President Truman signed the Marshall Plan to rebuild postwar Europe

On April 3, 1948, President Harry Truman signed the Economic Cooperation Act of 1948, the law better known as the Marshall Plan. It took its name from Secretary of State George Marshall, who in a June 1947 speech at Harvard had urged European nations to draw up a joint plan for recovery that the United States would help fund.

The stakes were stark. Much of Western Europe lay in ruins after World War II, its cities, factories, and farmland devastated, and Washington feared that hardship would invite Soviet influence.

Over the next four years, Congress appropriated $13.3 billion for European recovery.

That aid flowed to sixteen countries, from Britain and France to West Germany, channeled through a new Economic Cooperation Administration. The program is widely credited with reviving European economies and binding the Western alliance, a peacetime investment without modern precedent.