Editors' preface

Summary

The decade of the 1940s was a decisive moment in modern American history, as important for developments at home as for changes in U.S. relations with the rest of the world. The Second World War pulled the economy out of its worst depression, and in subsequent years the federal government for the first time in the nation's history took explicit responsibility for controlling the aggregate level of economic activity in the United States. A new style of foreign policy also emerged during and after the war. A nation that had in the 1930s turned its back on the European powers and belligerently proclaimed its neutrality, now became the leading power in the Allies' wartime coalition and in the postwar phalanx of Western, non-communist nations. These remarkable developments have received a great deal of attention from scholars – and deservedly so. But few historians have stressed the causal links between foreign and domestic events during these decisive years; of those who have, none has done so as convincingly as Michael Hogan.

Hogan's The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952, places this important policy innovation in a framework that he traces back to the 1920s, when Americans began to develop their particular brand of “associative state.” This new style of commonwealth brought organized interests into the state. Competition was qualified by new patterns of cooperation designed to shape the state as well as the capitalist system.