Truman's New Deal: Point Four and the Genesis of Modern Global Development

Abstract

This paper examines the geo-political reaction to President Harry S. Truman’s 1949 Inaugural Address, wherein he catalyzed post-war global development in the form of his Point Four program. Truman proposed sharing American scientific and technical expertise, ostensibly aimed at reducing or eliminating poverty in the developing world. Newspaper accounts and analysis of internal CIA documents reveal domestic and international responses to the policy initiative. Predictably, these responses mostly varied along early Cold War ideological lines. Examining Truman’s plan and other anti-communist American policies in the late 1940s reveals that although global development may have been a laudable effect of the plan, the primary aim was to prevent communism from spreading to countries viewed as vulnerable to subversion. The Cold War imperatives behind the plan seem to have been either implicitly assumed or ignored in the historiography. A brief sampling of Cold War historians shows a lack of explicit attention to Truman’s initiative.