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Europe in Shambles
Europe was a mess after World War II. Multiple governments and powerful leaders had been overthrown, leaving a power vacuum that left Europe in chaos. The violence of the war also left behind mass destruction and poverty . Businesses and factories as well as homes had been destroyed leaving people without work or a place to stay. This caused Europe to sink into a massive economic depression. This is where the United States decided to step in.
The European Recovery Program (ERP), closely modeled after the Truman Doctrine’s policy of supporting Greece and Turkey, was announced in June 1947 by General George Marshall in his speech at Harvard University. He stated there that the ERP was directed against hunger, poverty and chaos, not against any county or doctrine. In order to solve the post-war disorder in Europe, to prevent left-leaning governments from rising up in reaction to Nazi occupation, and for humanitarian reasons, the United States loaned money and material support worldwide. This is most commonly known as the Marshall Plan.
Dear mom and dad, send money
One of the main and well publicized goals of the Marshall Plan was to solve the post war disorder running rampant across Europe. Marshall recognized that the United States did not have the resources to rebuild Europe country by county without any cooperation, so the Plan was set up to force participating nations to work together in order to plan the most effective way to make use of American Aid. This spawned the creation of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), which was mainly a planning and coordinating group. The OEEC comprised sixteen free, European countries. The Marshall Plan was also an unpreced...
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...in Press, 2005
McMahon, Robert J. The Cold War New York: Oxford University Press, 2003
Powaski, Ronald E. The Cold War The United States and the Soviet Union, 1917-1991 [book
on-line] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, accessed 12 June 2011), iii; available from Questia, http://www.questiaschool.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=78888203; Internet.
Thackeray, Frank W. and Findling, John E Events that Changed the World in the Twentieth
Century. Westport, Connecticut: The Greenwood Press, 1995)
Walker, Martin The Cold War, NY, NY: Holt Paperbacks, 1993
Watson, Robert P., Devine, Michael J. and Wolz, Robert J. eds., The National Security Legacy
of Harry S. Truman [book on-line] (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2005, accessed 12 June 2011), iii; available from Questia, http://www.questiaschool.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=113611086; Internet.
Barnet, Richard J. “The Ideology of the National Security State”. The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 26, No. 4. 1985, pp. 483-500
Stephen Ambrose speaks much on wars that America was directly or indirectly involved in. In one chapter, The Legacy of World War Two, he saw war, for the US and the Allies, in World War Two, as “not to conquer, not to enslave, not to destroy, but to liberate” (Ambrose 120) He goes on to say that “the Marshall Plan was the most generous act in human history.” (Ambrose 121) The Marshall Plan created NATO, the Berlin Air Lift and Ambrose swimming in patriotism claimed it was “the American spirit, more than American productive power, that made it so.” (Ambrose 121) He continues h...
and other countries.People may argue that the foreign policies made at this time were ineffective. The Marshall Plan spent a lot of the U.S. money to rebuild and help countries in Western Europe recover from the war. Americans may not have appreciated the fact that the U.S. government decided to give other countries money when it could have been used for something more important in the U.S. The Truman Doctrine let the U.S. be in a close distance to the Soviet union and their buffer contraries, therefore provoking them and creating more unneeded tension. The idea of communism needed to be stopped but these policies may not have been the correct approach. The U.S. should have been constantly trying to negotiate with them even if they did not want to. Besides the fear of communism, people may argue that the domestic affairs were overall very good in the U.S. The economy was striving and many people had enough money to buy houses, foods, supplies, cars, and other discretionary items. The women that took over men’s jobs during the war made good money and had a lot of savings. Therefore, when the war was over they were able to help support their returning partners or family members. From the late 1940s to the early 1950s, millions of children were born, known as the Baby Boom. Also, the G.I. Bill was passed to help anyone who fought in the war, worked in factories that made supplies for the war, and anyone who did anything to help the war effort start their new life. The G.I. Bill did not include women, African Americans or Jewish people only white men. The government paid for these people to go to college, get higher paying jobs, and even get new
Offner, Arnold A. Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945-1953. 1st September 2002. New Article. 11th March 2014.
George C. Marshall of appointed by Truman as the Secretary of State who did a commencement speech at Harvard University for restoring Europe. After the end of war, much of the European’s continent still lay in ruins. European received shipments of food, staples, fuel and machinery. There were about sixteen countries that helped aid Western Europe and they were Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and western Germany. The Soviet Union did not trust the United States because they feared it was an attempt to weaken Soviet interest and also blocked benefits to Eastern Bloc countries creating their own Molotov plan. The goal was to help them get back on their feet after the devastation of the war. This was a good deed foreign policy. The plan helped so much that the national gross product grew as much as 25 percent. It put Western Europe back onto its feet. The plan funding ended in
Marshall, George C. Cold War Reference Library. Ed. Richard C. Hanes, Sharon M. Hanes, and
To what extent did the Marshall Plan aid Western Europe amidst the devastation of post-WWII?
The Marshall Plan was proposed by Secretary of State-- George C. Marshall at Harvard University on June 5, 1947. Marshall mentioned the terrible condition of Europe at the beginning of the speech, and he convinced that US should set up an aid program for Europe to recover their economy. The Marshall Plan was a 4-year aid program which the United States had to give over $12 billion to the countries in Western Europe to help them rebuild their economy since most part of Europe was devastated by World War 2. $12 billion was not a small amount of aid which was a huge cost for the United States. Why would the Marshall Plan still be approved and what was its benefit for the United States?
It is an attempt to solve the reparation issue of Germany after the World War I. The new German government stopped the resistance and tended to approach a new way to settle the reparations question under the Treaty of Versailles. Spielvogel noted that the Dawes Plans established by international commission “reduced reparations and stabilized Germany’ s payments on the basis of its ability to pay” (799). In order to reduce its burden and promote its recovery, this plan also provided a two hundred million dollars loan for Germany. It should be studied today because this plan allows the Germany to pay for the reparations. The loans offered by the United States starting the heavy American investment in the Europe, which brought about the flourish of Europe in the 1920s.
Truman’s accomplishments in his domestic policy were impressive, considering the hardships the nation was experiencing as World War II came to an end, and the resistance of Congress (which was greatly made up of Republicans and conservatives) to liberalism. The president was able to pas...
Powaski, Ronald E. "The Cold war: The United States and the Soviet Union." In The Cold war: The United States and the Soviet Union, by Ronald E. Powaski, 303-304. Oxford University Press, 1997.
To make things better, a new committee united and created an even more innovative plan to aid the German economy. It was named the Young plan after Dr. Owen G. Young. This plan stated that in order to make the German and world economy even more prosperous and allow the fluency of money, reparations will be set lower and all occupying troops must evacuate German
This investigation will utilize secondary sources to examine how the Marshall Plan promoted trade, resource, and financial aid organizations such as the OEEC and ERP, how the Marshall Plan’s aid of individual nations allowed them to be able to trade with neighboring nations again, and how the Marshall Plan created a
In 1929, the American economy crashed- and the Europeans, (especially the Germans) who were very financially dependent on the Americans, plummeted into the same state of homelessness and starvation. The air was already filled with anticipation- anticipation for war. Everybody was tense and bitter- the last thing that the Europeans needed was grumbling stomachs. The Germans were already in an economical predicament- and the American crash didn’t help in any way; the Americans had been helping Germany with the Dawes plan, which spread the reparations out over a longer period of time, and funded 8,000,000 gold marks. But even this small sliver of hope was faltering. The American economy had fallen- the help that Germany was receiving was beginning to fail. The Allies were still in debt to America after WWI, but had no money to pay off the debt. This money that America was owed (over $10,000,000,000) could have been used to stop the depression. This creates a very vicious, hypothetical circle: If the Europeans had been able to pay back America, America's economy would have been saved- thus uplifting the world economy; however, the American economy crash was the reason that Europe wasn’t able to pay America back in the first place! The fear, confusion, and stress of
...E. The Cold War: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1917-1991. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.