The Most Noble Adventure by Greg Behrman

Author:Greg Behrman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2007-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

BY THE EARLY SUMMER of 1949, Western Europe was recovering and Communism’s hold on the region was on the wane. European integration was proceeding slower than many in America liked, but much progress had accrued. The Marshall Plan was succeeding, Paul Hoffman believed, on all fronts—save one. ECA had underestimated the breadth and efficacy of the Communists’ information and propaganda campaign against the Plan. “We had originally believed that in the ECA we would require very little informational apparatus,” Hoffman wrote. He appointed a handful of information officials in each mission. But he and his colleagues soon found that in most of the Marshall Plan countries, the Communists outnumbered them 50 to 1. “On the political front the visible sector is propaganda,” Fortune magazine wrote in February 1949. “Here ECA is weak. Americans may be the most skillful sellers and promoters the world has ever seen, but you’d never know it in Europe.” The Communists outmanned ECA in the all-important war of perception. Their breadth was greater, their techniques were more sophisticated, and their efforts were impeding the Marshall Plan from realizing its political objectives.

Information officials working for Harriman at the Talleyrand did their best to steel themselves to the Communist onslaught and even endeavored to look upon some of the more outlandish Communist accusations with good humor. They could laugh at the Danish Communist newspaper reports that all the Marshall Plan had sent Denmark was toilet seats and water skis. “We’ve seen them so often,” one official recalled, “that we don’t even get startled to read, in the same article, in one or another Communist organ, such double charges as (a) the Marshall Plan isn’t working because Europe grows more feeble day by day, and (b) the Marshall Plan is building up [Western Europe] into a powerful aggressive military machine about to descend on Russia.” On occasion, certain accusations threw the Americans, such as when the Moscow-published Medical News wrote that egg powder shipped from America was laced with bacteria. The journal wrote that American interests were colluding to sicken Europeans, driving them to doctors as a means of increasing doctors’ incomes.

In Norway, the secretary general of the Labor Party noted that the more ground the recovery gained, the more conditions improved for labor, the more the Communists lost ground, the more they ratcheted up their attacks. The Communist propaganda effort was greatest in France. Communists played up French nativist and cultural anxieties. “Thanks largely to Russian propaganda,” wrote historian Frances Stonor Saunders, “America was widely regarded as culturally barren, a nation of gum-chewing, Chevy-drinking, Dupont sheathed philistines.” Using posters, pamphlets and public addresses, the French Communists warned that the Marshall Plan was a Trojan horse for American imperialism. Cajoled by Communist warnings, French wine producers began to worry that Coca-Cola would capture their market and ruin their business and joined forces with leftist parliamentarians to ban Coca-Cola from France and preempt the “Coca-Colonization” of their country. Coca-Cola, and other American companies, did not help their cause when they proposed foolhardy schemes such as placing a blazing Coca-Cola sign on the Eiffel Tower.

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