Word: western
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...discussing the program. His chief sponsor was George Marshall; he also had the approval of Senator Arthur Vandenberg. In his testimony before Vandenberg's Foreign Relations Committee, Hoffman outlined his conception of the nation's task in Europe: "If production can be increased by one-third quickly, Western Europe will be on the way to prosperity. ... A half-hearted program is likelv to be worse than useless...
From Sicily to the North Cape of Norway, the first days of spring brought clearing skies to Western Europe. Snow (enough for good skiing) lingered in northern Sweden, but in Stockholm people lounged at noon on steps and benches, tilting their faces to the new sun. One spring night last week at Josefsberg in the Russian Zone of Austria a Red Army soldier had a quarrel in a nightclub; he came back later with a Tommy gun, sprayed the dance floor with bullets, killed the band leader and a customer, wounded more than a dozen. In Britain, country fields shone...
...were lined with customers sipping aperitifs or spooning sweetened ices; children sailed toy boats in the stone-rimmed pond of the Luxembourg Gardens. In Italy, peasant women remarked on the number of hens laying two eggs a day; perhaps it was the warm weather. And in Western Germany, after one of the wettest and greyest winters in 20 years, the sun was shining again, fitfully, but shining...
Spring brought work as well as play and immemorial festival. It also brought, as always after the cold days and long dark nights, a mood of revived hope. Europe needed it. For the mood of Western Europe was a mixture of anxieties as much as hopes, of discouragements as much as resolution. A great deal of the European mood was apparent in what people did and chatted about; something more became clear in the answers they gave in simultaneous surveys* of what they thought and expected...
...what they did and thought the people of Western Europe displayed a similarity of hopes & fears, of cherished habits and guarded optimism about the future. Differences existed, and some were striking. But, looking back on '48, historians might find the differences less important than the likenesses. Outside the Iron Curtain, Europe, for better or worse...