The Cold War & Its Origins, 1917–1960. Vol.I, 1917–1950

Long before the Greek-Turkish Aid Bill had been signed it had become apparent that Britain’s weakness left a vacuum in all Western Europe. Before the winter crisis of 1947, which affected all of Western Europe only less than Britain, the world went on assuming that a weakened Britain was still an important center of world power. She had been that so long that people found it difficult to believe a great pillar of world power had fallen. The façade was still largely there, supported by more than a million troops. The shock of the winter crisis was required to make it clear that in all Western Europe there was no surviving center of power.

When this was realized in Washington it was evident that new conceptions were essential, and that they could not be primarily military, as in Greece and Turkey. At the same time it was appreciated that the technique of scaring the Congress and the country, appealing to fear and anti-Red emotions, could not be made to work again immediately. On March 25, shortly after the Truman Doctrine speech, bold headlines had announced that a large aid to Korea bill would be next. It was apparently the plan to go right around the map, plugging up all holes with Truman Doctrine bills, but by June the Marshall Plan idea had replaced this program.

Acheson’s Cleveland Address. The first indication of an important change of emphasis came in a little noticed speech by Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson at Cleveland, Mississippi, in which he explained that our exports were running at sixteen billion a year, twice our imports, and asked where the foreigners were to get the dollars to cover this huge difference. To attack the problem he laid down five points, the third of which seemed to indicate a continuance of the Truman Doctrine policy. Since we could not meet all demands for aid, our assistance must be concentrated “in areas where it will be most effective in building world political and economic stability, in promoting human freedom and democratic institutions, in fostering liberal trade policies, and in strengthening the authority of the United Nations.” There having recently been complete disagreement at the Moscow Conference over the meaning of the terms “human freedom” and “democratic institutions,” the use of these terms could only mean that we would use our great economic strength to aid those countries which accepted our interpretation of them. In other words, we would help those countries which lined up against the Soviet Union. However, the speech as a whole was in such marked contrast to the emotional anti-crusading of the Truman Doctrine that it produced a strong and hopeful impression in Western Europe.

Marshall at Harvard. At home the American public was hardly prepared for the famous speech of Secretary Marshall at Harvard University, June 5, 1947, which was pitched on a plane of dignity and reasonableness far above the Truman Doctrine. Marshall recalled the distortion of Europe’s economy and its spoliation under the destructive rule of the Nazis and described the current inability of the cities to supply goods to the farmers in exchange for food. The inability to get sufficient food for the cities from the local peasantry then compelled the governments to use their scarce foreign credits to buy food.

This vicious circle must be broken by additional help from the United States over a three or four year period, in order to prevent “economic, social and political deterioration of a very grave character” which would have serious consequences on the economy of the United States. However, this further assistance “must not be on a piecemeal basis as various crises develop. Any assistance that this Government may provide in the future should provide a cure rather than a mere palliative.” It was evident “there must be some agreement among the countries of Europe as to the requirements of the situation and the part those countries themselves will take.” The initiative must come from Europe and “the program should be a joint one, agreed to by a number, if not all European nations.”

Our policy was “directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.” Any government that was willing to assist in the task of recovery would find full cooperation, but any government which maneuvered to block the recovery of others could not expect help from us. “Furthermore, governments, political parties or groups which seek to perpetuate human misery in order to profit therefrom politically or otherwise will encounter the opposition of the United States.”

This paragraph was a warning to the U.S.S.R. and to the communist parties not to try to block a large planned program for the revival of Europe, but the invitation to participate clearly covered the whole of Europe, including the Soviet Union.

This was a far cry from the principle of the Truman Doctrine that the Soviets must be ringed in and contained. If the Marshall invitation had been issued before the Truman Doctrine, or rather in lieu of it, the Cold War might swell have been prevented. Coming after the recent promulgation of the Truman Doctrine the Soviets were bound to scrutinize it with extra suspicion, to see if it might be a means of implementing the Doctrine.

The UN By-passed. This was the more certain since the United Nations was by-passed again. Sumner Welles considered this to be “the same basic defect” which had been contained in the Greek-Turkish proposals. He pointed out that the UN Economic Commission for Europe, proposed by the United States, had been in existence since March. Every European state, including Russia, was represented on it and no right of veto existed in it.¹

Here again was a United Nations agency ready at hand for the administration of a program of aid to Europe and the failure to use it meant, as one contemporary historian recorded, that “there was little likelihood that the proposed new aid would go to countries under Soviet control. . . . Marshall’s offer was not a proposal to revive UNRRA. It was a move to consolidate Western Europe as a counter-weight to the concentration of Russian power in the East. . . . It was left to the Soviet Union to decide, for itself and its satellites, whether the offer was an invitation or a challenge.”²

Molotov at Paris. The first Russian reaction to the Marshall proposal was a denunciation in Pravda, on June 16, calling it an extension of Truman’s “plan for political pressures with dollars and a program for interference in the internal affairs of other states.” The next day Foreign Minister Bevin went to Paris to confer with Foreign Minister Bidault and an invitation was sent to Molotov to join in the talks. On June 26 Molotov arrived in Paris, at the head of an entourage of 89 persons, including many economic experts. This event indicated to the London Times that “the whole atmosphere of international debate had changed to a healthier and more hopeful mood.”³ Simultaneously, the French communists dropped their opposition to the Marshall Plan and the world had reason to believe that the dangerous cleavage between East and West might be on the verge of being healed. Surely Molotov would not have brought so many experts if he did not intend to do business.

Before he arrived Bevin had made a defiant speech on June 19, declaring that Britain would go ahead with or without the Soviet Union, and on arrival Molotov encountered the same atmosphere of “take it or leave it” on the part of Bevin. Molotov also resented the prior conferences between the British and French and disapproved of the plan they had ready for him, which required an overall European balance sheet, showing resources and needs for the continent as a whole. The British and French felt that such a plan was necessary to meet Marshall’s requirements, but Molotov objected to it on three grounds: (1) that it was an interference in the internal affairs of the European nations; (2) that there should be a distinction between former allied, neutral and enemy states; (3) and that the German problem was an entirely separate matter to be dealt with by the Council of Foreign Ministers alone.

Bidault tried hard for a compromise but could not achieve it. On July 2nd Molotov made his final statement, in which he condemned “the creation of a new organization standing over and above the countries of Europe and interfering in their internal affairs down to determining the line of development to be followed by the main branches of industry in these countries.” He maintained that “the European countries would find themselves placed under control and would lose their former economic and national independence because it so pleases certain strong powers.” This would mean, for example, that Poland might be put under pressure to produce more coal at the expense of other branches of Polish industry, or that Czechoslovakia might be required “to increase her agricultural production and to reduce her engineering industry.”

Russian Objections. The Soviet Government could not venture along this path, said Molotov, renewing his proposal that each European country submit a separate list of its needs to the United States.

In conclusion, he warned that the Franco-British plan would divide Europe into two groups of states, in which case “American credits would serve not to facilitate the economic rehabilitation of Europe, but to make use of some European countries against other European countries in whatever way certain strong powers seeking to establish their domination should find it profitable to do so.” The Soviet Government considered it “necessary to caution the governments of Great Britain and France against the consequences of such action, which would be directed not toward the unification of the efforts of the countries of Europe in the task of their economic rehabilitation after the war, but would lead to opposite results, which have nothing in common with the real interests of the peoples of Europe.”

Bidault returned to Molotov the warning about dividing Europe and asserted that the making up of a European balance sheet would not impose “a shadow of a suspicion of restraint” upon Europe. There was no question of giving directives. All that was proposed was the harmonizing of production targets in free discussion.

In his reply Bevin called Molotov’s objections to the Franco-British program “a complete travesty of the facts and a complete misrepresentation of everything the British Government had submitted.” The Marshall Plan was a way to really make Europe free—“not to provide for the domination of any one state.” He regretted the threat that “if we continue this beneficent work we must face grave consequences.” His country had faced grave consequences and threats before and would not be deterred now.⁴

When Molotov departed angrily from Paris the world was stunned, realizing that it was now really divided into two parts. This was the more probable since Molotov had decided nothing himself, referring everything to Moscow. He had had full possession of a telephone line to Moscow during the last twelve hours of the conference.

Why did the Soviet Government throw away what was apparently a golden opportunity to bridge the East-West conflict? One probable answer is that the Kremlin did not believe that the Truman Doctrine policy was being reversed. The only indication of reversal was the single sentence in Marshall’s speech, whereas for many weeks “there must have been thousands upon thousands of words transmitted to Moscow reporting the hostile utterances of Senators and Congressmen, of Cabinet officials and/or irresponsible private citizens of prominence.”⁵

If the good faith of the Marshall Plan had been accepted, the Russians would still have been highly unwilling to supply the many detailed figures required about their national economy, since these were considered to be state secrets upon which the security of the Soviet Union depended. The Russians believed that the curtain of secrecy over their strength had deceived Germany and saved them when she attacked and they were still unwilling to reveal either the extent of their strength or their great post-war weaknesses. During the UNRRA period they had indeed given international officials from the West free circulation in the Soviet Union, for the first and only time, but only parts of the country were covered and no observers could assess the full extent of Soviet weakness.

The UNRRA type of aid which Russia now desired to have restored might well have prevented or alleviated the Cold War, but it was obviously impossible to restore it in a balance of power conflict. For the same reason Russia could not risk opening up Eastern Europe to Western capitalist influence and control. The chief underlying cause of the great power rivalry was the removal of Eastern Europe from its colonial relationship to Western I Europe and from Western capitalist investment. It was this removal of West Europe’s economic hinterland which made its plight desperate and the Kremlin had ground for believing that the Marshall Plan could not succeed, unless West Europe again received the raw materials and food products of Eastern Europe and supplied it with manufactured goods in return. But this would restore the old colonial relationship and also undermine the brave plans for industrialization which the new communist governments in most of the East European countries had under way. Worse still, from Moscow’s standpoint, an extensive restoration of Western influence, coupled with dependence on the West, would most probably prevent these governments from consolidating their holds on the countries of East Europe.

For Moscow the Marshall Plan presented a real threat, but Russia was most inept in turning it back. The chance that the American Congress, newly schooled by the Truman Doctrine campaign in fear and hatred of the Soviet Union, would approve large funds for Russia’s rehabilitation, or for that of any one of her satellites, was small indeed. Molotov could quite safely have left it to the Congress to defeat the Marshall Plan altogether, if the Russian orbit had any part in it.

Instead of remaining in Paris, to try for better terms or at least to temporize, Molotov departed brusquely, and convinced the American people that his purposes were sinister. He not only rejected their generous offer, but seemed intent on frustrating its fulfilment elsewhere. His departure also enabled Bevin and Bidault promptly to issue an invitation to all of the European states, Russia and Spain excepted, to attend a Marshall Plan conference.

This invitation was a sore temptation to each of the East European governments. All of them delayed action, except the Czechoslovak Government under Communist Premier Gottwald, which announced its acceptance in principle. However, when Gottwald and Foreign Minister Masaryk visited Moscow they changed their minds. Finland was the last of Russia’s neighbors to refuse to participate, after long hesitation.

The Cominform Organized. Once the lines were drawn the alarm of the Kremlin was acute. The Russians had no doubt whatever that the Marshall Plan was merely a means of implementing the Truman Doctrine, and from their standpoint a very dangerous one.⁶ They proceeded to bind their satellites together by a new series of trade treaties, twelve signed within the first thirty days. Trade treaties were offered also to France and Britain, and concluded with the latter country late in the year. Poland was permitted to send larger coal exports to the West.

On October 5, 1947 the formation of a new international organization of communist parties was announced in a formal communique. The representatives of the communist parties of all the Eastern satellites, Russia, France and Italy, had met in Warsaw and had decided to establish an Information Bureau with headquarters in Belgrade. The manifesto described the split among the victorious Allies as one between the Soviet bloc, trying to liquidate fascism and establish peace, and the Anglo-American countries aiming to strengthen their imperialism and choke democracy. The “Truman-Marshall Plan” was “only a farce, a European branch of the general world plan of political expansion being realized by the United States of America in all parts of the world.” The document closed with a long and vitriolic attack upon the socialist leaders of Western Europe, by name, for being “traitors in this common cause.”

Pincer Movement Against Socialism. This slashing attack upon democratic socialism in West Europe, together with many others, might have diminished the force of the American attack upon the same socialists, but the pressure upon them steadily increased as the Marshall Plan developed. A State Department report to Congress, on January 14, 1948, finally described the democratic socialists of Western Europe as among the strongest bulwarks against communism, but this did little to affect the pressure of the American Right Wing upon the socialists. The National Association of Manufacturers laid down the principle that “during the period of economic aid the participating countries should not undertake any further nationalization projects, or initiate projects which have the effect of destroying or impairing private competitive enterprise,” and that “aid should be extended to private competitive enterprises in the foreign countries instead of to governments or their agencies.”⁷

Neither side was willing to give any aid or quarter to the middle ground solution of the conflict, democratic socialism.

Communism and Chaos. The formation of the new communist Cominform at once recalled to most Americans the old Comintern which had been Russia’s chief means of fighting the West down until the middle of the war, when it was dissolved. In both cases the basic purpose of the organization was defensive, but the tactics used were offensive, and they deeply offended the West. The Cominform was the institutional reply of the East to the Marshall Plan, but it seemed to the West to be an aggressive move, a revival of old, bad tactics.

It was easy for Americans to fall into the groove of thinking the Cominform to be just another expression of the inveterate lust of communists for creating chaos. The role which chaos had played in creating communism was so well understood that the deliberate creation of chaos to foster communism was generally believed to be a standard communist tactic. It was clear that some strikes and sabotage in France and Italy were communist inspired, for political purposes, though not necessarily engineered from Moscow. However, it did not follow that all communist-led strikes were politically motivated. Some of the worst of them were fully justified by the inferior and grinding position in which labor found itself after the war.

There were obvious limits beyond which chaos would become a danger to communism, not an aid to it. In the years before 1933 the leaders of the Comintern (Russian, of course) had learned through bitter experience that chaos in Western Europe did not create the conditions for a communist seizure of power at all, but brought fascism instead. The communists had been far too weak to seize power against the army, the police, the peasantry and all the other power groups aligned against them. This continued to be true after the war. No European country went communist unless it was first occupied by the Red Army. Wherever communism gained control, also, it insisted upon order even more rigorously than any capitalist government did.

In the weakness and desolation left by the war, too, the communist governments all feared any renewal of chaos. Nevertheless, many people in the West continued to believe that communists everywhere were intent upon extending their power by the creation of new chaos.

The creation of the Cominform drew the lines for a competitive struggle between the East and the West to see which could organize its part of Europe most effectively. In this competition the great economic power of the United States was a tremendous weight in the scales. The Soviets could attempt to counterbalance it only by applying the dynamism of communist methods to Eastern Europe. They could not supply much of the machinery needed for the industrialization of this area, but they did start with the advantage that it was a surplus area in natural resources, foodstuffs, manpower and virile peoples whose energies had never really been released in the past.

Planning Problems. When the sixteen Western European nations met to plan their application for Marshall Plan aid they were confronted with this basic dilemma: the United States wanted them to make a great overall plan for Western Europe, but did not want the individual nations in that area to plan their economies. The President’s Baylor University speech, which they had absorbed well, forbade government controls of trade, an essential of socialist planning. A stream of objections to subsidizing socialist countries had also begun to float across the Atlantic. Yet if planning was bad in a national area, what made it good in a supra-national area?

Another portentous problem also confronted them. The first had to do with the unbridled American economy which was running riot at the expense of other and weaker nations. Britain’s experience with her American loan was a standing warning of the kind of disaster that might occur. The British had been kept waiting a long time for the loan, and the amount was scaled down from the five billions which they believed might put them on their feet to some three and a half billions. Then having built a bridge three-quarters of the way across the river, to use Warburg’s phrase, we removed price controls late in 1946 and our prices shot upward, taking away more than twenty-five per cent of the purchasing power of Britain’s borrowed dollars.

This was bad enough, but the free convertibility clause was fatal to the success of the loan. In pursuance of our desire to create a great world market in which American laissez-faire capitalism could operate freely, we had compelled the British to agree that on July 15, 1947, the controls over the pound sterling should be removed and their currency made freely convertible into all other currencies. The day came and, as the Marshall Plan nations met, dollars were already flowing out of Britain in all directions at a rate which was to exhaust the American loan in a few months, when about half of the time it was expected to cover had elapsed. Now the Americans proffered aid to Europe again, with no assurance that another spurt of American inflation would not upset all calculations.

On August 20 our government was forced to agree to the reimposition of controls over the pound sterling, but not until great damage had been done to the entire economy of Western Europe, which was now hit by widespread drought, following the record damage of the preceding winter.

At the end of August the sixteen nation conference in Paris produced the first draft of its report showing a deficit of $28,000,000,000 over a four-year period. This figure brought a mission flying from Washington post haste which insisted upon reduction to $22,000,000,000. The Americans also insisted upon the adoption of liberal trade policies which pointed strongly toward a repetition of the free convertibility fiasco. The revised sixteen nation report was signed on September 20 and examined in the United States by three major committees. Its goals sounded much like a Russian five-year plan, but the reports insisted that they could not possibly be met without large trade with Eastern Europe. In presenting the program to Congress on December 19 the President cut the proposed amount to $17,000,000,000.

Interim Aid. In the meantime the desperate situation in Europe had finally compelled the President to announce on September 29 that an interim aid bill would be essential. A month later he called a special session of Congress which met on November 17, very late in the evening, to receive the recommendation that $597,000,000 be appropriated to see France, Italy and Austria through to the end of March. Then the China Lobby, led by the Luce publications and William Bullitt, forced the ear marking of $18,000,000 to China and cut the total to $540,000,000. An anti-inflation bill, designed to stabilize the value of the Marshall Plan dollars, was emasculated by the Republicans. This was not strange, since the President himself had labelled rationing and price controls as “police state methods,” on October 16.⁸

In the General Assembly of the United Nations Vishinsky attacked the whole capitalist system for the first time, on October 6, charging that capitalism was now entering its final or imperialist phase in which it aimed at world domination in order to bolster its sagging foundations. A month later, however, he maintained at a press conference that capitalism and communism could live side by side in peace and mutually beneficial cooperation. Basically there was no quarrel between the two systems and the Soviet Union was ready to cooperate with the capitalist world to the fullest extent on the basis of mutual respect.⁹

The Russian People Pacific. On October 26 John Steinbeck and Robert Capa, novelist and photographer, began in the New York Herald Tribune a serial report on their trip through Russia during the summer. They were depressed by the developing Cold War and particularly by their belief that “a man sitting at a desk in Washington or New York reads the cables and rearranges them to fit his own mental pattern.” So they went to see how belligerent the Russian people really were, travelling through much of European Russia. They visited the ruins of Kiev, where German Kultur had done its work, and felt that one of the few justices in the world was to be found in the work of the German prisoners helping to clean up the mess. The German prisoners they saw everywhere did not seem to be underfed or overworked. They visited a collective farm, where eight houses remained of 362 which had existed before the Germans came that way, and made the acquaintance of a little boy who ran to his mother crying with wonder, “But these Americans are people just like us!” They visited many farm houses and in nearly every one there was a room with an icon corner and on another wall almost invariably another kind of icon, the hand embroidered white cloth frames which held the photographs of the dead—“the best they had, the strongest and the best educated, the best loved and the most needed.” The farm people were always a little quiet in that room.

During their tour they “knew nothing about the things American papers were howling about—Russian military preparations, atomic research, slave labor, the political skulduggery of the Kremlin,” though they learned that the Russians did not fear the atomic bomb. Stalin had told his people it would never be used in war. The travellers had found the Russian people to be kind and friendly, wanting the same things that all peoples want, peace above all. The two did not “know who started this vicious and insane game of stupid accusation and violent criticism.” That was not very important. The important thing was “who is going to stop it?”¹⁰

This was a sharp question, the probable answer being that nobody would break the vicious circle of mutual suspicion, fear and hatred before the North Temperate Zone was laid in ruins. By this time the Russian press, radio, stage and screen were all busy giving the Soviet peoples the idea that the Americans were greedy imperialists and a large part of the American press gave its readers an equally distorted view of Russian aggressiveness.

The American People Conditioned for War. A Canadian member of the UN radio division recorded his depression on reading the newspaper accounts of UN meetings. With the exception of the New York Times and Herald Tribune no other American newspapers that he saw “gave anything like an objective report of what had gone on, and even they were prone to slight coloration.”

American movies and newsreels also gave the same distorted view. Most newspapers in their editorial policies seemed to believe “that the more we find out about countries we don’t like the more we will be convinced of their perfidy; while the more other countries get to know about us the more they will appreciate our shining righteousness. Frequently this pernicious piece of illogic is, of course, purposeful.” He noted also that the 1947 Pulitzer prizes were awarded to anti-Soviet cartoons, articles and books and that the list of books about the Soviet Union distributed by the very influential book clubs “included almost solely works likewise derogatory to the Soviets.”¹¹

A letter writer to the Nashville Tennessean, March 24, 1948, described the effect upon the public when she wrote that “anyone who reads the newspapers and listens to the radio is aware of the necessity of being ready to defend our country.” The public opinion polls reflected this same awareness faithfully. The records of the National Opinion Research Center showed that at the end of 1945, 32 per cent of the American people expected another big war within 25 years. A year later the percentage was 41, and at the close of 1947 it was 63.¹² The conversion to a war mentality was already well along.

In the autumn of 1947 American leaders continued to sound the alarm against the Soviet Union. Former Secretary of State Byrnes published his book, Speaking Frankly, about which the London Times said that Mr. Byrnes’ “latest contribution to policy seems little better than a simple recipe for war” and the London News Chronicle commented that Byrnes had “talked deplorable and dangerous nonsense.”¹³ A few days later Byrnes made a speech in which he declared that if the Russian Army did not leave Eastern Germany the United States and other nations must band together to take “measures of last resort”.¹⁴ Then after this apparently decisive utterance Byrnes made a somewhat astonishing statement before the assembled bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church, saying: “I am deeply concerned with the state of mind, at times bordering on hysteria, that ascribes to our former ally, the Soviet Republic, all the ills and errors which two world wars have brought.”¹⁵ In March, after the communist seizure of Czechoslovakia, Byrnes urged that the United States “act immediately” the next time Russia made even an indirect move of aggression in Europe.¹⁶

From John Foster Dulles, leading Republican adviser on foreign policy, there came a similar rising crescendo of anti-Soviet sentiment. In early December Mr. Dulles, while an official adviser to Secretary Marshall in London, undertook private negotiations with General Charles de Gaulle concerning the disposition of the German Ruhr.¹⁷ In January Dulles told a radio audience that the three year search for peace had entered a second phase in which action, rather than diplomacy, would be decisive.¹⁸ On November 23 the House Select Committee on Foreign Aid assailed the Soviet Union for blocking trade between Eastern and Western Europe, ascribing Western Europe’s plight largely to that cause.¹⁹ On December 7 Harold E. Stassen, Republican candidate for the Presidency, asserted that the United States should stop shipments of heavy machinery or potential war materials to the Soviet Union.²⁰ On December 4 Representative Clarence A. Eaton, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, stated: “We might as well face the situation that Russia proposes to conquer the world, either by infiltration or by force of arms.”²¹ On the same day Secretary of Defense Forrestal testified that “we are dealing with a deadly force and nothing less than 100 per cent security will do.” Two months later Secretary of Commerce Harriman told the House Appropriations Committee that Russian aggression was “a greater menace than Hitler.”²²

Deflation in the U.S.S.R. On December 14, 1947, the Soviet peoples woke up to learn that they had undergone a new social revolution inside the U.S.S.R. During the war the peasants and middle classes had accumulated large amounts of cash, partly because of higher prices and salaries, but largely because consumer goods were not to be had. Not a few citizens became millionaires, in the sense of possessing more than a million rubles.

The wage earners, however, had not fared so well, their wages being more rigidly controlled. The currency reform of December 14 accordingly aimed to redress the balance by destroying nine out of ten paper rubles outside the banks and one out of two rubles in the banks, though there was an even exchange for bank deposits under 3,000 rubles. Since wages were not lowered, the workers received a new incentive and production rose swiftly, partly because rationing was abolished in the same decree and the prices of consumer goods reduced. Inflation was effectively countered.²³

Abortive Conference. On November 25, 1947, the Council of Foreign Ministers met in London to make another effort to settle terms of peace for Germany and Austria. Again three weeks were spent in futile discussion of the same issues threshed over at Moscow in March. At its close Secretary of State Marshall stated, on December 19, his belief that the most fundamental reason for the failure of the conference was the existence of a political vacuum in Western Europe and he expressed his conviction that no agreement would be possible until this vacuum had been “filled by the restoration of a healthy European community.” Until this was done paper agreements would not assure a lasting peace, said Marshall, and he added: “Agreements between sovereign states are generally the reflection and not the cause of genuine settlements.”

America Over Extended? As 1948 opened, Lippmann warned that we were “morally and politically over extended.” We could not at one and the same time finance a global air force, a navy commanding all oceans, universal military service, heavy military research, the Marshall Plan, the states around the Soviet perimeter, and the good neighbor policy.²⁴ The next day the $17,000,000,000 commitment was eliminated from the European Recovery Plan bill, which simply proposed that $6,800,000,000 be authorized for the first fifteen months of the Marshall program. In his annual message to the Congress on January 7 President Truman devoted strong emphasis to “one major problem which affects all our goals,” inflation. He noted that inflation was “undermining the living standards of millions of families.” Corporate profits had risen in 1947 from $12,500,000,000 to $17,000,000,000 after taxes. He urged the Congress to make available “the weapons that are so desperately needed in the fight against inflation.” The Congress, however, paid no heed to his advice.²⁵

On January 8 Secretary of State Marshall made his formal plea for the full ERP appropriation, warning that “the way of life that we have known is literally in the balance.”

Reaction in the Saddle in Greece. In Greece the Royalist Government took the fullest advantage of the Truman Doctrine. In a series of dispatches from Athens Homer Bigart reported that Greek officials openly fed anti-American stories to the press, which our representatives had to answer. Ignoring the fact that no one but a Greek had been killed or captured in the civil war, the press complained that it was impossible to “contain the Slav hordes” with an army so small and poorly equipped. To such complaints our aid administrator, Dwight Griswold, replied that the army had plenty of good equipment and that there was no evidence of the presence of foreigners in the rebel ranks. Finally our mission revealed that fifty ship loads of military supplies and equipment had been unloaded in Greek ports up to January 20, 1948.²⁶

Auto-intoxication in Russia. In Russia the Communist Party was moving vigorously to break all cultural ties between the Russian intellectuals and the West. On February 11 the Central Committee of the party severely castigated the famous composer Shostakovich, and several others, for writing music which “strongly smells of the spirit of current modernistic bourgeois music of Europe and America.” This was only one of scores of attempts to proscribe any thinking which might have even a remote Western flavor.

The motive was not only to isolate all Soviet intellectuals and citizens completely but to prove that Russian Communism could create a culture superior to any other. In pursuance of this aim the Party and the Soviet press began to claim Russian origin for every scientific invention which ever entered the mind of man. A long succession of such claims asserted that the steam engine, the telephone, electric light, radio and every other modem invention, were all Russian in origin, even if it was necessary to concede that the inventor worked under the Tsars.

These twin campaigns were pushed to ridiculous extremes, revealing not only fear of the West, but a great inferiority complex. Unfortunately, they convinced many millions of young Russians that they actually were living in a civilization unique and superior to all others.

The Communist Seizure of Czechoslovakia

In February 1948 the Communist party of Czechoslovakia suddenly seized complete control of the little democracy upon which many people had set their hopes of a bridge between the East and the West. The Czechs never liked the figure, replying that bridges got walked upon, and knowing in their hearts that if the East-West conflict became acute enough they would be coordinated into the East.

This had been predetermined by many things that had gone before. Munich had made them unable for a long time to put any dependence in the West. The German occupation had subjected them to six years of merciless slavery, leaving no doubt in their minds that they must depend on Russia for defense against any repetition of that agony. The war, too, had created the conditions for communist control, whenever a real pinch came.

Knowing which way he had to go, President Benes had journeyed to Moscow in December 1943 to make a treaty of alliance with Russia. It was well that he did so, since the Czech Communist leader Gottwald was already there, making plans and available to head a government of the “Lublin” type for Czechoslovakia, should the Kremlin so decide. The treaty of alliance recognized Benes’ government-in-exile as the legitimate government and enabled him to return to Czechoslovakia, but he had to go by way of Moscow in 1945, when the Ruthenian tip of Czechoslovakia was liberated by the Russian Army, which had already established contacts throughout the country with the underground National Committees. These communist-led groups were to form the basis of a new and popular system of local government, as a departure from the too great centralization of government inherited from Hapsburg days. As it advanced, the Red Army and the NKVD were accordingly able to strengthen the communist party everywhere, and to support it with the prestige of the victorious Soviet Union.

This was the more true since the Teheran and Yalta conferences had agreed that the Russian armies should liberate Prague, a decision made on principle, which in January 1945 also seemed to conform to the military situation. Afterward the Russian forces advanced more slowly and the Americans much more rapidly than expected, so that General Patton’s army was held outside Prague until the Russians could arrive to free the Czech capital.

Dragon’s Teeth Communism. The war also left Czechoslovakia without any important class of large property owners to oppose communism. Up to 1918 Austrians, Germans and Jews owned the big properties, landed and industrial. After that date the Austrians were removed and during the Second World War the Jewish owners were killed by the Germans, who in their turn fled in 1945 or were dispossessed. Most of the Czech owners had collaborated with the Nazis to save their properties and when the Allies won the war they lost them. These processes left a majority of the large properties in the country ownerless. In most cases there was simply no one to claim ownership. The only practical way of working the properties was to nationalize them, a step which most Czechs approved in principle.²⁷

The expulsion of 3,000,000 Sudeten Germans to Germany also threw a vast number of properties, both large and small, into the hands of the state and the militant communist party managed to have a major hand in the redistribution of all these properties. As elsewhere in Eastern Europe they obtained two or three key ministries, seeming to defer to the other parties by letting them have a majority of the Cabinet posts. In every case the Minister of the Interior, controlling the police, was a Communist. In Czechoslovakia the Minister of Agriculture was Communist. When the landed estates were divided, Communists were accordingly rewarded and many new supporters gained from the non-Communists who received land. The normal operations of the Agriculture Ministry also furnished large opportunities to influence the votes of the farmers.

These circumstances largely account for the heavy vote received by the Communist Party in the election of 1946, when it polled 38 per cent of the total vote and became the largest party, entitled to the post of Prime Minister. Not all of the 38 per cent who voted Communist were indoctrinated Marxists. Doubtless a majority of them were people who voted Communist for other, materialistic reasons. The fact that the Communists had been heavily represented in Buchenwald and other German concentration camps, along with many Czech liberals, gave these two groups of Czechs a close bond. Comrades in arms are always likely to stick together.

Democratic Interlude. The 1946 election gave the three non-Marxist parties a total of 49 per cent of the popular vote, a fact which reassured them and led them to play their own party game more than the situation justified. The balance of power was held by the Socialist party, under the leadership of Zdenek Fierlinger who worked closely with the Communists, from his ambassadorship to Moscow during the war down through his temporary premiership at its close to the end of the Republic. Like all European socialist parties, his party was divided into Right and Left wings, and late in the day it rebelled and ousted him from the leadership, thereby contributing one of the events which precipitated the Communist seizure of power. While the Socialists worked with the Communists the two Marxian parties represented 51 percent of the people and the same proportion of the parliament.

The Cabinet was a coalition, representing all of the parties, and in the main it worked harmoniously for the reconstruction and revival of Czechoslovakia for about two years. In this period Czechoslovakia was the marvel of most observers. Its government was led by communists, but it remained a democratic country. Freedom of press and speech continued. All the controversial literature of the West could be purchased freely and in great variety. Travellers who visited the country reported no evidences of a police state. The Czechs were happy and many of them shared the belief of numerous people in the West that Czechoslovakia might be the common meeting ground in which the East and the West could reconcile their most acute differences. This was probably an illusion, since the Communists were very unlikely to permit the democratic process to deprive them of their primary position in the state, especially since this position steadily grew stronger basically, through Communist control of the workers and peasants. Backed by the memory of the Red Army’s rough behaviour, and by the knowledge that it was just beyond the border on nearly all sides of Czechoslovakia, the Communists were in position to take control of Czechoslovakia at any time after 1945. Lying in the Soviet orbit, as she did, it was probably only a question of time until she was communized. Nevertheless, without the compulsions of the Cold War her chances of maintaining a middle ground position would have been very much better.

Both the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan made it certain that the crisis would come at or before the elections scheduled for 1948. The end of the Czech idyll was clearly indicated at the start of the Marshall Plan, when Czechoslovakia first announced her participation in the plan and then reversed herself after consultation with Moscow. The original decision of the Czech cabinet was unanimous, the Communist ministers included, and the decision to reverse was more nearly unanimous than the West believed. Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk told James P. Warburg in August 1947 that it was the Western press, especially the American newspapers, which made it impossible for Czechoslovakia to go ahead in the Marshall Plan. When our press played up the Czech decision as a break on the part of Czechoslovakia with her Soviet ally, the Czechs had no option but to reverse themselves. Masaryk was not summoned to Moscow for brutal disciplining, as was so widely reported. His visit, to negotiate a trade treaty, had been arranged a month before. He did not have to be bludgeoned in Moscow to do what the Western newspapers had made essential.²⁸ At the same time the original unanimous desire of the Czechs to participate in the Marshall Plan warned Moscow that it could not permit the democratic parties to take control of Czechoslovakia, lest they gradually ease her into the Marshall orbit.

There were many signs also that the Communist vote would drop in the forthcoming election. The democratic forces had grown considerably. Immediately after the war the Red flag predominated in national celebrations; two years later the Czech national colors were in the majority at all great demonstrations. When Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart visited Czechoslovakia in May 1947 President Benes assured him that the elections of 1948 would see a reduction of the Communist vote, though he expressed foreboding about the growing discord between the Anglo-Americans and the Russians.²⁹

Sample polls also indicated a drop in the Communist vote. Even that great arbiter of all elections, the weather, had turned against the Communists. The great snows of 1947, which toppled Britain from her status as a great power, had been succeeded by searing drought which affected most of Europe but hit Czechoslovakia worst of all. Spontaneous combustion created widespread fires, destroying forests and crops. Food was so short that consumer goods had to be exported to pay for food. People were hungry and as usual the party in power was blamed. The Prime Minister was a Communist and his party the largest one in the government.

The same trends naturally encouraged the democratic parties to believe that they were certain to gain a parliamentary majority in the election and many of the party leaders began to plan to put the Communists out of the coalition and govern without them. This was precisely what had happened in France and Italy after the Marshall Plan was announced and largely because of it. From Moscow’s standpoint there could be little doubt that the same thing would happen in Czechoslovakia, and no doubt that Russia’s hold on the Bohemian bastion would be weakened. Given the Cold War this was a development which Moscow could not permit, since Bohemia is the strongest military position in Europe and under Russian control would be a great forward fortress of her defenses. No great power engaged in a power struggle would surrender such a position. The power conflict had become so acute also that the Czech Communists “being an instrument of Soviet foreign policy, could not take even a slight defeat if it amounted to a Soviet setback at a decisive moment. Such was the case in 1948.”³⁰

Communist Drive. In this situation the communist leaders moved first to break up the Slovak Democratic Party, which had polled 60 per cent of the vote in Slovakia. The Slovaks, living in the agricultural end of Czechoslovakia, had been exploited in the same way that all agricultural regions are by the industrialized areas. Largely for this reason they had been disloyal during the Munich period, falling in with Nazi plans to disrupt Czechoslovakia. They had established a Nazi puppet state and sent a sizeable army to fight Russia, spite of this treason the Czechs had spent the largest part of the national budget for new industrialization in Slovakia after the war, to make this backward part of the country a full partner. They had not held the treason of the Slovaks against them, but when the Communist leaders began to charge subversive plots against the Slovak leaders there was enough doubt in the minds of the Czech Democrats to prevent them from rejecting the charges and acting accordingly. Indeed there was no doubt that fascist tendencies persisted in Slovakia and that its post war record had been “shot through with very real plots against the government.”³¹

A wave of Red terrorism to gain complete control of the labor unions began in early January, provoking strong Socialist protests. On January 9, the Secretary General of the Communist Party promised a purge of the army.³² By this time the police force was 80 per cent Communist. The Communists also sought to push nationalization down to very low property levels.

Then the Communists proposed a series of provocative measures in the Cabinet in an effort to precipitate a crisis. When these tactics did not work they proceeded openly to complete their infiltration of the police. In February 1948 eight high police officials in Prague were ousted and communists installed in their places. The non-communists in the Cabinet mustered a majority to condemn this action and demand its revocation. When Premier Gottwald refused, they resigned. The democratic side was able to command a bare majority on this occasion because the socialists had ousted the pro-communist Fierlinger as their leader. Yet when the twelve non-socialist Cabinet members resigned they neglected to carry along with them the socialist members, who were subject to persuasion and who did nothing during the crisis. This left thirteen members of the Cabinet still in office and there being a quorum Premier Gottwald continued to rule, and to demand that the resignations of the twelve be accepted. This upset all of their calculations, since they had expected that an immediate dissolution of parliament would be forced.

Most historians of the crisis have condemned the democratic leaders for their ineptitude in resigning. Perhaps it was a mistake. Yet they could hardly overlook the open packing of the police command without inviting the kind of campaign and election that would have given the Communists control, though there is the possibility that a full communist coordination could have been avoided for a time, if the election did not diminish the communist share in the government.

Others have attached much importance to the poor health of President Benes, who had suffered two breakdowns, one of them a stroke, in the preceding summer. It is reasoned that a resolute man could have called the nation and the army to arms in ringing tones and prevented communist rule.

Before accepting the conclusion that events could have been ordered otherwise, either by the democratic Cabinet members or the President, it is necessary to consider the succeeding events. A great communist labor congress had already filled Prague to overflowing, making drastic military action difficult. Then on February 21, the day after the Cabinet resignation, the Communists called out 200,000 workers for a giant demonstration which threatened a general strike if the resignations were not accepted. The next day the labor congress issued an action program which contained attractive promises for many segments of the population. On the 23rd the Communists announced an alleged plot by the resigned Cabinet members to denationalize the factories, disturb the land reform and take the back track generally. This faked announcement served as an excuse for placing machine guns around key buildings, one of them the radio station, which gave only the Red side of the crisis. On the 24th the opposition newspapers were prevented from publishing, in one way or another by the workers, and “action committees” suddenly sprang up in every factory, shop and office, taking control to thwart the alleged plotters. The same evening still more tremendous demonstrations of workers, “stirring, overwhelming, frightening,” shook the city—to such effect that the democratic parties collapsed, fifty leading members of Parliament, representing three non-communist parties, rushing to Gottwald to offer their cooperation, which was accepted on the condition that they purge their parties. The purges began at once. The Socialist party was forcibly coordinated and Fierlinger reinstated.³³ On the 25th, when Gottwald went to the tired, sick President for his decision, the streets were full of armed workers, marching with rifles on their shoulders.

Communism in Power. Benes accepted the resignation of the twelve, saying that “any other solution would deepen the crisis and lead to a sharp division of the nation, and eventually this could lead to chaos.” It is difficult to imagine an experience sadder or more pathetic in any man’s life than to have to preside twice over the death of the Western democracy that he loved, and that his great mentor, Thomas G. Masaryk, had so successfully established. Yet in both 1938 and in 1948 he was confronted with such overwhelming power that it is difficult to see what else he could have done.

At Munich, and before, his sworn allies in the West had not only deserted him but threatened his country with the most savage destruction by Germany if he did not surrender. In February 1948 a huge minority of his own people rose in such overwhelming might that he had no time to counter or deny them. He could only say: “You want a new form of democracy. My wishes are addressed to you and to the nation that this new way may be favorable for all.” He could hardly do otherwise when Howard K. Smith was able to walk the streets of Prague from dawn to dusk during the five days of the 1948 crisis without seeing a single person weeping, nor in fact any expression of anger.³⁴ When the Germans marched into Prague in 1939 the people wept and cursed them unrestrainedly.

Of course Benes knew in his heart that the second tragedy was caused by the first. He could tell himself, too, that it was still possible to hope that the new way might not develop so badly, the Czechs being noted for their moderation, even in revolution.

Masaryk. For Jan Masaryk, son of a great father, the choice was equally painful and even less supportable. As Foreign Minister he was a non-party member of the Cabinet, one who loved the West but knew that if forced to choose he would have to go with the East. He told Smith in the summer of 1947, “it would kill me!”³⁵

When the February crisis developed Masaryk resigned himself to the inevitable. He led his employees in the one-hour demonstration strike and after the crisis was over he said to a French newspaperman “there were people in this country who thought it was possible to rule without the Communists. . . . I have always been passionately opposed to this idea.”³⁶ He had known nothing about the resignation of the Ministers until afterwards and considered it a mistake. After the crisis Benes begged him to remain in office and he accepted in his father’s name a declaration from the new Communist Government, afterwards going alone to his father’s grave on March 7, at which time he sent word to friends in England that he could carry on no longer.³⁷

On the morning of March 10 his pajamas-clad body was found on the pavement several floors below an open window of his apartment in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There were many stories about his having been thrown from the window by the Communists, but they were not necessary to explain his death. On various occasions he had grieved to his friends about the great power conflict which was pushing his country toward a new crucifixion. The real trouble, he had said in December 1947, was ignorance. “The Americans knew nothing about the new Russia; the Russians knew even less about the New World.” To Masaryk the containment policy applied to Russia “was immature, negative and dangerous.”³⁸ If only “the world could be cut in two parts and the antagonists allowed to drift into space all would be well,” but this could not be. Instead, Masaryk was compelled to face an inevitable and intolerable choice.

Conclusions. Was the February revolution ordered by Moscow? The charge is often made because Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister V. A. Zorin arrived in Prague on February 19, the day before the democratic leaders made their decision to resign. His ostensible mission, to supervise deliveries of Russian wheat to Czechoslovakia was not very plausible, and his presence undoubtedly gave confidence and élan to the Czech Communist leaders during the crisis, after which he promptly departed.

It is not necessary to ascribe any greater importance to Zorin’s visit. The correspondent of the New York Times wrote on March 21 from Prague that nothing had happened which could not “just as well have happened if the Soviet Russian Government had been completely without interest in the outcome, assuming that other states did not interfere.” Once the communist party had attained the leading position in the state the revolution would have occurred under similar circumstances even if Russia had ceased to exist. This, however, does not obviate the equally apparent fact that the stage in the Cold War had been reached where it was essential to Russian policy that Czechoslovakia should cease to be a bridge between the West and the East. It was Lockhart’s judgment, after a long experience with Russia, that “it is still rather more than an even-money bet that Russia’s policy of consolidation in Eastern Europe is dictated more by fear of being attacked than by the desire to attack others.”³⁹

Nor did the Anglo-American power bloc have a pronounced grievance when Czechoslovakia was cemented into the Russian orbit. Everyone knew that she was already there, and in many ways the West had already treated her as a member of the camp of “the enemy.” American credits had been cancelled and withheld and much of our press had spoken disparagingly of the strongly socialized Czech Republic. Very little had been done to support democracy in Czechoslovakia or to build up the morale of its leaders, who felt the lack of sympathy and support keenly, in contrast with the close bonds between the Czech Communists and Russia.

From the power standpoint nothing was lost in February 1948 that was not already lost. Nevertheless, the communist coup had a tremendous impact upon the West, dramatized as it was by the poignant death of Masaryk which brought the East-West conflict home to each individual, especially in Western Europe. People suddenly remembered that the Czechs were a long suffering, democratic people. They remembered, too, their own guilt in the crucifixion of the Czechs in 1938, the irrevocable step which had opened the flood gates to everything which followed. From the ideological standpoint many undoubtedly felt worse about the internal communist coordination of Czechoslovakia than they had about the Nazi rape of the little country in 1938 and 1939.

There was shock and warning also in the speed and smoothness with which democratic liberties had been erased in Czechoslovakia. All Europeans began to wonder if their own communist parties might not sometime repeat the same feat.

Rising War Fever

Demands that a Line be Drawn. On February 28 Anthony Eden declared that the Western Europeans and the United States must unite now to save what was left of world freedom. When Russia proposed a treaty of mutual defense to Finland, on the 27th, a new alarm spread through the West, lest Finland’s hour had come. However, the treaty eventually concluded did not make any serious inroads on Finland’s independence. The Czech and Finnish episodes galvanized consideration of the ERP bill in the Senate, where Senator Vandenberg denounced the “subversive conquest” of Czechoslovakia and declared that “the Iron Curtain must not come to the rims of the Atlantic either by aggression or default.” His entire speech was keyed to the theme of checking further Soviet expansion.⁴⁰

The moment seemed also to Prime Minister Jan Smuts, of South Africa, to be perhaps the most critical in a thousand years. Changing his position toward the power struggle markedly, he declared that Czechoslovakia was the last step permissible before a line was drawn. In New York the writer of a letter to the Herald Tribune on March 4 expressed the feeling of many when she cried out: “Oh, come on, America! Get tough! Use the threat of the atom bomb while it’s still our secret, and the bomb itself if necessary!”

“Frenzied War Talk.” On March 11 Secretary Marshall described the situation as “very, very serious,” a statement which led Samuel Grafton to observe that the American people were having their nerves scraped. Public alarm was rising like fever on a hospital chart. Some of our commentators especially were “gushing as if their word arteries had been cut,” on the themes “crisis,” “action,” “military phase approaching,” etc. It was “a movement of great depth and breadth,” which had suddenly seized hold of articulate America. The angry sounds he thought would only confirm and harden Russian policy, having no more effect upon it than would a Russian threat of war made to stop the Marshall Plan.⁴¹

On the same day the New York Post called for a peace treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union, declaring that the alternative was war on a global scale in which the first victim would be the free world, since regimentation on a totalitarian scale not dreamed of in World War II would inevitably become a requirement for its prosecution. A call of “Halt!” backed by the threat of war might be greeted as evidence of our courage and strength by the “hot-eyes and hysterical war-at-any-price proponents here and abroad,” but it would not be likely to bring about the peaceful settlements which the world so desperately required.

On March 17 President Truman addressed a message to Congress in which he repeated the opening sentiments of his Truman Doctrine speech, blamed Russia for violating the Yalta and Potsdam agreements and directly accused the Soviets of “designs to subjugate the free communities of Europe.” To meet the situation he recommended universal military training and a temporary selective service law.⁴²

On the 22nd Drew Pearson reported that our war chiefs were studying how we could drop the atomic bomb on strategic Russian cities—“if we have to.” If Russia could bite off Italy, then Greece and Arabia, the only air bases she would have to worry about would be in Japan and Alaska, which points they could blanket with interceptor planes. That is “what’s behind the currently reported Russian stretch for territory. It’s also what’s behind the frenzied Washington war talks.”⁴³ In the Herald Tribune the editor spoke of “the violent waves of emotion that seem to sweep, periodically, through Washington and out into the country at large,” and the ultra conservative writer Heptisax wrote that the Red leaders “undoubtedly feel that the security of the Stalin group’s hold on Russia and her environs depends upon the conquest of this country in one way or another.”⁴⁴

News Slanted Toward War. Throughout this period most of the American press continued to fan the war fever. Dr. Curtis MacDougall, Professor of Journalism at Northwestern University, described the situation accurately when he said to a Colorado audience that the majority of American newspapers and commentators were convincing most Americans that war was the only solution for current national problems. He illustrated one method used to create war sentiment, as follows: “Eddy Gilmore, of the Associated Press, wrote from Moscow a fortnight ago that there was no comparable war fever there at all, but his dispatch was printed on inside pages, if it was used at all. If Gilmore’s objective report had been the opposite, it would have been streamer-headline news in every paper subscribing to the Associated Press report.”

MacDougall added that the most frightening aspect of the situation was that some people wanted to combat communism by imitating some of its worst features at home. The attacks on our civil liberties were the most disturbing of all, yet instead of combating these anti-democratic trends in the United States a large section of the press was “aiding and abetting the hysteria.”⁴⁵

“Blind Hatred” Protested. The Committee on the State of the Church of the Methodist General Conference, in session at Boston, also urged Christian men and women “to resist a mood of despair, blind hatred, hysteria, and hopelessness.” Being sure that neither the Russian nor the American peoples wanted war, the committee called upon all of our people “promptly to change the prevailing mood, which we believe conducive to war” and to work for understanding.⁴⁶

Atomic Attack Certain. These, however, were lonely voices. The prevailing mood which the Cold War generated was expressed in its fullest strength by Father Edmund A. Walsh, Vice President of Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., who described the “most optimistic” forecast of world affairs as an armed truce between the United States and the Soviet Union, producing a deadlock in which the test would be “who will crack first?” This “long-time student and foe of the Soviet system” predicted that “if they get the atomic bomb—and in quantity—God help us!” They “‘would use it in a second,’ the Jesuit priest said, snapping his fingers, ‘and without warning’.”⁴⁷

This expression of irreconcilable distrust was important, coming as it did from the head of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, which pours a steady stream of people into the Foreign Service and State Department of the United States. The assumption that the Russians will wipe out our cities on the first dark night after they are able to do so is the most hostile thesis that any American can lay down. It means that the Soviet Union is so totally lawless that we can only live in cowering fear until it is destroyed—by our atom bombs. This assumption is not only absolutely irreconcilable with peace; it is also the most far fetched that could be produced. So far the Soviets have not used mass destruction as a weapon of war. It is the Americans and British who developed the destruction of cities to the point where one bomb could, and did, wipe out a city. To assume that the Soviets will begin the killing of nations with A-bombs is to assume a complete lack of rationality in the Kremlin, a quarter with a considerable reputation for hard-headed realism.

Reaction Active. A disturbing aspect of the situation was also to be found in the way in which reactionary forces at home played a double game. Thomas L. Stokes wrote that the forces of domestic reaction were sweeping in on our domestic affairs. Sections of the South resisted bitterly the granting of civil rights to Negroes, and free elections. In Congress special interests were trying to weaken the social and economic welfare laws which had spread our prosperity somewhat more equitably, and some of the same people were “loudest in the call for arms to spread democracy in other lands.”⁴⁸

Looking Ahead. On March 25 two remarkable warnings against a precipitate rush to war were uttered. Walter Lippmann cautioned that a refusal to appease was not the whole of statesmanship. Other fearful mistakes could be made, such as becoming over extended and dispersed, becoming engaged in the wrong place and at the wrong time, and becoming involved in war for “such unlimited and unattainable ends that it can never be concluded and settled,” bleeding white the last great power of the Western world.

At the University of Florida, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas warned that war does not destroy abhorrent philosophies or political programs, but only creates conditions that nourish them. “If we visualize the United States the victor in a war with Russia and roll the film ahead ten years, what would we see?” he asked. “We would see a world in ruins—poverty and great illness on every hand—suffering and dislocations of life unequalled in history. That is the environment in which ideas as virulent as fascism and communism flourish.”⁴⁹

The Marshall Plan in Operation

Defense Secretary Forrestal appealed for a revival of the draft and universal military training, March 19th. The next day Secretary of State Marshall declared that we now witnessed “duplication in Europe of the highhanded and calculated procedure of the Nazi regime.” A little later the House Armed Services Committee declared that a peace time draft was made imperative by the “new and ominous” possibility that “the Soviet Union may be willing to risk a showdown” with the United States. The Soviet Union might feel that time was running against it. Therefore, “in order to deter any such rash decision on the part of the Soviet Government” the United States had “to transform a reasonable measure of its armed strength from the potential to the active.”⁵⁰

These fears reflected faithfully the deadly dynamics under which all great power arms races have moved. A step by one side creates fear and counter move, which in turn generates fear and counter move, until finally few know how it all began. Only the end is certain, and the logic of any “defensive” step is difficult to deny. In this case the communization of Czechoslovakia had alarmed us, so we must have conscription to make ourselves feel safer and to convince the Soviet Union that we mean business.

Spurred by the fate of Czechoslovakia the House of Representatives passed the six billion dollar foreign aid bill on March 31, by a vote of 329 to 74, aid to Franco Spain included, though this was killed in the conference committee. Realizing the disastrous political effects of a partnership with fascist Spain the State Department was able to eliminate recurring aid-to-Spain amendments until July 1950, when the Senate attached one to the huge 37 billion dollar omnibus appropriation bill which could not be vetoed.

The 1948 aid bill included also $570,000,000 for the corrupt and inept regime of Chiang Kai-shek in China.

The entire appropriation, including the Marshall Plan funds, was signed by the President on April 3, two days after the Russians began to impose restrictions on Berlin communications, and three days before the Russo-Finnish Mutual Assistance pact was signed. On April 17 the fifty-year Western European Union treaty between France, Britain, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg went into effect. This pact had been signed on March 17, under the shadow of the Czech coup. It created an alliance which was without military significance in the absence of powerful backing by the United States, where it was warmly welcomed officially.

To facilitate the administration of the Marshall Plan the sixteen participating European nations formed, on March 15th, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation. Its American counterpart was the European Cooperation Administration. The act of April 3, 1948, appropriated $4,300,000,000 for grant purposes and up to one billion for loans. The grants were turned over to the European governments in the form of goods, through private trade channels. The European consumer then paid his government the full price and these “counterpart” funds went into a development account, out of which things like hydro-electric power plants were built, if approved by ECA, which also made outright grants for matching counterpart funds and conditional grants which required the receiver to export the same value of his own goods to another OECA member without receiving direct payment for it. Technical assistance was financed through a special fund.

The Marshall Plan was a four year plan. The funds for grant purposes actually appropriated in 1948 were four billion, to last for fifteen months. Another $4,800,000,000 was appropriated in 1949, to last until mid-1950 and in that year the grants were cut to less than three billions.

In 1950 it was too early to assess the final results of the Marshall Plan. There could not be any doubt that it averted economic disaster in Western Europe. Britain, for example, would have had to sell her capital goods in order to maintain greatly reduced rations. Unemployment would have risen until her position became desperate indeed. Production figures had risen everywhere in Western Europe and highly encouraging investments in capital goods had been made. These averaged twenty per cent of the gross national product in 1949.⁵¹ The dollar deficit was cut from ten billions to four billions, with the prospect that it could be reduced to three billions by 1952.

The dollar deficit, however, was very tenacious. It had been reduced since 1947 almost entirely by cutting European imports from the dollar area by $2,500,000,000, while expanding exports to it by only $204,000,000.⁵²

Social Reform Retarded. One other very essential requirement of viability for Western Europe, real progressive social reform, lagged. We had marked success in enforcing business management. For example, in the Spring of 1948 the French Government asked for a release of counterpart funds, but ECA pointed to the unbalanced budget and three governments collapsed before the Queuille government finally succeeded in securing approval of a balanced budget. Then ECA released some of the money, but only “for two months at a time.”⁵³

This kind of pressure had succeeded, but in the vital area of social reform the same impact had not been achieved. ECA backed scores of important experiments in social progress, such as housing cooperatives and public power systems,⁵⁴ but it had not induced the European governments to make any significant reforms in the social structure. On the contrary, the conservative American business men who in the main managed the ECA program used their influence to discourage social reform. In Italy a former vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers was quite naturally opposed to land reform, one of Italy’s crucial needs and perhaps the outstanding way of combating communism in Italy. The net effect in Western Europe had been “to discourage direly needed social changes that alone will keep democracy viable in the next generation.”⁵⁵

Nor was this the worst of it. Our influence encouraged the premature abandonment of economic controls and rationing in countries like France, Germany and Italy, where wealth was already maldistributed, and the wide-open return to free enterprise “yielded every advantage to people with wealth and put the workers at great disadvantage.”⁵⁶ This exploitation of labor in turn lowered production and kept great blocs of workers communist or susceptible to communism.

Socialism Discouraged. The effect of our economic intervention in Europe has been not only to oust the communists from the governments but to put the socialists out or decrease their influence. This was one of the reasons for the near defeat of the British Labor Party in early 1950. Thus the effect of our economic control was to decrease the strength and influence of democratic socialism which the New York Herald Tribune, January 14, 1948, rightly termed “our strongest ally in Europe.”

Fascism in Colombia. What happens when the social struggle becomes too raw, and wealth tries to assure its position by force, was illustrated by the great riots in Bogota, Colombia, which disrupted the Ninth Pan American Conference in April 1948. For sixteen years Colombia had had the reputation of having one of the most democratic and stable governments in Latin America. During this period the Liberal party had consistently won large majorities, but in 1946 it split and the Conservatives obtained the presidency by a minority vote. In February 1948 President Perez ousted the Liberals who had been serving in a coalition cabinet, naming a notorious reactionary, Laureano Gomez, to head the cabinet and serve as Foreign Minister. A reign of terror then followed, Liberals being shot daily until the killed averaged twenty a day at the end of March 1948.⁵⁷

It was in this atmosphere that Dr. Jorge Gaitan, the beloved leader of the Liberals was assassinated on April 9. The news spread like wildfire and bloody rioting flamed through the center of the city instantaneously. The assassin was killed on the spot and his body dumped before the presidential palace. There was such mass anger and such complete anarchy that Laureano Gomez hastily fled to Franco Spain. The Pan American delegates quickly retreated to the outskirts of the city, where they assembled half-heartedly and Secretary of State Marshall issued a statement ascribing the riots to the communists.

It was plausible in the atmosphere of the time to believe that the diabolical men in the Kremlin would try to disrupt the Pan American Conference. There were also a few Communists in Bogota who most probably took part in the riots with gusto, but a communist explanation of the tragedy was far fetched and unnecessary.⁵⁸ All the conditions for it were native to Colombia, and the outcome was not communism but fascism.

The Conservatives maintained their hold on the armed forces, packed for the purpose, and on the executive. Gomez, who was an open Falangist, anti-American and pro-German, returned from Spain in October 1949 and announced his candidacy for President. Armed clashes led by the Conservatives then grew in intensity until the Liberal candidate withdrew from the campaign, on the ground that the violence of the Conservatives was overwhelming.⁵⁹

The Conservative government then imposed a full state of siege. Some 1500 Liberals were jailed and on the day of the one-party election the Conservatives announced that they had become the majority party.⁶⁰

Thereafter the rights of the Liberal majority in parliament were ignored, and all constitutional processes frustrated, as Colombia became a fascist dictatorship of the Franco stripe and “part of the Madrid-Buenos Aires Axis.” Thus there emerged “a totalitarian state, directly instigated by the Government of Spain on the very frontiers of the Panama Canal.”⁶¹

The fascist seizure of Colombia was far more brutal and had far less popular support than the communist mastery of Czechoslovakia. In Colombia 500 people were killed and millions of dollars worth of property destroyed during the riots, and many hundreds of others were killed during the gradual mastery of the state. But the advance of fascism to the Panama Canal itself did not cause a wave of anger and fear to sweep through Washington and the West. This was due to two reasons: fascism was not then led by a great power; and, in the main, it preserves the privileges of the upper classes, instead of turning the social structure upside down.⁶²

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