The Country We Forgot to Rebuild

We saved Europe from starvation and communism. Now America needs a Marshall Plan of its own.

The brilliant historian William Manchester, in his work The Glory and the Dream, covers four tumultuous decades of American life, stretching from 1932 through 1972. In his treatment of postwar Europe and America, he points out the disastrous situation in which Europe found itself. In 1947, the British Empire was bankrupt and breaking apart at the seams. Greece was embroiled in a civil war that threatened to turn it communist, while Turkey faced growing Soviet pressure. Great Britain, which had been supporting anti-communist efforts in both countries, was out of cash. A desperate call came to Washington: Britain could no longer provide the aid needed to prevent these two countries from falling into the communist orbit.

Meanwhile, the fractured European countries were full of unemployed, homeless, and starving people. Our old ally Joseph Stalin controlled half of Europe through the advance of the Red Army and a bungled Roosevelt foreign policy, while other countries were defenseless against the Soviet war machine. Having these countries fall to the communists was not going to bring freedom or comfort to Western Europe, and a plan was badly needed not only to feed and rebuild Europe but also to protect it from falling into the totalitarian orbit.

Although the plan was devised within the State Department, it was determined that George Marshall was the man to sell the idea of continued aid to Europe to the American people. He announced the proposal in a commencement address at Harvard University. Hard-line Republicans, including the soon-to-be-famous Joseph McCarthy, were not thrilled with the idea of endless aid to Europeans whom many—correctly—felt were unappreciative and undeserving of endless American assistance. Nonetheless, the Marshall Plan came into being, costing American taxpayers billions upon billions of dollars to rebuild infrastructure and provide food, fuel, machinery, and grain from the American Midwest to prevent starvation in Europe. Military assistance came through related but separate American programs. For a nanosecond, Europeans expressed some gratitude. Winston Churchill praised Marshall’s decision as statesmanship “on the highest level.” He recognized that America had used its extraordinary postwar power to rebuild other countries rather than exploit their weakness. Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary, described Marshall’s proposal as a “lifeline to sinking men” and said that it “brought hope where there was none.” The French—albeit briefly—were complimentary. George Bidault, the French foreign minister, said that “the noble initiative of the Government of the United States is for our peoples an appeal which we cannot ignore.” Not exactly gratitude, but probably as close as a French person would ever come to giving it.

Even two years earlier, the United States had already begun the relief effort. Farms, factories, railroads, and power grids had been destroyed. Food production had collapsed, and there was nothing even approaching adequate housing, fuel, medicine, and sanitation. The United States supplied enormous quantities of wheat, flour, powdered milk, cooking fats, medicine, clothing, coal, trucks, and other necessities. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, largely funded by the United States, fed millions of civilians and provided medicine, clothing, and shelter. In addition, the United States eventually welcomed hundreds of thousands of displaced persons into the country. The Marshall Plan was rolled out over a little more than four years, costing approximately $13.3 billion at the time—about $183 billion in today’s dollars, but more like $1 trillion when measured by its relative weight in the American economy.

As we know, it wasn’t long before French and British socialists condemned the United States for the extraordinary acts of generosity it undertook to save Europe from starvation and a bleak totalitarian future. Nowadays, we look in amazement as Europe enacts speech codes, welcomes populations containing people who want to reduce women to property, and speaks lovingly of figures like Stalin and Mao. Anyone who has lived in Europe cannot be surprised, given the state of the press, the universities, and the fact that it is nearly impossible to find a decent cocktail on the whole European continent. In fact, in one memorable moment shortly after the arrival of American aid, French Communists introduced legislation to prohibit the importation, manufacture, and sale of Coca-Cola in France and its remaining territories. The legislation failed, but the warm sentiment was … typically French. What a bunch of swell guys.

The takeaway here should not be that Europeans today are both misguided and ungrateful. We already know that. The takeaway is that the Marshall Plan and continuing American aid did help prevent Western Europe from falling within the Soviet orbit and revived European economies to such an extent that these countries were eventually able to form the European Union—among other reasons, to give themselves the economic scale to compete with us. Today, we see bestsellers in Italy such as Viaggio in America by Federico Rampini, an Italian scholar and journalist trying to persuade Europeans that we aren’t all that bad. Bad certainly, but not that bad. Heartwarming. I suppose this is progress.

The unfortunate part of all of this is that while we have spent trillions in cumulative foreign assistance around the world to incur the wrath and hatred of the French and socialist Italian professors, our own problems have been mounting. What we have missed while traveling through the world looking for accolades that are never coming is that our own country is falling apart. And there are obvious reasons for this. George Marshall knew that communism was not going to be defeated simply by giving speeches about the superiority of capitalism. Communism is awful; its record demonstrates that. However, hungry and destitute people do not eat speeches. Unemployed men do not raise families on political philosophy. Distributing Adam Smith and Ayn Rand books at political rallies is not a long-term solution. The importance of the Marshall Plan—the very reason it worked—is not that it merely attacked communism. It rebuilt communism’s strongest competitor.

It is time for another Marshall Plan, but the country that needs rebuilding is our own. We did not need to ban Marx or call for ideological purity to put an end to the Soviet Union. The American approach in Europe—and the approach that needs to be deployed here—is to counter bad ideas with better ideas. We need to do here what we did in Europe: rebuild the economic, educational, and civic conditions that make collectivist and authoritarian ideas look as bad as they are.

It is not a big surprise that, after three generations of filling our kids’ ears with garbage in the universities while providing scant opportunities for young people, they do not feel that capitalism is working for them. We have constructed a ridiculous system wherein 18-year-olds and their parents are told, encouraged, and compelled to borrow enormous amounts of money for a degree that does not lead to the opportunity they were promised. So, we have swarms of alienated young people whose heads are already full of Marxist propaganda, who carry substantial student debt, cannot afford a house, move from one temporary or demeaning job to another, and wonder whether having a family is economically feasible. Then they listen to speeches about how capitalism is working wonderfully. Well, it is for hedge funds and private equity investors. Not so much for Middle America.

INVEST IN THE BROADER POPULATION: College is not the answer for the broader population. It never has been. It has traditionally been for those who wanted to enter professional careers requiring additional education. But the notion of studying literature as a path to a job in anything other than teaching literature—jobs that are tough to come by—is not realistic. The answer is to employ capitalism in an intelligent manner for our young people, not merely for a few rich kids from New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles. America’s Marshall Plan should include a massive expansion of apprenticeships, vocational education, and employer-based training. We should make it once again respectable to become an electrician, machinist, contractor, mechanic, nurse, farmer, or small-business owner. Because we need these jobs, we should invest in them. We need to remove needless licensing barriers and encourage companies, with appropriate subsidies, to hire and train inexperienced workers. A free-market society cannot survive if entire generations or populations conclude that the market has no place for them.

CREATE OWNERS: Capitalism should be geared toward creating more owners, not merely more consumers and debtors. Although Marxism is a dead end, some Marxist critiques of capitalism are valid, and we should have the self-awareness to address our deficiencies. Accumulating great wealth in the hands of a few while creating a massive underclass is not the goal of capitalism. If that is what is happening, then it is not functioning properly.

CREATE THINKERS: We will not create owners unless they can think. The purpose of our school system is not to manufacture Democrats or Republicans. If that is what is happening, then taxpayer dollars should be withheld. The goal of education is to produce intelligent and moral adults who are capable of examining ideas and reaching conclusions on their own. There is no reason not to teach Marx, but we should not proselytize for Marxism. We should examine the promises it made and what actually happened. Similarly, there is no reason to conceal our country’s sins. But a civilization that teaches only its sins should hardly be surprised when its children conclude that the nation needs to disappear. We also need to teach Washington’s decision to surrender power; Lincoln and the abolition of slavery; the immigrant experience; the Marshall Plan; Apollo; and America’s contribution to music. The story of America is the story of a society repeatedly trying to live up to elevated principles it has often violated. But it is also the story of a country that is self-aware and strives to be good.

CREATE ADULTS: The new Marshall Plan should not be about prolonging adolescence but about creating adults. The infantilization of our adult class is apparent in the way 60-year-olds try to conduct themselves like teenagers. Adulthood should be the goal—something our own congressional candidates hardly display in their incredible inability to work together or behave like grownups. A republic depends on adults who can do things: cooperate, endure disappointment, care for children and parents, and accept responsibility for themselves and others. Clearly, we are failing at this. That means we need to take action to relearn these skills.

One widely circulated idea that needs to be implemented as soon as possible is a large American Service Corps. If I were an employer, I would be looking for individuals who had volunteered for this kind of service rather than spending their time vaping in the university cafeteria. Young Americans could spend a year or two working in conservation, disaster relief, tutoring, elder care, hospitals, infrastructure, or the military and receive significant benefits afterward toward housing and the building of a family and future. Why are we not investing in creating responsible adults?

INVEST IN COMMUNITIES: Another element of a new Marshall Plan would be investing in the communities themselves—the same way we did in Europe. We have spent the last seventy years measuring success on a national scale rather than a local one. Gross domestic product can be a misleading statistic. We can have an impressive GDP while losing factories, stores, banks, newspapers, and the reasons young people once had for remaining in their communities. The entire republic was built on the notion that everything of importance should not be concentrated in the cities. Why do we care only about a handful of metropolitan centers that are increasingly crime-ridden, crowded, and expensive while abandoning the rest of the country?

Industry, federal offices, and research facilities should be moved out of high-population centers in an effort to rebuild small-town and regional America. There should be incentives for businesses to locate in communities that have lost major employers. We should not stand idly by while global banks swallow up our community banks. Modern broadband infrastructure should be extended to less populous areas, and we should encourage the rehabilitation of older and more elegant buildings rather than the construction of ugly strip malls. There should be incentives for remote workers or “digital nomads” to move to small towns, similar to those offered by the European countries trying to steal our digital workers away.

DEMOCRATIZE CAPITALISM: This is about democratizing capitalism. We can demonstrate that it works better than its totalitarian nemesis. The Trump Accounts have been an excellent start—this program needs to be expanded. If an 18-year-old receives a statement showing that he owns pieces of hundreds of American companies, suddenly the stock market is not an abstraction for rich people. The stock market is now something in which we all participate, and our children will understand that it represents the basic building blocks of America: transportation, software development, communications, food service, aircraft, manufacturing, and farming.

BUILD COALITIONS: Finally, the new Marshall Plan offers Republicans and Democrats a way to revitalize their political coalitions. Moderate Democrats do not need to become Republicans, but they are certainly repulsed by the “democratic socialists”—aka communists—who threaten their party. A Republican may say that he favors entrepreneurs while a Democrat supports organized labor. However, they should be able to agree that a 25-year-old who works hard should have a shot at a decent job, a family, a house, a safe neighborhood, and a piece of the American dream. Instead of talking past each other, there should be a common effort to invest in that portion of America that has gotten the shaft for seventy years while we have been floating all over the world trying to make life better for everyone other than Americans.

The next Marshall Plan does not require rebuilding Europe. Europeans are fine now, and their future is up to them. The next Marshall Plan requires rebuilding Detroit, Cleveland, Fresno, Youngstown, and a thousand places that no one remembers or sees on social media. We can defeat communism. But we do so by helping create a society in which all Americans have a piece of the capitalist system, and that system works well for everyone. We can demonstrate why capitalism is better than communism, as we did in Europe. And we should have enough confidence in our principles to give it another shot here at home.

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A few required elements that are missing:

1) get rid of "free trade." This was always a con to allow US manufacturers to employ wage arbitrage to lower US wages or turn them into fraudulent importers buying at Third World prices and reselling at First World prices.

2) Call a halt to almost all immigration. Right now it simply pushes up housing costs and crime and lowers wages.

3) Get rid of hyper-regulation. It's ridiculous that the legal size of a toilet tank in Boise is set by some office in DC. Relax environmental and other regulations so a foundry or blast furnace can be setup and built in less than a year. Allow resource extraction here.

4) Get rid of most zoning regulations. When I first moved to my big city, there were large factory buildings with rail access surrounded by 3 or 4 flat apartments and single family homes where the workers used to live. Allow increases in housing density.

5) Clean up crime. Americans pay an enormous crime premium: razor wire chain link fences, alarm systems, security guards, etc., etc. I recall a study from 30 years ago that pointed out incarceration cost $60K/year but allowing the criminal on the street incurred $450k per year in direct and indirect costs. If this requires half of black males 15 - 30 to be incarcerated until too old to be criminals, tough.

*** The infantilization of our adult class is apparent in the way 60-year-olds try to conduct themselves like teenagers.***

Is the author talking about Congress or more generally? I realize he mentions Congress in his next sentence, but other than in Congress, I’m not sure I see many 60-year-olds acting like teenagers.

When he mentioned infantilization of our adult class, I thought he would be referring to 25-40 year olds who would rather play video games than hold down a job. So he lost me when he brought up 60 year olds.

I seem to remember an Interstate Highway System built after the War, not to mention the gas and oil pipeline system we have today. There was tons of housing built in the burbs. Then there’s there are the communications networks that have been built.

I’ve heard this pitch, “We need another Marshall Plan” several times over the years and all it really means is “We need more pork.” Earth to Mr. Andrews: We’re spending a trillion a year on interest. Fix that and we’ll have plenty to spend on infrastructure. Dump the illegals and we won’t need as much of it.

I find these kinds of articles annoying because what the man says should happen is what is happening in the USA.the dimwit just doesn’t get it.

This is written for a broad audience and a good reminder for those of us who know some things.

Read it again, let your lips move and I am sure you will find a few nuggets. It is a well written and thought out piece. Organizes a plan. Each of us can do a small thing of the plan.

I have sold some of my rental properties to my good tenants and the change in them is amazing to watch. They would never have been able to own property without my help.

We've spent and lost trillions and trillions of dollars in the middle east for foreigners. Parties and politicians have cast aside America for foreigners and the world.

That blood and treasure isn't coming back and we are far worse for that sacrifice. Everyday, Americans have more debt on each individual and less to show for it here because of those actions.

The author makes good points & has ideas that are worth implementing. I do have a small niggle with calling the way the European War ended with division between East & West the fault of FDR policy. FDR was a sick and weak man who was being manipulated by Soviet moles in the White House & State Department. It is most certainly an FDR legacy but there were plenty of malevolent cooks in that kitchen.

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