Human Rights and the Negotiation of American Power

Glenn Mitoma

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812208030
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The American attitude toward human rights is deemed inconsistent, even hypocritical: while the United States is characterized (or self-characterized) as a global leader in promoting human rights, the nation has consistently restrained broader interpretations of human rights and held international enforcement mechanisms at arm's length. Human Rights and the Negotiation of American Power examines the causes, consequences, and tensions of America's growth as the leading world power after World War II alongside the flowering of the human rights movement. Through careful archival research, Glenn Mitoma reveals how the U.S. government, key civil society groups, Cold War politics, and specific individuals contributed to America's emergence as an ambivalent yet central player in establishing an international rights ethic.Mitoma focuses on the work of three American civil society organizations: the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the American Bar Association—and their influence on U.S. human rights policy from the late 1930s through the 1950s. He demonstrates that the burgeoning transnational language of human rights provided two prominent United Nations diplomats and charter members of the Commission on Human Rights—Charles Malik and Carlos Romulo—with fresh and essential opportunities for influencing the position of the United States, most particularly with respect to developing nations. Looking at the critical contributions made by these two men, Mitoma uncovers the unique causes, tensions, and consequences of American exceptionalism.

Chapter 1

The Study of Peace, Human Rights, and International Organization

Signed by representatives from fifty-one nations on June 26, 1945, the UN Charter placed a commitment to international human rights at the core of the organization’s raison d’être. The second stanza of the preamble proclaims an abiding “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” Among its four main purposes, the charter holds that the UN seeks to “achieve international cooperation in . . . promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedom without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.” Toward this end, the charter specifically delegates responsibility for human rights to three of its five principal organs. It authorizes the General Assembly to “initiate studies and make recommendations” for “assisting in the realization of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” A more explicit mandate is given to the Economic and Social Council, which is required to set up a commission “for the promotion of human rights.” Finally, the Trusteeship Council, in its oversight of the system to administer certain colonial territories, is obliged “to encourage respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms” in those territories. Both the frequency and imprecision with which human rights were invoked in the charter ensured that the United Nations would become the principal site of human rights discourse and politics over the next decade and beyond.

These provisions, along with the more robust peace enforcement powers (and more limited democracy) of the Security Council, were key to distinguishing the new United Nations Organization from its interwar predecessor, the League of Nations. The League’s covenant contained not a single mention of human rights, and while some of its efforts on behalf of minorities in Eastern Europe were significant in elaborating specific practices and precedents in international human rights protection, the League staunchly rejected human rights promotion as a general principle applicable around the world. As Mark Mazower has demonstrated, the UN Charter was designed by the “Big Three” powers, U.S., UK, and USSR, to ratify and protect, rather than undermine, their status as Great Powers with special prerogatives on the world stage.¹ As such, there is significant continuity between the prewar international system centered on imperialism and the postwar international system based on national sovereignty.² But if it is true that the UN “became an even fiercer defender of national sovereignty than the League had been,” it was both because the Charter raised the possibility that human rights might be a legitimate object of international concern and because the waning of empire produced more and more small states for whom scrupulous observance of national sovereignty was one of the few ways of promoting a more democratic world order.³

What remains impressive about the UN Charter from a human rights perspective, then, is not that it signaled an end to power politics or the dawning of a new era of justice in international affairs—as we shall see, few at the time were under such illusions. Rather, the significance of the charter’s human rights provisions lay in the political dynamic for which they were both the result and the basis. This chapter describes the origins of these provisions in the research, lobbying, and public relations work of a small group of elite American internationalists on the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace (CSOP). Elaborated and insisted upon by this organization, the commitment to international human rights in the charter demonstrated the extent to which the U.S. government in particular was open to pressure from the public sphere in framing its participation in organized international life. The limitations of that openness were evident throughout the charter, from the veto power of the five permanent members of the Security Council to the weak and truncated trusteeship system. And yet, the seminal human rights provisions of the charter were sufficiently novel, prominent, and open-ended to inaugurate a new era in international politics and life—one in which the discourse of rights became the lingua franca of global morality, the structures of international law became the fora of individual rights, and the practices of social movements became the politics of global justice.

With the exception of Dorothy Robins’s pioneering study, most histories of the charter neglect the role of NGOs, focusing instead on the U.S. government as the primary force behind the development of the UN. Ruth B. Russell’s classic history of the charter focuses almost exclusively on U.S. officials, not surprising given her close relationship with Leo Pasvolsky, the State Department official most responsible for negotiating and drafting the charter.⁴ Stephen C. Schlesinger’s study of the San Francisco conference likewise emphasizes how much of the document was dictated by Washington—in part to dispel the contemporary criticism that the UN is inherently un-American.⁵ Published in 1971, Robins’s book came well before the current interest in NGOs and politics, and while it foregrounds the work of “U.S. citizen organizations,” she emphasizes the period immediately prior to the San Francisco conference and fails to identify the origins and intent of the charter’s human rights provisions.⁶ This chapter fills in some of these gaps, making the case for the centrality of the CSOP as the single most important organization in this regard.

In the human rights historiography, the importance of NGOs in drafting the charter’s human rights provisions has not gone unnoticed, but the focus has tended to be on the lobbying work by the so-called “consultant group” of U.S. civil society organizations at the San Francisco conference. Paul Gordon Lauren and William Korey have described the pressure this group put on the U.S. delegation to sponsor and advocate for broader human rights commitments in the charter, as an inauguration of the increasingly sophisticated NGO activism that would have such a dramatic impact on human rights politics in the last decades of the twentieth century.⁷ Others, including M. Glen Johnson and more recently Elizabeth Borgwardt, have read the charter’s human rights provisions as a tribute to and institutional embodiment of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms,” originally enunciated in his 1941 address to Congress.⁸ This chapter places Roosevelt’s contribution in the context of his exposure to the ideas and advocacy of the CSOP. And while it is hardly the case that the president needed the commission’s help in formulating the rhetorical masterpiece of the “Four Freedoms,” the idea that U.S. support for, as the president’s speech put it, “the supremacy of human rights everywhere,” meant that the propagation of an international bill of rights within the context of a larger international organization was rooted in the particular proposals of this civil society organization.

The CSOP, Postwar Planning, and Human Rights

The origins of the Charter’s human rights provisions lie largely in a group of progressive American internationalists who, over the course of the Second World War, articulated an intellectual rationale for a global human rights regime, lobbied and advised U.S. policy makers, and conducted a broad public advocacy campaign on behalf of international organization in general and human rights in particular. Inheritors of the uncertain victory of Progressive and Social Democratic reform, this group sought to engineer an international order where peace would be predicated on the systematic and organized elimination of the economic, social, and cultural root causes of war. In this, they were quite explicitly continuing the Wilsonian efforts that had resulted in the establishment of the League of Nations after the First World War. But having watched the failure of the League up close—as a political issue in the United States and then as a peace organization in Asia, Africa, and Europe—this group hit on an international human rights system as a critical corrective to the League that would both promote justice and give individuals an interest in global governance. Their proposals inspired, extended, and specified the rhetoric of human rights that emerged from various quarters—not the least of which was the president of the United States—as a way of describing the stakes of the war against Germany. In the work of the CSOP, human rights went from inspirational war aim to concrete postwar plan.

The need for a new approach became apparent in 1938—a full year before German forces surged into Poland and World War II began—when the deepening crises in Europe and Asia signaled to many the collapse of the interwar international order. Having failed to stop Japanese aggression in Manchuria in 1931, and then even to condemn the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the League of Nations had become irrelevant as a peacemaking body; so much so that by the time Germany moved to annex the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, no one even bothered to bring the issue before the assembly.⁹ Figures as distinct as Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov and former South African prime minister Jan Christian Smuts found themselves in perhaps grudging agreement with the pro-Mussolini editors of Tribuna, who concluded that 1938 marked “the end of the whole diplomatic construction and international political system based on . . . the League of Nations.”¹⁰ So too was the man professionally predisposed toward optimism about the League, U.S. national director of the League of Nations Association (LNA) Clark M. Eichelberger. After attending the ruinous 1938 assembly in Geneva, Eichelberger returned to the United States condemning the “mutilation” of Czechoslovakia as “one of the greatest betrayals” in history and convinced that, while the ideals of the League were sound, only a more strident and thoroughgoing revision of international politics could “deflect humanity from the road to disaster.”¹¹

Eichelberger had served as director of the LNA since 1933 and was a veteran of both the First World War and the effort to draw the United States out of the isolationist shell into which it had withdrawn after that conflict. The son of a shoe salesman in Freeport, Illinois, Eichelberger developed an early interest in progressive politics that, after serving as an Army corporal in France during the war, brought him into association with the “militant internationalists” for whom Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a more just and rational world order inspired an unprecedented lay engagement in international affairs. After the war, Eichelberger made a name for himself speaking about international topics on the Radcliffe Chautauqua lecture circuit before being hired by Raymond Fosdick to lead the Chicago office of what was still called the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association. Set up in early 1923 by former Supreme Court justice John H. Clarke and Taft attorney general George W. Wickersham, the LNA was dedicated from the beginning to cultivating grassroots public support for American entry into the League. Although hired on the strength of his speaking abilities, Eichelberger soon demonstrated an unexpected organizational enthusiasm and initiative that made the Chicago office the center of an empire of local chapters throughout the Midwest and the home of the LNA journal, the League of Nations Chronicle. On becoming national director, Eichelberger expanded on the LNA traditional focus on education, and began a more systematic effort to directly influence policy makers in government and opinion makers in the media.¹² This organizational structure failed to deliver on its stated goal of American membership in, let alone leadership of, the League of Nations, but Eichelberger’s experiences with the LNA would prove most important to the CSOP’s later success in delivering a UN Charter with provisions for human rights.

At Eichelberger’s initiative, the LNA board approved the creation of an “Unofficial Enquiry” in April 1939, dedicated not only to the study of “the bases of a lasting peace and the organization of international society,” but also to public education and advocacy on behalf of the principles of internationalism.¹³ The group’s awkward and seemingly vague name, which would be changed to the equally ponderous Commission to Study the Organization of Peace, is perhaps more revealing than it appears at first blush. The Unofficial Enquiry was formed in conscious imitation of President Wilson’s “Enquiry,” established in 1917 to research and make recommendations regarding peace settlements.¹⁴ The Enquiry—whose members included Colonel Edward M. House, Walter Lippmann, and the man who would serve as the chairman of the CSOP, James T. Shotwell—had helped devise the League of Nations system and had provided the intellectual basis for Wilson’s peacemaking and postwar plans. That Enquiry had been, of course, “official”—a state-authorized commission, albeit with an intentionally broad civilian membership. Eichelberger’s Unofficial Enquiry revived this model of a relatively high-profile commission of experts, but did so fully within civil society. This shift from state to civil society was critical to the emphasis on human rights by this new organization.

At the first meeting on November 5, the Unofficial Enquiry rechristened itself the Committee for the Study of the Organization of Peace, later edited to the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace, and elected Shotwell chairman.¹⁵ Shotwell was professor of history and international relations at Columbia University and one of the most prominent public intellectuals on the subject of international affairs. Shotwell was born and raised in rural Strathroy, Ontario, but his family settled in the Great Lakes region of North America with what he proudly regarded as a studious disregard for national borders and nationalist sentiments.¹⁶ Although a medievalist by training, his academic career was dedicated to demonstrating the humanitarian impact of rational, scientific thought on Western civilization. As Charles Benedetti has described, by the First World War Shotwell shared the optimistic, Progressive faith of his friends John Dewey and Herbert Croly, and sought to extend the principles of rational organization to the one area of modern life in which an archaic anarchy persisted unabated: the international sphere.¹⁷ A friend and advisor to Wilson, Shotwell was deeply chastened and disappointed by the president’s doomed attempt to achieve Senate ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. Nevertheless, he continued to advocate U.S. entry into the League of Nations long after it had become politically anathema, and was a consistent voice for an internationalist U.S. foreign policy during the interwar period.

Shotwell served in an official government capacity from time to time throughout his career, but his most dramatic impact on U.S. foreign policy came through his efforts as a private citizen. In 1927, while working with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Paris, Shotwell met with French foreign minister Aristide Briand and suggested that he seek a treaty between the United States and France forswearing war between the two nations. For Shotwell, this appeared an excellent way to leverage what he saw as one ascendant strain of American opinion, pacifism, against another, isolationism. Briand was perhaps less interested in securing a perpetual p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Study of Peace, Human Rights, and International Organization
• 2. A Pacific Charter
• 3. Carlos Romulo, Freedom of Information, and the Philippine Pattern
• 4. Charles Malik, the International Bill of Rights, and Ultimate Things
• 5. The NAACP, the ABA, and the Logic of Containment
• Conclusion: Toward Universal Human Rights
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments