was 333-78.
That was the
enactment of the Marshall Plan, which remains controversial among niggling ideological
economists today but elsewhere is seen as one of our country’s finest hours.
The Congress that enacted it was the one President Truman called the
“do-nothing, good-for-nothing 80th Congress” in his successful 1948
election campaign. Domestically, the 80th didn’t do much, and what
it did was not good.
True. But that Congress,
with both houses controlled by Republicans for the first time since 1934, did pass
the Marshall Plan. Republicans then were, as now, opposed to foreign aid, opposed
to government spending, opposed to government planning, opposed to Democrats
and especially opposed to a Democrat in the White House.
So, how did they
assemble the better angels of their natures and pass the Marshall Plan?
I pondered
that question while reading The Marshall
Plan: Dawn of the Cold War, by Benn Steil, senior fellow at the Council on
Foreign Relations. The book has a buzz among people who read books like this,
but I am not going to review it. The domestic politics of passing the Plan is
of less concern to Steil than the international politics of using aid to keep
the Soviets out of western Europe and settle the problem of divided government
for Germany by dividing Germany.
But the domestic politics are familiar. Harry Truman and
Joe Martin didn’t get along any better than Barack Obama and John Boehner, maybe worse. Nevertheless, when a big thing needed doing, the U.S. government was able to do
it 70 years ago.
So far I have come up
with five things that were different then:
1.
Harry Truman didn’t have psychic needs that had
to be pandered to. He put Marshall’s name on the plan, and nobody could confuse
Gen. George Catlett Marshall with a political hack. He wasn't going to run for anything; he already had done as much as anyone to win World War II.
2.
Sen. Arthur Vandenberg got on board at the
start. The Michigan Republican, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, was a
rock-ribbed isolationist until Dec. 7, 1941. Then he wasn't an isolationist anymore. He not only was smart, he had gravitas. Isolationism wasn’t dead in
his party, but the isolationists knew and respected him.
3. A Hall of Fame of great Americans was involved,
including: George Kennan, the Russia expert who could be dour at times but
never stopped thinking; Charles “Chip” Bohlen, who knew almost as much about
Russia as Kennan and had more finesse; Averell Harriman, who was wealthy
enough to be a Republican but found being a Democrat was “more fun” (Harriman
used his own airplane to fly to Moscow because he thought it would be unseemly
to represent the United States in a military DC-4 transport); Paul Hoffman, who
in fact was a Republican and administered the plan and chose a staff without a single
political ward-heeler; cotton baron Will Clayton who was turned into an avid
free trader by the Depression; Gen. Lucius D. Clay, the U.S. military governor
in Germany who really could herd cats if it came to that; Clay’s civilian
#2 Robert Murphy who aptly titled his
autobiography Diplomat Among Warriors, and Dean Acheson, who aptly
titled his autobiography, Present at the Creation. Those folks
disagreed a lot about details but they were smart, experienced and focused on
outcomes. They could have made more money doing something else; most of them
already had and knew when they had enough.
4.
Congress members of 1948 were open to
persuasion. Members from both sides of the aisle went to Europe to see
conditions for themselves. In December, 1947 James “Scotty” Reston of the New York Times wrote that
the House of Representatives was not only divided by parties but by “those who
went away and those who stayed home.” Those who went favored the Marshall Plan.
5. Members
didn’t have to fear being “primaried” by zealots from the left or right of their own party
as long as they voted for what they saw as the best interests of their constituents and understood the issue enough to explain it to their voters. Of course, voters paid more attention.
I believe it was Naomi Klein that wrote that Democratic Socialism was tolerated because of the great big commie threat from the east. Since the CCCP collapsed, the United States of Neoliberalism will tolerate no such thing, stifling any democratic socialism in post-invaded Iraq. It was neoliberal orthotoxy all the way. Before, it was the Marshall Plan. Now it's the Friedman Plan.
ReplyDeleteThat is, democratic socialism was tolerated in Europe.
DeleteNeoliberal orthotoxy: if that's a typo, it's a good one!
DeleteGood essay, Tom. My dad was a Truman Democrat and often opined about what HST would have had to say about various pols.
ReplyDeleteI think we are also plagued with aggrievement and identity politics.
This latest play against Kavanaugh by the Democrats seems a bit of a stretch: an unwitnessed drunken teenage assault 30 years ago. Unless it triggers other more recent accusations, showing a history. I'm not a fan of this tactic but if it keeps another corporations-can-do-no-wrong dweeb out of the Court, I have no problem with dirty tricks. It's just that the Democrats are so bad at it.
ReplyDeleteI believe both the woman and Kavanaugh are telling the truth about the incident in question; that the incident happened, and that Kavanaugh doesn't remember it. I'm basing that on a memory from college days; that a guy at a dance was a drunker-than-a-skunk pain in the neck, and I was pretty frightened. I'm fairly sure he has no memory of the incident, because that's how polluted he was.
DeleteI agree with Stanley that if there were other accusations or more recent ones it would be worse. I am sorry for the woman in question, but I would prefer them to stop Kavanaugh based on his judicial record.
The "alleged" victim admits she was wearing a swimming suit under the street clothes her assailant was trying to pull off. She wasn't wearing a chastity belt. So the Rs will dismiss her as "a little bit slutty and a little bit nutty," eh?
DeleteFunny, every time I see a Coke can I think of Justice Thomas. I guess every time I see a swimming suit I'll think of Justice Kavanaugh. You see a lot of both in Florida.
Katherine, the story the woman tells of what happened at a high school party is absolutely credible based on my personal knowledge of the schools, clubs, and general social circle she describes. The Georgetown Prep boys have been notorious for decades for heavy drinking, heavy partying, and generally obnoxious behavior. Certainly not all of them, but a large percentage. The story she tells of being at the country club swimming with friends, then hearing about a party, throwing a "shift" or sundress over her bathing suit, and going with her friends, without knowing whose house, or who was even driving, is very typical of the social scene among high school kids at the elite schools in the DC area. Then and now. Unfortunately.
DeleteAs I mentioned previously, I know many families whose kids attended/attend these schools, and themselves belong to the country clubs.
In Kavanaugh's era, the parties were spread word of mouth - no cellphones. But the word did get out. I vividly remember when our neighbors gave a party for their daughter and date (all Catholic prep school kids - girls went to Stoneridge (Madames of the Sacred Heart), boys to Georgetown Prep and Gonzaga (Jesuit) - six high school couples. But word went around at a football game and suddenly our street was overrun by loud, drunken teenagers who pushed their way into the house. The parents had to call the cops. In fact, the same thing had happened to other neighbors, a bit up the street a few years earlier.
Kavanaugh was apparently something of a good time boy, in high school, college and law school (based on his own statements). It is very possible he was too drunk to remember, as you say. But he has lied about something already in his testimony, and he would have been better off if he had simply said that a couple of times in high school he drank too much and didn't remember what happened. Instead he has issued a blanket denial. The GOP is refusing to call the witnesswho was the other boy in the room to testify.
Why not?
If he is lying deliberately, he should not be on the Court. Unfortunately for the USA, it probably won't help the country if he isn't confirmed, as the next nominee would be just as bad in the matters that concern me about someone on the SC for the next few decades. Which do not include Roe v Wade.
p.s. Gossip from the local scene - Neal Gorsuch's daughters attend the same school that Kavanauh's accuser attended.
DeleteAnne, what you describe makes me grateful we didn't have to raise our kids there. Not that there's not some partying that goes on here. But it's a little easier for parents to keep track of what's going on here.
DeleteAnne - there were no hoity-toity prep schools in the town we lived in during my high school days, and I never witnessed a sexual assault, but everything else you describe about that social scene rings true to me - sounds like my life in those days. I've thought all along that there is nothing intrinsically unlikely in what Ford is claiming.
DeleteTom, this is very interesting and it sounds like an interesting book. I read a biography, believe it was one of FDR, that suggested that Harriman (I think - I hope I'm not remembering the wrong person) was part of a State Department team that was quite anti-Semitic and that he worked actively to prevent Jews in Europe from coming to the US as refugees during the war. Is that possible I'm remembering the wrong person? Or perhaps that particular author's take on him was not the mainstream take?
ReplyDeleteHarriman doesn't sound right for your suspect. You may be thinking of Breckinridge Long, who has that kind of name and is often fingered as the chief finder of reasons to keep out Jews at the State Department during the 1940s. At least I don't remember seeing Harriman's name come up in the "St. Louis" incident or other outrages. Factually, though, the FD didn't want to add rescuing Jews to its full plate of political dynamite in the run-up to Pearl Harbor.
ReplyDeleteAverell spent most of WWII running around the world for FDR, arranging Lend-Lease. The thought of Harriman -- who was a business partner of Herbert Walker (the H.W. in Poppy Bush's name) and whose second wife was a Whitney who had been married to a Vanderbilt, and this was after he bought the Whitney stables and founded the Sun Valley ski resort -- working hand-in-hand with Harry Hopkins, the lower middle class social worker from Iowa, who never came close to being governor of New York -- keeps me feeling good thoughts about the USA on rainy nights.
A friend of mine house-sat for Harriman for two weeks during the '60s. He said that even after he got used to the art on the walls he was afraid to sit down because he figured the sofa was worth more than he'd earn in his lifetime.
"the FD" is the FDR administration. Not the fire department.
DeleteOkay, could very easily be a case of my memory playing its old tricks. I tried to google info about Harriman before posing the question but couldn't find anything. I just walked over to my bookshelves to see if the biography in question has an index, but the book isn't on the shelves anymore - I must have given it away at some point. Oh well.
DeleteI saw this article a while back, in which Mikhail Gorbachev was interviewed:
ReplyDelete"As the Soviet Union was breaking up 25 years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev expected the United States and its allies to provide vital aid. The former Soviet president thinks their failure to offer significant help wasted a chance to build a safer world and resulted from short-sighted gloating at a Cold War rival's demise.
"Gorbachev, who helped end the Cold War by launching liberal reforms, cutting nuclear stockpiles and allowing Soviet bloc nations in Europe to break free from Moscow's diktat, spoke bitterly about the West's failure to embrace the new era of cooperation he says his policy of "perestroika" offered.
"They were rubbing their hands, saying, 'How nice! We had been trying to do something about the Soviet Union for decades, and it ate itself up!'" Gorbachev said.
He blasted what he described as Western "triumphalism," saying it remains a key factor in tensions between Russia and the West."
Of course, that is Gorbachev's take, but if the West had undertaken something like the Marshall Plan at that point, might things be different now?
I remember sending a letter to then PA Senator Harris Wofford (D) to the effect that we were at a critical point in history and that some sort of Marshall Plan was called for to insure Russia and other ex-Soviet republics transitioned to stable democracies. The letter I received in answer said we needed the money for OUR country. I took it to mean statesmanship was dead in the Democratic Party, too. I agree with Gorbachev who I think was a decent man.
DeleteSorry this is off topic, but Jim Pauwels, did you folks in the Chicago area hear anything about this story? Sounds pretty over the top.
ReplyDeleteKatherine - yes, my wife sent the story to me a day or two ago. I don't know the priest in question, but I'm grateful he's not at my parish. I'm guessing that "All Are Welcome" is not his favorite church song.
Delete