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- Title
"The American People Rose to the Occasion": A Proverbial Retrospective of the Marshall Plan After Seventy Years.
- Authors
Mieder, Wolfgang
- Abstract
The American soldier-statesman George C. Marshall (1880-1959) played a major role as United States Army Chief of Staff during World War II and as United States Secretary of State from 1947 to 1949. He was a major player in rebuilding the economies of Western Europe on democratic principles by envisioning, planning, and executing the European Recovery Program that became known as the Marshall Plan and that earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953. In his numerous addresses, speeches, and testimonies for this sociopolitical program he also stressed the necessity of humanitarian aid in the form of food, clothes, and other necessities to return life to normal in sixteen war-torn countries. While his rhetoric was for the most part straight-forward and to the point, he also employed such proverbs as "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," "The proof of the pudding is in the eating," "Practice what you preach," and "Man does not live by bread alone" to add metaphorical expressiveness to his deliberations. Proverbial expressions like "To sell the same horse twice," "to throw down the gauntlet," "to tighten one's belt," and "to hang in the balance "played their part in making Marshall's rhetoric more effective by supplying some colloquial color. While there is no plethora of proverbial language, George Marshall clearly helped his important cause by relying on at least some traditional folk speech and its emotional cadence.
- Subjects
MARSHALL Plan; MARSHALL, George C. (George Catlett), 1880-1959; WORLD War II; ECONOMIC conditions in Western Europe; NOBEL Peace Prize
- Publication
Western Folklore, 2017, Vol 76, Issue 3, p261
- ISSN
0043-373X
- Publication type
Article