l gave a talk in Tryon, N.C. on May 16th [1998] to Dartmouth College Alumni. I spoke of four men of Dartmouth and what they did 1943 - 1945 to  bring the United Nations into being.

Read the 1971 book,  EXPERIMENT IN DEMOCRACY: THE STORY OF U.S. CITIZEN ORGANIZATIONS IN FORGING THE CHARTER OF THE UNITED NATIONS. It is the popularized redo of the doctoral thesis of Dorothy B. Robins-Mowry.  She has a footnote about a meeting at Blair House in Washington in November 1944. The meeting was called to coordinate public educational activities of the U.S. Department of State and leading private organizations. It occurred five months before the writing of the UN Charter. The meeting was called by Professor Ernest M. Hopkins. His  private guests included Sidney Hayward. The State Department delegation included John S. Dickey and Richard Morin.

Who were these four men?  As Dorothy Robins-Mowry wrote: 

"..it is interesting to see the Dartmouth college spirit interjected into these proceedings. Hopkins was president, Hayward was head of the AlumniAssociation and Dickey, who is now Dartmouth president, and Morin were both alumni."

From 1939 onward Secretary of State Hull and later his successor Edward Stettinius created  post-war planning teams. Those groups included career Government employees, private Americans with unique expertise, representatives of voluntary associations and, above all, members of  the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The four men of Dartmouth, Hopkins, Hayward, Dickey and Morin, already knew one another. Sidney Hayward, as head of the Dartmouth College Alumni Association, pulled together ideas and personal networks useful to the makers of the United Nations. He was also a member of  Americans United For World Organization (AUWO), one of several umbrella organizations which united private American groups imagining the post-war world to come.

Ernest M. Hopkins was  President of Dartmouth College and also founder and President of AUWO. He drew some Dartmouth men towards AUWO and  interacted with other Dartmouth alumni  already at work within the Department of State. October 1944 launched an American government-private partnership in foreign policy making. Americans, British, Russians and Chinese, meeting at Dumbarton Oaks, had just agreed on  the negotiating basis for  the U.N. Charter. Through the Dumbarton Oaks text private Americans finally had  for public discussion ideas both detailed and official.

Ernest Hopkins (working closely with his two Dartmouth colleagues inside State--Dickey and Morin) persuaded the State Department to host an unprecedented  meeting on October 16, 1944. Hopkins was present in his capacity as Chairman of Americans United for World Organization. 95 private American groups sent representatives. They received  high level, frank briefings about Dumbarton Oaks and agreed to work with State to educate the American people prior to formal world-wide negotiations.  Hopkins then continued as a vigorous private leader in the national educational campaign.

Ernest Hopkins had invited the private groups to the October 16, 1944
meeting at the State Department. The Department had never before deigned to ask Kiwanians or the NAACP or the American Association of University Women for advice on major pending negotiations.

John S. Dickey was the most creative of the four players with links to Dartmouth. He had worked 1934-36 on Inter-American Affairs at State and had rejoined the Department in 1940. In June 1943 Secretary of State Hull made Dickey his Special Assistant on how to relate State to the world of Rotary, CIO, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant and other private groups studying post-war international organization. During two 1944 reorganizations of the State Department, Dickey's star rose. He was made Director of the new Office of Public Information. There were four operating divisions under him, one headed by Richard Morin.

Dickey's thinking evolved rapidly. In a memo to Hull dated October 1,1944 he argued that there was only a single, tiny window of opportunity for American private groups to make any impact on coming negotiations: namely, before the international negotiating Conference began.  But a few months later, Franklin Roosevelt accepted an even bolder proposal of Dickey, Morin and others. 

From among organizations invited to the October 1944 meeting,
42 private American groups were hand picked to serve as official
"Consultants" to the American delegation at San Francisco.  These 42 included National Exchange Club, the American Legion, the Farm Bureau Federation, the National Education Association and the American Bar Association. It no longer sufficed for the State Department to seek private organization input BEFORE negotiations. Now State empowered private groups to advise DURING negotiations.  The Consultants constantly interacted with the Dartmouth duo of John  Dickey and his Division Chief Richard Morin. The Consultants contributed ideas and language to the text of the U.N. Charter regarding education, human rights and access of private organizations to such UN bodies as UNESCO and UNICEF.

The October 16, 1944 meeting had broken the ice of decades of State
Department aloofness and hinted at an enduring two-way partnership with ordinary Americans. The awed tone of private sector deference to State is palpable in the contemporary documents. Even more ice remained to be broken. John Dickey soon sent his assistant and fellow Dartmouth man Richard Morin to a follow-on meeting in Manhattan. There Morin hunkered down and uttered only a cautious, vague general invitation to feel free to call on State. But the pace picked up as confidence grew among the partners. 

Dickey and Morin by then had a new boss: Assistant Secretary of State Archibald MacLeish,  Poet Laureate and Librarian of Congress. Before, during and (for a brief period) after the UN Charter negotiations April - June 1945, the State Department reveled in its new, ever bolder two-way partnership with private Americans. That partnership paid off in July 1945 when the Senate ratified the UN Charter 89 -2.

The Dartmouth Four were perfectly positioned when the United Nations idea needed them. But so were the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the League of  Women Voters and  many thousands of other Americans  represented by their Consultants at San Francisco. For the first time ever a peace was made on Main Street, with input from YMCA and YWCA, from Lions and Chamber of Commerce, too. Democratic foreign policy has been made only once on that scale in this country.  The President, the State Department, the Congress and American publics pulled together to make the United Nations.Yet the Dartmouth College spirit in foreign policy making is now only a memory. 

I often wonder why.

-OOO-

my column for the weekly Asheville TRIBUNE

revisited Saturday 11/19/2011 for visiting Dartmouth alumna Sarah  Jackson-Han currently with UNDP in Washington, D.C.