League of Nations and United Nations

II. LEAGUE OF NATIONS COVENANT
AND UNITED NATIONS CHARTER

A. SIMILARITIES IN AMERICAN APPROACHES TO LEAGUE AND UN

B. DIFFERENCES IN AMERICAN APPROACHES TO LEAGUE AND UN

C. AMERICANS AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

D. AMERICANS AND THE UNITED NATIONS

E. 42 PRIVATE AMERICAN ASSOCIATIONS
SENT CONSULANTS TO SAN FRANCISCO
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A. SIMILARITIES IN AMERICAN APPROACHES TO LEAGUE AND UN

It took two world wars and 32 years to create the United Nations. In the United States of America and throughout the world there was an underlying procedural sameness about the building of the League of Nations and the making of the United Nations. For both League and UN had been preceded by unspeakably terrible wars. At the end of both conflicts the victors made peace structures meant to be permanent. Both League and UN were built around small Councils and large Assemblies. The Councils' members were to use their collective armed might to prevent or end aggression. In both Assemblies dialog and reason would remove the underlying causes of peacelessness among nations. Both international bodies possessed and promoted rational instruments which members would use (such as courts, arbitration and conciliation) to sort-circuit members' rush to war. Both organizations had permanent Secretariats staffed by international civil servants who did not receive instructions from their own national governments. Preventing or undoing aggression was what both League and United nations were there to do.
^{(n. 02)}

In the United States what elements of method to make the League of Nations remained the same for making the United Nations?

In both cases powerful Presidents planned for peace during war, dealt with Congress and the press, treated with private experts and representatives of private associations. In planning the two postwar peace structures American Presidents worked with Secretaries of State, with the Department of State and with unofficial personal "executive agents." Presidents despatched distinguished teams to Paris and to San Francisco to negotiate the two postwar international organizations (IOs) for peace and security. Negotiating teams contained Democrats and Republicans. To both delegations were attached representatives of the American Federation of Labor. Once the treaties were made, Presidents appeared in person before the Senate to seek that body's formal advice and consent to U.S. membership in the new IOs. In both world wars private Americans contributed decisively to the content of Covenant and Charter. Americans in private groups educated themselves and others about the League and the United Nations. Private Americans also put pressure on the Senate to ratify by the required two-thirds majority the Treaties of Versailles and San Francisco.

B. DIFFERENCES IN AMERICAN APPROACHES TO LEAGUE AND UN

There was therefore a common American approach to creating and ratifying both League Covenant and UN Charter. But there were also powerful differences in the processes: differences in the way Presidents used the constitutional and non-governmental assets available to them and vast differences in the outcomes. For in both 1919 and then again in 1920, when 80% of Senators favored "a" league of nations, the Senate, eight months after receiving the treaty text, nonetheless rejected American membrship in "the" League of Nations. ^(n.
03) In 1945, by contrast, less than one month after receiving the text, the Senate ratified the UN Charter by a vote of 89 to 2. ^{(n. 04)}

What were the all important differences in method which led to such vastly different results?

C. AMERICANS AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

The differences related to the very personal way President Thomas Woodrow Wilson chose to mix together the elements common to both processes: his relationship with Secretary of State Robert Lansing; with Lansing's Department of State; with Wilson's unofficial executive agent Colonel Edward House and with House's secret planning group the Inquiry; with private Americans and with Congress, especially the Senate, more especially Wilson's relationship with Republican Senate Majority Leader and Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge ^{(n. 05)}

In planning for a postwar peace structure which the President ordered begun in September 1917, Woodrow Wilson used the Secretary of State and the State Department for perhaps five percent of his ideas. But he used Colonel House and the Inquiry for a good 95 percent. Wilson consulted with the Senate only sporadically and, except for one 3 1/2 hour White House session in August 1919, minimally. He named himself the principal American negotiator in a five man American Peace Commission. The negotiators included no women, no members of Congress and only one Republican, Henry White, a respected career diplomat, friend of Theodore Roosevelt, of ex-President Taft and of elder statesman Elihu Root, but not himself a leader of the GOP.

The call for a League of Nations came in Article One of a complex peace treaty with Germany and was caught up in another treaty guaranteeing the Security of France against Germany as well as anticipated peace treaties with Austria, Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria. When the President personally delivered the text of the proposed Treaty of Versailles to the Senate, he lectured that august body as if they were schoolboys and at length. When Republicans indicated that the Senate would not consent to the Treaty of Versailles without some amendments or reservations, the President appealed in vain to the American people against the Republican majority in the Senate.

As for private Americans and the League Covenant: a handful of them made up the intellectuals -- medievalists, historians, social scientists -- in the Inquiry. ^{(n. 06}) Henry Ford sent his peace ship to Norway. Jane Addams of Chicago's Hull House mobilized women for peace and was elected President of the 1915 International Congress of Women at the Hague. Those brilliant ladies from neutral and warring nations made sensible but unheeded recommendations: for example, continuing mediation by neutrals and a role for women in negotiations for peace ^{(n. 07)}. William Howard Taft's powerful private American group, the League to Enforce Peace, united elite Republicans and Democrats for a time ^{(n. 08)}.

Woodrow Wilson all too soon antagonized Reublicans in the League to Enforce Peace and neither that body nor any other private American group worked consciously with the Secretary of State to educate and mobilize American publics in a partnership with President and Senate. Indeed, what with its insignificant role during the First World War in either planning or negotiating for the postwar League of Nations, the State Deparment could not possibly have been an effective leader or partner of either Senate or American publics. Despite, therefore, the underlying positive similarities between American approaches to the League and to the United Nations, Wilson's errors and Lodge's commitment to American indendence and freedom of action led in 1919 and 1920 to Senate rejection of the League of Nations Covenant.

D. AMERICANS AND THE UNITED NATIONS

Through the increasingly dangerous isolationist years from 1920 until the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the spiritual heirs of Woodrow Wilson mourned his errors and made sure not to repeat them. In September 1939, within days after the German invasion of Poland and the British and French declarations of war, Secretary of State Cordell Hull began America's postwar planning. The Secretary also moved quickly to assure that he and the State Department would dominate the official side of that postwar planning. Harry Hopkins, to name someone who might have challenged Hull, helped make the UN but did not play the postwar planning role which Colonel House and his Inquiry had 1917 - 1919. ^{(n. 09)}

By 1942 and 1943 Secretary Cordell Hull and Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles were leading a 45-member Presidential Planning Committee which included eight members of Congress and ten private persons. On January 9, 1943 Representative Sol Bloom, Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, joined the Advisory Committee on Post-War Foreign Policy. James T. Shotwell, historian, Director of the Division of Economics and History of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) had joined earlier, in June 1942. The Committee had a Political Subcommittee, chaired by Under Secretary Sumner Welles. In June 1942 Welles's Political Subcommittee established its own Subcommittee on International Organization (IO). Between July 1942 and June 1943 the International Organization Subcommittee met 45 times. James T. Shotwell was a member and so was Clark Eichelberger, who, in addition to myriad activities in private foreign policy associations, was then serving as consultant to Dr Leo Pasvolsky's State Department Research Staff. ^{(n. 10)}

In 1943 Sol Bloom saw to it that the House of Representatives handily passed the Fulbright Resolution. And later that year Senator Tom Connally, also a member of Secretary of State Hull's Planning Committee, gave his name to a resolution substituting for one originally proposed by the young internationalist Senator Joseph Ball. Both the Fulbright and Connally resolutions put the U.S. Congress on record,prior to negotiations, in support of a postwar international peace organization.

Among private associations primarily focused on foreign affairs, six worked especially closely with the State Department from 1939 onward ^(n.
11). Deserving particular attention is the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace (CSOP). The CSOP had been founded in November 1939 by James T. Shotwell ^{(n. 12)}. Virginia Gildersleeve, Dean of Columbia University's Barnard College for women, was a charter member and Clark Eichelberger was its Director. The six private groups supplied ideas and in some cases staff to the State Department planning team lead by Russian born economist Leo Pasvolsky, formerly with the Brookings Institution.

At least 90 percent of the thinking behind the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals (the negotiating basis for the future UN Charter) originated outside the State Department, much of it contributed by private Americas and such members of Congress as Fulbright and Ball. Aother big difference from World War One: this time American women had the vote. President Roosevelt also made himself personally accessible to representatives of private groups. He not only met on several occasions with Clark Eichelberger but also authorized Mr Eichelberger to float trial balloons to test how far Americans were ready to go towards an organization to succeed the League of Nations.

When the UN Charter treaty was negotiated in San Francisco in April, May and June of 1945, the seven American negotiators on the ground included four leading members of Congress (two Democrats and two Republicans) and two representatives of the public: one a man who had resigned as Governor of Minnesota to become a Commander in the Navy and the second a woman who was Dean of Barnard College as well as a founder of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and also of the naval women's auxiliary, the WAVES. The delegation was led not by the President (as Wilson had done at Paris) but by Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr.^{(n. 13)}

Once the UN Charter was made, President Truman presented it simply and briefly to the Senate. Among the members of that body in July 1945 were two men who only days earlier in San Francisco had signed the United Nations Charter as Delegates of the United States of America. They were Senators Tom Connally and Arthur Vanderberg, Chairman and Ranking Minority member, respectively, of the Foreign Relations Committee. They led in committee work and floor debate and were among the 89 Senators voting to accept the Charter. Two other Congressional co-signers of the UN Charter, Representatives Sol Bloom and Charles Eaton, attended some of the Senate hearings of public opinion of the Charter. Unlike the Treaty of Versailles, the San Francisco agreement was not a peace treaty. Thus the matter to be ratified by the Senate was much simpler than in 1919 - 1920.

E. 42 PRIVATE AMERICAN ASSOCIATIONS
SENT "CONSULTANTS" TO SAN FRANCISCO

In March 1945 there was concern in Washington about how to respond to hundreds of requests from private groups to be included among the American delegation about to be sent to the San Francisco Conference. This public demand to do foreign policy democratically was batted back and forth among the State Department, Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, Clark Eichelberger and seven American Delegates while the latter were being briefed before they left for San Francisco. As a compromise, the State Department on April 10, 1945 invited 42 private American associations each to send one Consultant and up to two Associate Consultants (to be freely chosen by the private groups themselves) to San Francisco for daily two-way interaction with the Delegates, Advisors, Staff and Secretariat of the large American delegation.^{(n. 14)}

In addition to the official Consultants, about four times as many other private American groups were encouraged to come to San Francisco as unofficial but welcome "Observers." A State Department team led by poet and Assistant Secretary of State Archibald MacLeish and by future President of Dartmouth College John S. Dickey interacted vigorously with both Consultants and Observers. In addition, the Consultants and Observers quickly learned to pool resources and work together. The Consultants elected Professor James T. Shotwell their Chairman. This is not surprising. For among the Consultants were Clark Eichelberger and most of the 17 other members of Shotwell's Commission to Study the Organization of Peace (CSOP) who were attached to various parts of the U.S. Delegation. Official Delegate Virginia Gildersleeve and Delegation Advisor John Foster Dulles were also members of the CSOP. ^{(n. 15)}

From publication of the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals on October 9, 1944 through Senate ratification of the UN Charter on July 28, 1945, CSOP and the other Consultant and Observer organizations present at San Francisco also carried out, in conscious partnership with the Department of State, the most far-reaching public education program for foreign policy in American history. And the virtual field commander of this campaign was Clark Eichelberger. After San Francisco private American groups steadily informed their members about the text of the UN Charter, mobilized members to keep pressure on the Senate, sent representatives to testify before Senators Connally and Vandenberg and then helped their membership to monitor events leading to 1946 and the first meetings of General Assembly and Security Council.^{(n. 16)}

Scholars agree that the private American Consultants and Observers had measurable direct impact both on the text of the UN Charter, especially Article 71, and on later UN openness to private organizations. Consultants and Observers also supported Sol Bloom's insistence that the Preamble to the UN Charter begin with the words, "We, the peoples of the United Nations." Consultant and Observer pressure also saw to it that the UN's Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) acquired a much higher organizational status than that envisaged by the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals. From Consultants and Observers reresenting American agriculture, business, labor and education (the so-called "ABLE" group) there came the pressure which made education an explicit goal of the United Nations. And there came as well pressure for the Charter to call for creation of a Human Rights Commission.^{(n. 17)}

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This completes a brief squirrel's eye comparison of American contributions to planting the seeds which bloomed into first the League of Nations and then the United Nations. There are uncountable other issues great and small. President Truman, for example, was not amused when Asheville, North Carolina was not seriously considered as a permanent seat for the UN ^{(n. 18)}. Deserving more attention as well are the federalist ideas of contract bridge champion Ely Culbertson, Clarence Streit, Senator Joseph Ball, Harold Stassen, Cord Meyer, Jr. and others. Their ideas lost out to the UN's weaker, essentially League of Nations style "permanent alliance" structure ^{(n. 19)} In such a foundation epic extending over 32 years there are many other such issues and subplots.

The United Nations came to be because Americans remembered what President Wilson had done right and had done wrong 1914 - 1920 regarding what became the League of Nations. President Roosevelt remembered and learned from Wilson v. Lodge. So did Secretary of State Hull, Undersecretary Welles and the State Department planning teams.

Remembering and learning in addition were those historians, journalists, lawyers, politicians, private foreign policy elites and concerned American professional and service associations which made up or supplied the 42 cadres of Consultants and Associate Consultants to the U.S. Delegation. The Consultant and Observer organizations included such groups as Rotary and Lions, the NAACP, the AFL, AAUW and the National Council of Churches of Christ in America.

Also remembering and learning from the duel between Wilson and Lodge were the four New Yorkers whom we shall now bring on stage one by one: Sol Bloom, Virginia Gildersleeve, James Shotwell and Clark Eichelberger.

-OOO-

NOTES

(02) Recollections of the League and expressions of conviction of the need to learn from the League experience abound in Cordell Hull's MEMOIRS and in the writings of Sumner Welles, James T. Shotwell, Clark Eichelberger, Sol Bloom, Virginia Gildersleeve, John Foster Dulles, Charles A. Beard, Senator Joseph H. Ball and many other Americans who worked 1939 - 1945 to make the UN Charter.

(03) Among the many treatments of the Senate and the Treaty of Versailles none surpasses in its icy isolationist Americanism Senator Henry Cabot Lodge's 1925 THE SENATE AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS.

(04) On 1945 Senate ratification see Ruth Russell (1958) A HISTORY OF THE UNITED NATIONS CHARTER 936 - 947; also the compete text of the July 1945 Senate Hearings on the UN Charter; Robert A. Divine's 1967 SECOND CHANCE 304 - 314; and Dorothy Robins (1971) EXPERIMENT IN DEMOCRACY 146 - 149.

(05) Especially useful on President Wilson is Harley A. Notter (1937) THE ORIGINS OF THE FOREIGN POLICY OF WOODROW WILSON. See also Sondra Herman (1969) ELEVEN AGAINST WAR, Chapter VII, "Woodrow Wilson: The Polity as an Instrument of National Policy," pp. 179 - 216.

For Colonel Edward House, Woodrow Wilson's executive agent par excellence during the war and at Paris, see especially A.L and J.L. George (1956) WOODROW WILSON AND COLONEL HOUSE as well as Charles Seymour (1928) THE INTIMATE PAPERS OF COLONEL HOUSE. Presidential use of private persons for official business is covered in Henry M. Wriston's 1929 EXECUTIVE AGENTS IN AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS. Franklin Roosevelt gave his own twist to the use of private persons by influencing Clark M. Eichelberger's information and action networks and through insisting on a role for Consultants and Observers at the San Francisco Conference.

For WW I peace planning and the Paris Peace Conference see Robert Lansing (1921) THE PEACE NEGOTIATIONS: A PERSONAL NARRATIVE and (1935) WAR MEMOIRS OF ROBERT LANSING, SECRETARY OF STATE. See also Theodore Marburg (1917, 1918) LEAGUE OF NATIONS. Also David Hunter Miller (1928) THE DRAFTING OF THE COVENANT. Finally James T. Shotwell (1937) AT THE PARIS PEACE CONFERENCE AND (1944) THE LONG WAY TO FREEDOM.

(06) Exhaustive on the Wilson - House postwar planning group is Lawrence E. Gelfand (1963) THE INQUIRY: AMERICAN PREPARATIONS FOR PEACE, 1917 - 1919.

(07) On women see especially Jane Addams et al. (1916) THE INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF WOMEN AND ITS RESULTS. Also Sondra Herman (1969) ELEVEN AGAINST WAR, Chapter V, "Jane Addams: The Comity as a Neighborhood," pp. 114- 149. The Henry Ford peace ship is frequently mentioned as an eccentic pacifist effort at private peacemaking.

(08) Many of the older makers of the UN Charter, e.g. Cordell Hull, Tom Connally and Sumner Welles, recalled with favor the private body treated by Ruhl J. Bartlett (1944) THE LEAGUE TO ENFORCE PEACE. See also Sondra R. Herman (1969) ELEVEN AGAINST WAR, Ch. III, "The League to Enforce Peace: The Polity as Posse Comitatus, 55 - 85. The League to Enforce Peace provided speaking platforms for both Woodrow Wilson and Henry Cabot Lodge as well as for Dean Virginia Gildersleeve.

(09) State Department postwar planning is presented from different points of view in Cordell Hull's 1948 MEMOIRS, especially Chapters 116 though 122; in Ruth Russell's 1958 A HISTORY OF THE UNITED NATIONS CHARTER, passim; and by Harley Notter's 1950 POSTWAR FOREIGN POLICY PREPARATION, 1939 - 1945 passim and in Robert A. Hildebrand, (1990) DUMBARTON OAKS passim.

Postwar planning is also brought into biographies and memoirs of such participants as Virginia Gildersleeve, Sumner Welles, Clark Eichelberger and James T. Shotwell. For planning in relationship to broader American internationalist tides see Harold Josephson's 1975 biography of James T. Showell, Shotwell's own works and Robert A. Divine (1967) SECOND CHANCE.

(10) Sumner Welles himself describes his roles in the various State Department postwar planning efforts, e.g. in (1945) WHERE ARE WE HEADING? 18 - 31, 34f and in (1951) SEVEN DECISIONS THAT SHAPED HISTORY 123 - 145. A somewhat jaundiced view of Welles as planner appears in Hull's 1948 MEMOIRS. Shotwell and Eichelberger give Welles much higher marks. In their pages the four State Department officials who stand out most strikingly as postwar planners are Sumner Welles and Edward Stettinius at the top and below them Assistant Secretary Archibald MacLeish and Office of Public Affairs Director John S. Dickey.

(11) Ruth Russell (1968, 215) thought that "Probably no other major governmental policy has ever been the product of so many minds as the American proposals for an international organization."

She listed six private groups singled out for consultation by State Department planners. They were (alphabetically) ibid., 215, n. 9:

--American Association for United Nations,
--Americans United for World Organization,
--Commission to Study the Organization of Peace,
--Council on Foreign Relations,
--Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America,
--Foreign Policy Association.

(12) Co-founding organizations behind the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace (CSOP) were the American Association of University Women, American Union for Concerted Peace Efforts, Church Peace Union, League of Nations Association and World Citizens Association. See Walter Johnson (1944) THE BATTLE AGAINST ISOLATION, 59. That a commission on human rights is called for in the UN Charter is due to a proposal submitted by the CSOP. "This is one of the first instances in history of an unofficial body determining the text of a treaty in an international conference of governments," said Shotwell (1960) THE LONG WAY TO FREEDOM 584.

(13) On the San Francisco Conference in general see Stettinius's 1945 REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT, Russell's 1958 HISTORY 625 - 934, Divine's 1967 SECOND CHANCE 287 - 298 and Robins's 1971 EXPERIMENT IN DEMOCRACY 86 - 90. Hilderbrand (1990) DUMBARTON OAKS, 81, roots the selection of Virginia Gildersleeve as sole American woman Delegate at San Francisco in public complaints that no women had been in the Dumbarton Oaks conversations.

(14) The lengthiest treatment of Consultants to the U.S. Delegation at San Francisco is presented by Dorothy Robins (1971) EXPERIMENT IN DEMOCRACY. See especially Chapters VI and VII. The Consultants were also looked at by Russell (1958) HISTORY 594 - 596, 801 and 938. Information on how they were selected is given by Notter (1950) POSTWAR FOREIGN POLICY PREPARATION 215 and 421f, by Divine (1967) SECOND CHANCE 283 - 286 and Robins (1971) EXPERIMENT IN DEMOCRACY 86 - 90.

(15) Shotwell's leadership of both Consultants and Observers is described in Shotwell (1960) THE LONG WAY TO FREEDOM 580, n.2, in Josephson (1975) SHOTWELL 256 - 260, also by Robins (1971) EXPERIMENT 109, 111 and Chiang (1981) NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS 39 - 42. Chiang basically follows Robins.

(16) For the UNEC campaign: Robins op. cit. passim; Divine op. cit. Chapter 10, pp. 243 - 278; Eichelberger (1977) ORGANIZING FOR PEACE, Chapter 16, 249 - 259.

(17) For the impact of the Consultants and Observers on the UN Charter and subsequent UN practice: Robins 1971, Chapter VII, 114 - 139 and Chiang (1981) 39 - 42. H.G. Nicholas (1971), WASHINGTON DESPATCHES 1941 - 1946: WEEKLY DESPATCHES FROM THE BRITISH EMBASSY, argues "The United Nations as a Political Institution," p. 138, that the presence of Article 71 in the UN Charter

reflected directly that solicitude for interest groups which is such a marked feature of American government and in particular the indebtedness felt by the United States State Deartment to the various private bodies which had conspicuously cooperated with it to recommend the U.N. to a public hitherto isolationist.

(18) President Truman was annoyed that sentiment among members of the first UN General Assembly swung strongly towards a headquarters in the expensive New York City area. On February 28, 1946 Truman spoke with Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., by then no longer Secretary of State but U.S. Representative on the Security Council:

He said it was perfectly ridiculous to let foreigners come over here and pick out areas ... expensive land, when five communities offered land free of charge -- Asheville, North Carolina ('where the Biltmore place is'); Chicago, Denver; San Francisco; and Philadelphia, all of whom want the United Nations and ... willing to give the free land. [Thomas M. Campbell and George C. Herring (eds.), THE DIARIES OF EDWARD R. STETTINIUS, JR., 1943 - 1946. (1975), p. 455]

(19) The Senate testimony of witnesses for and against ratifying the UN Charter is covered in (1945) THE CHARTER OF THE UNITED NATIONS: HEARINGS BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS UNITED STATES SENATE. The testimony (452 - 455) by Ulric Bell and Leo Cherne representing Americans United for World Organization called for ratification of the Charter. In retrospect,however, there is evidence of that sense that the UN did not go far enough which later led to creation of United World Federalists. To Cherne the United Nations proved that Americans preferred "even imperfect collaboration to perfect chaos" (455).

For the differing aproaches of Ulric Bell and Clark Eichelberger see Divine (1967) SECOND CHANCE, 247 - 250. In his Senate Testimony (1945 HEARINGS 584- 589) Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas saw the UN Charter as enshrining "the dangerous myth of absolute national sovereignty" (584). "...we are dealing not with a beginning of federation but with an alliance of big powers" (588). Were force ever needed, he said, to maintain peace, then let it be in a framework along the lines suggested by Ely Culbertson. Contract Bridge expert Culbertson opposed ratification because of shortcomings in any collective security system based on national contingents. (See Russell's 1958 HISTORY 937; Divine (1967) SECOND CHANCE 307 on Culbertson's testimony, and Divine 324 on Clarence Streit's UNION NOW and its appeal for a union of democracies and on Culbertson's two books, SUMMARY OF THE WORLD FEDERATION PLAN and TOTAL PEACE. Divine also mentions Mortimer Adler's HOW TO THINK ABOUT WAR AND PEACE, which argued for an eventual world federation.

Cord Meyer, Jr., Delegate Harold Stassen's aide at San Francisco, argued in the September 1945 issue of ATLANTIC MONTHLY against extravagent claims for the United Nations. Only if the UN Charter were promptly amended to give that body "law-making and law-enforcing powers" could an arms race be avoided. [Meyer (1980) FACING REALITY; FROM WORLD FEDERALISM TO THE CIA: THE MEMOIRS OF CORD MEYER, 43f.]

The ATLANTIC article eventually led to a meeting in February 1947 of various world federalist groups in Asheville, North Carolina. They merged into United World Federalists (UWF) and lobbied Congress for a more federalist United Nations (Meyer, FACING REALITY, 43f). In PEACE OR ANARCHY, published in October 1947 Cord Meyer, Jr., reviewed at length UN weaknesses and made the case for true federalism or "world government." Alan Cranston would later succeed Meyer as president of UWF.

-OOO-

presented orally 07/26/1991
revisited and lightly edited 03/24/2004
revisited 02/20/2009

Patrick Killough
Black Mountain, NC