World At War

It's impossible to understand the Marshall Plan without knowing about World War II. Every man over forty is obsessed with it—what's up, Uncle Bruce—but that doesn't help you too much.

So here are the basics.

The Great Depression was a global economic downturn that basically made life suck for, well, pretty much everyone. Using a combination of virulent nativism, fiery speeches, horrific genocidal policies, and a very silly mustache, Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany and decided that he was going to pay the world back for losing World War I.

He allied himself with Mussolini's fascist government in Italy and the Empire of Japan, and the Axis Powers (that was their cool band name) went to war by invading any country close enough. Eventually, a coalition of (mostly) the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union (they were the oddball) came together calling themselves the Allies.

Short version: fighting ensued, and the Allies won. But you probably know that, because your Uncle Bruce made you watch Band Of Brothers.

Throw Money At The Problem

The problem with war is...wait. One of the problems with war (there are a ton of them), is that it tends to be a wee bit destructive. Especially the modern, industrial version. Back in the day, armies liked to meet each other out in fields, line up and shoot. But they also liked to wear oh-so-easy-to-spot red coats.

In the modern age of the 1940s, the way to win was to cripple the enemy's manufacturing base. This meant bombing things like factories and railroads. No way to make weapons or ship them to the front. So when the dust settled and the Allies were victorious, the entire manufacturing base of Europe was just about pounded flat.

Now you're faced with a big problem. What provided the fertile soil for Hitler? A depressed economy. Now with industry crushed, people aren't exactly hiring. Communism might start looking awfully attractive to desperate people, and the more that spreads, the more influence the Soviet Union is going to get. It's a lose-lose.

So George Marshall thought the solution was to rebuild Europe's economy. Get people back to work and stuff the U.S. values, like the free market and so on, will win over communism. He thought the best way to do that would be to give Europe a ton of money. He'd prioritize: U.S. allies (like Britain and France) would get more than US enemies (like, oh, we don't know, Germany).

Whether it worked or not is being debated, but economies did recover. By the end of the Marshall Plan, they were better off than they had been before the war. At the time, the plan was considered enough of a success that aid (under different names) kept being sent over. For whatever it's worth, communism didn't get into Western Europe, and there were no new Hitlers running around either.

So that's a happy ending.