New Book on Marshall Plan Shows America at Its Very Best

Nicolaus Mills

As a boy growing up in the American Midwest in the late 1940s, Nicolaus Mills -- author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America's Coming of Age As a Superpower (Wiley) -- was not much concerned with the currents of thought and tides of events that as a future historian he'd teach and write of. "I was not a particularly intellectual kid, in any way," Mills said recently by phone from the East Coast, where he has been a professor at Sarah Lawrence College for several years. "I'm afraid my childhood fascination was with the Cleveland Indians."

But one thing did catch his attention back then: the CARE packages he and his school peers were encouraged to send to grateful youngsters in post-World War II Europe.

"We collected money through either saving up our allowances, or paper sales. We sent the money to CARE, and they did the rest ... The packages were, for me, utterly banal: they'd have a washcloth and soap, and I think dried beef ... And we would have pen pals writing back to us from a particular school or town in Europe, so it did give me an odd sense, at a very early age, of how acute this need must be, in Europe. I think, also, I got the sense that this was something that Americans did -- they helped others."

Mills did some helping of his own, en route to becoming a Harvard- and Brown-trained historian: He worked both in Mississippi in the Civil Rights period and as a union organizer for Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers. His social activism fed his early writing, and he published articles in The Nation and The New Republic as well as in traditional academic journals. "I felt that I always had one foot in an academic camp, and one foot in a camp that was trying to reach a larger popular audience."

When he came to write books -- such as Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964 and Their Last Battle: The Fight for the National World War II Memorial -- the books were often about occasions when Americans rallied together in service of a worthy cause. "The idea of taking a comparatively small episode in American life ... and [suggesting] that it represents what America can do at its absolute best," Mills said, "seems to me a common thread in my writing."

That theme continues in Winning the Peace, Mills' account of the Marshall Plan, the project through which a victorious U.S. helped finance the economic recovery of Western Europe after World War II, and an initiative that current U.S. foreign policy puts in an intriguing perspective.

The subject was long of interest to Mills -- one brought into focus for him, he said, by two transformative modern events: "One was the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the sense that we were in a brand-new world. And that was followed, 12 years after, by 9/11. At 9/11, it seemed to me we were at a situation where, as in the Cold War in 1947, we faced a war on terror without an end in sight, and, at this point, it was incumbent upon America not simply to think of military solutions but, also, to think of the way foreign aid and foreign alliances could safeguard the country."

General George C. Marshall, retired chief of staff of the U.S. Army and secretary of state in the cabinet of President Harry S. Truman, confronted a parallel situation in 1947, Mills said, when he gave his famous speech at Harvard announcing the ambitious plan to help rebuild Europe -- a plan which bore Marshall's name rather than Truman's because Marshall's popularity greatly exceeded the president's.

"Marshall had this tremendous credibility coming from World War II," Mills said, "where he had petitioned for and fought terrifically well to get a peacetime draft in [early] '41. He had called for a cross-Channel invasion very early on. The level of trust that Marshall had, as a straight-talker and as someone who was right, was very high in Congress."

And Marshall didn't hesitate to speak to Congress in the bluntest terms. "In the book," Mills said, "I speak about Marshall telling Congress, this program will cost our country billions of dollars. It will impose a burden on the American taxpayer. It will require sacrifice today in order that we may enjoy security and peace tomorrow. There's such a notion of candor about the program ... Marshall believes it will work -- but, as he also tells Congress, it's a calculated risk: He doesn't guarantee it; there are no rosy scenarios that he promises. His real argument is that if we don't do it, Europe is sure to be in real trouble."

George C. Marshall had a sense of history -- indeed, a memory of it. As General John Pershing's aide, he had served overseas in World War I and had seen a victorious America then fail to come to Europe's aid in any significant way. "Marshall is deeply aware of America's [previous] neglect in Europe," said Mills, "and the sort of frittering away of the goodwill that we'd won ... as was Franklin Roosevelt, who was secretary of the Navy [during World War I] in the Wilson cabinet. Both of them, [near] the end of World War II, are deeply aware of the failures of World War I; and both are determined not to repeat those failures."

Marshall's credibility and popularity enabled him to win bipartisan support for the plan, Mills said. "The key figure helping Marshall is Arthur Vandenberg, who's the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. So it becomes both a Republican and a Democratic bill, in the end."

George Marshall not only testified in the House and Senate on behalf of the Plan, he also campaigned for its popular support through a series of speeches across the country, "much as any politician would do," said Mills. "He doesn't distance himself; he's not aloof from it at all. He puts his own integrity and reputation on the line to get it through."

The Marshall Plan proved every bit as expensive as Marshall had warned, costing some $13 billion (in current terms, roughly $579 billion). In its first full fiscal year, the Marshall Plan took up 10 percent of the federal budget.

The Plan worked, as Marshall had believed it would, to bring postwar stability to a Europe that was able to rebuild its infrastructure without sacrificing social-welfare programs. In 1953, George C. Marshall received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Every generation since World War II has viewed the Marshall Plan through the prism of its immediate experience, noted Mills. "The Bush administration has actually talked about a Marshall Plan for Iraq," the historian said, "but it's never implemented it very seriously. And it seems to me that the real problem with the Bush administration is that it painted the idea of going into Iraq as something that could be done quickly. It minimized the notion of sacrifice. It minimized any need for bipartisan politics. And, above all, it treated allies as a convenience. The Marshall Plan's essence was that Marshall really believed that the plan could only work if it were done with the Europeans -- not despite them."

The Marshall Plan, then, for today's Americans remains a tantalizing if receding symbol -- one that leaves Nicolaus Mills both proud and anxious.

"I feel optimistic in the sense that I think the Marshall Plan shows what America is capable of at its very best, and that's reason for writing about it," said the former youthful sender of CARE packages. "I feel great anxiety when I think that the values that Marshall espoused seem so distant and hard to come by in our world today." --Tom Nolan