Anything but Inevitable: How the Marshall Plan Became Possible

David M. McCourt; Stephanie L. Mudge

doi:10.1177/00323292221094084

McCourt, David M.; Mudge, Stephanie L.

2023-12-01 00:00:00

Historians typically explain the Marshall Plan (1948–52) as an effect of a bipartisan embrace of liberal internationalism, which became the dominant ideology of US foreign policy. However, predominant accounts downplay interpretive contention, historical con- tingencies, and counterfactual possibilities that are very much in evidence. There was no bipartisan liberal internationalist consensus immediately after World War II; indeed, there were no “liberal internationalists” until 1947. The present analysis identiﬁes two intercon- nected processes behind the Plan: the emergence of a new kind of political actor,the cred- ibly anti-Communist New Deal liberal, and the coalescence of an unlikely coalition of Trumanites, New Dealers, and congressional conservatives. Together, these processes enabled the passage of a large-scale, Keynesian-style spending initiative that excluded Russia, despite the electoral weakness of New Dealers, and the consolidation of liberal internationalist ideology in American foreign policy—with signiﬁcance for today’sera of renewed great power competition. Keywords Marshall Plan, United States, US foreign policy, liberal internationalism, political persons Corresponding Author: David M. McCourt, Department of Sociology, University of California, Davis, 1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA. Email: dmmccourt@ucdavis.edu 2 Politics & Society 0(0) In April 1948, Harry Truman signed into law the Marshall Plan, through which the United States would expend an unprecedented $12 billion ($151 billion in 2022 dollars) stimulating postwar economic recovery. The Marshall Plan is typically cast as central to the “liberal internationalist” order constructed by the United States and its allies after 1945. As an ideology, liberal internationalism rejects isolationism and “implies ...an agenda that involves promoting open markets, international insti- tutions, cooperative security, democratic community, progressive change, collective problem-solving, shared sovereignty, and the rule of law.” Liberal internationalism, however, also rested on a deeper, categorical way of thinking that pitted the liberal “West” against a USSR-led Communist sphere—an opposition built into the Marshall Plan’s formulation. After 1949, the consequences became increasingly clear, as the United States pivoted toward military intervention in the name of “contain- ment,” setting the stage for the Cold War. Well attended in historical, political economy, and international relations (IR) liter- atures, with important exceptions sociologists have paid limited attention to the Marshall Plan. This lack of input is striking. In addition to current sociological interest in transnational relations, empire, and colonialism, the postwar period’s resonance today is unmistakable. Increasing tensions between the United States and China bear eerie similarities to the events of 1944–48. Declarations of contemporary global poli- tics entering a “new Cold War” render imperative accurate understandings of the ﬁrst Cold War’s onset. America’s embrace of liberal internationalism after 1945—the Marshall Plan at its core—is, admittedly, a historiographical commonplace. Yet, existing works fail to grasp the enduring puzzle of the Marshall Plan in the form and at the time of its cre- ation, with implications for understanding liberal internationalism itself. For example, while some type of American aid to postwar Europe was highly likely, it was not at all inevitable that such an initiative would take the Marshall Plan’s form of grants—focused on state-building and integrating parts of the working class— rather than loans like those provided after World War I through the Dawes and Young Plans. Moreover, existing accounts display hagiographic, reductionist, and tel- eological tendencies that a sociological approach is well equipped to remedy. Broadly speaking, existing accounts point to an array of variable-like causes: the foresighted efforts of charismatic actors; economic necessities; a clear Communist threat; sponta- neous cross-partisan convergence on liberal internationalism; or some combination thereof. Yet, by treating the aforementioned as established social things, existing anal- yses tend to render the Plan inevitable, when it was anything but, downplaying coun- terfactual possibilities that were very much in evidence. Indeed, as the historian Jonathan Bell has chronicled, contra common wisdom, there were no discernible “liberal internationalists” until 1947, and no bipartisan liberal internationalist consensus before 1948—raising doubts about liberal internation- alism’s relationship to the Marshall Plan. After Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, Democrats’ foreign policy views were fractious: some hewed to FDR’s hopes for cooperation with Russia; others soured on relations with Moscow. Before 1947, dominant New Deal Democratic politicians (including President Roosevelt) favored a “One World” foreign policy that rejected the sort of us-versus-them McCourt and Mudge 3 anti-Communist logic that underpinned the formulation of, and justiﬁcation for, the Marshall Plan. In short, between 1944 and 1948 the future of the Democratic Party, the New Deal, and New Dealers was very much in doubt; the meanings of economic interest, liberalism, internationalism, and Communism were matters of contention, not consensus; and the contours of postwar foreign policy were undeﬁned. The period between FDR’s reelection in 1944 and 1948 saw the emergence of novel political per- sonas, organizations, and modes of thinking later read as stable historical facts. If the Marshall Plan appears in our rearview mirror as inevitable, it is only because certain ways of thinking and kinds of persons became settled in the interim. It is here, in the making of new political persons—namely, the anti-Communist liberal Democrat—and novel coalitional possibilities—of those liberal internationalist Democrats with anti-Communist internationalist Republicans—that our article inter- venes in the debate on the Marshall Plan’s origins. We emphasize the puzzle of the Plan’s creation by addressing a series of questions: How, despite FDR’s insistence that New Deal foreign policy should favor cooperation with Russia, did a cadre of “New Deal” yet “anti-Communist” Democrats hawkish on Russia emerge? How, given the power of anti–New Dealers in the American Congress, did a massive Keynesian-inﬂected foreign aid program become law? How, despite the fractiousness of American politics between 1944 and 1948, did the period later appear as one of con- sensual “liberal internationalist” foreign policy? In answering these questions, we foreground two interconnected processes: (1) the emergence of a new kind of political person on the American political scene in late 1946 and 1947, what we call the “credibly anti-Communist New Deal liberal” (or CANDL); and (2) the coalescence of unlikely coalitions made possible by the credibly anti-Communist New Deal liberal’s arrival, here the previously unlikely bipartisan coalition between Democratic internationalists and those in the Republican-controlled Congress. By “new person,” to clarify from the outset, we do not mean new individuals entering ofﬁce after elections. Instead, the concept is meant to grasp how, as political contexts change, political actors not only shift their views and strategies but adopt new styles, perspectives, and positions. Consider, to illustrate, the emergence of the “Trump Republican” in US politics since 2016—a new kind of political person, emerging but also distinct from previous sorts of conser- vative Republicans and willing to ignore a whole range of traditional Republican pol- icies. However short-lived the Trump Republican’s life in American politics may be, no account of events since 2016 is complete without recognition of its impact. Conceptually, we show that the formation of new political persons and the novel coalitional possibilities they bring about are similar types of process: namely, relational struggles of a speciﬁcally political sort in which symbolic boundary-work produces new social things imbued with causal potential. Just as the Trump Republican emerged from struggles within Republican networks—over what it means to be a Republican versus a “Republican-in-Name-Only” (RINO) —we trace how conten- tion inside Democratic Party networks produced a novel type of political person in 1946 and 1947. The core issue was support for Communism, both outside the United States and inside American labor organizations, with the “liberal” Democrat emerging as at-once credibly anti-Communist yet still pro–New Deal, in opposition 4 Politics & Society 0(0) to self-styled “progressives” willing to tolerate Communists in their ranks and seek to work with Communist Russia. Historians like Landon Storrs, Daniel Immerwahr, and Jess Gilbert have each detailed pressures on prominent New Dealers during the 1930s to assert their anti-Communist credentials during the McCarthyism of the late 1940s and early 1950s. We highlight forerunning pressures on Democrats in and around the Truman administration to clarify the scope of their left-liberal commitments. By describing how they did so, and the emergence of the credibly anti-Communist New Deal liberal, it becomes possible to account for the unlikely passage through a conservative-dominated Congress of a large Keynesian-style aid initiative—despite the electoral weakness of New Dealers—and hence the longer-term consolidation of liberal internationalism in US foreign policy. Analytically, our approach is historical, biographical, and relational. We draw on archival evidence, and especially ﬁrst-person accounts, to map how shifting positions and oppositions generated new persons, meanings, and policy possibilities over time. We prioritize the identiﬁcation of plausible counterfactuals overlooked in existing accounts. The resulting contribution shows that the Marshall Plan was a contingent outcome of symbolic boundary-work in a series of relationally organized contests that originated in Democratic Party networks and closed off a One World progressive foreign policy, inclusive of Russia, while setting in motion an era of US-led “liberal internationalist,” but divisive and increasingly militaristic, foreign policy. We proceed in ﬁve parts. We ﬁrst highlight the tendency of existing accounts of the Marshall Plan to treat persons and meanings as stable things rather than historical accomplishments. We then outline our analytical approach, paying special attention to how the Goffmanian concept of person production can enhance our understanding of the dynamics and causal signiﬁcance of American parties. After describing our research design, we offer a historical analysis of the necessitation of the Marshall Plan. Finally, we discuss implications for contemporary US foreign policy and con- sider applications to non-US settings. The Origins and Consequences of the Marshall Plan On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall told an audience at Harvard that America must “assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace,” through a far-reaching foreign aid program. Marshall deliberately omitted referencing a Soviet or Communist threat, despite Truman having invoked that rationale in February 1947 to promote aid to Turkey and Greece: failure to send aid, Marshall then argued, risked extending “Soviet domination to Europe, the Middle East and Asia.” In June 1947, Marshall called for humanitarian assistance “directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.” The ensuing ﬂurry of activity speaks to the Plan’s contingent nature. Marshall’s speech was followed by extensive trans-Atlantic and cross-national negotiations; reports from various branches of government; a “massive campaign to mobilize public support”; and efforts “to convince Congress of the wisdom of aiding Europe.” To ensure the Plan’s passage despite a skeptical Congress, Truman McCourt and Mudge 5 “opened his foreign policy initiative to perhaps the most thorough examination prior to launching of any program” and cultivated a “rare process of close consultation between the executive and Congress.” All this suggests the Marshall Plan was not an outcome of consensus; foreign threats, economic interests, and the principles of US foreign policy were contested, not settled. Alternatives were not just possible but entirely plausible. On April 3, 1948, Truman signed the Economic Cooperation Act (Title I of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948, P.L. 80-472) establishing the European Recovery Program (ERP), operational until 1952. The ERP remains the largest-ever grant of US foreign aid in any four-year period, to any region—including post-9/11 (Figure 1). Total aid, at 13 percent of the 1948 budget, exceeded “development and humanitarian assistance the United States provided from all sources to 212 countries and numerous international development organizations and banks in the four-year period 2013–2016.” The Plan was also an important driver of the construction of the institutional archi- tecture of the American-led postwar liberal international order (see Figure 2). In par- ticular, the ERP was a direct forerunner of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which solidiﬁed the Plan’s shift from loans-based aid to the developmentalist model that would be central to US aid provision throughout the Cold War. By stimulating the formation of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Plan also helped bring about European uniﬁcation. The Plan thus stands as a watershed in world history. Had it failed or appeared in an altered form (for instance, in the more Russia-friendly and Communism-neutral form preferred by FDR and Henry Wallace), postwar international history and US hege- mony would have been very different. Narratives of selﬂessness aside (for Winston Churchill, the Plan was “the most unsordid act in history”), the new era of liberal internationalism in US foreign policy rested on a bedrock of anti-Communist militarism. As shown in Figure 1, ERP economic aid was followed by a second phase of military aid—aform Marshall himself feared would strengthen the inﬂuence of Communist propa- ganda. Objections notwithstanding, congressional amendments to the ERP after the North Korean invasion of South Korea (June 1950) displaced the central- ity of economic assistance, allocating $400 million in military aid. The shift expressed the darker side of the ERP’s underlying logic: that the central mission of US foreign policy was to manage a deadly opposition between the capitalist- democratic “West” and the Communist “East,” with dire consequences for the Global South. What if the Marshall Plan took the One World form popularized by former presiden- tial candidate Wendell Willkie and favored by former vice president Henry Wallace? What if the dominant ideology underpinning postwar US foreign policy did not hinge on a world carved into opposing spheres? What if Marshall Plan institutions were UN-based, as progressives proposed? These are important counterfactual questions, downplayed in existing scholarship that too often afﬁrms rather than historicizes Cold War logics of inevitability. 6 Politics & Society 0(0) The Marshall Plan: Existing Accounts Historical scholarship on the Marshall Plan is, to be sure, extensive, rendering efforts to classify existing accounts necessarily partial. Nonetheless, four broad and non– mutually exclusive explanations are prominent: economic interests, leadership and ideology, experts and elites, and foreign threats. While meritorious individually, important gaps remain. The core problem is a tendency toward teleological explana- tions that deploy variable-type thinking without attending to the contingent historical processes that constitute causal social things. In some scholarship, economic interest was central. Revisionist historical and world systems scholarship situates the Plan as a means of extending US economic power. Postrevisionist historians as well as sociological political economists also highlight economic self-interest, with good reason: with the postwar US economy unrivaled, the Marshall Plan was a solution to the problem “of creating enough world-effective demand for U.S. production.” Still, as is often the case in Marxian-style explanations, this line of thinking tends to sideline the multiplicity of views of actors—including those who, like Marshall, foregrounded the Plan’s humanitarian rather than economic impulses. Another account foregrounds leadership and ideology, highlighting the importance of a supposed bipartisan liberal internationalist consensus in Congress, and the role of Truman and Republicans Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI) and John Foster Dulles, who reached across party divides to steer the country away from isolationism. A related argument focuses on Southern Democrats’ backing of internationalist policies from the 1930s. Figure 1. US overseas loans and grants, ﬁscal years 1946–2018. Source: US Agency for International Development (USAID) 2020, “U.S. Overseas Loans and Grants: Obligations and Loan Authorizations, July 1, 1945–September 30, 2018,” https://explorer.usaid.gov/reports, accessed April 22, 2020. In 1976 the government changed the ﬁscal year from July–June to October–September; data for 1976 include the adjustment period from July through September. McCourt and Mudge 7 Figure 2. The Marshall Plan in the making of the American-led postwar international order. Authors’ elaboration. Sources: Curt Tarnoff, “The Marshall Plan: Design, Accomplishments, and Signiﬁcance,” Congressional Research Service Report R45079 (2018); Kenneth Dyson and Ivo Maes, eds., Architects of the Euro: Intellectuals in the Making of European Monetary Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 13–14; OECD, G.C. Marshall Foundation, White House Ofﬁce of the Historian; see also William Adams Brown and Redvers Opie, American Foreign Assistance (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1953). Leadership and ideology accounts complement others centered on experts, economists, and elites. For Ikenberry, US support for a liberal world order was under- pinned by an expert consensus among British and American Keynesian economists. Michael Hogan situates the Marshall Plan as an effect of business elites’ search for a global corporate neocapitalism grounded in liberal principles: “an American political economy founded on self-governing economic groups, integrated by institutional coor- dinators and normal market mechanisms, led by cooperating public and private elites, [and] nourished by limited but positive government power.” Stephen Wertheim, ﬁnally, shows how many of the guiding ideas were forged in wartime planning for American global supremacy at elite organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations. A ﬁnal family of accounts explains the Plan as a response to foreign threat. One version, centering on Soviet Communism, can be found in accounts of historical players themselves: in the words of ERP director Paul Hoffman, “The real objective [of the Marshall Plan] was to stop the spread of Communism.” This Soviet-threat per- spective heavily informs “realist” IR takes. Here disagreements over promises made at Yalta in January 1945 about Eastern Europe, including Stalin’s refusal to allow free elections in Poland, as well as burgeoning Soviet-friendly politics in countries includ- ing Italy, Greece, and France, led to an anti-Soviet foreign policy and hence the Marshall Plan. 8 Politics & Society 0(0) A variation on the foreign threat account, ﬁnally, emphasizes both domestic ideo- logical currents and geopolitical circumstances, situating liberal internationalism and the Marshall Plan as joint effects of war-induced “fading ideological divisions” and multiple foreign threats. For Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz, liberal internation- alism “was the product of both geopolitical and domestic developments. The threat posed by Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union combined with the fading of ideological divisions ...to enable Democrats and Republicans to coalesce around a common strategy.” Here diverse foreign threats posed by dictatorial regimes accelerated the consolidation of bipartisan convergence on liberal internation- alism. Yet, the centrality of a supposed threat from America’s erstwhile ally, Russia, to the Marshall Plan—after the defeat of the German and Japanese enemies—hints at a certain fuzziness concerning the timing and process of “fading ideological divisions.” Together, these accounts take economic interest, ideology, expertise, and foreign threat as settled, objective things with an intrinsic capacity to exert “forcing-cause” effects. And yet the Plan’s oft-cited causes were accomplishments, not givens; only in retrospect did historically emergent causes acquire the veneer of natural facts. Economic interests, for example, differ between classes and sectors and can be fur- thered in different ways. The constitution of an “expert” requires credentialing and rec- ognition, both conditioned by the sociostructural location of would-be experts. A similar case can be made regarding national threats: in the absence of open warfare, what counts as a “threat” to the national interest is not self-evident and is usually a matter of the victory of some interpretations over others. If we do not understand how certain types of actors emerge and acquire political power, or how certain inter- pretations of facts and events become dominant, we risk taking for granted that which most needs explaining. An Alternative Approach Our analysis operates in the mode of what Daniel Hirschman and Isaac Reed call “for- mation stories,” where the key concern is how “social things come to be stable enough to force or be forced.” In short, our aim is to explain how the oft-cited forces that necessitated the Marshall Plan—a recognition of the Soviet threat, elite consensus on the economic necessity of aid for Europe of a speciﬁcally New Deal–inspired type, and the existence of “liberal internationalism”—became the sort of social things that could cause something like the Marshall Plan. In ways that can easily slip from view, such processes are contingent, and consequential in that they close off some avenues and open up others. We take as our unit of analysis symbolic boundary-work, or the making of “concep- tual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices.” The symbolic boundary-work that concerns us is, ﬁrst, the making of particular kinds of political persons, and second, the production of coalitions based on shared frames con- cerning problems, issues, and realities. We center American party networks as the site for the production of new political persons—here the “credibly anti-Communist New Deal liberal,” or CANDL—who understand the political world in a certain way, and who then drive framing, policy formation, and coalition building. McCourt and Mudge 9 Our inspiration is Erving Goffman. For Cahill, “the collaborative manufacture of public persons” was among Goffman’s “abiding concerns.” Starting from the Durkheimian principle that the social comes ﬁrst and the person (understood as a cat- egory or representation, distinct from bodily individuals) second, a sociology of partic- ular types of political person requires attention to “interpretive frameworks of accountability that individuals draw upon to produce and recognize actions that are indicative of one or another kind of personhood.” Persons are contested cultural forms that, once crystallized, open up some “ways of thinking, feeling, and acting” and close off others, delineating counterpersons, creating new axes of difference and, at every step, new counterfactual possibilities. Consider, for instance, how elections generate nationally visible partisan personas —think the “Trump Republican” or the “New Democrat.” The contours of the political ﬁeld shift as politicians adopt person/counterperson stances (e.g., the “Trump” vs. the anti-Trump RINO). Meanwhile, in the broader cultural arena, media outlets, scholars, and pundits situate new persons relative to contemporaries and antecedents (e.g., is Biden the next FDR?). Similar processes occur between elections, as politicians and their associates link themselves, or are linked by others, with policy agendas (“New Deal Democrats”), social movements (“Tea Party Freshmen”), or expert cliques (“Brain Trusters”). Viewed in this way, the formation of political persons is crucial for which policy frames and hence coalitions are possible and impossible, and thus what policies become thinkable and operationalizable. But often the mere availability of a given policy frame is not enough; frames with certain person-associations—especially factional ties—may, for counterpersons, be read as purely strategic, and thus inauthentic (e.g., a non-Trumpist Republican who embraces Trumpism in an election year). The trouble, in a Goffmanian way of think- ing, is that frame-based coalition building requires credibility—and credibility requires proof. Commitment, or “the objective appearance of persuasive evidence that a pro- posed course of action has been unretractably entered upon,” is one form of proof. Commitment involves giving up latitude to change one’s course of action—say, by severing connections that might otherwise allow alternative alliances. Beyond public pronouncements, which may not do the trick, an alternative route is substantiating pro- nouncements by forming an organization on the basis of a person/counterperson stance (e.g., for anti-Trump Republicans, the Lincoln Project). In this case, person/counterper- son dynamics become organizational positions and position-takings: “organizational actors distinguish themselves from others” via “symbolically meaningful position- takings—e.g., works, services, acts, arguments, products” that derive signiﬁcance “from their difference vis-à-vis other such position-takings.” Such organizational position-takings generate “openings . . . for innovative action,” including for the making of otherwise unavailable framing strategies. The aim of this—necessarily brief—theoretical discussion is to reorient our gaze on the formation of the Marshall Plan away from large-scale forces such as economic interest toward the symbolic boundary-work involved in the production of particular types of persons in the speciﬁc contexts of a party’s struggles for power. Following this way of thinking, below we describe the formation of a new ﬁgure on the political scene in 1947, one accepting the necessity to set the United States on a collision course 10 Politics & Society 0(0) with the USSR in order to advance their foreign policy objectives. We then highlight the coalition-building potential that underpinned a distinct kind of muscular interna- tionalism in US foreign policy after 1948—liberal internationalism—the contested origins of which we recover at the individual, party-political, and state levels. Data and Research Design A formation story analysis centered on political person production requires evidence that allows the analyst to map out positions and position-takings in party networks over time. With this in mind, oral histories, memoirs, and biographies constitute our primary source of evidence, supplemented with obituaries and government reports. We also draw on secondary historical works on diplomacy and the changing postwar political landscape. A note in defense of this approach is warranted. Our formation story account is abductive, rejecting both pure inductive description and pure deductive theory-testing. Instead, it moves back and forth between the gen- eration of theoretical propositions and analysis of historical evidence. An ongoing process, in abductive research the conceptual framework and historical questions shift as one moves through sources and develops potential explanations. At every step, we formulate historical questions in terms of plausible counterfactuals evidenced in the evolving structure of persons and counterpersons in party networks, treating emergent patterns of opposition as the birth of new historical possibilities. Theoretically, we began with the limited hunch that contingent circumstances and party-centered dynamics played more of a role in the Marshall Plan than present his- toriography suggests. Speciﬁc puzzles and the conceptual vocabulary needed to explain them crystallized as we developed our historical account, settling after a time on the centrality of boundary-work in political processes. Our empirical project also developed gradually, inseparably from theory development. In particular, our emphasis on ﬁrst-person historical sources was based on a realization that a little-acknowledged but necessary factor in the making of the Marshall Plan was the arrival in late 1947 of an entirely new political person: the credibly anti-Communist New Deal liberal. Our analytical strategy hinged on ﬁrst understanding how and why the CANDL emerged, and then following events from there. In so doing, we sought to demonstrate how biographically oriented, semiethnographic sensibilities enrich historical sociology—a subﬁeld that tends to favor macroinstitutionalist modes of analysis in which persons and personal trajectories ﬁgure, in Mudge’s words, as “interesting, but merely anecdotal, indicators of other, more important things.” In terms of data, ﬁnally, a relational approach aiming to identify evolving patterns of opposition in a ﬁrst-person perspective problematizes overreliance on “the” archive. While historical sociologists are right to assert that archival research should not be “left to the historians,” we should not take for granted that archival work is always the best means to evidentiary ends. In particular, we are cognizant of the concern that archives may be arranged in ways that tend to reinforce reigning narratives—a concern directly relevant to the counterfactual analysis of an overdetermined event that we undertake here. The Marshall Plan ﬁles at the National Archives, for McCourt and Mudge 11 example, begin in 1947—after what we consider many of the crucial events leading to the Plan’s creation. Thus, in the present case we found that memoirs, oral histories, and other ﬁrst-person sources in digital archival collections proved sufﬁcient basis for our claims, read alongside the exhaustive work of historians working in archives including the George Marshall Foundation and the Truman Library. Once again, the Marshall Plan and the early moves toward the Cold War constitute one of the most intensively scrutinized periods in international history. Our claim to novelty in the following account lies less with what is factually new, than with what is seen in a fresh light through the lens of person production in intraparty contestation. Necessitating the Marshall Plan Our analysis of the Marshall Plan focuses on new political persons between 1944 (FDR’s reelection) and January 1947 (the initiation of the 80th Congress), when two of the Plan’s drivers emerged. First, there appeared on the American political scene for the ﬁrst time the credibly anti-Communist New Deal liberal (or CANDL), a novel kind of person at the same time Democratic, a self-deﬁned “liberal”—as opposed to progressive—and believably anti-Communist. The CANDL’s appearance, second, closed off a renewed One World foreign policy coalition of liberals and pro- gressives, at the same time as it made possible a coalition of liberal Democrats and Republican internationalists, who united around a bipartisan anti-Communist frame. Without these two drivers, the Marshall Plan, and liberal internationalism itself, would have been impossible. Person/Counterperson Production in Party Networks, 1944–47 At the time of the 1944 election, and well into the year 1946, a Democratic New Deal–associated anti-Communist foreign policy initiative like the Marshall Plan was unthinkable. Before FDR’s death, the framing of Communism as a transnational threat was a speciﬁcally Republican as well as conservative means of attacking Democratic New Dealers. Symptomatically, the 1944 Republican platform painted the New Deal as “Communistic” and un-American; another four years of FDR, it warned, “would centralize all power in the President . . . and this country could remain a Republic only in name.” This “un-American” framing of Communism had a long lineage, reaching as far back as the Red Scare (1919–21), the Overman Committee (1919), and, during the New Deal years, the Congressional Dies Committee of 1938–44, the Hatch Act (1939), and the policing of Communist activity in organized labor, civil society, and the federal government. Although Communism had the potential to mobilize as a transnational threat, under FDR it remained a partisan issue, not the sort of mobilizing strategy capable of underpinning a bipartisan effort like the Marshall Plan. Indeed, anti-Communism, from Democratic New Dealers’ perspective, was not a very effective framing strategy in 1944. FDR dismissed Republicans’ Communist fear- mongering, and the Democratic platform made no reference to Communism. Both FDR and his new running mate, Truman, rejected the notion that domestic organized 12 Politics & Society 0(0) labor or New Deal policies were “Communistic.” The FDR-Truman ticket won with more than 53 percent of the popular vote, and FDR pressed ahead with his New Deal agenda. Domestically, this meant the management and extension of the New Deal state, including bureaucracies like the Ofﬁce of Price Administration (OPA) and initiatives such as the Economic Bill of Rights (unveiled early 1944). In foreign policy, winning the war was the pressing task, followed by demobilization, economic reconversion, and maintaining international peace. Crucially, FDR was explicit that the New Deal position on Russia was to maintain cooperative relations. Democratic Party strength under FDR, however, masked the increasing power of congressional conservatives and moderates and a growing fracture between Northern and Southern Democrats (Figure 3), with important implications for what might happen should FDR exit the political stage. Figure 3A shows that House membership was becoming more conservative, espe- cially on the Democratic side, between 1944 and 1948. Likewise, Figure 3B shows a sharp uptick in bipartisan moderation in the House after the 1946 midterms. Finally, Figures 3C and 3D show that the Democratic Party was deeply fractured across the North-South divide throughout the 1940s. Yet, despite growing conservativism in Congress, 1940s polling shows less than 40 percent of the US public viewed Russia as a deﬁnite threat (see Figure 4). From the late wartime period through late 1945, around two-thirds of Americans either viewed Russia as trustworthy or had no opinion on US-Russia cooperation. This shifted after the Potsdam conference in July–August 1945; still, about half of respondents remained unconvinced regarding a Russian threat. It was not until the spring of 1947—around the time of the Truman Doctrine speech (March 12)—that public opinion decisively shifted toward distrust. In the interim, serious political and economic trouble set in centered not on the Depression-era problem of stimulating a lagging economy but reining in a strong one, featuring large wage and price differentials. The administration imposed unpop- ular price controls but did not rein in wages. As pent-up frustration resurfaced across industries, labor unrest turned sharply upward in mid-August 1945 (after Japan’s surrender), peaked in January 1946, and spiked again in April–May (Figure 5). Considering that the Labor Department’s Conciliation Service “assisted in the adjustment of over 15,000 labor-management controversies in 1946,” ofﬁcial ﬁgures on stoppages underestimated the full scale of unrest. “The ﬁrst 6 months of 1946 marked the most concentrated period of labor-management strife in the country’s history.” In this context Democratic fractiousness deepened, giving rise to intraparty struggles that would, by early 1947, fundamentally alter the public character of “New Dealers,” opening up new framing and coalition-building possibilities. Person-Differentiation in Democratic Party Networks Between the 1944 election and January 1947, intraparty contestation drove two phases of person/counterperson production: ﬁrst, between Truman and those loyal to him (hereafter “Trumanites”) and New Deal intellectuals; second, among New Deal intellectuals, between those true to FDR’s vision of New Deal foreign policy McCourt and Mudge 13 and those who sought to make anti-Communism a credible New Deal stance. The result was a new partisan person porting a historically conservative frame: the cred- ibly anti-Communist New Deal liberal or CANDL. A ﬁrst fracture rent a set of Trumanite loyalists from New Dealer holdovers from FDR. A North-South Democratic fracture and growing conservatism of congressional Democrats had already shaped FDR’s choice of Truman as running mate. Truman was a compromise, “acceptable to all factions of the party,” backed by an alliance of big- city machine bosses and conservatives who blocked a last-minute motion to reelect Wallace. “Hardly an auspicious beginning for those who looked to a postwar expan- sion of the New Deal at home and to the creation of a world New Deal,” Truman’s nomination was the ﬁrst of a series of events that drove a wedge between Democratic Party loyalists, who saw Truman as one of their own, and New Dealers. The opposition deepened after FDR’s death on April 12, 1945. At ﬁrst Truman pressed ahead with FDR’s agenda, despite opposition from the anti–New Deal, ﬁscal, and “states’ rights” conservatives who dominated Congress. Truman ini- tially retained Roosevelt’s cabinet; his ﬁrst legislative proposals, including full employment laws, were a “comprehensive statement of progressive philosophy and Figure 3. Increasing congressional conservatism and democratic intraparty fracture, 1901–51, US House of Representatives. (A) Polarization on the liberal-conservative dimension (higher = more conservative). (B) Proportion with a moderate score (−0.25 to 0.25) on the liberal-conservative dimension. (C) Intraparty regional polarization. (D) Difference in intraparty regional polarization, Democrats versus Republicans. Source: Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, “The Polarization of the Congressional Parties” (2016), accessed October 9, 2018, https://legacy.voteview.com/political_polarization_2015.htm. 14 Politics & Society 0(0) a sweeping liberal program of action.” On foreign policy, Truman supported FDR’s cooperation-focused approach. Truman, however, gradually displaced New Dealers between late 1945 and late 1946. Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins, and Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard left immediately; Harold Ickes at the Department of the Interior left the following year. In came former national chairman Hannegan as post- master general, George Allen as the director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), and Edwin Pauley as the head of the Anglo-American-Soviet Reparations Committee. Cabinet positions went to James Byrnes (State), and Fred Vinson and subsequently John Snyder at Treasury, with James Forrestal retained as Navy Secretary. Truman also brought in a group of friends that included Harry Vaughan and James K. Vardaman. The Trumanites were not “conservatives,” but neither were they New Dealers. They were party men, loyal to the Democrats and to Truman. “Cronies” for some, the Trumanites shared ﬁve features: “they were . . . intensely loyal to Truman”; all (except Byrnes) were from west of the Mississippi; they were “safe” Democrats; they were not liberal New Deal intellectuals (e.g., “there was no one who was notably brilliant or colorful or vociferously liberal”); and all had strong links to Congress, which Truman hoped to rebuild after FDR’s neglect. Many also had connec- tions to Truman from shared service in World War I. The Trumanites’ arrival thus crystallized a person/counterperson distinction in elite Democratic networks. The story of the replacement of Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, a longtime Democrat and aide to FDR, is illustrative. Byrnes, Stettinius’s Trumanite replacement, was among those FDR passed over for Truman in 1944, Figure 4. Trends in public opinion: Can Russia be trusted? Source: Roper Center, accessed April 22, 2020, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/. Survey questions are variations of “Do you think Russia can be trusted to cooperate after the war?” McCourt and Mudge 15 Figure 5. US labor unrest, 1916–50. Source: Department of Labor, July 15, 1951, “Analysis of Work Stoppages during 1950,” Bulletin No. 1035, United States Department of Labor, p. 2, Table 1. and Truman felt he owed Byrnes a prominent role in his administration. When Allen (another Trumanite) delivered the news of his ouster, Stettinius responded, “You Democrats are just trying to throw me out, and I’ve done a great job.” Stettinius’s use of the phrase “You Democrats” is a clear discursive marker of person- differentiation: Stettinius was himself a Democrat, but not a Trumanite Democrat, and that made all the difference. On the other side of the divide were the New Deal Democratic “liberals.” Like Trumanites, New Deal liberals had well-recognized positions and dispositions: they were academic, Keynesian, or “intellectual”; they were from the East Coast; they were more committed to principle than party (thus tending to eschew strategic compromise); they had afﬁliations with FDR and the New Deal; and they adopted certain policy stances. Clifford, for example, remarked that his differences with Truman’s assistant John Steelman were not so much a matter of belief than a matter of “very different styles.” Self-understood liberal Robert Nathan (formerly of FDR’sOfﬁce of War Mobilization and Reconversion) would later emphatically afﬁrm the Trumanite-liberal distinction: “Truman certainly wasn’t the idol of the 100 percenters—you know, all or nothing. Now, this is agreat problemwithliberals.... When the liberals want something, they don’t compromise.” The Fracture Deepens: Trumanites’ Hardline Turn on Russia As the 1946 midterms approached, New Dealers hoped to push the administration in a liberal direction. Hannegan held out hope of joining with Trumanites to develop “a pro- 16 Politics & Society 0(0) union, liberal identity for the national Democratic party, especially for gaining the support of CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] unions.” But, as events related to Russia complicated this prospect, the question of foreign threat increasingly deﬁned the Trumanite-liberal New Dealer opposition. Initially Truman’s foreign policy stance was a continuation of FDR’s “grand design,” which rested on the view that as long as it refrained from exporting Communism, Russia’s security needs could be met. However, unlike the liberal New Dealers, Trumanites were not inclined to “bend over backwards” to achieve rec- onciliation. The Trumanite takeover of the White House thus brought a hardening of views toward Moscow. Despite later accusations of being soft on Communism, early anti-Russian inﬂu- ences came strongly from the State Department, where the historian Daniel Yergin has charted the rise of the “Riga axioms”—a set of anti-Soviet views named after the US diplomatic post in Latvia. As prominent diplomats either stationed there or who made frequent visits during the 1930s, Averell Harriman, George Kennan, and Charles “Chip” Bohlen came to share a suspicion of Russia. Harriman was particu- larly inﬂuential, rushing back to Washington after FDR’s death to urge Truman to adopt a “ﬁrm, but friendly, quid pro quo approach” on issues like Lend-Lease. Harriman, Bohlen, and (later) Kennan’s views found sympathetic ears among the hard- nosed Trumanites, where Byrnes pushed a “get-tough” approach that, by fall 1945, was ofﬁcial administration policy. The fate of a potential loan to Russia demonstrates how Truman’s hardline stance ruptured Trumanite–New Dealer relations. According to State Department economist Emilio Collado, New Dealer Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau was strongly in favor of a loan in spring 1945, as were Ickes, Wallace, Stimson, and Benjamin Cohen. As Edwin Nourse later relayed, Cohen was “a Soviet loan guy,” telling hard- liner Elbridge Durbrow that “you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs” and “we don’t like their system, but we can’t change it either.” On the other side, “Harriman took a rather powerful view against this,” as did Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Will Clayton. For Durbrow, Cohen’s reasoning was quix- otic Keynesian thinking—“another unrealistic ‘beautiful thought’”—characteristic of intellectual New Dealers. When the New Dealers’ loan idea papers ended up on Collado’s desk in September 1945, “it was convenient to have them lost.” The hardliners found plenty to support their concerns, including evidence of spying and a ﬁery speech by Stalin in February 1946 warning of inherent contradictions within 82 83 capitalism. The latter led Kennan to formulate his famous “long telegram,” which urged a policy of what would later become “containment.” Kennan’s message was echoed when Winston Churchill declared at Fulton, Missouri, the descent of an “Iron Curtain” between East and West, and when Senator Arthur Vandenberg asked Congress ominously, “What is Russia up to now?” New Dealers’ hope for a modus vivendi hinged on Wallace, a charismatic New Dealer who, in characteristic liberal style, was unwilling to change his mind on coop- eration. Trumanites like Edwin Pauley saw Wallace as typical of ideologically driven New Deal intellectuals—in Pauley’s words, “Wallace was so involved in the Soviet [pro-cooperation] approach . . . that it was almost impossible to talk to him about it. McCourt and Mudge 17 His eyes were always looking to the stars; he felt he was right, and no one could tell him any different.” As anti-Russian views gained acceptance among the Trumanites between mid-1945 and late 1946, prospects for a foreign policy alliance of New Dealers and Trumanites faded. The period witnessed “a movement into the anti-Soviet camp of aides and advis- ers who had staked no previous turf on foreign policy, people like Truman who were fundamentally centrists”—such as Fred Vinson, Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson, and Clark Clifford. “These individuals were above all party-oriented prag- matists, moderate liberals cognizant of political considerations ﬁrst and foremost, but they all gradually came to the conclusion that no compromise with the Soviet Union was possible, sharing ‘Truman’s own conceptual journey.’” The effect was the opening of an unbridgeable divide between the Trumanites and the New Dealers. Public Opposition to War: A Counterfactual Possibility Between March and August 1946, as midterm elections approached, opinion polls sug- gested that the American public was, on the one hand, increasingly aware of the debates over Russia policy, opposed to the conciliatory position associated with Wallace, and favorable toward Byrnes’s “get-tough” stance—but, on the other, only supportive as a means to peace. Truman knew the public was wary of conﬂict. Tellingly, when a September 1946 report on Russian adherence to wartime agreements (submitted by Clifford and naval aide George Elsey) summarized what was becoming commonsense to many Trumanites—that America should prepare for prolonged hos- tilities—the president worried that the public would not welcome the message. While “pleased” with the report, Truman asked for all copies to be locked away. Truman’s concern suggests that in late summer of 1946 New Dealers confronted a strategic choice. One option was to capitalize on the public’s desire for peace by making the case that anti-Soviet foreign policy would lead to war, putting pressure on Trumanite hardliners to stay true to FDR’s vision. Given the New Dealers’ margin- alization from the administration, the risk was a loss of inﬂuence in Washington. An alternative was to embrace the hardline position and seek an alliance with Trumanites, but this also presented risks: breaking with FDR’s foreign policy would undermine New Deal alliances and lend credence to Republicans’ framing of Communism as a transnational threat, inclusive of organized labor and the New Deal. As we discuss in the next section, a fraction of New Dealers chose this route nonetheless. Opening the Door to a “Liberal” Transnational Anti-Communist Frame As noted above, the largest strike-wave in American history unfolded between mid-August 1945 and summer 1946. Truman’s initial response was to try to accom- modate union demands. He gave little credence to conservative notions that strikers were domestic subversives. In a May 24, 1946, radio address, at the apex of the rail workers strike, Truman made a clear distinction between “action by a foreign enemy” and strikers, whom he described as Americans “who place their private 18 Politics & Society 0(0) interests above the welfare of the nation.” A common phrase in the White House was that “communism was a threat to America, but not a threat in America”—pushing against rhetoric that tied Communism to organized labor. And yet, with Truman’s popularity plummeting, administration insiders worried about how his response would play. Clifford questioned whether (in his words) Truman had “the personal strength and political power to deal with American labor.” Still it is not quite accurate, as Bell argues, that “the sheer scale of industrial strife pushed Truman into an anti-union stance by April 1946.” Rather, the push came from inside Truman’s networks: in response to pressure from Trumanites, the president situated labor as overly powerful. Truman threatened to draft the railroad strikers, and later took the head of the United Mine Workers Union John Lewis to court for strikes on federally owned railways—resulting in a $3.5 million ﬁne on the union and a $10,000 ﬁne on Lewis. Truman’s tough stance increased his political capital as elections approached, even as “the political right was coalescing around . . . opposition to any extension of the New Deal state,” in part by “using anti-totalitarianism as a weapon against liberal candidates.” Conservative anti–New Deal rhetoric linked domestic and foreign Communism. In this context, Truman’s shift to a hardline stance on both Russia and domestic labor threatened conservatives’ hold on the framing of Communism as a transnational threat. The result was that “for the ﬁrst time during an American era of peace, it was next to impossible to discern domestic problems coherently without having the points become entangled with foreign affairs.” In the end, ﬁery White House rhetoric embraced the very framing Truman once rejected: a conﬂation of domestic Communism, subversion, totalitarianism, and Russia—a transnationalized Communist threat. Truman’s move generated dissent among New Dealers, who perceived Truman’s embrace of a historically conservative framing device as conservative sabotage of the New Deal agenda. Among the dissenters was Wallace, the most prominent New Dealer in the cabinet by September 1946. On September 12, Wallace gave a speech contradicting Byrnes’s get-tough policy, and by extension undermining Truman’s efforts to co-opt conservatives’ hardline stance. “Getting tough never brought anything real and lasting whether for schoolyard bullies or businessmen or world powers,” Wallace pronounced. On September 20, 1946, Truman ﬁred Wallace—setting in motion a new episode of person/counterperson production. Still a lodestar for New Dealers, and convinced that “Cold War abroad meant the end of the promise of the New Deal at home,” Wallace adopted an alternative trans- national rationale: a “One World” policy that acknowledged multiple modes of socio- economic organization, accepted the legitimacy of Russian interests in Eastern Europe, and notably avoided framing Communism as a transnational threat. The One World concept was neither new nor, historically speaking, strictly “pro-Communist” or pro-Russia. For former Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, One World meant a broad vision of global equality, including the end of colonialism and world federalism. Bohlen, an early hardliner on Russia, advocated for a less ideal- istic vision as recently as February 1946, when he acknowledged “the legitimate inter- ests of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe” in a report and called for support for the McCourt and Mudge 19 non-Communist left. In the wake of the Truman-Wallace split, One World–ism was anathema for Trumanites. Raising the specter of a challenge to Truman’s bid for reelection in 1948, Wallace became a ﬁgurehead for the Progressive Citizens for America (PCA) in September 1946. The PCA’s manifesto called for “winning the peace” and a return to the New Deal agenda, while Wallace criticized big business, the conservative press, and those undermining lasting peace with Russia. With Democratic Party fractures on full display, conservative Republicans like Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy suc- cessfully used anti-Communist language to oust liberal-backed candidates. The Democrats, having controlled Congress since 1932, lost sixty-ﬁve seats and control of both chambers. The Birth of the Credibly Anti-Communist New Deal Liberal As a transnational Communist threat became a more bipartisan frame, and Wallace and the One World agenda crystallized in opposition to the administration, pro–New Deal Democrats confronted a choice: back Truman, creating a rift that would close off any chance of a New Deal coalition on foreign policy, or remain allied with Wallace and the PCA, rendering a coalition with Trumanites and congressional conservatives impossible. Given that Truman was seemingly on his way out, the latter strategy was plausible, but the former prevailed. True to the arguments of Goffman concerning the possibilities inherent in person-differentiation, placed in the speciﬁc context of state struggles, pursuing this strategy required more than New Dealers’ adoption of an anti-Communist and anti-Soviet New Deal Democratic foreign policy stance; that stance also had to be credible. New Deal liberals’ credibility problem on the matter of anti-Communism was a topic of heightened debate in the wake of the midterms in late 1946. For instance, pro- gressive Robert La Follette Jr.—founder of the Wisconsin Progressive Party turned Republican—despite his afﬁnities with New Deal liberalism, made clear his position that “Communist activities in America” were both “a serious menace to democracy” and a core dilemma confronting liberals. In an article in Colliers, titled “A True Liberal Turns the Light on Communism,” La Follette argued that “LIBERALS MUST DIVORCE THEMSELVES FROM FELLOW-TRAVELLER ELEMENTS OR THEY WILL BE DISCREDITED AND IMMOBILIZED.” La Follette’s argu- ments were symptomatic of struggles over the differentiation of persons within liberal ranks, along an anti-Communist-versus-Communism neutral axis. A new person-producing process thus ensued within predominantly Democratic networks, in which two otherwise weakly differentiated positions—liberal and pro- gressive—became a stark opposition across a new axis: “liberal” became an anti-Communist, pro-containment, New Deal stance; “progressive” came to be associ- ated with One World Communist-neutrality. Wallace maintained that liberals must work together within the Democratic Party as long as the Democrats remained the party of the New Deal. Appeals for unity not- withstanding, the PCA’s challenge to the administration’s foreign policy complicated marginalized New Dealers’ efforts to maintain inﬂuence in Congress and over the 20 Politics & Society 0(0) Truman administration. The response was the January 1947 formation of a liberal New Deal organization on an anti-Communist basis: the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). The ADA was a reincarnation of the earlier Union for Democratic Action (UDA, established May 1941), which had been derailed by conservative accusations of Communism. With the UDA’s experience in the background, the ADA was initiated when James Loeb Jr. joined with other FDR New Dealers—Leon Henderson, Wilson Wyatt, Hubert Humphrey, and others—in a call for a Democratic progressive convention. Joseph Rauh, an ADA lobbyist, would later summarize the ADA’s aims as “to separate the Commies from the liberals”—in other words, to delineate the CANDL, making anti-Communist New Deal liberalism credible. Soon after its founding, the ADA explicitly disafﬁliated from Wallace and the PCA, establishing “commitment” in Goffman’s sense by closing off any possibility of an ADA-PCA alliance. The CANDLs’ move against One World progressivism frac- tured the network of Democratic New Deal intellectuals for whom Wallace was once a central charismatic ﬁgure—and Truman an outsider. “Wallace was our hero,” Loeb later explained, so “there was the kind of ideological split between President Truman, who was a non-intellectual, and the [ADA] intellectual liberals.” Thus, with the making of the ADA, a new kind of partisan ﬁgure crystallized on the national political scene: the credibly anti-Communist New Deal liberal, or CANDL. New Coalitions Inside and Outside the Democratic Party The emergence of the CANDL did not lead by itself to the Marshall Plan. Indeed, Truman “suffered” the ADA “but he didn’t believe in their movement.” Partly for this reason, some characterize the ADA’s founding as a strategic move that pulled “organized labor into a Faustian pact with the political language of the American right.” However, by preempting a One World coalition, and situating themselves as credible allies for an embattled president with whom they had a history of mutual enmity, the CANDLs made two new coalitions possible, one inside the Democratic Party and another with internationalist Republicans anxious to develop a muscular postwar foreign policy for America. Inside the Democratic Party, a network grounded in the administration, which con- solidated in the wake of midterm losses, mobilized to show that Truman “was pitching for their [liberal] team.” This self-styled “Monday Night Club”—whose members included Trumanite Democrats Clark Clifford, Leon Keyserling of the Council of Economic Advisers, and former Democratic National Committee (DNC) director Oscar Ewing—met on Monday evenings at Ewing’s home, and built a case for Truman to make common cause with ADAers (i.e., CANDLs). Considering issues like a possible presidential veto of the anti-union Taft-Hartley legislation (they were in favor) and civil rights issues such as armed forces desegrega- tion, club members understood themselves as more pragmatic than CANDLs. As Clifford later recalled, they were “outnumbered by the conservatives within the Administration and misunderstood by most of the old New Dealers and ideological lib- erals on the outside.” As such, they were well positioned to build a bridge between McCourt and Mudge 21 the two. Despite having excluded CANDLs (“We did not include in the group ‘profes- sional liberals,’ whose ardor and search for ideological purity outweighed their discre- tion and their judgment”), club members viewed Democrats’ midterm losses as an indictment of Truman’s failure to stake his claim as a New Deal liberal. And so, “although no one realized at the time, [the election] shifted the equation within the Administration in favor of the liberals.” Although Truman’s freedom of domestic legislative action was curtailed after the midterms, with the backing of CANDLs the way was open for an anti-Soviet foreign policy with a (previously unthinkable) New Deal gloss. CANDLs’ willingness to embrace the framing of Communism as a transnational threat was key: with conser- vative, congressional Republicans in the majority, liberals “could not simply oppose; they had to take afﬁrmative action.” As Clifford later explained, armed with a trans- nationalized anti-Communism, “it turned out to be easier to fashion a bipartisan foreign policy with a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats than with Democrats alone.” From the Truman Doctrine to the Marshall Plan, March to June 1947 On February 21, 1947, the British ambassador to Washington, Clark Kerr, informed the American government of his country’s intention to cease military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey. Three weeks later, on March 12, in his famous “Truman doc- trine” speech, the president called for America to replace British assistance and to “support free peoples everywhere.” For the historian Jonathan Freeland, Truman’s urgency was not a function of the situation in Greece and Turkey. Since no aid would reach Greece until the fall of 1947, “the crisis of March 1947 had its origins in American politics.” The British note offered the Truman adminis- tration an opportunity to seize the legislative agenda where he still could: on foreign policy. Truman’s forceful remarks thus signaled a foreign policy shift: out went the vague concept of “get tough” and in came the explicit containment of a transnationalized Communism. The meat of this new policy was an ambitious interventionist foreign aid package designed to get ahead of Congress on European policy. The crux of the issue was the ﬁscal burden on the American taxpayer of the occupation of a bankrupt Germany. Either the administration developed a plan for reducing the cost of the occupation, therefore, or the new Congress would, and the administration would most likely disapprove of its form and implications for foreign policy beyond Germany. What Congress might have proposed is difﬁcult to ascertain. Congressional leaders would have been placed in a similar position in squaring the circle of achieving savings in Germany, while not appearing soft on the Soviet Union. What is clear is what was increasingly off the table, namely, the universalist “grand plan” approach of FDR cen- tered on a continuation of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). As the historian Hadley Arkes notes, the elections shifted the view in Washington of the UNRRA, as the “impartial and ‘universalistic’ criteria of the United Nations—the criteria that made no distinction between friends and enemies, 22 Politics & Society 0(0) between the decent and the corrupt—were no longer seen as neutral in their political effects.” “Once the Greek-Turkish aid program was undertaken, once it was justiﬁed in doctrine and reinforced with the scheme of post-UNRRA aid, it was a much shorter step to the Marshall Plan.” The shape of American commitments remained ill-deﬁned at the time of Truman’s speech, but cross-government planning was quickly initiated. At the new Policy Planning Staff, George Kennan set to work on the problem of the disarray in a European economy reeling from an especially harsh winter. Kennan drew in part on Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Will Clayton’s report on the dire situation after returning from a trip to Europe in April 1947, which played into thinking in Washington concerning the need for a comprehensive move on foreign aid to kick-start the European economy. As Jones recalls, Clayton “believed that nothing less than full economic federation of Europe and massive United States aid in its support would save the situation, and he freely said so during the period.” In seeing the problems of Germany and Europe as one and the same, Kennan and Clayton were thinking along the same lines as the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC, pronounced “Swink”), an interagency committee also consider- ing European policy, which submitted a report on April 21, 1947, urging large-scale assistance. The purpose of US aid was thus to bolster countries—especially France and Italy—on the edge of political shifts that might “adversely affect the secur- ity of the US.” The sum total of these inputs was a convergence on a large-scale New Deal–esque recovery package as offered by Marshall in early June. Bohlen, who wrote the speech, took sections directly from the memos ﬂoating around the department. In addition to Bohlen, Kennan, and Clayton, historical accounts have highlighted the important role of younger members of the State Department who saw the German question as an opportunity to restore the world economy along Keynesian lines, which required getting Western Europe back on its feet, not just Germany. For Hogan, the Marshall Planners—individuals like Ben T. Moore, Miriam Camp, and Harold Van Buren Cleveland—“tried to transform political problems into technical ones that were solv- able, they said, when old European ways of conducting business and old habits of class conﬂict gave way to American methods of scientiﬁc management and corporative collaboration.” The Marshall Plan blended a set of seemingly incompatible policies from a set of opposed groups. The Plan managed to upload to the now ﬁrmly anti-Communist Trumanites a vision of foreign aid similar to the One World concept held by the pro- gressives around Wallace. As State Department economist Willard Thorp recalled, “the economic group in the State Department was operating on a kind of ‘one world’ kind of concept.” They maintained a Rooseveltian hope of cooperation: “Even the Greek-Turkish program did not shift as to a dominating Cold War policy.” Yet the idealistic notions of the young planners were couched in the rhetorical cloak of anti-Communism, and the message that foreign aid was urgent and necessary was communicated to Congress by individuals—like the war hero Marshall himself— untainted by associations with the New Deal. The formation of that Marshall Plan was thus driven by a conﬁguration of individuals across the administration, the State McCourt and Mudge 23 Department, and Congress, and in the broader political ﬁeld that had at times strongly divergent goals but could agree on large-scale foreign aid justiﬁed in strongly anti-Communist terms. As Markowitz shows, the Marshall Plan, therefore, was a par- adoxical policy “that made the division of the world into hostile power blocs an inev- itable fact while appealing to those for whom dreams of One World and a World New Deal still had relevance.” Conclusion The Marshall Plan was not an inevitable outgrowth of a postwar bipartisan embrace of liberal internationalism, as common wisdom holds. The Plan was bipartisan only to the extent that some members from both parties supported it and Republicans like Vandenberg and Dulles were involved in its formation. Cross-party support for aid was never guaranteed, opening ﬁssures throughout its life along the opposition between the New Deal liberals and their allies and conservative members of Congress. For Senator Robert Taft, the Plan’s leading critic, for example, the ERP was “agiant ‘European TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority].’” The admin- istration, Taft said, “can’t get away from the New Deal principle that Government spending is a good thing in itself.” The Marshall Plan emerged before the meaning of liberalism had solidiﬁed and its bearers had differentiated themselves from progressives, as an effect of intraparty struggles in the polarized context of postwar US politics. Truman’s replacement of FDR’s New Dealers with a group of moderate conservatives (the Trumanites) facili- tated the rise to power of individuals willing to risk a diplomatic break with Russia to further European economic recovery. By 1947, crucially, they could draw on a trans- nationalized frame that tied Communism in one sense, as a Russian geopolitical chal- lenge, with Communism in another sense, as domestic militant unionism. The rise of the Trumanites led to a split in New Dealer ranks, and the emergence of a speciﬁc ﬁgure: the credibly anti-Communist, New Deal liberal (CANDL)—pro-Truman, anti-Communist, and in favor of a large foreign aid package. The rise of the CANDL made possible a conﬁguration of liberals, Trumanites, and internationalist Republicans that successfully steered the ERP through a conservative Congress. Our account has implications for the sociology of foreign policy making, of the United States but we hope beyond too. Unlike familiar emphases on bureaucratic pol- itics and interparty conﬂict, our analysis points to intraparty struggles as a key site in which new actors and new coalitional possibilities are forged. In the United States, intraparty struggles become especially intense during transitional periods in and around elections and/or changeovers in factional control of government. During these periods, party actors invest resources in developing new factional power bases or augmenting existing ones. These processes demarcate new kinds of Democrats and Republicans able to adopt credible positions on contentious issues, producing the raw materials of novel coalitions. The implications for our understanding of liberal internationalism are signiﬁcant. Often considered the dominant ideology of US foreign policy, understanding liberal internationalism in monolithic terms represents an impoverished conceptualization. 24 Politics & Society 0(0) Supposedly able to explain such contradictory policies as the late 1990s embrace of interventionism, the neoconservative turn in the post-9/11 years that led to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and President Barack Obama’s continued use of special forces and drone strikes and restraint from using more large-scale military interven- tions, a more ﬁne-grained approach—like the one developed here—would seem valuable. The relational understanding of liberal internationalism we propose foregrounds the boundary-work involved in creating shifting coalitions within and across political parties, and the dual demarcation of particular types of actors and credible political stances—here the liberal Democrats with a strong anti-Communist stance. In the case of the ERP, central to those processes was the transnationalization of Communism as a threat to America—simultaneously meaning Russia as geopolitical competitor, the American Communist Party, and potential subversives in the United States, in the context over a struggle over the future of the labor-friendly New Deal. Today, similar boundary-work is a feature of partisan struggles over the meaning of geopolitical challengers such as China and Russia that generate potential spaces for cross-party alignment or misalignment. Whereas Russian interference in the 2016 elec- tion renders unlikely cross-party agreement on Moscow, a space for alignment on China exists, notably on the Republican side, with prominent GOP members pushing a stance strongly critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over human rights violations in Xinjiang, Hong Kong’s special status, and responsibility for the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Many Democrats, including Senate leader Chuck Schumer, have also voiced criticisms of Beijing, suggesting a potential anti-China stance for Democrats. However, up to now, “playing the China card” remains a divisive interparty strategy. It may not stay that way. Nevertheless, at issue in American China policy is not whether the United States should or should not adhere to liberal internationalist ideology, or an isolationist alternative, but whether a durable and effective bipartisan alliance against China will emerge in rela- tional party and state struggles. Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank the editors of Politics & Society for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article, in addition to audiences at annual conferences of the American Social Association, the International Studies Association, and the Social Science History Association. Declaration of Conﬂicting Interests The authors declared no potential conﬂicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding The authors received no ﬁnancial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. McCourt and Mudge 25 Notes 1. Barry Eichengreen, The European Economy Since 1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 2. G. John Ikenberry, “Liberal Internationalism 3.0: America and the Dilemmas of Liberal Order,” Perspectives on Politics 7, no. 1 (2009): 71. 3. Michael Cox and Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, “The Tragedy of American Diplomacy? Rethinking the Marshall Plan,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 1 (2005): 97–134; John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 4. Fred Block, The Origins of International Economic Disorder (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Albert O. Hirschman, “Fifty Years after the Marshall Plan: Two Posthumous Memoirs and Some Personal Recollections,” French Politics & Society 15, no. 3 (1997): 37–43; Mark S. Mizruchi and Linroy J. Marshall, “Corporate CEOs, 1890–2015: Titans, Bureaucrats, and Saviors,” Annual Review of Sociology 42 (2016): 143–63. A May 2020 Web of Science search produced 614 sociology books and articles on foreign policy published since 1948—2.3 percent of 26,671 works across the social sciences. Notably, the phrase “Marshall Plan” appears in only thirteen articles in this journal, none of which take the Plan as a primary object. 5. Nitsan Chorev and Sarah Babb, “The Crisis of Neoliberalism and the Future of International Institutions,” Theory and Society 38, no. 5 (2009): 459–84; Alexander Kentikelenis and Leonard Seabrooke, “The Politics of World Polity: Script-Writing in International Organizations,” American Sociological Review 82, no. 5 (2017): 1065–92; Julian Go and Monika Krause, “Fielding Transnationalism: An Introduction,” Sociological Review 64, no. 2 (2017): 6–30; Nicholas Wilson, “From Reﬂection to Refraction: State Administration in British India, circa 1770–1855,” American Journal of Sociology 116, no. 5 (2011): 1437–77. 6. See, among others, Hal Brands and John Lewis Gaddis, “The New Cold War: America, China, and the Echoes of History,” Foreign Affairs 100, no. 6 (2021): 10–20; Hal Brands, The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great Power Rivalry Today (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022). 7. Jonathan Bell, The Liberal State on Trial (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 8. Samuel Zipp, The Idealist: Wendell Willkie’s Wartime Quest to Build One World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2020). 9. Thomas Gieryn, “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-science: Strains and Interests in the Professional Ideologies of Scientists,” American Sociological Review 48, no. 8 (1983): 781–95; Michèle Lamont and Virág Molnár, “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences,” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 167–95. 10. See, e.g., the boundary-work in evidence during the February 2022 Republican National Committee (RNC) decision to censure Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) for taking part in a House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol. In supporting the censure resolution, a majority of the RNC’s 168 members identiﬁed themselves as Trump Republicans, a novel political person in the United States. At the same time, Cheney, Kinzinger, and others like Mitt Romney were outed as counterpersons, the “RINOs”—Republicans In Name Only. See “RNC Votes to Condemn Cheney, Kinzinger for Serving on House Committee Investigating Jan. 6 Attack on the Capitol by Pro-Trump Mob,” Washington Post, February 3, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022 /02/03/rnc-cheney-trump/. 26 Politics & Society 0(0) 11. Landon R. Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); and Jess Gilber, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). 12. http://marshallfoundation.org/marshall/the-marshall-plan/marshall-plan-speech/. Online sources accessed March 2022 unless noted. 13. Larry Bland et al., The Papers of George Catlett Marshall (2013), 55–58, https://www .marshallfoundation.org/library/digital-archive/6-029-statement-congressional-leaders -february-27-1947/. 14. Meredith Hindley, “How the Marshall Plan Came About,” Humanities 19, no. 6 (1998): 54. 15. Ibid. 16. Curt Tarnoff, “The Marshall Plan: Design, Accomplishments, and Signiﬁcance,” Congressional Research Service Report R45079 (2018): 4. 17. Ibid., 23–24, emphasis added. 18. https://www.marshallfoundation.org/blog/marshall-myths-the-most-unsordid-act-in- history/. 19. Bland, Papers of George Catlett Marshall, 395–96. 20. David Ellwood, “The Marshall Plan: A Strategy That Worked,” Foreign Policy Agenda (2006): 17–25, 21, https://www.marshallfoundation.org/library/wp-content/uploads /sites/16/2014/05/The_Marshall_Plan_A_Strategy_that_Worked_000.pdf. 21. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 22. Wendell Willkie, One World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1943); Zipp, The Idealist. 23. For a good overview, see Cox and Kennedy-Pipe, “Tragedy of American Diplomacy?” 24. Joyce Kolko and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Norton, 1959). 25. For a postrevisionist history, see Gaddis, Strategies of Containment; for a treatment by a sociological political economist, see Block, Origins of International Economic Disorder. 26. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power (New York: Free Press, 2003), 48. 27. Lawrence Haas, Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2016); Melvyn Lefﬂer, A Preponderance of Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); Richard Immerman, John Foster Dulles (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleﬁeld, 1998). 28. Peter Trubowitz, Deﬁning the National Interest: Conﬂict and Change in American Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 29. Jeffrey W. Legro, “Whence American Internationalism,” International Organization 54, no. 2 (2000): 253–89. 30. G. John Ikenberry, “A World Economy Restored: Expert Consensus and the Anglo-American Postwar Settlement,” International Organization 46, no.1 (1992): 289–321. 31. Michael Hogan, The Marshall Plan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 3. 32. Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2020). 33. Greg Behrman, The Most Noble Adventure (New York: Free Press, 2007), 182. 34. Athan Theoharis, The Yalta Myths (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1970). 35. Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz, “Dead Center: The Demise of Liberal Internationalism in the United States,” International Security 33, no. 1 (2007): 8. McCourt and Mudge 27 36. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [1982] 1991), 178–79. 37. Daniel Hirschman and Isaac Ariail Reed, “Formation Stories and Causality in Sociology,” Sociological Theory 32, no. 4 (2014): 260. 38. Lamont and Molnár, “Study of Boundaries,” 168. 39. Spencer Cahill, “Toward a Sociology of the Person,” Sociological Theory 16, no. 2 (1998): 13. 40. Cahill, “Sociology of the Person,” 47; Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual (New York: Routledge, [1967] 2005). 41. Erving Goffman, Strategic Interaction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969), 112–13. 42. Mustafa Emirbayer and Victoria Johnson, “Bourdieu and Organizational Analysis,” Theory & Society 37, no. 1 (2008): 14, emphasis in original. 43. Ibid., 16. 44. The oral history collections of the Truman Library and Diplomatic History Association proved particularly rich: https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/oral-histories/oralhis, https://adst.org/oral-history/. 45. Iddo Tavory and Stefan Timmermans, Abductive Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 46. While an inﬁnite number of counterfactuals are always possible only some are sufﬁciently plausible to warrant scrutiny. We note here particularly the counterfactual possibility of a different post–Civil War settlement, one not resulting in the distinct politics of race in the late 1940s, rendering our story less centered on the production of almost exclusively White and male political persons. 47. Stephanie L. Mudge, Leftism Reinvented (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 25. Also Ines Jindra, “Why American Sociology Needs Biographical Sociology —European Style,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 44, no. 4 (2014): 389–412. 48. Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 140–68. 49. Anna K. M. Skarpelis, “Life on File: Archival Epistemology and Theory,” Qualitative Sociology 43 (2020): 385–405. 50. https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/marshall-plan. 51. https://www.marshallfoundation.org/library/collections/, https://www.trumanlibrary .gov/education/presidential-inquiries/marshall-plan-and-cold-war. 52. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1944. 53. Dies Committee, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1938–44). 54. Jennifer Luff, Commonsense Anti-Communism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 55. Curtis MacDougall, Gideon’s Army (New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1965), 38. 56. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), “Work Stoppages Caused by Labor-Management Disputes in 1946” (Bulletin No. 918, Washington, DC, June 4, 1947), 3, 5–7. 57. Ibid., 9. 58. Norman Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the American Century (New York: Free Press, 1973), 82. 59. MacDougall, Gideon’s Army,5–22. 60. Markowitz, Rise and Fall of the American Century, 82. 61. Here the term “conservative” does not refer to a deﬁnite, uniﬁed group, except perhaps that conservatives were not New Dealers. 28 Politics & Society 0(0) 62. Davis McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 39, 468. 63. John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, [1972] 2000), 198. 64. Robert Allen and William Shannon, The Truman Merry-Go-Round (New York: Vanguard Press, 1950), 40. 65. Cabell Phillips, The Truman Presidency (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 159. 66. McCullough, Truman, 385. 67. Alonzo Hamby, Beyond the New Deal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 142. 68. https://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/allenge.htm#18. 69. Clark Clifford, Counsel to the President (New York: Random House, 1991), 79. 70. https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/oral-histories/nathanrr, 67–68. 71. Sean Savage, Truman and the Democratic Party (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 61. 72. Gaddis, United States and the Origins of the Cold War,6. 73. https://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/durbrow.htm, 12, 16, 47. 74. Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1977). 75. Charles Bohlen, Witness to History (New York: Norton, 1973); T. Michael Ruddy, The Cautious Diplomat: Charles E. Bohlen and the Soviet Union, 1939–1969 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986). 76. Stuart Weiss, The President’sMan (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 224. 77. https://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/collado1.htm#40, 40–42. 78. https://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/durbrow.htm, 56–57. 79. Gaddis, United States, 192. 80. https://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/durbrow.htm, 60. 81. https://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/collado1.htm#40, 41. 82. Richard Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York: New York University, 1972), 120–21. 83. Reproduced in Foreign Affairs (July 1947) under the pseudonym “X.” 84. Gaddis, United States, 295. 85. https://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/pauleye.htm, 5. 86. Alonzo Hamby, Man of the People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 355. 87. Ibid. 88. By fall 1946, a Gallup poll showed Americans favoring tough policies by a wide margin, 78 percent vs. 16 percent. Gallup Organization, “Gallup Poll #379, Question 15: USGALLUP.46-379, QK18,” 1946, https://doi.org/10.25940/ROPER-31087362. 89. Clifford, Counsel to the President, 128. 90. George Elsey, An Unplanned Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 142– 91. Irving Richter, Labor’s Struggles, 1945–50: A Participant’s View (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 92. Barton Bernstein, “The Truman Administration and the Steel Strike of 1946,” Journal of American History 52, no. 4 (1966): 794. 93. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=12406. 94. Clifford, Counsel, 177. 95. Ibid., 85. 96. Bell, Liberal State on Trial, 26. 97. McCullough, Truman, 503, 630. 98. Clifford, Counsel, 85; see also Phillips, Truman Presidency, 161. McCourt and Mudge 29 99. Bell, Liberal State, 25. 100. Ibid., 47. 101. Eric Goldman, The Crucial Decade: America, 1945–1955 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1956), 28. 102. http://newdeal.feri.org/wallace/haw28.htm. 103. Bell, Liberal State, 96. 104. Willkie, One World; Zipp, The Idealist. 105. Ruddy, Cautious Diplomat, 56. 106. Markowitz, Rise and Fall of the American Century, 221. 107. Bell, Liberal State, 42, capitals in original. 108. Patrick Maney, “Morris H. Rubin, the Progressive, and Cold War Liberalism,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 67, no. 3 (1984): 185–98. 109. Markowitz, Rise and Fall, 250–60. 110. Daniel DiSalvo, “The Politics of a Party Faction: The Liberal-Labor Alliance in the Democratic Party, 1948–1972,” Journal of Policy History 22, no. 3 (2010): 276. 111. Other ADA founding members included Eleanor Roosevelt, Eugenie Anderson, Joseph Rauh Jr., Walter Reuther, Reinhold Niebuhr, Herbert Lehman, Joseph and Stewart Alsop, Marquis Childs, and Elmer Davis. 112. https://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/loeb.htm, 17–18. 113. Ibid. 114. https://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/connly2.htm#276. 115. Bell, Liberal State, 62. 116. Phillips, Truman Presidency,62–63. Other participants included Charles Brannan, assistant secretary of agriculture; Jebbie Davidson, undersecretary of the interior; and Wayne Coy, publisher of the Washington Post, https://fdrlibrary.org/documents /356632/390886/ﬁndingaid_coy.pdf/ae731aed-0fce-4601-9359-023624df394d. 117. Clifford, Counsel to the President, 85. 118. Ibid., 85. 119. Ibid., 83–84. 120. Theoharis, Yalta Myths, 57. 121. Clifford, Counsel to the President, 131. 122. Full speech at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/trudoc.asp. 123. Freeland, Truman Doctrine, 93. 124. Ibid. 125. Hadley Arkes, Bureaucracy, the Marshall Plan, and the National Interest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 47. 126. Freeland, Truman Doctrine, 94. 127. Arkes, Bureaucracy, the Marshall Plan, and the National Interest, 44. 128. Ibid., 47. 129. Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. 3, Western Europe (1947), 223–30. 130. Gregory Fossedal and Bill Mikhail, “A Modest Magician: Will Clayton and the Rebuilding of Europe,” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 3 (1997): 195–99. 131. Joseph Jones, The Fifteen Weeks (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964), 242. 132. Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. 3, Western Europe (1947), 213. 133. Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. 3, Western Europe (1947), 217. 134. Ikenberry, World Economy Restored. 135. Michael J. Hogan, “Revival and Reform: America’s Twentieth-Century Search for a New Economic Order Abroad,” Diplomatic History 8, no. 4 (1984): 307. 30 Politics & Society 0(0) 136. https://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/thorpw.htm, accessed July 30, 2018, 34. 137. Ibid., 36. 138. Markowitz, Rise and Fall of the American Century, 248. 139. Bell, Liberal State, 47. 140. Behrman, Most Noble Adventure, 148–49. 141. Ibid., 135. 142. On interparty conﬂict, see Brian Rathbun, Partisan Interventions (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). On bureaucratic politics, see Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, The Essence of Decision (New York: Pearson, 1999). 143. Bob Davis and Lingling Wei, Superpower Showdown (New York: Harper, 2020). 144. Tarun Chhabra, Scott Moore, and Dominic Tierney, “The Left Should Play the China Card,” Foreign Affairs February 13, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com /articles/china/2020-02-13/left-should-play-china-card. Author Biographies David M. McCourt (dmmccourt@ucdavis.edu) is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. His research centers the social and discursive dynamics underpinning foreign policy-making, particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. He is the author of Britain and World Power Since 1945: Constructing a Nation’s Role in International Politics (University of Michigan Press, 2014) and articles in International Studies Quarterly, Perspectives on Politics, and the Review of International Studies, among other journals. Stephanie L. Mudge (mudge@ucdavis.edu) is a historical, economic, and political sociologist and is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. Her book Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018), received 2019 book awards in both Political Sociology and Comparative Historical Sociology from the American Sociological Association, as well as an honorable mention in Economic Sociology. Other published work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, the Annual Review of Sociology, the Socio-Economic Review, the European Journal of Sociology, and Social Science History, among others. She is a series coeditor of Cambridge Studies in Historical Sociology.

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Keywords: Marshall Plan; United States; US foreign policy; liberal internationalism; political persons

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