Capitalism had to appear as though it was working.
The most effective case against hard-left dissent was high levels of employment, good wages, and overall prosperity at home. The Canadian establishment also understood that the appeal of communism in Canada was enhanced in the 1940s by the alliance with Stalin’s USSR, the appearance of several new communist regimes in Eastern Europe and, in 1949, the People’s Republic of China. Canada engaged directly in recovery efforts in Europe for this reason, while establishing a role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as an instrument for economic regeneration. The United States could absorb only so much, so Western European markets were essential to a Canadian transition to peacetime prosperity. First, although Canada was one of the very few strong economies left standing at the end of the war, it depended on exports to survive. These measures were important to Canada for several reasons. They were about providing legitimacy for capitalism and turning off the appeal of revolutionary movements in the post-war world. As Soviet interest in participating in the ERP waned, these instruments of investment and recovery became imbued with a stronger ideological hue that reflected the sentiments of the emerging Cold War (see Section 9.4). The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were two institutions that emerged from Bretton Woods and, along with the Marshall Plan (aka the European Recovery Plan or ERP) in 1947, they were geared to restoring Europe’s economic health so to avoid the kind of post-war turmoil that followed the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. In the middle of a devastating World War, Western, Allied governments met at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire to identify the tools necessary to rebuild the liberal democratic and capitalist order, assuming they could beat the Axis Powers. Probably no period in human history has witnessed such a concentrated attempt to plan and shape the national and international economy as the years after 1944.
Consumerism as an economic growth strategy and a lifestyle is embodied in the family automobile, such as the short-lived Ford Frontenac, 1960. 8.11 Fashioning a Post-War Economy Figure 8.17 The path to happiness in the post-WWII era is paved not with gold but with blacktop.
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