Reclaiming American Virtue

Barbara J. Keys

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674726918
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

The American commitment to international human rights emerged in the 1970s not as a logical outgrowth of American idealism but as a surprising response to national trauma, as Barbara Keys shows in this provocative history. Reclaiming American Virtue situates this novel enthusiasm as a reaction to the profound challenge of the Vietnam War and its tumultuous aftermath. Instead of looking inward for renewal, Americans on the right and the left alike looked outward for ways to restore America's moral leadership.Conservatives took up the language of Soviet dissidents to resuscitate a Cold War narrative that pitted a virtuous United States against the evils of communism. Liberals sought moral cleansing by dissociating the United States from foreign malefactors, spotlighting abuses such as torture in Chile, South Korea, and other right-wing allies. When Jimmy Carter in 1977 made human rights a central tenet of American foreign policy, his administration struggled to reconcile these conflicting visions.Yet liberals and conservatives both saw human rights as a way of moving from guilt to pride. Less a critique of American power than a rehabilitation of it, human rights functioned for Americans as a sleight of hand that occluded from view much of America's recent past and confined the lessons of Vietnam to narrow parameters. It would be a small step from world's judge to world's policeman, and American intervention in the name of human rights would be a cause both liberals and conservatives could embrace.

CHAPTER 1

The Postwar Marginality of Universal Human Rights

WHEN JIMMY CARTER put human rights at the center of his foreign policy, he said he was merely restoring morality to its rightful place after its anomalous demotion under Nixon and Ford. Carter’s invocation of a moral agenda was not new to American foreign policy, nor to foreign relations in general. All empires have cloaked their rule in moralistic garb, and even the consummate realists Nixon and Kissinger spoke of their foreign policy as designed to serve moral ends—in their case, the creation of a stable international order and a secure peace. Elements of the Wilsonian tradition of promoting democracy appeared in Carter’s human rights program, giving his foreign policy ideas a potentially long genealogy. Yet it is anachronistic to suggest that human rights promotion has always been embedded in U.S. foreign policy or that the human rights programs of the 1970s were merely a reversion to tradition. The Roosevelt and Truman administrations ensured that universal human rights became part of the United Nations’ mandate at the end of the Second World War, but the early history of American engagement with this creation shows just how unconvincing most Americans found it. International human rights enjoyed a brief fluorescence at the end of the war, but for most of the 1950s and 1960s, Americans mostly ignored UN human rights. When the subject was in the news, it was often regarded as alien, un-American, or irrelevant.

With the rise of human rights as a moral lingua franca after the end of the Cold War, observers began to read human rights back in anachronistic ways. A recent survey of U.S. foreign relations, for example, sees human rights as a major element in American thinking in the nineteenth century, calling social reformer Jane Addams a “human rights advocate” and claiming that the U.S. government pressured Russia “on issues of human rights” in the 1880s and private American groups urged “their own government and others to protect human rights in countries where they were threatened.”¹ These descriptions conflate a post-World War II system and definitions with differently grounded and articulated notions of justice and rights. Before the twentieth century, Americans spoke most often not of human rights but of natural, civil, political, social, or constitutional rights.² Such rights, along with Christian values, the notion of civilization, and ideals such as freedom, republicanism, and democracy, were part of a distinctive idiom of international idealism in the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, American conceptions of human rights were often defined in economic terms, especially after the devastating effects of the Great Depression. In the 1930s, drawing on a tradition of Populist backing for the “human rights” of workers in the contest between labor and capital, the demagogic Catholic “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin (before he turned to anti-Semitism and fascism) inspired millions of listeners in part by calling for tax cuts and living wages for workers on the grounds that the “sanctity of human rights” for the poor should supersede the “sanctity of property.”³ When President Franklin Roosevelt proposed a second bill of rights in 1944, it focused on economic rights and implied a diminishment of individual liberties in the form of property rights. These were features of rights that did not assume prominence in the postwar years.

The commonly held view that universal human rights are the contemporary articulation of deep ethical and religious impulses (for just rule, respect for the human person, avoidance of suffering) is a truism that obscures the postwar system’s unique features.⁴ It is too easy to assume that the rise of universal human rights after the Second World War was logical and inevitable and to look for antecedents that allow us to tell a story of continuities, in which ideas experience temporary setbacks but break through eventually due to their inherent appeal.⁵ In this version the 1940s set out a vision that was temporarily frozen by the Cold War but eventually triumphed, first tentatively in the 1970s, with piecemeal efforts to enforce the human rights ideals laid out after 1945, and then more vigorously in the 1990s after the constraints of the Cold War disappeared. In reality the links from the 1940s to the 1970s to the 1990s are less linear and more contingent and divergent than this story allows. In the United States, within a few years of their enunciation, the new rights ideas generated the most vigorous and energetic response not in the form of enthusiastic embrace but of attack from enraged conservatives.

The Roosevelt and Truman administrations were instrumental in inserting “human rights and fundamental freedoms” into the United Nations Charter, just as they orchestrated virtually all other aspects of the document. The Truman administration was later a key player in the drafting of the UDHR—by a commission chaired by the late President Roosevelt’s wife. Yet there is little evidence that the resulting acknowledgments of human rights were intended as anything more than “inspirational fiction.”⁶ Even to the women’s, Christian, Jewish, and African American organizations that lobbied for them, they were not the main prize; it was enough that an international organization dedicated to securing the peace was formed, even if it was predicated not on genuinely new visions of global governance or morality but was designed as a great power condominium.⁷

In the war’s early years, appeals to human rights were a way to inspire public enthusiasm for the war effort. When the conflict’s outcome seemed to hang in the balance, the Roosevelt administration invoked ideals to assure people that the enormously costly war was not merely another round in an endless contest of power politics, but a worthy struggle that would secure a better world and a lasting peace. In his January 1941 State of the Union address, even before the United States was drawn into the war, President Roosevelt proclaimed that an enduring peace required “a world founded upon four essential freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear of aggression. “Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere,” he declared.⁸ Crucially, the Four Freedoms encompassed New Deal-style economic and social justice, rather than merely civil and political rights. These broad sets of rights would make their way into the UDHR after the war, but economic and social rights would never have the same resonance for most Americans as the more familiar political freedoms, and in some quarters would evoke a deep-seated fear of socialism.

At Roosevelt’s initiative, a throwaway line was inserted in a 1942 declaration by allied and associated powers signaling their intent “to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands.”⁹ The wording signaled that the goal was merely preserving the status quo, not extending rights to new areas or creating new rights. Soon after the declaration was made public, Roosevelt ordered the internment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast.¹⁰

Even rhetorical obeisance to human rights was lacking in the Atlantic Charter, the joint statement of war aims that Roosevelt and Churchill drafted in August 1941, before the United States was a party to the war. The charter’s most heralded provision was a statement in flavor of self-determination, but it was hardly a paean to the self-governing capacities of colonial peoples. Churchill insisted that it applied only to areas under Nazi control, not to the British Empire. For Roosevelt’s advisers, anti-colonialism was a means of extending U.S. economic power by acquiring access to new markets and raw materials. The crux of the negotiations about the content of the declaration was not over what both sides regarded as purely aspirational rhetoric but rather over trade issues and a possible future international organization, issues with clear economic and security repercussions. As critics noted at the time, the charter failed to mention civil and political rights. Initially included by the British Foreign Office, a reference to defense of “the rights of freedom of speech and thought” was deleted by Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles on the grounds that a still heavily isolationist Congress might balk at a commitment to defend rights that, because they were abrogated in every Axis country, could pull America into the war. Although Welles added a reference to a peace that included “freedom from fear and want,” the charter did not hint at international protection of human rights.¹¹ It has even been suggested that when human rights were eventually inserted in the United Nations Charter, it was “a kind of consolation prize” offered in place of the Atlantic Charter’s promise of self-determination, which would eventually be deemed too dangerous and taken off the postwar agenda.¹²

Hesitancy and ambivalence characterized the American approach to international human rights throughout the war, especially when it came to actions that might have tangible effects. In late 1944, the Big Three initially excluded human rights from a draft of what would become the United Nations Charter. Although State Department planners considered including an international bill of human rights as part of the future United Nations and a subcommittee of legal experts even wrote a draft bill of rights in 1942, the idea was eventually dropped. Still, the U.S. delegation at the Dumbarton Oaks meetings that wrote the first version of the UN Charter pressed for some mention of promotion of human rights in the document, and the British and Soviets reluctantly agreed. The result was a deliberately weak and ambiguous formulation of a goal to “promote respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.”¹³

Tepid as it was, wartime rhetoric about human rights was partly a response to a groundswell of organizing and agitating among religious, women’s, and labor groups in the United States and many other countries. Statements of faith in human rights ideals and proposals for bills of rights proliferated. Enthusiasts embraced rights not in order to prevent recurrence of the Holocaust, which as yet only barely penetrated public consciousness, but because curbing the power of dictatorships to trample on individual rights seemed a way to reduce the chances of a future war.¹⁴ Many were also attracted to individual rights as an alternative to the now-discredited minorities rights structures embedded in the League of Nations, whose charter had placed the rights of specific groups in Eastern Europe under international protection but had made no mention of individual human rights.¹⁵

Recognizing the powerful resonance of the idea, the Roosevelt administration accredited nearly four dozen nongovernmental organizations as official consultants to the U.S. delegation sent to write the final UN Charter at the 1945 San Francisco Conference. The administration’s aim was to enlist these organizations—groups such as the National Peace Conference, the American Federation of Labor, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the American Jewish Congress—as public advocates of the new organization, selling the public on a more internationalist role for the United States.¹⁶ Wilson’s failure to gain U.S. admission to the League of Nations was a lesson in what to avoid; this time around, public support was to be carefully cultivated. Some of the nongovernmental organizations’ representatives came away feeling that it was their pressure that put human rights on the agenda, but it is more likely that the administration was already convinced of the public relations value of paying lip service to human rights ideals.¹⁷

The San Francisco Conference was an American show, and while the major powers fought battles on controversial issues such as veto power in the Security Council, when it came to human rights, the United States held the reins. The reference to “fundamental human rights” in the charter’s preamble was adopted from a South African proposal written by segregationist Jan Smuts, but the nature and thrust of the human rights references in the UN Charter are above all a product of American influence, for better or for worse.¹⁸ The charter includes several mentions of the aspiration to “promote” and “encourage respect for” human rights and fundamental freedoms; stronger verbs such as “assure” or “protect” were rejected. American officials believed that encouragement of rights could be an international concern, but protection remained the concern of states unless violations of rights were so extreme or extensive that they threatened the peace.¹⁹ Article 1, setting forth the principal purposes of the organization, included “international cooperation in . . . promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all.” Articles 55 and 56 committed members to take “joint and separate action” to promote “universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms.”²⁰ The charter thus became the first international treaty to refer to human rights in general, rather than to the rights of specific groups.²¹ These aspirational references, however, were deliberately curtailed by affirmation of the principle of state sovereignty in Article 2(7), which reads: “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any State. . . .”²² Nothing about the framing of the references to human rights or their elaboration in the subsequent drafting process suggests that they were intended to undermine the bedrock principle of national sovereignty.

The charter did not define or enumerate “human rights and fundamental freedoms,” leaving the meaning of the two terms and their relationship to one another deliberately vague. (It is an open question as to why “fundamental freedoms,” included by rote in references to the UN system into the 1970s, eventually dropped out of usage.) Acting Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, for one, merely sputtered that they were the same human rights and fundamental freedoms “for which great intellectual leaders of mankind have struggled since the ancient beginnings of Athens, Jerusalem and Rome.”²³

At American instigation, human rights made it into the 1947 Paris Peace Treaties with Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Italy, and Romania, with greater effort at definition. Each treaty included a pledge to “take all measures necessary to secure to all persons . . . without distinction as to race, sex, language or religio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Enter Human Rights
• 1. The Postwar Marginality of Universal Human Rights
• 2. Managing Civil Rights at Home
• 3. The Trauma of the Vietnam War
• 4. The Liberal Critique of Right-Wing Dictatorships
• 5. The Anticommunist Embrace of Human Rights
• 6. A New Calculus Emerges
• 7. Insurgency on Capitol Hill
• 8. The Human Rights Lobby
• 9. A Moralist Campaigns for President
• 10. “We Want to Be Proud Again”
• Conclusion: Universal Human Rights in American Foreign Policy
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliographical Essay
• Acknowledgments
• Index