In April 1948 Congress passed the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan. Secretary of State George C. Marshall had proposed that the European nations devastated by World War II jointly draw up a recovery plan that the United States would fund. The U.S. government hoped that the Marshall Plan would create stable economic conditions and prevent European nations from becoming communist. The United States offered aid to almost all the European countries, including the Soviet Union and the countries it occupied. However, the Soviet Union and eastern European countries withdrew in the planning stages of the program. The Marshall Plan provided some $12 billion in direct aid and $1.5 billion in loans to Western Europe over the next four years. From 1948 to 1951 it helped rehabilitate the economies of 17 European nations. Many of these nations later became members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and cooperated with the United States during the Cold War.
