WHITE BREAD IMPERIALISM - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 71

“in the form of preventing a generation of rickety European children from growing into a sickly, em-
bittered and grasping people bent on war. It will, in other words, return to us in the form of the better
chances of peace and security in our own homes which only a healthy and peaceful Europe can assure.” 6
An August 10, 1947, article in the Los Angeles Times summed up the new attitude in the headline
“Bread: It Is the First Concern of a Hungry World. Trouble Looms for the Nations Which Cannot
Provide It.” If bread doesn't come, the article continued, “bombs—in one form or another—will.” The
Farm Journal , which, granted, had its own interest in food exports, put the matter bluntly: “Better to win
friends now with flour, than have to face their guns later.” H. R. Baukhage, a nationally syndicated D.C.
pundit and popular radio personality, made the case even more explicit in his Associated Press column:
“The history of Europe since the war is that every government falls when the bread ration is reduced. …
The free world is at stake.” The only thing that can “save Europe for democracy,” he continued, is “the
American farmer.” 7
The news from France appeared particularly grave. The country's 1947-48 wheat harvest was as dis-
astrous as the previous year's, and even with emergency shipments from France's North African colon-
ies, the government could not maintain its basic bread ration at 300 grams per person. Foreign Agri-
cultural Service field officers in France wrote urgent telegrams to the State Department in Washington
warning officials to expect a general breakdown of the French food distribution system by the end of
May 1948 if even larger U.S. wheat shipments weren't forthcoming. This would likely trigger wide-
spread protests and strikes, as it had in 1946 and 1947, but the situation might get even worse. Oppos-
ition groups were already using the country's puny bread ration as a central wedge issue. French Com-
munists, in particular, had made impressive political hay out of a single five-thousand-ton wheat ship-
ment from Russia, and U.S. officials complained that the country didn't seem to appreciate the United
States' far greater contributions. If bad harvests forced the government to lower the bread ration to 250
grams, they predicted, it might tip France's delicate political balance toward Communist forces. 8
In Paris, the May Day parade that year featured a contingent of workers carrying placards reading,
“Give us a slice of bread.” Meanwhile, back in the United States, syndicated columnists Joseph and Ste-
wart Alsop warned readers that “if France starved, it would go Communist. … If France goes to the
Communists … the great struggle for Europe between the Soviet and western political systems will al-
most certainly be ended in Russia's favor.” The fate of Europe seemed to hang on French bread rations. 9
Whether those fears were reasonable or not, the United States responded with stepped-up wheat ship-
ments. On May 10, 1948, after two years and nine hundred shiploads of stopgap aid to France, the
Liberty ship John H. Quick docked at the Port of Bordeaux bearing the first official Marshall Plan wheat.
Lavishly praising the United States for its help, government officials announced that the bread ration
could be maintained. This averted full-fledged crisis in France, although bread-related protests and polit-
ical instability would continue into the 1950s.
In Iran, another quickly emerging Cold War battleground, U.S. and Soviet strategists mobilized
bread grains in the fight for control over oil. Through the late 1940s, with bad wheat harvests in Iran's
Azerbaijan breadbasket triggering bread riots throughout the country, Soviet propaganda spread rumors
that Tehran was selling scarce wheat to the United States to pay for arms. U.S. officials worried even
more about the Soviets' promise to provide Iran with one hundred thousand tons of wheat in 1949. Luck-
ily for U.S. strategists, however, the Soviet wheat traveling overland trickled into the country, while
American Liberty ships filled with wheat arrived with great fanfare. 10
Bread and flour shipments were also credited with undermining Communist forces in Greece where,
in 1948, 96 percent of the nation's staple was made from U.S. flour or wheat. 11 Turkey followed a simil-
ar pattern. And the Berlin blockade, for its part, confirmed policy makers' sense of the strategic import-