The Administration of the Marshall Plan and British Health Policy

Journal of Policy History

Volumn 16, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 191-211

  Fox, Daniel M ^a  

^a Milbank Memorial Fund   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 55049099133     PISSN: 08980306     EISSN: 15284190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jph.2004.0014     Document Type: Article

References (62)

1. There is substantial literature on both the Marshall Plan and the history of the National Health Service. I draw heavily on the literature about the Plan in the general discussion of Marshall aid in the first section; less so in the balance of the article. Two books by Michael Hogan are essential for understanding Marshall aid in its broad political and economic context: The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947—52 (New York, 1987) and
2. A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945—1954 (Cambridge, 1998).
3. Another important overview is Alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation State (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992).
4. Reviews in American History 18, no. 1 (1990): 102-11, and
5. “Alliance and Autonomy: European Identity and the U.S. Foreign Policy Objectives in the Truman Years,” in Michael Lacey, ed. The Truman Presidency (Cambridge and New York, 1989).
6. Other monographs that provide useful details of Marshall Plan implementation from an American perspective include: Hadley Arkes, Bureaucracy, the Marshall Plan, and the National Interest (Princeton, 1972), and
7. Wilson D. Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947—1950 (Princeton, 1992).
8. For a British perspective on Marshall aid, see Henry Pelling, Britain and the Marshall Plan (London, 1988)
9. Peter Burnham, The Political Economy of Postwar Reconstruction (New York, DANIEL M. FOX 209 1990)
10. Anthony Carew, Labour Under the Marshall Plan: The Politics of Productivity and the Marketing of Management Science (Detroit, 1987)
11. Martin Chick, Industrial Policy in Britain, 1945-1951 (Cambridge, 1998).
12. Burnham and Carew are critical of American motives and actions. Pelling and Chick generally agree with their American colleagues and, by implication, Milward that on balance Marshall aid hastened recovery and economic growth and that American intrusiveness in policy, when it occurred, did not compromise the goals of the Attlee government. Donald Sasson takes a more jaundiced view of American purposes and influence in One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (London, 1996).
13. Wendy Asbeek Brusse, in Tariffs, Trade, and European Integration (New York, 1997), argues that, in the broad European context, Marshall aid assisted national recovery without compromising domestic consumption. There is also a rich literature on the background and inception of the National Health Service. The NHS was enacted in 1946 and began to serve patients in July 1948: hence critical policy decisions had to be made at the same time that policymakers in the United Kingdom and the United States were making critical decisions about Marshall aid. This article takes the widely held view that by the end of the war there was a strong cross-party consensus about many of the major policies that governed the NHS. That view is articulated, among other places, in
14. Rudolf Klein, The Politics of the National Health Service, 4th ed. (New York, 2000), and
15. Daniel M. Fox, Health Policies, Health Politics: The British and American Experience, 1911-1965 (Princeton, 1986).
16. Charles Webster emphasizes Labour's unique contribution to the NHS more than Klein or I do, in The Health Services Since the War, vol. 1, Problems of Health Care: The National Health Service Before 1957 (London, 1988). All three authors have used most of the same sources.
17. A useful brief history is Stephen F. Ambrose, “When the American Came Back to Europe,” in “The Marshall Plan: A Legacy of 50 Years,” International Herald Tribune, 28 May 1997, 5;
18. see also Hogan, The Marshall Plan.
19. Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Statesman, 1945-1959 (New York, 1989), 207.
20. Charles L. Mee Jr. The Marshall Plan (New York, 1984), 169;
21. “Certain Aspects of the European Recovery Problem from the US Standpoint,” Department of State, Policy Planning Staff, probably summer of 1947, from the Clark Clifford Papers, in Student Research File B, Box 1, Harry S Truman Library, Independence, Missouri.
22. “Certain Aspects” (n. 4 above), 32–33.
23. C. J. Bartlett, The Special Relationship: A Political History of Anglo-American Relations Since 1945 (London and New York, 1992), 39.
24. Walter Millis, ed. The Forrestal Diaries (New York, 1951), 302.
25. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Relations, 80th Congress, Hearings on United States Foreign Policy for a … European Recovery Program, 17 December 1947, 12-29 January, 3-12 February 1948, 1275ff.
26. Lisle A. Rose, The Cold War Comes to Main Street: America in 1950 (Lawrence, Kan. 1999), 129.
27. The Cold War Comes to Main Street: America in 1950 8 April 1948.
28. Smith, Aneurin Bevan, 255.
29. Memorandum from British Embassy, Washington, D.C. to the Foreign Office, 13 February 1948, enclosing a U.S. congressional committee report. FO 371/ 71747, Public Record Office. Ewing and the chief executive of the British Medical Association, Charles Hall, made a joint broadcast on CBS during his visit to London. Hall defended the goals and mechanisms of the NHS. There is no record in Ewing's files of any negative criticism of the broadcast in the United States: Papers of Oscar E. Ewing, Box 30, Truman Library, Independence, Missouri.
30. Memorandum from British Embassy 49.
31. Alan R. Raucher, Paul G. Hoffman: Architect of Foreign Aid (Lexington, Ky. 1985), 71, implies that Hoffman was less than candid with Congress: “Of all the participating governments, the British caused Hoffman the most trouble.”
32. Paul G. Hoffman: Architect of Foreign Aid 155, 170–71.
33. Paul G. Hoffman: Architect of Foreign Aid 172.
34. Paul G. Hoffman: Architect of Foreign Aid
35. Paul G. Hoffman: Architect of Foreign Aid A copy of Mayhew's speech is in this file, in UR 2287.
36. Peter G. Boyle, “Oliver Franks and the Washington Embassy, 1948-1952,” in John Zametica, ed. British Officials and British Foreign Policy, 1945—1950 (Leicester, 1990), 196;
37. The Economist, 5 March 1949, 408.
38. The Economist, n. 31 above. In fact, a memorandum to Ernest Bevin, 28 February 1949, in FO 800/511 (PRO) summarizing British newspaper commentary on Mayhew, indicates that most press comment on the speech was favorable.
39. Christopher Mayhew to Ernest Bevin, “Personal,” 27 February 1949, in FO 371/77835, Public Record Office.
40. Philip M. Williams, ed. The Diary of Hugh Gaitskell, 1945-1956 (London, 1983), 139, and Carew, n. 16 above, 97.
41. The Economist, 25 June 1949, 1175–76.
42. Allen Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary, 1945-1951 (London, 1984), 717.
43. Hogan, The Marshall Plan, 227.
44. The Marshall Plan 248-49.
45. Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945-1951 (London, 1992), 397.
46. Boyle (n. 30 above), 197. See also Alex Danchev, Oliver Franks: Founding Father (Oxford, 1993), 87, on Franks's ability to “explain the welfare state to Washington in straightforward humanitarian terms.”
47. Kit Jones, An Economist Among Mandarins: A Biography of Robert Hall, 1901 —1988) (Cambridge, 1994), 100.
48. “Fundamental Discussions with the United States,” 9 March 1950, T232/ 199, Public Record Office.
49. Rudy Abramson, The Life of W. Averell Harriman, 1891—1986 (New York, 1992), 406-39.
50. “Notes on a conversation after lunch,” 9 May 1950, FO 800/517, E. Bevin Papers, Public Record Office.
51. Notes on a conversation after lunch
52. Williams, The Diary, 174, 231-32, 239.
53. Minutes of a meeting at the State Department, 10 October 1950, T232/ 198, Public Record Office. See also Williams, The Diary of Hugh Gaitskell, 207.
54. Bullock, Ernest Bevin, 824.
55. Pelling, Britain and the Marshall Plan, 116.
56. Britain and the Marshall Plan
57. At a seminar in London about my book, Health Policies, Health Politics, a British colleague said, in an example typical of my point, “We know you, like all Americans, are up to something. We just don’t know what it is.” See also Geoffrey Goodman, ed. The State of the Nation: The Political Legacy of Aneurin Bevan (London, 1997).
58. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, vol. 3, Fighting for Britain, 1937—1946 (London, 2000), 492.
59. G. C. Peden, The Treasury and British Public Policy, 1906—1959 (Oxford, 2000), 418.
60. The Treasury and British Public Policy, 1906—1959 423.
61. “The Long Term Economic Problems of the UK,” memorandum prepared by the Departments of State and Treasury and the European Cooperation Administration with “concurrence at the staff level in the three agencies,” 5 January 1952, RG 469, Records of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948-61, Mission to the U.K. Office of the Chief of Mission, Correspondence of Malcolm Hogg. National Archives.
62. Daniel M. Fox and Jordan S. Kassalow, “Making Health a Priority of U.S. Foreign Policy,” American Journal of Public Health 91 (October 2001): 1554-56.