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'You too can be like us:' selling the Marshall Plan by David Ellwood 
'You too can be like us:' selling the Marshall Plan.(American propaganda during the European Recovery Program) History Today, Oct, 1998, by David Ellwood David Ellwood shows how the US fought for the hearts and minds of the people of Europe with an Americanised vision of their future. When, in the summer of 1947, the European countries signed on for the Marshall Plan (officially known as the European Recovery Program, ERP), each of them accepted a clause which allowed for the dissemination within their borders of information and news' on the workings of the plan itself. From these premises, barely noticed at the time, there sprang the greatest international propaganda operation ever seen in peacetime. The United States, enjoying one of the most pragmatically creative phases of its modern foreign policy history, had invented with the ERP a new method for projecting its power into Europe. What started out as `a suggestion' by Secretary of State George Marshall to jump-start Europe's ailing post-war reconstruction process, then speedily evolved into a wide-ranging effort to modernise Europe's industries, markets, unions and economic control mechanisms. The means used were dollar loans and grants, technical assistance, `Missions' in each country and as much advice and exhortation as the Marshall Plan technocrats thought they could get away with. But crucial Marshall Plan concepts such as Counterpart, the dollar gap, productivity and European integration were not only quite new to European ears, but difficult to communicate in the best of circumstances. As the ERP administrator, the former car salesman Paul Hoffmann, explained later, there were only two objectives: `One to promote economic recover), and the other to promote understanding of the Marshall Plan itself. We had to move quickly and vigorously in order to get results'. The key countries were considered to be France, the Bi-Zone and Italy, followed by a second band containing Greece, Turkey, Austria, Trieste and the French Zone of Germany, a third including England and Sweden, and a fourth grouping the rest. But it was in Italy that the largest campaign emerged, the one considered `tops' in the Paris field headquarters of ERP. When the new National Security Council had started its work in November 1947 its first paper concerned Italy, the `pre-revolutionary' conditions said to exist there, the possibility that the Communists could come to power by legal or extra-legal means and the impression that Italy had first priority in Cominform strategy. As the 1948 general elections came nearer, with a democratic victory for the Left looking ever more likely, a vast propaganda mobilisation was set in motion with a significant new `black' or clandestine dimension supplied by the CIA and a part of the American trade union movement. The State Department made clear that Communist voters would be banned from emigration to the US, and Marshall himself declared that should the Left win, the country would be excluded from the benefits of the ERP. When the uproar died down and the true impact of the conservative victory on April 18th, 1948, could be measured, it became clear that not all the American plans had worked. The economic counsellor in the American Embassy, Henry Tasca, complained that the industrialists, large landowners and other elements of the ruling groups were capable of any compromise rather than recognising the need for long-term reform and social modernisation. A New York Times correspondent, Michael L. Hoffmann, concluded that the key question in Italy was not the defeat of Communism but whether the country could develop its own authentic capitalism. As he put it: The idea of persuading the low income consumer to feel the need for something he's never had, using advertising, and then to give it to him at a price he can afford, could be the Marshall Plan's biggest contribution to Italy -- if it gets anywhere. So the Marshall Plan, when it finally began in June 1948, was never just an abstract affair of economic numbers: loans, grants, investment, production, productivity etc, even if these were its key operating tools. Nor was it a frontal assault on European Communism. Instead it aimed to get as close as possible to the people it was benefiting in order to channel attitudes, mentalities and expectations in the direction Americans understood, the direction of mass-production for mass-consumption prosperity. Hoffmann later wrote in his memoirs: They learned that this is the land of full shelves and bulging shops, made possible by high productivity and good wages, and that its prosperity may be emulated elsewhere by those who will work towards it. `You Too Can Be Like Us' was the message of the Marshall Plan and it was the task of the propaganda effort to bring that promise home to Europeans everywhere. The operating principles arrived at in Italy were spelled out more clearly than elsewhere and although similar to the methods used in the other ERP countries, were probably applied more intensively after the experience of the 1948 elections. They changed little up to the outbreak of the Korean War. A January 1950 report from the Rome mission insisted: Carry the message of the Marshall Plan to the people. Carry it to them directly -- it won't permeate down. And give it to them so that they can understand it. The basic thrust, then, was for a truly mass programme using `every method possible ... to reach Giuseppe in the factory and Giovanni in the fields', or as the Paris office put it, `slugging it out way down among the masses'. This came to mean tens of documentary films, hundreds of radio programmes, thousands of mobile cinema shows, millions of copies of ERP pamphlets, tens of millions of spectators for ERP exhibitions and films. The methods proved extremely flexible and no idea seemed to large or too daring for the Information Program in its heyday. Millions of balloons were launched from Marshall Plan events in countries close to the Iron Curtain. Waterborne shows toured the canals of Holland, Belgium and northern Germany, as well as the islands of the Aegean. A Marshall Plan train visited major European stations, while caravans brought mobile exhibits to fairs the length and breadth of the Continent. In Italy, besides the traditional media there were ERP concerts and ERP essay contests, ERP art competitions and ERP variety shows on radio, ERP trains and ERP ceremonials. There were calendars, cartoon strips, postage stamps and atlases. There were even troubadours singing of ERP-sponsored miracles in Sicilian villages: Ah poor Mariella! She loves Giovanni who loves another. Mariella leaps into the river to end it all. She is saved and Giovanni realizes at last how much he loves her. Then [the guitar goes sombre] tragedy! The icy water has given Mariella double pneumonia. The doctors shake their heads: she is about to die. But wait! [the guitar goes faster]. Up comes a burly hero marked ERP' -- the European Recovery Program, the Marshall Plan. From a gigantic hypodermic needle labelled `ERP Pencillin from the USA', he treats the dying Mariella. She recovers! She marries Giovanni! Even mobile puppet shows were provided: `to bring the Marshall Plan message ostensibly to children but actually through the children [...] to semi-literate or illiterate adults [...]'. This was `Operation Bambi', run in agreement with the Ministry of Education, which according to its supporters did not: ... bring the children statistics or dry commentaries on international economics. It brings them entertainment they have never seen before and educates them with modern techniques. Whether opening an ERP pamphlet or visiting a Marshall Plan exhibition in the months leading up to June 1950, the same themes appeared. What was `the message'? A booklet distributed at the Venice exhibition on ERP in summer 1949 is a good illustration. It opens with a dramatic quantification of the dimensions of American aid: three ships a day, $1000 a minute, two weeks' salary from every worker. The goals?: By utilising American free supplies of foodstuff and raw materials, Italy and the other nations included in the ERP plan hope to attain by the year 1952: A higher standard of living for the entire nation, Maximum employment for workers and farmers, Greater production, through exploiting all their energies and by a close economic collaboration with all the other ERP countries. The essential mechanisms of the Plan are then outlined: how supplies of wheat and raw materials from the US turn into lira deposited in a special fund at the Bank of Italy, which is then used for public works and other `productive improvements aiming to diminish unemployment'. The details follow, underlining how work has been restored to lifeless industries, how new machinery has modernised factories and how greater output needed to be integrated Europe-wide to facilitate emigration and stabilise economic life on a continental scale. Throughout the campaign, film was the preferred medium for getting the message across, especially to difficult `target groups' such as Communist workers in factories. The aim was not to preach democracy or even teach the latest American industrial techniques, but to find a non-propagandistic point of contact with such an audience. `Even though these films do not openly praise the American way of life', explained the Embassy in Rome, `they reflect a part of it in the way the workers dress, the shining conditions in the factories, the technical excellence of the machinery etc.' According to an ERP report to Congress of July 1950, in the whole of Western Europe fifty ERP documentaries and newsreels were circulating, seen every week by upwards of 40 million people, divided between 30 million for the newsreels and 10 million for the documentaries. `Our enquiries in various countries', said the report, `have shown to us the great potential of the cinema in transmitting information in ways that spectators can understand, believe and remember.' Summing up the results of its efforts after two years of activity, the Information Division in Rome calculated that at least 30 million citizens could by then be counted as `well informed' on the Marshall Plan. Of the entire population 52 per cent considered it good for the country, while 11 per cent perceived it negatively. Women and young people were the key target-groups from a long-term perspective. Strategically, the objective was now defined as: ... the mobilisation of the Italians around the idea that only on the basis of a free economy can a strong, democratic and free Italy be constructed, together with a peaceful and prosperous Europe. In fact the Division considered the enthusiasm of the Italians for European unity (together with the growth of a non-confessional trade union movement where none existed before), among its greatest successes. But in private there were many doubts about the effectiveness of the message and the overall results. A high-level official in the Paris headquarters noted as early as February 1949: `the European worker listens listlessly while we tell him we are saving Europe, unconvinced that it is his Europe we are saving...'. An opinion poll carried out by the ECA in mid-1950 interviewed almost 2,000 people, including citizens from France, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Austria and Italy. On average approximately 80 per cent of those selected knew of the ERP and 75 per cent approved of it. (Outside France, which stood as a special case in view of the intensity of opposition to the Marshall Plan, 55 per cent was the minimal level of approval.) Between 25 and 40 per cent of those interviewed understood its functioning. But as the official sponsors of the poll commented, it was among the minorities `not on the team' that the most important groups for the persuasion strategy were still to be found: the workers and the peasants. It was they who doubted most profoundly the motives behind American action, just as Communist propaganda prompted them to do. But the greatest challenge to American action in Europe from summer 1950 onwards was the battle against the effects of the war in Korea. It is impossible to over-estimate the impact throughout Europe of this decisive moment in the Cold War escalation process. The war brought in its wake a qualitative change, an unprecedented intensification in the ideological and psychological commitment to the anti-Communist crusade. For their part, the left-wing opposition insisted -- with some success -- that the entire episode confirmed their prediction that the purpose of NATO was to drag Europe into America's wars. Henceforth, problems of military security would take over from economic reconstruction at the head of US priorities in Europe, But the militarisation of all the effort, coming together with the prospect of general rearmament, cost the promoters of productivity and prosperity as the solution to all ills very dearly. Throughout ECA it was recognised that the strains of rearmament could produce `internal security crises' in countries such as France and Italy, or at best sceptical neutralism of a kind evident in a number of countries, mid articulated most effectively by Le Monde. The ECA men on the ground had already decided, however, that there was no conflict between defence and the ERP objectives: it was just a matter of bending the existing policy goals to the new requirements. A paper of August 1950, produced in Paris, showed how, in order to increase European `stability, self-confidence and, therefore, self-respect', the existing policy themes might be transposed: 1. Marshall aid and military assistance are good for you because they give you -- as Europeans -- a fighting chance to make Europe strong enough to discourage any aggression. 2. But -- this strength can only be achieved through unity. As separate, rival powers, the nations of Free Europe are weak, are dangerously exposed. 3. Productivity must increase because more food, more machines, more of nearly everything is needed to make Europe so strong it will be unassailable. But the Americans were under no illusions as to the difficulties they faced. In a top level analysis of two-and-a-half-years of effort carried out for the Paris headquarters, it was admitted that knowledge of the Marshall Plan and its popularity were by that time -- November 1950 -- stagnant. While the percentage of the population opposing the Plan in countries such as France and Italy was smaller than the Communist vote, still the doubts persisted in `much too great a segment of the European population' around the question of whether America's aims were genuinely to improve living standards, or simply to shore up the existing system. The leading Americans in Europe considered they had been `led down the garden path' in countries such as France, Germany and Italy, where their investment showed so few signs of paying visible social or political dividends. They believed, said a British observer, `that really strenuous efforts ... from the masses cannot be expected unless "social justice" figured as part and parcel' of all future schemes to raise production for defence. Only from this time onwards did an awareness take hold that the effectiveness of the messages depended in the first instance on their being adapted to local circumstances. In the early months it had been considered more important to have available press articles, formulas for radio shows, exhibitions and films which could be used in any country in Europe and even be shown on American television. Hence the importance attached to the newsreels specially commissioned from the `March of Time' organisation and Fox-Movietone. In a country like Italy the need for more effective contact with local reality meant that local scriptwriters and directors were recruited to fabricate film propaganda material, using schemes furnished by the sponsor which they would then translate into the symbolic, visual and spoken language of the Italian audience. In this way the Organizzazione Epoca was born, set up not to proclaim, but to conceal the American origins of its operations. Naturally no one was taken in. As a Newsweek writer commented after a visit to Italy: `... even the most sincere friends of the United States sometimes find it hard to appreciate what they are getting.' The range of subjects treated began to evolve after 1950. There was talk of film projects to stimulate tourism in Italy, making use of the well-known Hollywood stars who were by now to be found in Rome production studios. On the broader European level there was discussion of how to translate into film language the two abstract concepts most difficult to treat and yet most important for the entire ERP project: productivity and European integration. But by this time even these priorities had given way to the struggle to explain rearmament. An October 1951 telegram from Rome to Washington described how new truck convoys had been organised to carry the story of NATO up and down the country. They offered two colour documentaries and two in black and white, on subjects such as the reconstruction of Italy's armed forces, with illustrations of the new motorised units, the renovated Alpine divisions, the rebuilt navy and air force. But no one apparently, either at the time or afterwards, ever chanced a serious analysis of the reception of all this inventiveness in the minds and hearts of the peoples to whom it was addressed with so much fervour. In private, however, scepticism was widespread, all revolving round the true nature of American motivation and resentment of the implied dependence. An ERP propagandist in Holland reflected: `We were paying the piper and it was a very delicate matter to decide how loudly to call the tune.' In its discussion of the Marshall Plan, today's European historiography emphasises the capacity of the governments of the era to elude, neutralise or ignore the American exhortations, even in an emergency such as that provoked by the Korean War. Outside France's Monnet Plan, few comprehensive or coherent strategies were ever drawn up for the use of American aid, in spite of incessant ECA pressure in this sense. Hardly any of the reforming, modernising methods proposed by the Americans for the national states and economies were ever adopted, even in the Britain of the much-publicised Anglo-American Productivity Council. Yet in a more diffuse, cultural sense the Marshall Plan in all its manifestations did put the American challenge of mental and technical modernisation on national agendas. In Italy the prevailing vision of the country's industrial prospects at the time, rooted as it was in traditional ideas of frugality and thrift, began to clash with the new expansionism demonstrated by parts of the private sector anxious to leave behind the protectionism of the Fascist era and take advantage of the opportunities offered by rapidly expanding world trade. By 1953 industrial production had doubled compared with 1938 and the annual rate of productivity increase was 6.4 per cent, twice the English equivalent. At FIAT, production per employee quadrupled between 1948 and 1955, fruit of an intense, Marshall Plan-aided application of American technology (as well as much more intense discipline on the factory-floor). But today's speculations overall impact of the on the participating countries see it not only in macroeconomic terms, but also as a sort of psychological plasma. The limits of its capacities have become clear, as the crudeness of its insistence on the American way as the solution to every problem. Intended also to be a weapon in the Cold War, the ERP failed to stop the growth of Communist parties and trade unions in France and Italy, while in Greece more forceful methods were needed to stop the revolutionary left. Even so the combination of ERP and NATO left no room for doubt over America's commitment to the security and prosperity of Western Europe, and at a time of widespread despair greatly revived confidence, the Old World's faith in its own potential for renaissance. The Marshall Plan ended prematurely in December 1951, when it gave way to the Mutual Security Program. But the underlying effectiveness of its energising impulses soon became clear. In Italy, government, industry, and the public all bet on the future in these years. When the era of the economic `miracle' began it quickly emerged that since the war the same psychological processes had been going on in Italy as in other Western countries: the transformation known as `the revolution of rising expectations', in the resonant phrase invented in 1950 by Harlan Cleveland, an economist and high Marshall Plan official. `The American myths kept their promises and won through', proclaimed Enzo Forcella, a veteran leftwing intellectual, in a post-Cold War discussion on the impact of American culture in all its forms in the ideologically radicalised Italy of the 1950s. Forcella was referring to the images offered by ERP documentaries of the American way of life, specifically those showing workers arriving at factories at the wheel of their own cars, an unthinkable notion in the Italy of 1949. While the inspirational message of the ERP films embodied an invitation to follow the American example all the way, the feature films on the same programmes demonstrated, for better or for worse, where the road might lead. Up there on the screen, where myth and model fused, the new civilisation of opulence and growth was on show. If there were those who did not like what they saw -- and many cultural critics founded their careers on denouncing it -- then it was simply up to the Europeans to provide something different. FOR FURTHER READING: D.W. Ellwood, Rebuilding Europe. America and West European Reconstruction (Longmans, 1992); Anthony Carew, Labour under the Marshall Plan (Manchester University Press, 1987); Matthias Kipping and Ove Bjarnar (eds.), The Americanisation of European Business (Routledge, 1998). An expanded version of this article will appear in L. Cheles (ed.), The Art of Persuasion, Political Communication in Italy from 1945 to the 1990's (Manchester University Press, 1999). David Ellwood is Associate Professor of International History at the University of Bologna. He is the Editor of Hollywood in Europe: Politics, Governments, Markets (University of Amsterdam Press, 1994). COPYRIGHT 1998 History Today Ltd. COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group |