Marshall

On the late-morning of Thursday the fifth of June 1947, at the Harvard Yard Tercentenary-Theatre at the Harvard-University-Commencement-ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the sixty-six-year-old Uniontown, Pennsylvania-born American General of the Army George Catlett Marshall, the General-of-the-Army US Army Chief of Staff who had led the World-War-Two American-Army-General-Staff through the 1939-to-1945 wartime-period and had been appointed United States Secretary of State by President Harry S. Truman on the twenty-first of January 1947 in his sixty-sixth year, gave the eleven-minute Harvard-Commencement honorary-degree acceptance-speech that has been universally remembered ever since as the foundational post-war announcement of the European Recovery Program, the thirteen-billion-dollar American-aid programme to the war-damaged-economies of Western-and-Central-Europe across the 1948-to-1952 Marshall-Plan-implementation-period that became the foundational post-war American-economic-aid programme to the recovering-European-economies. The Harvard-Commencement speech outlined the American-State-Department-proposal that the European-economies should propose a coordinated economic-recovery-programme on the strength of which the United-States-Congress would commit substantial American-economic-aid to the European-recovery-period. The European-response across the summer-of-1947 (the Anglo-French-organised European-Conference at the Quai-d'Orsay-Paris of the twelfth of July 1947, the Committee on European Economic Co-operation that drafted the September-1947 coordinated-European-economic-recovery-proposal) brought the Marshall-Plan to the Congressional Economic Cooperation Act of the third of April 1948 and the foundational 1948-1952 implementation period under the Economic-Cooperation-Administration. The Marshall-Plan remains the foundational American-economic-aid-programme in the modern-international-foreign-aid administration and was the foundational American-international-political-investment in the post-war Western-European democratic-and-capitalist-political-economic-recovery on which the NATO-defence-arrangement and the European-Economic-Community trade-and-political-integration would be built across the 1949-and-1957 institutional-foundations.

Read the story →