Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [187]
Averell Harriman, the Secretary of Commerce, had been at the forefront of persuading the American people, and especially the business community, that their self-interest and moral duty lay in helping Europe. The accompanying message was that Europe needed to learn American ways. ‘We have developed a system through which an American worker can produce many times more than a worker in any other country,’ said Harriman to the Pacific Northwest Trade Association in Seattle. ‘Less than half a million American miners produced last year 50 percent more coal than did two million miners in Europe.’ Yet the Marshall Plan proposal declared that it would be an ‘unwarranted interference with the internal affairs of friendly nations’ to demand that they adopt the American model of capitalism.
Harriman’s main objective was, in fact, strategic: he did not want to see a ruined Europe fall prey to Communism. Business leaders made it very clear through their lobbying offensive on Congress that the generosity of the Marshall Plan – up to 17 billion dollars to Europe over five years – should not be a one-way affair. American industry had to be allowed to profit, whether through the guarantee of increased export markets or the chance to dump excess stocks. This would lend some substance to the instinctive suspicion of many in Europe, mostly on the left but also on the right, that the Marshall Plan was America’s economic version of the Trojan Horse. (A public opinion poll in France showed that 47 per cent of the sample believed that the Marshall Plan was dictated by America’s need to extend its markets.) On the other hand, Jean Monnet, France’s greatest planner, defended it strongly, since to have continued with a ruined economy and severe social unrest would have allowed far less independence in the medium and long term.
Once the huge package of measures was sold to Congress, President Truman appointed Averell Harriman as the Special Representative of the Economic Cooperation Administration. His swearing-in took place just after the John H. Quick, the first American cargo ship full of Marshall Plan grain, had steamed out of Galveston, Texas. Within a few months, 150 vessels a day were crossing the Atlantic in a logistical operation that dwarfed any comparable movement during the Second World War.
Averell Harriman had already proved himself at almost everything he touched. As a rugged, good-looking and rich young man, he had rowed for Yale, skied superbly and excelled as an eight-goal polo player and member of the American team which defeated the Argentinians in 1928. He had been a highly competent chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad before Roosevelt had persuaded him to serve his country, most famously as United States ambassador in Moscow during the war. Now Harriman took over the Hotel Talleyrand on the corner of the Place de la Concorde as his headquarters in his battle to thwart Communism in Europe.
The announcement of the Marshall Plan may have been greeted by beleaguered European politicians like the distant trumpets of an army coming to its relief. But once the first tranche of 4.9 billion dollars was on the table to be divided between nations, Harriman needed all his experience of international dealings, all his toughness and all his self-control. He faced skirmishing and blocking actions in almost every direction: the British, who felt that they deserved special treatment after their wartime sacrifice,