Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  It was the most unambiguously and triumphantly successful of all America’s post-war policies. One of the reasons for this was that it was also the most tactful. Marshall Aid was administered by a small group of Americans in Paris, whose principal job was to approve European shopping-lists. Once so approved, dollars were exchanged for European currencies, and with those dollars the Europeans paid for their purchases. In this way American aid, though essential, was almost invisible: ordinary Europeans noticed only that they were dealing with their own authorities; no friction or resentment was created, as would certainly have been the case had the United States tried to administer its aid directly. To be sure, the Europeans were not given any clear cause to be grateful; but then gratitude is a transient and unreliable emotion at the best of times. A more solid quid pro quo was provided by the so-called ‘counterpart funds’ – the vast holdings in European currencies that resulted from the Marshall transactions. They were available to American businessmen wishing to invest in Europe, and as American industrial profits began to pile up there were many such. The economic bonds linking the two continents thus diversified and tightened.

  Yet even the Marshall Plan had its drawbacks. In the first place it marked the moment when the USA and the USSR formally and publicly became enemies. Years and years would pass before they found it possible to negotiate seriously again, years during which huge vested interests, with overwhelming stakes in the continuance of the conflict, would emerge. Secondly, what began as a policy of economic containment of Soviet messianism, as promulgated by George Kennan of the State Department, soon modulated into military confrontation. The division of Europe into East and West which the Marshall Plan signalized would soon become a division between military alliances. Third, the way in which the plan was presented to the American people had unfortunate consequences. The administration was chiefly, indeed exclusively, concerned with the Soviet threat to international peace; but anti-communism in the United States tended to be quite as much concerned with a wider range of issues, not all of which could reasonably be connected with the Cold War, and with the imaginary threat of internal subversion. The selling of the Marshall Plan blurred the difference between the two approaches and made the nastier, sillier, more demagogic form of anti-communism respectable. Worse: the intellectual processes behind the formulation, both of the Truman Doctrine and of the Marshall Plan, were deeply confused. The practical instinct of the policy-makers led them to the right policies – to rescue Greece from a communist take-over, to restore Europe to prosperity – but the reasons given, even in the innermost sanctum of the State Department, were fanciful. Dean Acheson, for example, said that a communist victory in Greece might lead to the loss of three continents to Russia. This was pure fantasy, and pointed to an abiding weakness of American diplomacy: its practitioners still found it difficult to recognize reality. Finally, the success of the Marshall Plan not only confirmed America’s position as leader of the West but encouraged policy-makers in Washington to undertake bold, ambitious schemes in the high confidence that American strength and will would be sufficient to carry them out. Hysteria at home and over-confidence abroad were the two unhappy states of mind which the designers of the Marshall Plan unintentionally fostered.

  At least the plan was not a partisan affair. Indeed it was a saying of the period that politics ought to stop at the water’s edge, which explains the prominence of Republicans like Vandenberg and John Foster Dulles in diplomacy. No such partnership was visible in domestic politics. The Republicans had not recaptured Congress to play second fiddle to the Democrats. On the contrary, they acted at times as if they hoped to undo the entire New Deal. Led by their narrow-minded paladin, Senator Taft, they pushed through the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution, which disqualified any candidate from being elected President more than twice. In view of subsequent abuses of Presidential power this revival of the two-term tradition looks a great deal wiser than it did at the time, when Truman denounced it, quite accurately, as a deliberate slur on the memory of Franklin Roosevelt (no one could doubt Truman’s disinterestedness, for the amendment did not apply to him). An even more important achievement was the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, a law which sharply curtailed the freedom of action, and thus the industrial power, of the labour unions. It outlawed strikes by government employees, for example, banned the closed shop and made the unions responsible for breaches of contract. It required union leaders to swear they were not communists. Above all, it revived the labour injunction by empowering the President to suspend or forbid by court injunction any strike for up to eighty days, the so-called ‘cooling-off period’, while an agreed solution was sought to whatever problem had arisen. This law could never have got through if the struggles between management and labour, in the post-war period of rapid inflation, had not been so bitter. There had been 5,000 strikes in 1946 alone, and 3,000 in 1947. They had created widespread public resentment. The anti-communist provision was possible because of the savage battles within the CIO and its member unions between communist and anti-communist leaders (men such as Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers). At least the unions were at one in denouncing Taft-Hartley. But they have never got it repealed, and it acted as an effective check on union growth in the Sun Belt.

  For the rest, the Republicans had little to offer their countrymen save opposition to the administration’s proposals, and Red-baiting. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, first set up in 1938, was put on a permanent footing and began a series of investigations and public hearings which initiated a long period of public demoralization, a cause of shame to Americans ever since.5 The committee members were much more interested in publicity for themselves than in protecting the United States from subversion or respecting the civil liberties of American citizens, not to mention their jobs, reputations and self-respect. The Committee was to have a run of twenty years or so, in the course of which it did incalculable damage and no good. It was an all-too-typical product of Congress in the forties.

  President Truman saw an opportunity. Running for election in his own right in 1948 he largely ignored the Republican candidate, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York (except that occasionally he abused him, to happy cries of ‘Give’ em hell, Harry!’ – once, monstrously, as a fascist). Instead he spent his time attacking the ‘do-nothing’ Congress. The experts all agreed that the President had no chance of victory, but he fought a doughty campaign. It was the most purely enjoyable contest of recent times. The candidates were well-matched, and however desperate the state of international relations (the Russians blockaded Berlin in June, which brought on the successful Berlin airlift in retaliation) it was, to the ordinary citizen, the least crisis-laden Presidential year since 1928. It was also the last campaign of the sort which had been traditional since the days of William Jennings Bryan. The conventions were televised, but there were too few households with sets for the new medium to have much effect on the outcome. Truman reached the voters by criss-crossing the country in a train, ‘whistle-stopping’ in the style of Theodore Roosevelt. Never again! His pugnacity, his good humour, his partisan loyalty and, perhaps, the fact that everyone has a weakness for the underdog (and Dewey was said to look like ‘the little man on the wedding-cake’) explain the outcome: Truman confounded the experts and defeated Dewey comfortably. He defeated Congress too: the Democrats regained control. In January 1949 he was inaugurated for his first full term, promising a ‘Fair Deal’ to the American people.

  The ‘Fair Deal’ was a continuation and extension of the New Deal, meant to please those groups – workers, blacks, farmers – whose votes had carried the day for the President. Some of it got through Congress: the minimum legal wage was raised, the benefits of Social Security were extended to ten million more people, a vast programme of slum clearance and federally supported public housing was launched (ultimately, perhaps, to the benefit of the construction industry more than of anyone else, for much of the new housing was so badly built and badly
designed that it quickly degenerated into new slums). Some of it did not: proposals for universal medical insurance, a new system of farm subsidies, an anti-lynching law and a Fair Employment Practices bill. Events soon overwhelmed Truman’s liberal programme. The 1948 election had not really suited the times. Within his own party Truman had had to fight off two challenges: from Henry Wallace, who eventually ran as a third party candidate, on a ‘Progressive’ ticket that was little more than a front for the American Communist party; and, more dangerous, from the ‘Dixiecrats’, Southern Democrats who walked out of the Democratic convention when the Northern liberals, led by the mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey, inserted a strong civil rights plank in the party platform. The Dixiecrats put up a fourth candidate, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, and although they did no fatal damage to Truman, they thereby served notice on him that he might have trouble with the next Congress, in which they would continue to be influential. But as it turned out Truman’s second term was dominated not by these domestic difficulties but by crisis abroad. In 1949 the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, and the Chinese communists drove Chiang Kai-shek and his forces from the mainland to take refuge on the island of Taiwan (or Formosa).

  The end of the atomic monopoly caused many Americans to start looking for the spies and traitors who (they assumed) must have made it possible for the Russians to catch up so soon. The assumption was wrong, but it was none the less potent. The episode also decided the administration to enlarge the defence budget and to start work on the hydrogen bomb. This acceleration of the arms race was lamentable, but, given the state of Russo-American relations, was equally inevitable. It illustrated the pattern which the arms race took ever after. The race developed in jerks, according to the state of the nuclear art and the nervousness, which rose and fell, of the great powers. The culmination of the communist revolution in China had equally dramatic results for America, of perhaps an even more ominous kind, which yet do not fit neatly into any pattern.

  China had a special place in the outlook of all too many citizens. According to legend, the doctrine of the Open Door had saved the country from the clutches of European imperialism; Sun Yat-sen’s revolution in 1911 had appeared to be very much an American affair, inspired by the American ideology; American missionaries and doctors (often the roles were combined) had poured into the country to do it good, to Christianize it, to Westernize it; the fateful dream of profit still haunted many American businessmen; and many American soldiers and airmen had served in China during the war. Finally, Mao Tse-tung was seen as just another Russian puppet. These factors in themselves would have been enough to make it exceedingly difficult for many Americans to accept the communist victory, or to endorse Dean Acheson’s assurance that ‘the unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the government of the United States’. Unfortunately their state of mind, that of believers in American omnipotence, to whom, as Acheson observed in his memoirs, every goal unattained was explicable only by incompetence or treason,6 was to be inflamed and sustained by comparatively accidental matters. The Republicans, for example, saw a heaven-sent opportunity to embarrass the Truman administration: they could accuse it of ‘losing China’ by weakness and negligence, if not by outright treason. Henry Luce had been born in China and was devoted to Chiang Kai-shek, and perhaps even more to his wife, Madame Chiang, adroit, beautiful and American-educated. Luce had for years propagated the myth that the incompetent Chiang was his country’s George Washington, and now he became the lynch-pin of the ‘China lobby’, a pressure group which dedicated itself wholeheartedly to the task of protecting Chiang from further defeat and, eventually, to the overthrow of ‘Red China’. As if all this did not create difficulties enough for the administration, in January 1950 a former State Department official, Alger Hiss, was convicted in the courts of perjury for having denied under oath before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that he had once been a Russian agent who had sent copies of confidential state documents to the Soviet Union. The fact that his accuser, Whittaker Chambers, worked for Luce’s magazine Time inclined the President and his advisers to think that Hiss had been framed (a belief rather hard for most historians to share); but guilty or not, he was a severe embarrassment to the Democrats. He had been close to Dean Acheson, for example, and Acheson was now Secretary of State. The Red-baiters were much encouraged, and began to assert that it was malice domestic, not developments abroad, which explained all they disliked about American foreign policy. Had not Hiss been present at Yalta? Had he not helped to set up the United Nations, in whose Security Council Russia wielded a veto? Was it not probable that he, or some as yet undiscovered traitor, had been responsible for ‘the loss of China’? A series of hostile and extremely damaging investigations into the State Department was launched by Congress.

  It was a situation made for demagogues. HUAC redoubled its unpleasant activities; but the limelight was soon seized by a latecomer to this particular stage. On 9 February 1950 Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin (1909-57) announced to the world in a speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, that he had in his hand a list of the numerous communists ‘known to the Secretary of State’ who were still working and making policy in the State Department. And so the great witch-hunt was launched.

  The villain of the piece was of an all too familiar type. True, the most notorious demagogues had always previously come from the South, with the exception of the Nazi-sympathizing Father Coughlin, and he was never an office-holder; but McCarthy was otherwise clearly of their kidney” And there has always been something demagogic about even mainstream American politics. If a deliberate attempt to stir up the crowd by character assassination and cries of conspiracy are characteristic of demagogy, then neither Sam Adams, nor Thomas Jefferson, nor Alexander Hamilton, nor Andrew Jackson, and certainly not their associates, were guiltless. They each committed these sins, though they did not make them the sole substance of their politics. Demagogy was a potent force in the 1930s, and but for the success of Franklin Roosevelt might have become really dangerous. The opportunity had if anything grown in the years since then. Previous demagogues had had little solid appeal outside their own states or sections; but twenty years of modern government, modern problems and modern population movements had made the Americans much more homogeneous than ever before, greatly increased the importance of the national government and national politics and, in such devices as radio and television, created a national audience. Thanks to aircraft, a politician in quest of that audience could move about the country far more rapidly and easily. Nationwide magazines like Time and Life, and the emergence of the syndicated columnist, whose articles would be printed in tens or hundreds of newspapers across the country, had even done something to break down the intense traditional localism of the American press. All this represented opportunity to a demagogue; all he needed as well was an issue; and of those there were plenty in 1950, when the people were bitter and bewildered, not just because of the pace of change in the past two decades but because of the horrible way in which the longed-for post-Hitler peace had turned into the Cold War and then become the prelude to yet another hot war.