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

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.

Point Four, Utah State University Technicians, and Rural Development in Iran, 1950–64

In 1950 Iran and the United States signed the first Point Four agreement, establishing a program now known as USAID. It fulfilled President Harry S. Truman's desire to control the Soviet bloc and to share technology with third world countries. Utah State University contracted with the U.S. Point Four program to provide technicians in agriculture from 1951 to 1954. This paper examines the successes and the frustrations that the Utahns felt in transporting technology to Iran. While there were some successes, the cultural and economic difficulties were hard to overcome. As a result, the technicians in the 1960s experienced the same problems faced by those in the 1950s. These included a negative reaction to farm machinery in a land with many laborers, problems training machinery operators, and language barriers.

A Foreign-Policy Model of the Distribution of British Bilateral Aid, 1960–70

As a consequence of Truman's Point Four Program of 1949, the provision of economic assistance to independent low-income countries became the official policy of the United States. In the early and mid-1950s economic development assistance, though growing, received relatively little attention as the Korean war turned the USA's foreign aid in the direction of military assistance. However, by the start of the 1960s, the transfer of economic assistance from high-income to low-income countries had developed into an institutionalized relationship. Economic assistance was clearly distinguished from military assistance and administered separately; the USA's monopoly of aid was decreasing as other high-income countries, partially under the USA's pressure, were establishing their own aid programmes; and the volume of aid and the number of recipients were increasing.

Multilateral Technical Assistance

Technical assistance remains a poorly understood tool for promoting development. Programs continue to grow, but persistent questions are raised about their effectiveness by practitioners and academic observers. Today's uncertainty contrasts dramatically with the exuberance which attended the launching of two landmark technical assistance programs, the Point Four Program of the United States and the Expanded Program of Technical Assistance (EPTA) of the United Nations.