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AFL-CIO supported it, as did all business/trade associations. Christian leaders loved it. Everybody loved the plan. There was grassroots efforts to encourage Americans to accept austerities. Women were encouraged to cook with leftovers (ugh 1950s jello dishes explained?)
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The South wants a Marshall Plan for the South. ASPCA wants one for animals. Who doesn’t like free money plans 😂
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Alright. To bed. We continue tomorrow. Homework: design your own Covid Marshall plan. Use arduinos and 3d printers if possible. Link it to a China scare so we can sell it better.
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Getting started early today since there's a heat wave on in LA and don't feel like doing much else. Now at four-power meeting on Germany, in London, November 1947. Writing on the wall, the talks are dead on arrival. Everyone knows the West has already forked away from Potsdam.
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Talks fail as expected. Stage set for partition of Germany and unique problem of Berlin 120 miles east of border. As expected Soviets make moves to nullify the four-party control of the city following failure of the talks. This would be exciting if I didn't already know ending.
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Dizzying cast of characters moving across the stage and I'm not bothering to keep track. Every big historical story has a unique set-piece short story within that's strategic and critical but doesn't rhyme with anything in other stories. Berlin is that for this story.
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Lots of speechifying. Everybody realizing that the Marshall Plan is not an alternative to re-armament or vice-versa, any more than Lend-Lease was an alternative to US militarization before WW2. Will the Cold War be economic or military? Why not both dot gif.
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WaPo, Nov 9, 1947: "If, as Bismarck says, history occurs when things happen, the last five months have teemed with history." August 1947 looms so large in the Indian imagination (Aug 15 was independence from Britain) that it's a blindspot for me for world history elsewhere.
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'The House of Reps, Reston observed, was now not just divided into parties, "but into whose who went [to Europe for visits] and those who stayed home."' Cf: 2020, Congress reps who made earnest attempts to determine ground reality re: Covid, vs those who stayed Trumpie.
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Lol, Henry Wallace, FDR's last veep, leads charge from the Left, arguing against the plan and suggesting a 3x bigger $50B European New Deal to be administered by the UN. So the farcicalization of the New Deal happened within a decade of the original. GND is just the latest.
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Interim aid: France $328m, Italy $227m, Austria, $42m. On to Chapter 8, ominously titled "Sausage" (as in, how it's made). TIL the origin of the phrase. "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made." -- John Godfrey Saxe, poet.