It is not unreasonable to suggest that the Marshall Plan contributed significantly to the esteem with which the US was held following WWII. Britain received much more than even Germany did through the Marshall Plan.

To suggest no one looked the gift horse in the mouth, while perhaps understandable, is unsettling. Such a position implies that post-WWII Europeans didn't care who gave them the money to rebuild. They'd take it from anyone without regard to the contributors decency or ethics. A variant of the Soviet apologist's "Stalin was brutal. But he inherited a nation using wooden plows and turned it into a nuclear power," if you will.

Neither you nor I were alive then. But, you are there and have grown to adulthood there. I'd normally be inclined to defer to you on this point. But the fact remains that at the height of our reputation we were deeply flawed, particularly on matters of race (and, not to put too fine a point on it, remain so today). But the UK is far from being without sin in this regard. I think you'd have to admit that the Brexit vote was won by appealing to racism far more than the uncountably many non-race based false claims made by Leave leaders.

So, was it blindness (willful or otherwise) or common bigotry that allowed our reputation to achieve its height in Europe in an era when our government was passing and enforcing the most racist laws in our post Civil War history? I cannot say I know the answer to that question. You're in a better position than I to answer that question, so feel free to choose the one that suits you best.

For my part, it still seems incongruous that we could be thought of so highly when our Federal Government was doing things like requiring clauses in deeds to read, "this property will never be transferred to ownership nor rental by Blacks" in order to gain a Fair Housing Administration loan and in the era of apartheid.