U.S. President Harry Truman’s inaugural speech in January 1949 was widely seen as a pivotal moment in the geopolitics of the postwar era, as it explicitly pledged that the United States would aspire to more than stability and reconstruction of war-torn nations: the U.S. would aim to help all “free peoples” living in underdeveloped nations. Broader provision of aid and development was known as “Point Four” because it was the fourth and final point in the list of major foreign policy objectives Truman put forward: support for the United Nations, ongoing reconstruction for war-ravaged countries, expansion of mutual defense treaties with allies, and aid for developing nations.
By the time the Eisenhower administration endorsed the creation of IFC in late 1954, the New York Times had concluded that financial aid and technical assistance to governments of developing nations would never be sufficient to achieve the goals that Truman had articulated. In short, four points were not enough. “No existing agency seems to be doing all that needs to be done to produce a flow of capital investment and the necessary trained personnel into countries where these are needed,” the Times wrote. “As it stands, the [IFC] project looks more like what industrialists call a pilot plant—a sort of halfway stage between the laboratory and the factory… But no thinking and no experimenting in this field are really wasted. The future peace and prosperity of the world may lie in a more even distribution of well-being among the countries and continents. Or, one might add, a more even distribution of the good things of life achieved in freedom and not be the cruel leveling down of the Communist method.”
If you have an idea for a “postcard from the past,” please email Celeste Diaz-Ferraro at cdiazferraro@ifc.org.
