The Herter Committee returned with a healthy and wholehearted respect for Europe's Reds. The committeemen had seen them at work. Ohio's Thomas Jenkins, once a rabid isolationist, had seen Communism's hard Yugoslav face at Trieste. Considerably shaken, Jenkins wrote: "This terrorism is an example of the methods which Communists will employ to extend their doctrines."
Europe's greatest danger lay in the people's complacency, they thought. They found Europeans less disturbed than Americans about Communism.
Said South Carolina's big James Richards : "We saw the Communist leaders in Italy and France and England. They are tough, hard, fanatical, well-financed and clever. They have the whole misery of the people to trade on. The European Governments are mostly made up of men who are old and tired and haven't the drive and determination of the Communists." One of the most cunning and toughest of Europe's Reds, according to Congressmen: Italy's Togliatti.
"The Great Tragedy." Said Richards: "The great tragedy is that the United States story is not getting out. We sit over here and argue about whether we'll spend eight or 18 millions to present our side of the case. In France, the Communists got all the best newspapers after liberation, and the biggest allotment of newsprint. We ship in wheat and not a word of it gets in the paper. Russia sends in a boatload of wheat, makes the French transport it and pay for it in American dollars, and you'd think it was the millennium from the way the Communist newspapers play it.
"The people incline naturally to the United States, but every day they are being poisoned, just as literally as if it were being shot into their veins. And we are doing virtually nothing to combat it."
Europeans were also filled with misconceptions of U.S. intentions. They looked upon the U.S. as a horn of plenty with the big end pointing in their direction. In Austria and Germany, startled Congressmen ran into posters which implied that the U.S. had already committed itself to the Marshall Plan, and that all Europe had to do was line up with its hand out. Many of the posters, said the Congressmen, were put out through U.S. military government sources. Many Europeans also seemed to believe that the Marshall Plan, with its program of exports, was something devised to save the U.S. from economic collapse.
Order & Chaos. One of the achievements of the Herter committeemen was their nation-by-nation report which they will take back to their constituents.
"Britain," said one committeeman, "is disintegrating in the greatest order ever displayed, and France is recovering in the greatest chaos imaginable." The key to Britain's recovery was production of coal, and in that effort Britain had fallen flat. Miners, in fear of mechanization, clung to old methods, persisted in working the short week because more than half their extra day's pay would have to go to the Government in taxes.
The French were still staggering under the moral shame of the occupation, filled with suspicions of one another and general listlessness. French peasants were reluctant to sell their produce for worthless francs; as a result, hunger stalked the cities.