by Benn Steil
Demonstrating that his aim was securing personal obedience, rather than ideological purity, Stalin even turned on the most ardent and spirited of Europe’s Marxist dictatorships, Tito’s Yugoslavia. In February of 1948 he blasted its “reckless independent actions” in the Balkans, which threatened to make Yugoslavia into a southeastern suzerain, or worse—one that would undermine Moscow’s authority in the wider East.27 Yet Tito refused to back down on his territorial claims or support for the Greek Communists: “We are not a pawn on a chessboard,” he declared in March.28 The second Cominform gathering in Bucharest, in June, would condemn “Titoism” as a heresy.
Stalin refrained, however, from sending the Red Army to bring Belgrade into line. “I’m absolutely sure that if the Soviet Union had a common border with Yugoslavia,” reflected his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, years later, “Stalin would have intervened militarily. As it was, though, he would have had to go through Bulgaria, and Stalin knew we weren’t strong enough to get away with that. . . . [T]he American imperialists would have actively supported the Yugoslavs—not out of sympathy with the Yugoslav form of socialism, but in order to split and demoralize the socialist camp.”29 The Cominform would meet for a final time, in Hungary, in November 1949. Khrushchev would abolish it in 1956.
As for the West, the creation of the Cominform “seems to foreshadow a fundamental change in Communist tactics in France and Italy,” Reston opined in The New York Times on October 12, 1947.30 He was right. Three years earlier, Stalin had warned Thorez not to undermine de Gaulle (who resigned as head of the provisional government in January 1946); but times had changed, with the Americans now on the offensive. On his return from the Polish debacle, Duclos reported Moscow’s new orders to the French Politburo. Zhdanov, he explained to his comrades, now “insisted on the need to destabilize the government. . . . The only objective is to destroy the capitalist economy. . . . In the future, the Kremlin will be completely indifferent to whether or not Communists are in or out of government, but all parties must fight against economic aid from the United States.”31 In fact, the Cominform, which reminded the French and Italian publics of the reviled Comintern, made it all the more difficult for their Communist parties to claim independence from Moscow—which was necessary to attract votes.
The new Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) concluded in a secret November 7 memorandum to the president that the Soviets had abandoned hopes for western Communist parties to attain power by the ballot box. “The post-war opportunity to win Western Europe by political action,” Moscow believed, “has now been lost.” It was therefore turning to “revolutionary activity in the pre-war style” in order “to defeat the European recovery program.”32
Moscow, Caffery cabled Marshall, “is convinced that the Marshall Plan [will] serve to promote the formation of a western European bloc [to] serve as a dangerous jump-off place for attacking Soviet Russia.” It therefore needed “bold action to neutralize capitalist assistance to France and Italy and to prevent establishment . . . of prosperous regimes . . . under American influence.”33 He said that French prime minister Ramadier was “deeply disturbed” by the situation. His government had been “progressively orienting its policy toward the US and [had] continued to oppose heavy Communist pressure to re-enter the government.” It did so “counting largely on the Marshall Plan and interim aid.” He urgently needed “a clearer indication that interim aid will be forthcoming”; otherwise “the government will probably collapse” in short order.34 Italy, American ambassador James Dunn cabled Marshall from Rome, was also “on the verge of a dollar crisis. . . . [P]olitical upheaval [could not] be held off for long. . . . While the Marshall Plan is still a light of hope on the dismal road Italy walks, it is a dim and distant one for the weary traveller.”35
A gathering of fifty thousand Communist supporters in Paris in October 1947 heard Thorez denounce the Marshall Plan as a “terrible menace” to French independence. American aid, he said, was nothing more than the “return of stolen goods.”36 In November, Communist-controlled French unions launched a wave of violent strikes, shutting down docks, coal mines, metalworks, and auto factories. Industrial production came to a standstill. Garbage lay uncollected, mail undelivered. By the end of November, over one million (perhaps as many as two million) workers would walk off their jobs.37 When in early December, John Foster Dulles visited Paris to assess the situation, his train had to be rerouted after the tracks were blown up. Communist-controlled media denounced capitalism and American imperialism for plunging France into crisis. And to show Washington that its Marshall Plan would be useless, union leaders ordered workers to destroy machinery and loot equipment before walking off the job.
Sabotage hit at a strategic weakness in U.S. aid conditionality—that recipient governments would have to meet production targets before further tranches would be disbursed. The Communists aimed at leaving behind no productive apparatus for American capital to revive. An angry Minister of the Interior Édouard Depreux told the National Assembly that the Communist riots in Marseilles had the same instigators as those in Italy. Without naming the Soviet Union, he declared that France would not permit “foreigners to stage violent political battles on her territory.”
The new confrontational tactics set back recovery in both countries. Feeling more dependent on Washington than ever, their governments, however, tacked to the right. Following de Gaulle’s speech condemning Soviet dictatorship on October 5, which the State Department judged a “spectacular success,” the general’s Rally of the French People (RPF) party stunned both the Communists and Socialists with a victory in municipal elections two weeks later.38 “The course of events in western Europe is demonstrating . . . that highly developed countries cannot be captured by Communist propaganda and infiltration,” said Walter Lippmann, whose collection of essays critiquing Kennan, The Cold War, had just been released in book form.39 “They do not react to hunger, inflation, and the paralysis of government by turning to the Communist Party. They turn to the right, not to the left.”40
On November 18, Thorez met with Stalin in Moscow. The Soviet leader warned him not to wage “the struggle against the Marshall Plan . . . too crudely.” Don’t let the Socialists paint the Communists as being against American aid, Stalin directed. Insist only that you are against “the enslaving conditions.” It was lamentable, of course, he added, that the Soviet Union had not liberated Paris, instead of the capitalists; Thorez agreed, saying that “the French people would have enthusiastically received the Red Army.” Stalin assured him, however, that Moscow could still supply the French Communists with arms “if it becomes necessary.”41
Meanwhile in Paris, de Gaulle fretted privately over a collapse in the franc. Paris was on edge with talk of yet another world war.42
The following day, November 19, Socialist prime minister Paul Ramadier—under intense pressure from a mass strike by 700,000 longshoremen, coal miners, and metalworkers—resigned. Seventy-four-year-old former PM Léon Blum, frail since his two-year Nazi incarceration, failed to muster a majority in the National Assembly to replace Ramadier. President Vincent Auriol, confiding to his diary that the country “was on the edge of the abyss,”43 turned to ascetic MRP (Christian Democrat) finance minister Robert Schuman. On a pledge to “defend the Republic,” Schuman secured the necessary majority on the 24th.44 Born in Luxembourg, educated in then-German Alsace, excused from German military service in World War I on health grounds, Schuman had only become “French” at the age of thirty-two. He would go on to become a celebrated architect of the European Community and the transatlantic alliance.
In Italy, Communist union bosses fulminated against the Marshall Plan. Togliatti—leader of the 2.25-million-member Communist Party, and a target of U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) bugging operations45—denounced Christian Democrat prime minister Alcide De Gasperi’s “sell out to foreigners.” He called on Italians to “liquidate this government of reaction!” Rioters graffitied Rome’s ancient walls with party slogans;
they defaced Vatican buildings with hammers and sickles. They clashed with carabinieri in towns throughout the south. Dozens died in November skirmishes; scores more were seriously injured.46
But the violence only “made most Italians more keenly aware that their political future depends to a considerable degree on the Marshall Plan,” in the words of New York Times Rome reporter Arnaldo Cortesi. De Gasperi appealed to Washington to speed aid. At home, his party pressed the message that the Italian Communists were tools of Soviet foreign policy. The country’s only hope for a better future, they insisted, was help from the United States.
“Far from believing in the danger of an American hegemony over Europe,” said Foreign Minister Count Carlo Sforza, “I sometimes fear that the United States, tired of so many paltry accusations and insinuations, may end by returning to isolationism and turn her back upon Europe. That would be an intellectual and moral disaster for the United States, but it would be an even graver disaster for the whole of Europe, even for that part that is beyond the so-called ‘iron curtain.’ ”
The political symbolism of the Marshall Plan had, by this point, become so enormous, so much greater than the actual sums involved, that “the outlook would be infinitely brighter for communism [if the Plan were defeated] than if it had never been proposed at all,” Cortesi observed.47 Yet watching the violence unfold, New York Times reporter Harold Hinton lamented that there seemed to be “more confidence in the [Marshall] program’s success in the Kremlin than exists in certain segments of the United States economic and political life.”
AS THE ADMINISTRATION BEGAN ITS autumn offensive to break down homegrown resistance to the Marshall Plan, the priority became sharpening the message. Yes, Europe was in humanitarian crisis, but that would not do. Too many saw aid as a bottomless sinkhole that would drain resources vital to American defense. Yes, boosting Germany’s industrial production would create resources to lessen America’s financial burden, but it would also help it rearm and threaten its neighbors again. Yes, Britain’s empire was imploding more rapidly and violently than had been anticipated. But hadn’t America fought two world wars to put an end to Europe’s iniquitous imperial impulses? The spotlight, Marshall knew, had to be on Soviet Communism—the threat it represented to the independence of European nations, and in turn to America’s own way of life.
Following Germany’s surrender in May 1945, Stimson and McCloy had tried to persuade Truman to rebuild German industry. A jolt went through the room when Stimson said that unchecked economic chaos was “likely to be followed by political revolution and Communist infiltration.” McCloy recalled that “people sat up and listened when the Soviet threat was mentioned.”48 If you wanted meaningful economic intervention in Europe, McCloy then understood, it was not enough to argue that it would make things better; you needed to emphasize that the alternative was communism.
In July 1946, Congress passed a controversial $3.75 billion postwar loan to Britain ($46 billion in today’s money); it did so not on the basis of warm feelings toward a democratic ally, nor even on the belief that aid could do much economic good. Rather it was, in Republican congressman Christian Herter’s words, to counter “impending Russian troubles.” Or, as Democratic house speaker Sam Rayburn put it, to prevent “England and all the rest [being] pushed toward an ideology I despise.”49
The State Department now applied what it had learned from such episodes. On September 29, 1947, its new Advisory Steering Committee on European Recovery Program laid out the new political focus in the starkest possible political terms:
There is reason to believe that the totalitarian [i.e., Communist] forces have decided to engage in, and have already begun, a militant and concerted effort to subvert democratic governments before [a] recovery program can get under way. They are hoping that the food and financial situation in Europe this winter will produce economic conditions sufficiently serious that they can be aggravated by aggressive communist actions to a point where the position of democratic governments in France and Italy can be made untenable and communist regimes installed.50
Indeed, West European governments were already issuing rationing directives for the winter, aimed at controlling consumption of scarce commodities such as heating oil. Just one day earlier, the Swedish government decreed that, under anticipated winter conditions, people were forbidden from heating their homes beyond 50º F.51
The committee’s memo went on:
From the viewpoint of the vital interests of the United States, the principal issue in Europe today is whether or not it will be totalitarian. If the virus of totalitarianism spreads much farther, it will be almost impossible to prevent its engulfing all western Europe. This would mean communist totalitarianism almost everywhere on the continent with the iron curtain moving to the Atlantic.
In the event of a totalitarian Europe, our foreign policy would have to be completely re-oriented and a great part of what we have fought for and accomplished in the past would be lost. The change in the power relationships involved would force us to adopt drastic domestic measures and would inevitably require great and burdensome sacrifices on the part of our citizens. The maintenance of a much larger military establishment would undoubtedly be required. The sacrifices would not be simply material. With a totalitarian Europe which would have no regard for individual freedom, our spiritual loss would be incalculable.52
Yet as Europe deteriorated—a pitiful wheat crop, violent strikes, falling dollar reserves—the sense of urgency impelling the administration still found little counterpart in Congress. Truman therefore invited legislators of both parties to the White House on September 29 to frame the case for immediate action.
“We’ll either have to provide a program of interim aid relief until the Marshall program gets going, or the governments of France and Italy will fall—Austria too,” the president told his reluctant guests, “and for all practical purposes Europe will be Communist.” This is as grim a picture of Europe’s future as Truman had painted since his call for Greek and Turkish military aid in March. “The Marshall Plan,” he went on, “goes out the window” once those governments collapse, “and it’s a question of how long we could stand up in such a situation. This is serious. I can’t overemphasize how serious.”
Rayburn took Truman at his word, but had no wish to be a profile in courage. “I had hoped very much, Mr. President, there would be no special session of Congress,” he said. “Can’t something be worked out [without Congress]? Can’t you find the money in the government agencies?”
No, Truman said, “Congress has got to act.” Without a special session, Truman knew, Republicans would duck responsibility and attack the White House for partisan gain.
“Then the plan had better be well worked out,” Rayburn said resignedly, “right down to the details . . . so that we get right to it the minute Congress meets.”
Republicans, however, were less ready to buy in. “Mr. President, you must realize there is a growing resistance to these programs,” house majority leader Charles Halleck objected. “I have been out in the hustings, and I know. The people don’t like it,” he said. “They can see very well that for all of the money we have appropriated and spent, billions of dollars, they are worse off over there than before,” said New Hampshire senator Styles Bridges.53
Conservative opposition to the Plan was widespread. Many questioned the Plan’s economic premises. New York representative John Taber said he had seen no “underfed people” in his European travels. Their problem was that they were simply “not working as hard or as vigorously as they should. We in the United States,” he said, “got where we are because we worked harder.”54 Nevada senator George Malone attacked the Plan as a “World-wide WPA scheme,” referring to Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, the largest New Deal agency. There was, he said, “no call for the United States to finance socialism all over Europe.”55 New York representative Jacob Javits, who acknowledged that Europe “desperately needed” aid, warned that “the threat of the con
tinent going Communist must not scare the United States into doing something unwise or uneconomic.”56 Ohio representative George H. Bender assailed “the Truman Administration’s reckless policy of foreign expenditures,” which the president, he said, justified by creating “synthetic” crises.57 Michigan senator Homer Ferguson argued that loans should be extended only to companies operating in Europe, rather than their governments, as aid to governments only served to undermine free enterprise.58 This was no way, he said, “to develop democracy or fight communism.”59 Others demanded that any new foreign aid be tied to domestic demands: “No tax relief, no European relief!” insisted Ohio representative Clarence Brown.60
Warnings about Europe’s political weakness did, however, find purchase with some on the right. “We’ve got to stop Communism,” House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Charles Eaton told Truman, “and I’m ready to work with Senator Vandenberg.”61 But Truman’s challenge was to convince many more Republicans that the Marshall Plan was the answer to communism, rather than being communism itself.