FDR and the Creation of the U.N. / Edition 1

by Townsend Hoopes, Douglas Brinkley

Overview

In recent years the United Nations has become more active in—and more generally respected for—its peacekeeping efforts than at any other period in its fifty-year history. During the same period, the United States has been engaged in a debate about the place of the U.N. in the conduct of its foreign policy. This book, the first account of the American role in creating the United Nations, tells an engrossing story and also provides a useful historical perspective on the controversy.

Prize-winning historians Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley explain how the idea of the United Nations was conceived, debated, and revised, first within the U.S. government and then by negotiation with its major allies in World War II. The experience of the war generated increasing support for the new organization throughout American society, and the U.N. Charter was finally endorsed by the community of nations in 1945. The story largely belongs to President Franklin Roosevelt, who was determined to form an organization that would break the vicious cycle of ever more destructive wars (in contrast to the failed League of Nations), and who therefore assigned collective responsibility for keeping the peace to the five leading U.N. powers—the major wartime Allies. Hoopes and Brinkley focus on Roosevelt but also present vivid portraits of others who played significant roles in bringing the U.N. into being: these include Cordell Hull, Sumner Welles, Dean Acheson, Harry Hopkins, Wendell Willkie, Edward Stettinius, Arthur Vandenberg, Thomas Dewey, William Fulbright, and Walter Lippmann. In an epilogue, the authors discuss the checkered history of the United Nations and consider its future prospects.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300085532
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	07/11/2000
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Read an Excerpt

FDR and the Creator of the U.N.

---

By Townsend Hoopes

Yale University Press

Copyright © 2000 Townsend Hoopes
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0300085532

---

Chapter One

As the United States was being drawn inexorably into the maelstrom of World War II, the ghost of Woodrow Wilson was in the mind of every person and institution, public or private, who set out to think about, plan for, or create a new system of world security to ensure peace and stability in the postwar period, when the guns would once again fall silent after the democratic victory. Although by no means assured until perhaps late 1943, victory was a necessary article of faith for all who struggled to preserve civilization against the darkest forces of tyranny in modern history.

Many continued to believe that Wilson's ideals remained a body of profound political wisdom that could still light the true path for humankind, despite the undeniable failure of the League of Nations and the onset once more of bloody global war. This was the implicit conviction in Wendell Willkie's best-selling 1943 book, One World, as well as the principal theme of the 1944 film Wilson, produced by Darryl F. Zanuck. Also in 1944, Sumner Welles, who had resigned as Under Secretary of State just a year before, wrote that it was time to reaffirm the Wilsonian ideals, which had thrilled his generation "to the depths of our intellectual and emotional being" and whose realization was "well within human capacity."

But many others concluded that Wilson's high principles amounted to a moral code which humans could never live up to, and which thus led the world into dangerous delusions of what was possible. Also in 1944, the eminent editor, scholar, and political columnist Walter Lippmann wrote that Wilson's "supreme spiritual error" lay in "forgetting that we are men and thinking that we are gods. We are not gods.... We are mere mortals with limited power and little universal wisdom." To President Roosevelt and the other leaders of World War II fell the hard task of searching anew for some workable solution to the human race's most besetting problem--recurrent, ever more destructive wars.

The Senate's rejection of the League of Nations treaty on March 19, 1920, was a result of many factors, of which perhaps the most basic was the enduring American fear and contempt for Europe's continual intrigues and wars. As most Americans saw it, they had sent their young men to France in 1917 to fight and die for a worthy cause--"to make the world safe for democracy." But they had recoiled in disgust and disbelief at the spectacle of greed displayed by the European victors and embodied in the vengeful Treaty of Versailles. More direct and immediate reasons for the Senate's rejection of the League were the personal bitterness between President Wilson and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (A-Massachusetts), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the misplaced loyalty of the Democratic Senators to their party leader in the White House. The primary cause of failure, however, was the absolute rigidity, rooted in moral and intellectual arrogance, of Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson had arrived at Brest on December 13, 1918, to overwhelming acclaim and adulation. Frenzied, cheering crowds welcomed him in every European country. It was said of him that "no such evangel of peace had appeared since Christ preached the Sermon on the Mount ... that only Augustus nineteen centuries before had such an opportunity to create a new world." In the peace conference at Paris, however, his high-flown idealism met and was forced to accommodate the hard realities of age-old feuds, territorial disputes, and the European victors' utter determination for revenge against the evil Germans who had cost them so much blood and treasure. But if he was forced to swallow the corrosive Versailles Treaty, he believed that all could be redeemed by the Covenant of the League of Nations, which was his creation and which he had sold to the statesmen of Europe.

Pale and tired, but confident that he could raise American awareness to the height of his own vision, he returned home on July 8, 1919, determined to obtain quick Senate ratification of the League treaty. But his laying of the political groundwork for Senate approval had been negligent, even offensive. In 1918, he had asked the American people to give him a Congress dominated by his own party, but the voters had returned Republican majorities to both houses. Ignoring this political fact, he had included no Republicans of stature in the U.S. delegation to Paris, implying that he did not consider the GOP to be a factor in the peace-making. In Paris, he consulted only with himself, treating even politicians of his own party with suspicion and thinly disguised disdain. All of this provoked anger and distrust on Capitol Hill.

On July 10, 1919, Wilson went before the Senate to present the League treaty. His manner was not ingratiating. To his listeners, he was "the schoolmaster incarnate raised to unthinkable heights from which he flung down not requests but dictates." He seemed to be saying to the Senators that "as he had redone the world, so now it was their duty to approve his work and then be gone." In the press gallery, a journalist named Henry L. Stoddard thought to himself that "below stood a being utterly suffused with arrogance." In April, Wilson had announced that the European governments had accepted several amendments to the League treaty to accommodate American critics. He considered these appropriate but would go no further. He wanted the treaty ratified as presented, without a single further amendment. To the affronted United States Senate, he seemed to be asking for a rubber stamp.

The changes accepted by the Europeans did not go far enough for the Republicans. The heart of the problem was Article 10, which they read as automatically committing each League member to guarantee the territory and independence of all nations. This was an extreme interpretation, given the unanimity rule in the League Council (which would permit the United States to veto any proposed action), but a distrustful Senate wanted tangible safeguards. Some thoughtful Republicans were seeking a workable compromise. Elihu Root, a distinguished former Secretary of State, proposed that the United States exempt itself from the presumption of an automatic commitment under Article 10. Senator Lodge put forward several additional reservations, the most important of which was to require prior congressional approval for the deployment of American armed forces abroad. This requirement was not inconsistent with the exclusive constitutional power of Congress to declare war, but it chose to ignore similar presidential powers to conduct foreign policy and implement U.S. treaty obligations.

A growing number of devoted internationalists, both in the government and outside it, understood the partisan political realities as well as the constitutional ambiguities and were prepared to support the Lodge reservations. For them, the moral and strategic imperative was for the United States, the most powerful and prestigious democracy, to join the League. They were confident that time and experience would show that a number of the commonly expressed fears were exaggerated. It appeared that a majority of the American people and nearly 80 percent of the Senate supported the central idea of collective security to prevent future wars.

Wilson's political advisers persuaded him to confer with a number of Senators during the summer, but these talks only confirmed the political fact that he did not have enough votes to ratify the treaty without further amendments. Frustrated, but obsessive about protecting the purity of his League Covenant, Wilson decided that he must go over the heads of the politicians and "take the issue to the people." In early September he embarked on a grueling railroad campaign through all but four of the states west of the Mississippi. In deciding to undertake this trip, he acted against the advice of his doctors, who were worried that he could not stand the strain of traveling 9,800 miles between the Canadian and Mexican borders in a jarring railway coach, making twenty-six major stops and giving ten rear-platform speeches every day. They worried especially about his ability to withstand the intense late summer dust and heat in places like the Badlands of South Dakota and the Great Salt Desert. One of Wilson's closest political aides, Joseph Tumulty, later wrote, "It needed not the trained eye of a physician to see that the man ... was on the verge of a nervous breakdown," and he warned the President of the possibly "disastrous consequences" of making the trip. Wilson replied that he could not place his personal safety before his duty. He seemed prepared for martyrdom: "I don't care if I die the next minute after the treaty is ratified," he told a friendly journalist, who predicted that he would break down before he reached the Rockies.

His doctors were proved painfully right. Plagued by excruciating headaches throughout the trip, the President, previously a compelling orator, began slurring his words and losing the thread of his argument. On September 25, after a speech in Pueblo, Colorado, he suffered a mild stroke and was forced to cancel all further plans and return to Washington. Back in the White House, a second, far more serious stroke on October 1 paralyzed his entire left side. For several days he could not speak. His condition raised the urgent question of his capacity to perform his constitutional duties. But his inner circle, dominated by his doctor, Admiral Cary Grayson, and his second wife, Edith Galt Wilson, then organized perhaps the most complete and sustained cover-up in the history of the American presidency. Refusing to disclose the nature of the President's illness or to acknowledge any incapacity, they formed an impenetrable defense of his sickroom and issued vague, reassuring medical bulletins, while all but the most routine and perfunctory business of government ground slowly to a halt.

After six weeks, a slightly recovered Woodrow Wilson received Senator Gilbert Hitchcock (D-Nebraska), the minority leader, on November 18. Hitchcock informed him that a vote on the League treaty was imminent, and defeat unavoidable without compromise. Hitchcock said that all of the prominent men who had been with the President in Paris--Herbert Hoover, Bernard Baruch, Secretary of State Robert Lansing, even his closest political adviser, Colonel Edward Mandell House--were for acceptance of the Lodge reservations. But Wilson's rigidity and political purblindness had been, if anything, intensified by his physical affliction. "I have no moral right to accept any change in a paper I have already signed," he said. Then he dictated a brief letter, taken down in longhand by Edith Wilson and handed to the Senator; it said, "I hope all true friends of the treaty will refuse to support the Lodge reservations." He asked Hitchcock to convey this message to all the Democratic Senators.

The next day, Hitchcock, who lacked any conspicuous qualities of leadership, read the letter to the Democratic caucus, and fatefully they all agreed to follow the wishes of their President. Accordingly, that same afternoon, Democratic votes ensured the defeat of a motion for American entry into the League with the Lodge reservations. The margin of defeat was increased by the votes of a handful of "Irreconcilables," extreme isolationists who were opposed to U.S. participation under any circumstances. A few minutes later, in a following vote, the same extremists joined with Lodge and the other reservationists to defeat a motion calling for U.S. entry without the reservations.

The public outcry at this rejection was surprisingly strong, and the intensity of the continuing national debate on the treaty suggested that the Senate might reconsider the matter. The White House received hundreds of appeals to accept the reservations, but they never reached the President; they were ignored or left unopened by the palace guard, of which Edith Wilson had become the undisputed captain. She was not concerned with public issues, but only with her husband's health. His views were her views and his wishes were her commands.

The President remained in extremely precarious health, and his actions gave increasing indication of a distinctly unbalanced mind. Lord Grey, who had left Washington after waiting in vain for four months to penetrate Wilson's sickroom and present his credentials as the British Ambassador, wrote a letter to the London Times on January 31, 1920, expressing the growing apprehension in Europe that the United States might not come into the League. His letter emphasized the vital importance of American participation and dismissed the reservations as essentially innocuous and unobjectionable. Edith Wilson carried the letter, which was reprinted in the New York Times on February 1, to the President's sickroom and came out with a statement he had dictated and she had written down in her childish scrawl: "Had Lord Grey ventured upon any such utterance while he was still at Washington as Ambassador, his government would have been promptly asked to withdraw him."

In February 1920, Wilson suddenly wrote to his Secretary of State who, with the knowledge of the palace guard, and indeed of the press and the general public, had been holding regular Cabinet meetings since October to keep the wheels of government turning at least in routine orbits. In the letter he asked, "Is it as true, as I have been told," that Lansing had been holding these Cabinet meetings? An astonished Lansing replied that of course it was true, and that the meetings were prompted by a general agreement among Cabinet members that, being denied communication with the President, it was "wise for us to confer informally together." Wilson wrote back demanding Lansing's immediate resignation for an unjustified "assumption of Presidential authority." Lansing resigned and released the exchange of letters to the press, which led to the venting of serious questions about the President's mental state and the honesty of the medical bulletins issued by the White House. "It is unthinkable that a sane man would offer any objection to the department heads getting together," said the Worcester (Mass.) Evening Gazette. A Los Angeles Times headline read, "Wilson's Last Mad Act." The "act" was almost certainly triggered by Wilson's remembering that Lansing supported the Lodge reservations.

In a last-ditch effort to save the League treaty from all but certain death, the President's liaison man in Paris, Ray Stannard Baker, returned to Washington, and was finally allowed to see Wilson in early March. He pleaded passionately for the reservations, appealing to the need to put first things first, but his arguments fell on deaf ears: "If I accept them, these Senators will merely offer new ones, even more humiliating.... These evil men intend to destroy the League."

The end came on a second and final Senate vote, on March 19, 1920. This time twenty-one Democratic Senators disobeyed the President and voted to accept the Covenant with the Lodge reservations. But the tally fell seven votes short of the two-thirds required to ratify a treaty. If only seven more Democrats had mustered the courage to defy their President's self-destructive stance, the United States would have become a member of the League of Nations.

The refusal of the United States to join the League was without question a major cause of the League's weakness from the outset. The added weight of the world's largest democracy would, at the very least, have reassured and lent courage to Britain and France. But it is by no means certain that U.S. participation would have prevented Hitler's coming to power, the progressive erosion of international stability during the 1930s, or the ultimate cataclysm of World War II. Woodrow Wilson's conviction that the mere presence of the United States on the League Council would be a decisive deterrent to future wars rested on the assumption that Congress and public opinion would, owing to the simple fact of U.S. membership, support strong and consistent policies to deter or punish aggression--backed by active diplomacy, economic and political sanctions, and if necessary by overwhelming military force.

That is a very large assumption. It tends to dismiss, or heavily discount, Americans' historic sense of separateness and their enduring instinct to avoid foreign entanglements--an instinct that in 1920 still pervaded hundreds of small towns "where the paving ended at the limits where the trolley made its turn-around ... and Europe was strange, foreign, different--bad."

It is also an assumption undermined by what then happened in American life: a decisive inward turning, and the successive election of three Republicans--Warren G. Harding in 1920, Calvin Coolidge in 1924, and Herbert Hoover in 1928--whose common denominator was narrow isolationism. There was also Congress's steady refusal--heedless or deliberate--to fund the armed forces above a starvation level. Would Senate ratification have suddenly and decisively transformed the main currents of American life and greatly enlarged the nation's political willingness to take a major part in shaping world events between 1920 and 1940? It is and will remain a question with no certain answer, but the burden of proof is on the supporters of Woodrow Wilson's idealism.

Wilson himself, although his vision of American leadership of the League was shattered, stayed on in the White House through the 1920 election, in which the Republican, Harding, defeated the Democratic nominee, James M. Cox. Still weak and frail, Wilson accompanied Harding to the inauguration in March 1921 and lived as a private citizen in Washington until his death in 1924.

As the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1920, Franklin Roosevelt made more than eight hundred speeches in support of the League of Nations. But in contrast to Wilson, who had emphasized the idealism of the League idea, Roosevelt argued for it in terms of "practical necessity." He told audiences at campaign rallies that if the United States did not join the League, it "would degenerate into a new Holy Alliance" dominated by the European states. Nor did he share Wilson's uncompromising attitude toward the Covenant text, but was open to commonsense amendments if these were needed to make it politically palatable to the U.S. Senate. He repeatedly argued that it was important not to "dissect the document," but to "approve the general plan."

During the following two decades, however, even Roosevelt's qualified enthusiasm for the organization and its relevancy steadily cooled to a point which intimates described as "glacial." He was disgusted by the ways in which France and Britain consistently blocked the League's efforts to respond effectively to aggression and used the League as an instrument of their own myopic, self-destructive policies. But he also came to believe that the organization's inherent structure and its rules of procedure were grossly inadequate to the basic task of safeguarding peace and preventing war.

The Covenant of the League was mainly the creation of Woodrow Wilson and reflected a soaring idealism rooted in the philosophical premise that there could and must be genuine equality in relations among the sovereign nations of the world. It provided for: an Assembly, composed of representatives from all member nations, with each member having one vote; a Council, composed of one permanent representative from the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan (known as the Principal Allied and Associated Powers), plus four nonpermanent members to be elected by the Assembly; and a Permanent Secretariat.

League members were obligated by the Covenant's preamble "not to resort to war" and to conduct "open, just and honorable relations" with all other nations. Great emphasis was placed on the peaceful arbitration of disputes and, after 1924, on the referral of contentious issues to the new Permanent Court of International Justice, located at the Hague. But League members were obligated to preserve "the territorial integrity and political independence" of all nations, whether League members or not, against "external aggression," and it was the duty of the Council to "advise upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled" (this was the controversial Article 10). If negotiation and arbitration failed to resolve an international problem, and a member nation resorted to war in disregard of the Covenant, it would be deemed an act of war against all League members, who would immediately impose financial and trade sanctions. If such sanctions proved insufficient to halt the aggression, it would be the duty of the Council to recommend that member governments contribute effective army, naval, or air forces to carry out "enforcement by common action of international obligations."

This sounded like an impressive armory of collective responses, but a fatal weakness lay in the unanimity rule, which flowed directly from Wilson's belief in the necessity for the sovereign equality of member nations. The Council could therefore respond to situations of external aggression only by unanimous decision (Article 5). Moreover, whatever might be the normal prospect for unanimous agreement to act against aggression, it was fatally compromised by a provision that any member nation whose interests were affected by the matter under discussion was permitted to sit with the Council as a member thereof--and thus to cast a vote (Article 4). This meant that an aggressor nation could sit with the Council and veto proposed sanctions against itself. The Council's only recourse was to expel the aggressor from the League, which happened in the cases of Japan and Italy. As later events proved, the League was paralyzed by the unanimity rule, which could have been changed only by the determined unity and vigor of the major democracies. Because the United States was not a member, and Britain and France were irresolute, the League could not cope with the rise of aggressive dictatorships driven by revenge and quite prepared to flaunt all forms of international law.

In 1923, Franklin Roosevelt, as a private citizen, developed a "Plan to Preserve World Peace" for a competition for the American Peace Award sponsored by the Saturday Evening Post. Its most notable feature was the proposal to eliminate the League Covenant's requirement for unanimity in decisions involving sanctions and the use of collective force. "Common sense," he wrote, "cannot defend a procedure by which one or two recalcitrant nations could block the will of the great majority." On the basis of his political instincts and his own direct experience, Roosevelt accordingly approached the problem of securing peace and stability after World War II as a thoroughly disenchanted Wilsonian idealist. He had become an advocate and exponent of realpolitik.

Continues...

---

Excerpted from FDR and the Creator of the U.N. by Townsend Hoopes Copyright © 2000 by Townsend Hoopes. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
CHAPTER 1 The Ghost of Woodrow Wilson	1
CHAPTER 2 A Grim Road to War	12
CHAPTER 3 Argentia and the Atlantic Charter	26
CHAPTER 4 Postwar Planning Begins	43
CHAPTER 5 The Widening Public Debate	55
CHAPTER 6 Progress in 1943	64
CHAPTER 7 Will the Russians Participate?	75
CHAPTER 8 Quebec and Moscow	83
CHAPTER 9 Cairo and Teheran	94
CHAPTER 10 High Hopes But Inherent Limits	110
CHAPTER 11 Domestic Politics in 1944	123
CHAPTER 12 The Dumbarton Oaks Conference I	133
CHAPTER 13 The Dumbarton Oaks Conference II	148
CHAPTER 14 The 1944 Election	159
CHAPTER 15 An Unsettling Winter	166
CHAPTER 16 Contention and Compromise at San Francisco	184
Epilogue	205
Appendix. Charter of the United Nations	223
Notes	251
Bibliography	271
Index	279

Editorial Reviews

From the authors of Driven Patriot (1992), a history of the rise of the United Nations out of the ashes of the failed League of Nations and WW II.

Hoopes and Brinkley devote most of the story to FDR, who was determined throughout the war to create an international organization that would be an effective guarantor of peace. Planning for a postwar international world order began as early as 1942, when Soviet and Chinese representatives joined with FDR and Winston Churchill in signing the Declaration of United Nations, in which they vowed not to sign a separate peace with the Axis and to wage war with all their resources. As early as this FDR had developed the idea that powerful nations, like Britain and the US, should be "trustees" for world peace for the less powerful nations. The debate in the US about he shape of a new world order began early in the war as well: The failure of the League of Nations was ever-present in the public mind. While plans for a postwar world order took shape at the conferences between FDR and Churchill, attempts were made to involve the prickly Soviets, without whose cooperation no world organization could be created. The planning culminated in the 1945 San Francisco Conference, which formally gave birth to the UN. In an epilogue, the authors consider the manner in which the UN became an arena for playing out Cold War tensions and, in the cases of the Korean War and the Gulf War (in both cases led by the US), a means by which the world coordinated a response to international aggression. The authors argue that, in a world of escalating North-South conflict, the UN system needs continued strong US support.

An absorbing study of the genesis of the UN and its continuing importance, with all its imperfections, to world peace.

Kirkus Reviews