The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952

The European Recovery Program or Marshall Plan was a massive American-aid package designed to help the war-torn countries of Western Europe after WW II. Hogan, who teaches at Ohio State University, describes the plan from its inception through congressional enactment and analyzes in detail the methods by which it was put into action. His study goes far beyond description and analysis. Hogan's ambitious, closely reasoned and strongly supported argument is that the Marshall Plan was an outgrowth of organizational, economic and political trends that had already forged American business methods before World War II, and that the plan was a bold attempt to project the American corporative-political economy across the Atlantic. The author brings into sharp focus ""the triumph of the traders' approach,'' an important turning point in the history of the plan, and the problems of reconciling European recovery-aid with U.S. rearmament imperatives during the Korean War. (September)