American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  Truman needed congressional approval for aid to Greece and Turkey, which presented a serious challenge. The 1946 election had bolstered the ranks of conservative Republicans skeptical of international obligations and their cost, while most liberals preferred working through the United Nations to unilateral action. To garner congressional votes and public backing, the president appealed for his aid proposal in sweeping, near-apocalyptic terms. Truman described the particular problems of Greece and Turkey as part of a global struggle between “alternative ways of life,” one based on democracy and freedom, the other on terror and oppression. “The policy of the United States,” he said in announcing what came to be called the Truman Doctrine, must be “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” “If we falter in our leadership,” Truman concluded, “we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.” Truman’s creation of a Federal Employee Loyalty Program to ferret out subversives within the government just nine days after his speech on Greek and Turkish aid heightened the sense of threat posed by world communism. Some critics of the president’s pronouncements (if not necessarily his aid program itself ), like well-known political writer Walter Lippmann, warned of the dangers of an “ideological crusade” that would draw the country into battles all over the world. But the president’s expansive rhetoric and dire warnings proved sufficient to win congressional passage of his program by wide margins. At least rhetorically, the United States had committed itself to resisting communism everywhere.

  In Greece, American officials, using aid as a club, became deeply involved in shaping almost every aspect of public life, from the composition of the cabinet to the policies of the trade union movement. Not wanting direct military involvement, the United States pressured Britain to keep a reduced military contingent in the country, which it did until 1954. Meanwhile, U.S. officials supported or condoned wholesale violations of civil liberties, including mass executions of political prisoners, as preferable to communist victory. This initial American exercise in orchestrating another country’s anticommunist struggle proved successful when, in the fall of 1949, the left-wing guerrilla movement collapsed.

  Well before then, the United States had launched a much larger European assistance program, the European Recovery Program (ERP), better known as the Marshall Plan, to jump-start the stagnating European economies. George Marshall, who had replaced Byrnes as secretary of state, proposed the program in June 1947. American leaders had genuine humanitarian concerns, but they also saw European economic recovery as a way to diminish support for the political left. An element of economic self-interest came into play, too. With Europe importing far more goods from the United States than it exported to it, a growing “dollar gap” raised the specter that soon European countries would not have the currency reserves they needed to continue trade with the United States.

  American planners believed that European recovery required multinational economic integration, which would expand markets, facilitate the sharing of resources and industrial capacity, and allow the reindustrialization of Germany, which France as much as the Soviet Union would never tolerate on a stand-alone basis. Rather than propose a specific plan, Marshall called on the Europeans themselves to develop a recovery program. To avoid the negative tone of the Greek and Turkish aid effort, which had stressed resisting communism rather than the positive gains of economic growth and cooperation, administration officials invited the Soviet Union to the planning meetings for the program (though they had no desire to actually have it participate). The Soviets came but soon walked out, objecting to the priority the plan gave to using German production to promote European recovery rather than to pay reparations, as well as the requirements that aid recipients share economic data and integrate their recovery efforts. Soviet leaders then forced the Eastern European countries that wanted to join the plan to walk away, too. The sixteen nations that remained developed a complex program for immediate relief, long-term aid, currency stabilization, and increased U.S. investment and trade, all accompanied by joint economic planning.

  In late 1947, Truman sent to Congress a bill to fund the ERP with an initial fifteen-month outlay of $6.8 billion, nearly a fifth of the total federal budget. At first, the plan faced considerable opposition. With Taft on the right and Wallace on the left criticizing the proposal, Congress moved slowly. Many members were as concerned with the huge cost of the plan as with its foreign policy implications. Soon, though, developments in Eastern Europe led Congress to act.

  Soviet leaders had not expected the United States to maintain a prolonged postwar presence in Europe and assumed that Anglo-American rivalry would preclude a united, anti-Soviet capitalist front. The Marshall Plan proved both these assumptions wrong and raised the specter of a restoration of German power. In response, Soviet leaders moved to consolidate control over their sphere. To redirect their economies eastward, the Soviet Union negotiated a series of bilateral trade agreements with its Eastern European neighbors. To assert political control, it set up the Communist Information Bureau, which joined together the Soviet, Eastern European, French, and Italian communist parties. Across Eastern Europe, combinations of Soviet and local communist initiatives forced noncommunist parties out of government coalitions. The last Eastern European country to have significant noncommunist forces in its leadership, Czechoslovakia, fell in line in early 1948, when its Communist Party used mass demonstrations, violence, and a rigged election to assume control. The only holdout from Soviet domination was Yugoslavia, whose Communist Party, led by Josip Tito, refused to submit to orders from Moscow.

  The Soviet crackdown in Eastern Europe, especially the events in Czechoslovakia, ended congressional hesitation about the Marshall Plan, which in early April won approval by very large margins. Over the next four years, the United States spent $13 billion on Marshall Plan aid. American aid helped reduce balance of payments problems, eliminate industrial bottlenecks, and encourage transnational economic cooperation. Western Europe entered a period of unprecedented growth.

  At least in the short run, the Marshall Plan went counter to the hope of the American foreign policy elite to create a world of free markets, free trade, and free currency exchange. European integration created the basis for a new regional tariff union that favored trade within its boundaries. But overall, American leaders proved remarkably successful in moving areas outside of Soviet control toward something approaching the liberal, capitalist world economic system that they saw as critical for American prosperity.

  The price for this accomplishment proved high, a long era of international tension and the increasing militarization of American society. As both camps hunkered down for prolonged conflict, the United States created structures for carrying out its side of what Walter Lippmann termed “the Cold War.” In mid-1947, Congress passed the National Security Act, unifying the armed services under centralized civilian control by creating a cabinet post of secretary of defense with supervisory power over the Army, Navy, and a new, autonomous Air Force and giving statutory authority to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to coordinate military advice and operations. (Two years later Congress created the Department of Defense, with the three armed services placed within it.) The law also established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to coordinate military and diplomatic intelligence and undertake other actions authorized by yet another new creation, the National Security Council (NSC), a top-level interagency group, headed by the president.

  In 1948, the NSC authorized the CIA to create a covert operations staff to undertake a broad range of activities, from propaganda and economic warfare to sabotage and aiding underground guerrilla groups. Very quickly, the CIA got deeply involved in Western European politics, using money and persuasion to get noncommunist trade unionists to break with communist labor organizations and promoting and funding noncommunist parties in the April 1948 Italian election. That same s
pring, Congress reinstituted the military draft and raised authorized troop levels. In the course of a single year, the country embarked on an unprecedented level of peacetime military preparedness and the creation of a large, permanent national security apparatus at the very center of the government.

  Meanwhile, a new, frightening conflict developed with the Soviet Union. In spring of 1948, the French succumbed to American and British pressure, agreeing to merge the three countries’ occupation zones to create a western German entity, which would be included in the Marshall Plan. To assure the French that they would not again face a hostile Germany, the United States pledged to keep its occupation troops in place for a prolonged period. The Soviets responded to these steps toward creating a western Germany integrated into an American-led bloc by harassing travel between western Germany and Berlin, which lay inside the Soviet occupation zone and like Germany itself had been divided into four occupation zones. When the Western powers announced that they would introduce a new currency in their zones, the Soviet Union began blocking train and truck traffic to the old capital, arguing that having effectively abandoned the idea of German reunification, its onetime allies should leave Berlin.

  Faced with a very dangerous situation, Truman decided that the United States would refuse to abandon its presence in the city but avoid a direct military confrontation by using an airlift to supply it. A long, tense stalemate ensued. As positions hardened, the United States, Britain, and France moved toward the creation of a self-governing West Germany, all but accomplished by the summer of 1949. Meanwhile, the United States, Canada, and ten European allies negotiated a self-defense alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to assure the Western Europeans that the United States would come to their defense if they were attacked by the Soviet Union or a resurgent Germany.

  The Soviet Union, having seen its effort to prevent a division of Germany boomerang, conceded defeat. In May 1949, it called off its blockade, having alienated Germans on both sides of the east-west divide and solidified a western anti-Soviet alliance. But there was no going back. Within just four years after the end of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union had gone from being allies to being leaders of opposing political-economic-military-ideological blocs, increasingly entrenched in their hostility to one another.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  Stalemate in Washington

  On November 2, 1948—election day—Harry Truman slipped out the back door of his home in Independence, Missouri, where he had come at the end of a hard campaign, and, accompanied only by Secret Service officers, drove to an all but deserted hotel in the small resort town of Excelsior Springs. He went to bed early. When he awoke briefly at midnight, he later recalled, a radio announcer said that he was “undoubtedly beaten,” confirming the predictions of the polls and major newspapers. Four hours later, a Secret Service agent, after hearing a radio report that the tide had turned, woke up the president. Long before dawn and the arrival of the final tallies, Truman declared, “We’ve got ’em beat,” and left his hideaway.

  The 1948 election provided the first opportunity after World War II for Americans to clearly indicate what direction they wanted their nation to go. Earlier contests gave some sense of their will, but local dynamics had played a role along with national issues. Only every four years, in presidential elections, did voters across the country get a chance express a verdict on the same candidates, the policies they promoted, and the visions they put forth.

  Developments abroad played a role in the 1948 election, but only indirectly. Truman’s handling of foreign policy rarely emerged as an electoral issue. Nonetheless, it proved a great asset. For one thing, it gave him a measure of stature that he had failed to achieve in his handling of domestic matters. For another thing, it helped rally to his side anticommunist liberals, who otherwise had little enthusiasm for his presidency. By adroitly winning bipartisan congressional support for his major foreign policy moves, Truman forced the election to be fought in large part as a referendum on the New Deal, terrain that proved hospitable.

  Liberalism Divided

  By the time of the 1948 election, liberals had split into two antagonistic camps. Both thought of themselves as heirs to Roosevelt and defenders of the New Deal, but they divided over policy toward the Soviet Union and the role of domestic communists. Tensions between them broke into the open after the 1946 election, during which anticommunist attacks had figured in some contests. The Democratic defeats forced liberals to rethink their strategies.

  One group, clustered around the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), formed in early 1947, sought a flexible policy toward the Soviet Union while fighting at home for a broad extension of the New Deal. Disillusioned with Truman and the Democratic Party, they explored the idea of realigning American politics by creating a new liberal party, unrestrained by conservative elements. Recognizing that the communists had important organizational resources, especially within the labor movement, they were willing to work with them. The idea of a third party became a reality when Henry Wallace—who since leaving the cabinet had been barnstorming the country attacking Truman’s foreign policy, calling for a revival of the New Deal, and sharply criticizing racial segregation—agreed to be its standard-bearer.

  Anticommunist liberals clustered around the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), formed shortly after the PCA. They viewed both the Soviet Union and domestic communists as antidemocratic and untrustworthy. Working with either, they believed, betrayed liberal principles. Additionally, they recognized that the conservative tide in the country, evident in the 1946 election, meant that any group that accepted communists in its ranks would be opening itself to attack. ADAers concluded from the election that liberals needed to trim their sails, build alliances with centrists, and remain in the Democratic Party. Like Wallace’s backers, they saw Truman as an inept hack, squandering the Roosevelt inheritance. They so desperately sought an alternative that they tried to recruit wartime hero General Dwight Eisenhower for the role, knowing almost nothing of his political beliefs. But in the end, swayed by Truman’s foreign policy and his veto of the Taft-Hartley bill, and without any other choice, they reluctantly accepted him as their candidate.

  As more and more liberals embraced anticommunism as a central ideological belief, subsuming other causes to it, the split in the left-liberal world spread from organization to organization, weakening or destroying many of them. Fighting between pro-communist and anticommunist factions racked the American Veterans Committee, set up as a liberal alternative to the American Legion. The Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the most important organization in the South supporting New Deal liberalism and racial equality, lost more and more of its anticommunist members as the organization drifted into the Wallace camp, so weakening it that it folded after the 1948 election. The National Student Association, founded in 1947, managed to keep both liberal camps within it by rejecting a proposal to ban individual communists from belonging, instead barring all national organizations from membership and picking its leaders through local student governments, which made it unlikely that Communist Party members would have much power.

  The widening chasm on the left particularly impacted the CIO. Immediately after the war, most CIO leaders, whether they allied with the Communist Party or opposed it, promoted an extension of the New Deal and called for maintaining an alliance with the Soviet Union, which they worked alongside within the newly established World Federation of Trade Unions. But in a much more conservative political environment, many CIO activists came to see the communists in their organization as an unacceptable liability and fell in line with the Truman administration’s hardening anti-Soviet foreign policy. The CIO took no official position on the Truman Doctrine, which AFL and railroad brotherhood leaders enthusiastically backed. But sharing the view that future national prosperity depended on expanded trade, CIO leaders found the humanitarian and economic thrust of the Marshall P
lan more acceptable. After George Marshall came to the 1947 CIO convention to personally promote the ERP, the labor federation endorsed his proposal.

  In early 1948, CIO president Philip Murray began using his power to line up opposition to the Wallace third-party effort. Wallace’s break with the Democratic Party, along with Truman’s veto of Taft-Hartley, led many labor leaders who had admired the former vice president to shift their allegiance to the president. Having built their organization under the shelter of sympathetic federal policy, CIO leaders feared for its future if the Republicans took over the White House. With Murray making opposition to the Wallace campaign a test of loyalty, in the end only a handful of unions supported it.

  Even as the Democrats fractured on their left, civil rights led to a breakoff on their right. In 1948, the treatment of African Americans emerged as a national electoral issue for the first time since Reconstruction. In many parts of the country, local black activists and their allies had begun pressing for equal access to the vote, jobs, housing, and schools. As large numbers of southern blacks moved to northern cities, they became a key electoral constituency in closely contested industrial states like New York, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, leading the parties to vie for their support. International developments also thrust the issue of racial discrimination forward. The wartime rhetoric of democracy and antifascism heightened sensitivity about racism at home, as did the UN commitment to universal human rights. Flagrant racial injustice within the United States made it difficult to make a convincing case that the Soviet-American rivalry pitted democracy against totalitarianism. Civil rights organizations moved to take advantage of the new circumstances, filing lawsuits, petitioning the UN to investigate racial discrimination in the United States, and threatening black resistance to the draft if the armed services were not desegregated.