William Clayton (1880-1966) - 6 June 1997

Throughout America, last weekend and this one, a tune, an anthem, arose, usually on the morning air, across the campuses of hundreds of universities, thousands of colleges, numberless high schools.

This tune is not that of the national anthem, though a visitor from a foreign land might think so. It celebrates the annual American institution of "Commencement", the end of college life for one class of students and the beginning of life itself.

It’s a rhapsody, an anthem in praise of the British Empire. In one famous couplet, a prayer that it will not go on shrinking but expanding and expanding,

"Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set;

God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet."

I ought to say that nobody among these millions of students, graduates, parents, friends, nobody sings the words. Indeed I’m fairly sure that nobody knows the words. If they did – and worse, if they sang them – there would be protest parades on every American campus, and, I imagine, a national march on Washington organised by the societies (of which there are many) for the advancement of a multicultural America.

What caught on long ago was not the unsung lyric, but the mighty tune of Sir Edward Elgar, which came out during the Boer War when belief in the Empire as a universal blessing was rampant in Britain; and when in America the idea of an American Empire, whose time had come, blazed for a while in the bosom of President Theodore Roosevelt.

I notice, by the way, that Elgar received one American honorary degree. It was from Yale, where his music had been promoted by a minor American composer. Could it be that it was in honour of Elgar tramping beneath the elms of the Yale campus in 1906 that the imperial tune was first heard here? I offer the question and let it go.

Because of the inevitable growth of children and grandchildren, I’ve found myself recently at several commencements and, consequently, I’ve been reminded again of the unavoidable ordeal of commencement anywhere: the commencement orator.

It doesn’t seem to matter who they get. The chosen speaker immediately conceives of himself/herself as a sage, and starts a droning sermon of advice about life now and what lies ahead.

It’s an odd tradition of getting people who are going downhill to say what lies over the next crest.

Very few commencement addresses will ever be remembered. There is, however, one that this weekend everybody’s being told to remember, though its reception by the Harvard audience that heard it (and subsequently by the press) was listless. It was, as no doubt you’ve already heard, the commencement address given to the Harvard graduating class of 1947.

Fifty years ago this weekend, the then Secretary of State, General George Marshall, was the speaker; and only a day or two before he went up to Massachusetts, he abandoned the speech he’d originally intended to give. I think I ought to tell you why at the last moment he substituted a speech written in the main by three other men.

For the last year or two of the Second World War, a man who played a great role backstage away from the battles, the great names, the egos, was a mild-spoken southerner, a businessman who’d gone into diplomacy because he felt politicians on the whole were either ignorant of, or indifferent to, economics. His name was Will Clayton. You’ll not find him in the encyclopedias.

He wasn’t so much interested in how the war was to be won as how Europe was to renovate its economy. Would it ever manage a favourable balance of payments? Would there ever again in Europe be a prosperous commodity market? These are not concerns that inflame the multitude.

Clayton was sent by President Truman to Europe to look over its devastation. He saw the ruined cities, the broken railroads, the bombed out factories, mines, saw the lack of the simplest goods of ordinary life, saw people starving.

He came back and at once conceived a vast plan to restore the economy of Europe by direct aid from America. Not the promise of help later on, but by grants, loans, massive investment by America in steel, coal, mining now.

He wrote several memoranda on this big theme and they were passed on in time to Secretary of State Marshall. Clayton enlisted the energy and intellect of Dean Acheson, General Marshall’s second in command at the State Department, and Acheson worked with him and recruited other economists in the State Department.

In the early spring of 1947, Acheson was to make a speech at a small college in a small town in Mississippi. With Clayton’s enthusiastic support, he decided to make the speech all about the grand theme of what Acheson then and later called nothing less than an attempt to restore the fabric of European life.

Nobody of any consequence paid any attention to the speech, but within two weeks Clayton and Acheson and George Kennan, the State Department’s Soviet expert, got to Secretary Marshall and urged him at least to incorporate their theme in his commencement address at Harvard. In effect, his new speech was collectively written by these three men and put into General Marshall’s words at the last minute.

The speech was barely commented on in the press. One famous paper wrote, "General Marshall spoke".

The general’s prose was flat and dull because he was too thoroughly decent a man to have a spark of theatre, a hint of ham about him. The speech was also vague, deliberately, because Marshall knew the temper of the Congress not to get tangled again in Europe’s affairs and to restrict American aid to military aid, to be given to countries like Greece and Turkey that were just then visibly threatened by the Communists both from within and without.

But one American journalist suggested to his paper that the speech was nothing less than a plan to revive the whole of Europe. And one English broadcaster, the BBC’s man in Washington, Leonard Miall, had known what was in the minds of Clayton and Acheson, and in an evening broadcast he filled in Marshall’s vague speech with the more vivid promise of Acheson for a grand plan that would rescue Europe from hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.

That broadcast was heard in the middle of the night by Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. And that poor Somerset farm boy could immediately sense the human pain implied in one flat sentence of Marshall’s speech, “The farmer or the peasant cannot find the goods for sale which he desires to purchase.” Bevin saw the large, exciting outline of the plan and said, “We grabbed it with both hands.”

Two big problems stood like roadblocks in the way of getting the plan moving. One was the question: What was Europe? Did it mean the old enemies as well as the old allies? Did it include the Soviet Union, which, like Britain, had been a principal beneficiary of the lending and leasing of war materials? The answer was yes. But this brought up the second problem: Would any American Congress pour out money for a Soviet Union which was giving every sign of wanting to overrun Europe? Of course not.

The Soviets objected to the plans taking in the whole of Europe; they wanted to pick and choose one nation at a time. Luckily, an impossible condition. So the Soviet Foreign Minister walked out in a huff, muttering that the whole plan was an imperialist racket to swamp Europe with American goods and arms.

The next hurdle was the Congress. Congress was under the impression that it had helped win the war in Europe; indeed been the decisive combatant. But all over Europe governments were turning left and picturing the United States as a monster only a little less menacing than Russia.

Only one year before Foreign Secretary Bevin had grabbed the Marshall Plan with both hands, he’d called Britain, “the last bastion of social democracy against the red tooth and claw of American capitalism and the Communist dictatorship of Soviet Russia.” Now he was eager for a whacking loan from the “red tooth and claw.”

It was a very difficult sale to a Congress in no mood to be insulted by the people it was being urged to help at (it turned out) the huge cost of $13billion in loans, grants and goods and services. Marshall himself appeared before the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee. So did Acheson; and it was Acheson who put the fear of Stalin into them. He had to gloss over the creative economic side of the plan and picture Europe as a broken continent, poor and hungry, red meat for a Communist takeover.

Acheson’s passion – I remember his sitting there, his face as purple as a lobster in anger – his passion won the day. It was done.

And what, of course, also quickened the impulse in Congress to pass the plan was the swift brutality with which the Soviets imposed Communist governments on Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and give frightening reality to that Iron Curtain which Churchill had foreseen as the new and threatening division of Europe.

It takes nothing away from General Marshall that, while it was not his idea, he was its most conspicuous champion. There could have been no better sponsor, a man of unfailing modesty and immense integrity. Churchill called him “The finest character I met during the whole of the second war.” Roosevelt three times offered him the supreme command in Europe, but Marshall gave it over to a junior – one Major General Eisenhower. He felt he had to stay in Washington to manage the huge task of running the wars of supply for both the Atlantic and the Pacific.

“Without George Marshall,” President Roosevelt was heard to say as the Nazi armies were falling back helplessly on their own lands, “I don’t think we should have made it.”

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