Video Transcript

George C. Marshall – Spiced excerpts from “Your Eighty Dollars” (Mutual Security Agency film, 1952) and rereading of his Marshall Plan speech given at Harvard University, June 5, 1947 – Courtesy of George C. Marshall Research Library

"We recognize that the greatest factor in European recovery is production. And it goes without saying that you don’t get production without the work of the trade unions. What is happening in the support of you labor leaders of the nations of Europe is of great historic importance for the whole world. What we are fighting for is not just peace, but a type of peace in which an individual or a trade union is free to meet as it pleases, to say what it pleases. This is about as far from the regime of a police state as you can get. The greatest security we have in the critical situation today is that free, great nations are united standing side by side. But that's for today. In the long run our security rests on the economic rehabilitation of Europe, on the coordination and determination of the free countries of Europe. In this endeavor great and historic progress has been made.

Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos."