The Marshall Plan

The Marshall Plan was the program of American economic aid to rebuild Western Europe after World War II. Announced by Secretary of State George Marshall in 1947, it provided more than $13 billion in assistance between 1948 and 1952.

In June 1947, in a commencement address at Harvard, Secretary of State George Marshall called on the United States to help fund the recovery of a war-shattered Europe. The continent's industrial base was destroyed. Cities were rubble. Famine threatened. Communist parties were gaining ground in France and Italy. Marshall proposed that European nations draft a common recovery plan and that the United States help finance it. Congress passed the Economic Cooperation Act of 1948 with strong bipartisan support, and over the next four years the United States transferred more than $13 billion to sixteen European countries. In current dollars, that figure exceeds $150 billion. The aid funded raw materials, food, fuel, machinery, and the rebuilding of ports and railways. It also tied recipient nations together in a common framework, an early step toward what became the European Union. The Soviet Union and its satellites declined to participate, deepening the division of Europe that would last until 1989. The Marshall Plan succeeded by almost any measure. Western European industrial production exceeded prewar levels by 1952. The plan helped lay the economic foundation that NATO would secure militarily. It became the template that later generations would invoke when calling for major reconstruction efforts, though no subsequent effort has matched its combination of scale, ambition, and historical timing. The plan also marked the moment when the United States accepted permanent engagement in European affairs, ending more than a century in which the country had treated transatlantic involvement as an exceptional and temporary measure.