The Committee for the Marshall Plan, also known as Citizens' Committee for the Marshall Plan to Aid European Recovery, was a short-term organization established to promote passage of the European Recovery Program known as the Marshall Plan – which "fronted for a State Department legally barred from engaging in propaganda." The committee disbanded not long after April 3, 1948, when U.S. President Harry S. Truman signed the Marshall Plan into law, which granted $5 billion in aid to 16 European nations.
Opposition to the Marshall Plan
Postwar anti-Communism, pullback to American isolationism, and general conservative backlash led U.S. Republican Party politicians like U.S. Representatives Howard Buffett of Nebraska and Fred Busby of Illinois to oppose the Marshall Plan, which Buffett called "Operation Rathole".
History
The Citizens' Committee for the Marshall Plan to Aid European Recovery formed in late October 1947. Its leaders were prominent liberal Eastern internationalists, members of the Council on Foreign Relations and Brookings Institution, a balance of bipartisan politicians, and labor leaders. Major donors included John D. Rockefeller. Awareness of the Marshall Plan was already rising from July to December 1947, but the committee felt the need to propagandize. To sway public opinion, the committee advertised, issued various documents, sponsored radio broadcasts, hired speakers bureaus. Targets included women's clubs, church councils, and public affairs groups. Dean Acheson went on his own speaking tour, which included Palo Alto, Portland, Spokane, Minneapolis, and Duluth. Message focused on American idealism, self-interest, and ideology–particularly, humanitarian and economic concerns. Legislative efforts included an interim aid bill. In January 1948, debate and hearings geared up and ran through June 1948. The Harriman Committee made a report, and the committee sent private organizations as witnesses, of which 26 members were committee members themselves. The Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia worked in the committee's favor, but it did not adopt a strong "bulwark against Communism" position but rather avoided the topic of Communism. On November 16, 1947, Alger Hiss published an essay that appeared on four pages of The New York TimesSunday Magazine, entitled "The Basic Question in The Great Debate." One of its five arguments was to answer the question "Why should we support socialist governments?" He summarized by writing, "Essentially the answer to this fifth question lies in the fact that the freely chosen governments of western Europe are the governments with which we must deal if we are to prevent economic chaos. We have no alternative." He also argued, "No country of Western Europe is at present fully socialistic or even 50 per cent socialistic in its control of economic life." Passage by the House and Senate of the Foreign Assistance Act helped. After cartoonist Munro Leaf volunteered his skills to the State Department's Office of Public Affairs, he wrote a book published by the Committee for the Marshall Plan in 1947, titled Who Is the Man Against the Marshall Plan?, a Bibliography of Basic Official Documents.
Other members included Robert Gordon Sproul and Katharine Marston Seabury, chair of the "women's division."
Legacy
Historian Michael Wala wrote, "The Citizens' Committee for the Marshall Plan to Aid European Recovery's work was crucial in passing the Marshall Plan."
