What Marshall proposed was a program to use financial aid to fight “against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.” Without naming the Soviet Union, he said that “governments, political parties or groups which seek to perpetuate human misery in order to profit therefrom politically or otherwise will encounter the opposition of the United States.”
The idea was a program to spend billions of dollars on rebuilding Europe, for only nations with viable infrastructure, commerce, food, and political stability would be able to resist the wave of Soviet expansion. Truman later explained, “Nations, if not continents, had to be raised from the wreckage. Unless the economic life of these nations could be restored, peace in the world could not be re-established.”
Following Marshall’s speech, the debate in Washington began. The conservative Congress had approved hundreds of millions of dollars for two small countries. But billions for Europe was a much tougher request. Behind the scenes, Truman had helped to envision the Marshall Plan, and he got behind it immediately. Vandenberg was daunted by the idea. “We now apparently confront the Moscow challenge on every front and on every issue,” Vandenberg wrote to Senator Robert Taft. “It is a total ‘war of nerves’ . . . I am sure that Secretary Marshall is alive to this fact.”
Taft, the conservative powerhouse in the Senate, wrote a friend saying he had “no confidence whatever in [Marshall’s] policy.” Conservative Republicans would dig in and fight against such massive federal spending, Taft was sure. “In my opinion,” he wrote, “the policy of Secretary Marshall may well be the principal issue in the next election.”
The president himself would later say that it could take decades before the world would know for sure if radical programs like the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan would prove successful. To his surprise, however, powerful forces were already taking shape from within his own party to destroy them.
If a rogue politician wanted to make himself heard in 1947, Madison Square Garden was a good place to do it. Built by Tex Rickard for boxing matches in the heart of New York City at Eighth Avenue between Forty-Ninth and Fiftieth Streets,* MSG was known as “The House That Tex Built.” It held nineteen thousand seats, and on the night of March 31, 1947, every one of them was taken, every seat paid for. American flags hung between four sprawling banners that read DON’T ARM TYRANNY; FEED PEOPLE, DON’T FIGHT THEM; WE DON’T WANT A CENTURY OF FEAR; and U.N.: THE HOPE FOR WORLD PEACE.
The crowd was noteworthy for the number of fresh young faces—youth at a political rally, not your usual crowd in 1947. But then nothing about this rally was usual. It was the birth of a new antiestablishment, and its hero was Henry Wallace of Iowa—whom Harry Truman had fired from his cabinet six months earlier.
Warm-up speakers had no trouble getting this crowd going. There was the late president’s son Elliott Roosevelt, a US Army Air Forces officer; the astronomer Harlow Shapley, head of the Harvard College Observatory; and the actor and comedian Zero Mostel. One by one they came onstage to throw jabs at the Truman punching bag. When the keynote speaker appeared, fans went wild. Henry Wallace’s eyes peered out from under his swoop of iron-gray hair. Wearing a rumpled suit jacket that hung from his tennis-player shoulders, the fifty-eight-year-old looked younger than his years. Wallace was going to fight Truman’s new foreign policy plans with all the power he could summon. When he began his speech, an ABC radio hookup took him nationwide.
“Unconditional aid” to anti-Soviet nations, Wallace said, will “unite the world against America and divide America against itself.” He called on the United Nations rather than the Truman administration to come to the aid of Greece and Turkey. The UN’s budget was “less than the budget of the New York City Sanitation Department,” Wallace railed. The way forward was to fund the UN, not to employ foreign policy measures that the Soviet Union would view as confrontational.
“In the name of crisis, America is asked to ignore the world tribunal of the United Nations and take upon herself the role of prosecutor, judge, jury—and sheriff—what a role!” (Roars from the crowd.) “In the name of crisis, facts are withheld, time is denied, hysteria is whipped up.” (Woots! Hollers!) “The Congress is asked to rush through a momentous decision [on the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan] as if great armies are already on the march.
“I hear no armies marching,” Wallace said. “I hear a world crying out for peace.”
Soon after Wallace’s New York City appearance, he embarked on a two-week speaking tour in Europe, to argue that the Truman administration was moving the United States toward war with the Soviet Union. “The world is devastated and hungry,” Wallace said to a sizable crowd in London. “The world is crying out, not for American guns and tanks to spread more hunger but for American plows and machines to fulfill the promise of peace.”
Washington powerbrokers were stunned. Not so long ago Henry Wallace was considered one of the most powerful New Deal Democrats, a man who nearly became president. Now he had gone abroad to attack his own country’s political administration.
In a cabinet meeting with Truman in the White House, Attorney General Tom Clark weighed whether Wallace should be allowed to reenter the United States. On the floor of the House of Representatives, Democrats and Republicans argued about whether Wallace’s passport should be revoked, and even the possibility of prosecuting him under the 1799 Logan Act, which forbade private citizens from corresponding with foreign governments without authorization. The chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Republican J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, charged that the Logan Act “covers Wallace like a
