FDR\'s Dilemma

Excerpts from the Presidential Press Conference, December 22, 1944,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=16484

"The Atlantic Charter, August 14, 1940," The Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp

Robert Smith Thompson, The Eagle Triumphant: How America Took Over the British Empire (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2004), p. 237.

Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946), pp. 35-36

David Steigerwald, Wilsonian Idealism in America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 94.

Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People. Eighth Edition (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969), pp. 681, 684, 689.

Winston Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures (London: Macmillan, 1942), p. 59.

Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (Macmillan, 2010), p. 172.

Robert Rhodes James, Churchill: A Study in Failure, 1900-1939 (1970), p. 329.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "The Great Arsenal of Democracy," December 29, 1940, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrarsenalofdemocracy.html

Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms Speech" Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union: 01/06/1941, http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/pdfs/fftext.pdf

Lloyd C. Gardner, "The Atlantic Charter: Idea and Reality, 1942-1954," In ibid., p. 53.

Joint Declaration of Washington Conference, 1841-1942, The Avalon Project,
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/washc014.asp

Ibid., p. 61.

Elliott Roosevelt, op. cit., pp. 71-76.

Paul Orders, "'Adjusting to a New Period in World History': Franklin Roosevelt and European Colonialism," pp. 63-84. In Ibid., p. 63.

Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 143.

Ibid.

Thompson, op. cit., p. 273.

Stephen C. Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations (Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 2003), p. 48.

Thompson, op. cit., p. 277.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 126.

Ibid., p. 128.

Winston Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy. Vol. 7,The Second World War. (Boston and Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin and Riverside Press, 1953), p. 210.

Tony Smith, America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press for the Twentieth Century Fund, 1994), p. 125.

Thompson, op. cit., p. 5.

John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), p. 8.

Schlesinger, op. cit., p. 105.

Ibid., p. 191.

Charter of the United Nations," p. 555. In The United Nations: International Organization and Administration, edited by Maurice Waters (New York and London: Macmillan and Collier-Macmillan, 1967).

Thompson, op. cit., p. 287.

Paul Orders, "'Adjusting to a New Period in World History': Franklin Roosevelt and European Colonialism," pp. 63-84. In The United States and Decolonization: Power and Freedom, edited by David Ryan and Victor Pungong (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), p. 65.

Niall Ferguson, Empire: the Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), pp. 294, 295, 300, 301.



Listening to the Better
Angels of Our Nature:
Ethnicity, Self-Determination,
And the American Empire

Chapter Twenty-Six
FDR's Dilemma

David Steven Cohen

On August 9, 1941, the American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (referred to as "FDR" by the New York Times in the first year of his presidency) and Britain's prime minister Winston Churchill met on the U.S. cruiser USS Augusta in Placenta Bay in the North Atlantic off Newfoundland. Churchill wanted the United States to commit itself to the defeat of Nazi Germany. Roosevelt wanted to establish the principles for which a future war would be fought. For the next several days British and American diplomats negotiate a joint declaration that became known as the Atlantic Charter. Britain had made a vague promise in 1940 of home rule leading to eventual independence for India. Secretary of State Cordell Hull raised the issue of Indian self-government with the British in the spring of 1941, but the idea was rejected out of hand. When Roosevelt and Churchill met for the first time on the USS Augusta, Roosevelt proposed a purposely vague statement of self-determination. Churchill interpreted it as applying only the previously self-governing nations conquered by Germany, and not the British Empire. Churchill made a point about the fact that the Atlantic Charter was never signed. Furthermore, this was a joint declaration, not a formal treaty. Nevertheless, in a press conference in December 1944, Roosevelt compared the Atlantic Charter to Wilson's Fourteen Points, when he said: "the Atlantic Charter is going to take its place . . . as a definite step, just the same way Wilson's Fourteen Points constituted a major contribution to something we would all like to see happen in the world . . . a better life for the people of the world."


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The Atlantic Charter stated that "The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom, being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world." It consisted of eight principles: (1) that both the United States and Britain "seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other"; (2) "desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned"; (3) "respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them"; (4) "will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity"; (5) "desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security"; (6) "hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want"; (7) that "such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance"; and finally (8) that both countries "believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential. They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measure which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments."

"The Atlantic Charter at last publicly committed the United States to the defeat of Nazi Germany," writes Robert Smith Thompson. "Churchill had no choice but to sign the Atlantic Charter: Great Britain needed America's money. Yet the price he had to pay was the promise of the dissolution of the British Empire." According to FDR's son Elliott Roosevelt, who was a military aide to his father, at a dinner hosted by FDR on the second night of the conference, the US president insisted that Britain dismantle its system of imperial preferences.

"Of course, . . . after the war, one of the preconditions of any lasting peace will have to be the greatest possible freedom of trade. . . .No artificial barriers. . . As few favored economic agreements as possible. Opportunities for expansion. Markets open for healthy competition." . . .
Churchill shifted in his armchair. "The British Empire trade agreements" he began heavily, "are—"
Father broke in. "Yes. Those Empire trade agreements are a case in point. It's because of them that the people of India and Africa, of all the colonial Near East and Far East, are still as backward as they are."
Churchill's neck reddened and he crouched forward. "Mr. President, England does not propose for a moment to lose its favored position among the British Dominions. The trade that has made England great shall continue, and under conditions prescribed by England's ministers."
"You see," said Father slowly, "it is along in here somewhere that there is likely to be some disagreement between you, Winston, and me."
"I am firmly of the belief that if we are to arrive at a stable peace it must involve the development of backward countries. Backward peoples. How can this be done? It can't be done, obviously, by eighteenth-century methods. Now—"
"Who's talking eighteenth-century methods?"
"Whichever of your ministers recommends a policy which takes wealth in raw materials out of a colonial country, but which returns nothing to the people of that country in consideration. Twentieth-century methods involve bringing industry to these colonies. Twentieth-century methods include increasing the wealth of a people by increasing their standard of living, by educating them, by bringing them sanitation — by making sure that they get a return for the raw wealth of their community."
Around the room, all of us were leaning forward attentively. [Harry] Hopkins [Roosevelt's advisor] was grinning. Commander [Charles Ralfe] Thompson, Churchill's aide, was looking glum and alarmed. The P.M. himself was beginning to look apoplectic.
"You mentioned India," he growled.
"Yes. I can't believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy."
"What about the Philippines?"
"I'm glad you mentioned them. They get their independence, you know, in 1946. And they've gotten modern sanitation, modern education; their rate of illiteracy has gone steadily down. . . ."
"There can be no tampering with the Empire's economic agreements."
"They're artificial. . ."
"They're the foundation of our greatness."
"The peace," said Father firmly, "cannot include any continued despotism. The structure of the peace demands and will get equality of peoples. Equality of peoples involves the utmost freedom of competitive trade. Will anyone suggest that Germany's attempt to dominate trade in central Europe was not a major contributing factor to war?"

This was a direct challenge to the tariff preferences within the British Empire created by the Ottawa Agreements in July 1932. Great Britain and its dominions in the Commonwealth, including Canada, Newfoundland (not then part of Canada), Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe today), India, and Ireland, had met in Ottowa, Canada. It was a response to the American Smoot-Hawley tariff passed by Congress and signed by President Hoover in 1930, which raised import duties to protect American jobs from foreign competition. This was followed by other countries raising their protective tariffs. Canada was upset by limits placed on its lumber exports by Great Britain, as well as Australia on wool and mutton, Ireland its potatoes, India its rice, New Zealand its butter. The so-called "Ottowa Agreements" that came out of the conference established a group of arrangements based on the policy of "imperial preference." Great Britain rescinded its taxation of food imports and adopted the slogan, "home producers first, empire producers second, and foreign producers last." With this in mind Churchill added the qualification to the Atlantic Charter that nations must pay "due respect to their existing obligations," i.e., the British Empire's tariff preferences.


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Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born in 1882 to a prominent Dutch-American family in Dutchess County, New York. He attended Groton prep school in Massachusetts and Harvard University. In 1905 he married Eleanor Roosevelt, a distant cousin. He was elected to the New York State Senate in 1910, and in 1913 he was appointed Assistant Secretary of Navy by President Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt ran for Vice President in 1920 on a ticket headed by James M. Cox, but they lost to the Republican candidate Warren Harding of Ohio and his vice presidential candidate Calvin Coolidge of Vermont, who succeeded Harding upon his death in 1923. Roosevelt was a member of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation founded in 1922 to further Wilson's ideals. David Steigerwald not only considered FDR a "Wilsonian," but also his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, and undersecretary of state, Sumner Welles.

Roosevelt was stricken with polio in 1921, which crippled him for the rest of his life. After attempting to recover from his illness in Warm Springs, Georgia, Roosevelt returned to politics in 1924, when he nominated Alfred E. Smith of New York for President at the Democratic National Convention. The Irish Catholic Smith lost to Harding and also to Harding's Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in 1928, but Smith convinced Roosevelt to run successfully for the governor of New York in 1928. The following October 1929 the New York Stock Market crashed marking the beginning of the Great Depression. In 1932 Roosevelt defeated Hoover, and in his inauguration address in March 1933 Roosevelt reassured the American people during a banking crisis by saying "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

After his inauguration Roosevelt introduced a series of reforms known collectively as the New Deal. They included initiating a bank holiday to end a run on savings accounts; establishing federal insurance of bank deposits; separating commercial banks from investment banks under the Glass–Steagall Act; creating government jobs for the unemployed such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC); instituting wage and price controls under the National Relief Administration (NRA); establishing the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to build dams and generation electricity in the South; as well as repealing Prohibition to increase the morale of the American people. The Second New Deal between 1935 and 1936 included the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) subsidizing farmers, the Wagner Act providing workers with the right to form union, engage in collective bargaining and strikes when necessary; the Works Progress Administration (WPA) creating a large number of federal jobs; and the Social Security Act establishing federal retirement insurance for all workers. However, in 1935 the conservative- dominated Supreme Court struck down the NRA, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and other New Deal legislation.

According to diplomatic historian Thomas A. Bailey, "Franklin D. Roosevelt baptized, publicized, and glamorized the Good Neighbor Policy, even if he did not invent it." It was Herbert Hoover who first used the term "Good Neighbor" policy on a good-will tour he took to Latin America in 1928 as President-elect. In his inaugural address in March 1933 Roosevelt stated that the United States had "no desire for territorial expansion." In May 1934 the U.S. signed a treaty with Cuba repealing the Platt Amendment of 1901 requiring Cuba to allow the United States to intervene in its internal affairs as a condition for the withdrawal of American troops (See, The Close Frontier and the Open Door and Woodrow Wilson: Imperialism and Self-Determination). Under an executive agreement with Haiti in 1931, the U.S. agreed to withdraw marines from the island in 1934, although financial supervision continued until 1941. "For the first time since 1915 no U.S. troops trod Latin-American soil. None returned until 1965, when President Johnson ordered the Dominican intervention," says Bailey.

In July 1940 the second Conference of the Foreign Ministers of the American republics passed the so-called Act of Havana. This provided that if any of the colonies of European powers in Latin America were to fall to hostile nations (i.e., Germany), these colonies would temporarily be administered jointly by the American republics. A treaty implementing this act with approved by two thirds the American republics in 1942. "The Act of Havana was a milestone in both the history of Pan-Americanism and of the Monroe Doctrine. It was not only an epochal act of joint defense but the most striking step yet taken toward the multi-lateralization of the Monroe Doctrine (See, A Doctrine for the Hemisphere)." Gaddis Smith argues that Woodrow Wilson had attempted to make the Monroe Doctrine multilateral under a Pan-American treaty under which all members would guaranteed each other's independence and territorial integrity. But Chile was reluctant to sign on to Wilson's idea, and the looming war in Europe refocused Wilson there. Nevertheless, Wilson included the idea of a mutual guarantee in his Fourteen Points and the League of Nations.

In the Presidential election of 1936 Roosevelt defeated the Republic nominee Alf Langdon of Kansas in a landslide. Despite the fact that Roosevelt benefitted from the traditional segregationists in Democratic Party in the South, the election witnessed a major re-alignment of the African-American vote from the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln to the Democratic Party based on Roosevelt's programs to establish a Welfare State. Buoyed by his election victory, Roosevelt in February 1937 attempted to "pack" the Supreme Court by trying to appoint three additional justices to the nine already on the court. But the retirement of one of the conservative justices in June and Roosevelt's appointment of Hugo Black to replace him convinced Roosevelt to abandon the court-packing scheme. The effectiveness of Roosevelt's New Deal in reviving the economy has been debated, especially since it relapsed between 1937 and 1938. What finally brought an end to the Great Depression was the looming World War.


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Winston Spencer-Churchill, who was born in 1874, was eight years older than Roosevelt. Like Roosevelt he came from an upper- class family. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, who served as the Chancellor of the Exchequer under prime minister Lord Salisbury was a descendent of the dukes of Marlborough; his mother, Jennie Jerome, was an American socialite. But Churchill's politics were totally different than Roosevelt's. Churchill was a Conservative and a staunch defender of the British Empire. He was educated at three elite private schools: St. George's School, Ascot; Brunswick School; and Harrow School. He was a poor student with a speech impediment that caused him to lisp, but he loved the English language. He left Harrow in 1893 and applied to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and in 1895 he was commissioned as a cornet (second lieutenant) in the Fourth Queens Own Hussars.

Churchill traveled to Cuba in 1895 to observe the Cuban War of Independence from Spain as a correspondent for the British Daily Graphic. There he developed a love for Cuban cigars. In October 1896 he was transferred to British India. During the Second Anglo-Afghan War he asked to be sent to the North West Frontier (part of Pakistan today) to fight against the Pashtun tribesmen there. He saw action in the defense of the British garrison at Malakand, an account of which he published in December 1900 under the title The Story of the Malakand Field Force. He also wrote dispatches for The Pioneer and The Daily Telegraph newspapers (See, The Jewel in the Crown: Part 2-The Great Game). In 1898 Churchill was transferred to Egypt, where he joined the Twenty-first Lancers serving the Sudan under General Herbert Kitchener. There he participated in the cavalry charge at the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898. Again, he doubled as a war correspondent, this time for the Morning Post. In October he returned to Britain where he wrote a two-volume account of the British conquest of the Sudan under the title The River War published in 1899. In May of that year Churchill resigned from the British Army (See, Mapping and Remaking the Arab World: Part 2-Remapping).

Churchill stood for election to Parliament as a Conservative Party candidate from Oldham, but failed to get elected. In October 1899 he obtained a commission to be a war correspondent for The Morning Post during the Second Boer War. He was captured by the Boers (the Dutch settlers in the Transvaal) and imprisoned in a POW camp in Pretoria, but he managed to escape to Portuguese East Africa. His exploits made him a minor national hero, but rather than returning to Britain, he participated in breaking of the Siege of Ladysmith and the capture of Pretoria. In 1900 he returned to England and published the second volume of his Boer war experiences under the title London to Ladysmith. Churchill then stood for election to the Parliamentary seat from Oldham, and this time he was elected. However, in Parliament he differed with the Conservative Party by being in favor of free trade as opposed to protectionist tariffs, and in 1904 he left the Conservative Party and joined the Liberal Party. As a Liberal, Churchill was appointed Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1905 to 1908. In 1908 Churchill also married Clementine Hozier, the daughter of Henry Montague Hozier and Lady Blanche Hozier, and he was appointed as President of the Board of Trade. In the latter capacity he introduced the first minimum wage bill in Britain, established labor exchanges to help unemployed people find work, and drafted the National Insurance Act of 1913 establishing a system of unemployment and health insurance. However, he also was a supporter of the eugenics movement, and he was in favor of sterilization of the so-called "feebleminded."

In 1910 Churchill was promoted to Home Secretary. In this capacity, in November 1910 he sent the British Army to intervene in the violent confrontation between coal miners and police in the town of Tonypandy, South Wales. This made him unpopular in Wales for the rest of his life. In January 1911 he was involved in the so-called Siege of Sidney Street in which the police and military in London besieged two Latvian revolutionaries suspected as being involved in an attempted jewelry robbery in which three policemen and the leader of the Latvian gang were killed. In the confrontation the building in which they were hiding caught fire. Churchill had authorized sending the Scots guards to reinforce the police, and he personally went to the scene of the standoff. He later admitted: "I told the fire-brigade officer on my authority as Home Secretary that the house was to be allowed to burn down and that he was to stand by in readiness to prevent the conflagration from spreading."

Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in October 1911. In this office he was an advocate of using airplanes in combat and replacing oil for coal power in the British navy. He established a royal commission that travelled to the Persia Gulf, and he recommended that the British government buy stock in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and negotiate a secret contract for a twenty-year supply of oil. When World War I broke out, Churchill advocated for the disastrous invasions of Gallipoli in the Dardanelles between April 1915 and January 1916. In November 1915 he resigned from the government and was given command of the Sixth Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, and he saw action on the Western Front. However, after a few months he returned to England in March 1916 to resume his seat in the House of Commons. In January 1919 Churchill was appointed Secretary of State for War, and he ordered the sending of para-military forces known as the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries to intervene in the Irish War for Independence.

In 1921 Churchill was appointed Secretary of State for the Colonies, and he signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 establishing the Irish Free State as a dominion within the British Commonwealth of Nations. He also convened the Cairo Conference of Middle East British military leaders and civilian administrator in March 1921 at the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo in which it was agreed that Lebanon and Syria should remain under French control and Britain should obtain a mandate for Palestine and continue to support a Jewish homeland there. It was also agreed that Abdullah bin Hussein would administer the territory east of the Jordan River, his brother Faisal would become the king of Iraq, their father Hussein would be recognized as the King of the Hejaz, and Abdul Aziz ibn Saud maintain his control of the Nejd in the Arabian Desert. This, in effect, created the modern Middle East and all of the problems resulting from it (See, Partitioning the Holy Land, Sunni Versus Shi'a: Part 1-Iraq, and Sunni Versus Shi'a: Part 2-Syria). In 1923 Churchill became a paid consultant for Burmah Oil (today British Petroleum or BP) to lobby for exclusive rights to the Persian (Iranian) oil resources.

In 1924 Churchill rejoined the Conservative Party and became the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Here is oversaw the return of Britain to the Gold Standard, which the economist John Maynard Keynes warned would lead it a worldwide depression. Churchill later regarded this is a great a mistake. It led to a General Strike of miners in 1926 in which the government enlisted special constables called the Organization for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS) to maintain order on the streets. The government said that Fascists would not be allowed to enlist in the OMS, so they formed their own Q Division to combat the strikers. Churchill opposed Gandhi's peaceful disobedience actions to gain Indian independence, stating in 1920 that Gandhi "ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back."

Churchill was estranged from the Conservative Party leadership over the issue of protective tariffs and Indian Home Rule, and when Ramsay MacDonald formed a national government in 1931, Churchill was not invited to join the Cabinet. He spent the next few years writing a biography of his ancestor the first duke of Marlborough and a History of the English Speaking Peoples. During the 1930s Churchill felt that the danger or Communism was greater than the threat of Fascism and Japanese imperialism. In 1931 he warned against the League of Nations opposition to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, stating that "On the one side they have the dark menace of Soviet Russia. On the other the chaos of China, four or five provinces of which are being tortured under communist rule." During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Churchill considered the Republican government to be a Communist front and the Fascist General Francisco Franco's army to be an "anti-Red movement." Until 1937 he continued to praise Benito Mussolini as a bulwark against the Communism in Italy. In October 1935 Italy invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia, today). The following year Germany and Italy signed an alliance, which became known as the Axis after Mussolini declared that the rest of Europe would spin on the Rome-Berlin Axis.

Beginning in 1932 Churchill also began to warn about the rearmament of Germany. In November 1936 Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, an anti-Communist treaty that was joined by Italy the following year. In July 1937 Japan invaded China, and Germany's annexed Austria in March 1938. Churchill was a fierce critic of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's Munich Agreement with Nazi Germany in September 1938, saying in Parliament that "Chamberlain had the choice between war and shame. Now he has chosen shame – he'll get war later." In March 1939 German troops marched into Czechoslovakia.

After Germany invaded Poland from the west and Russia invaded it from the east in September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Churchill was again appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. As a member of Prime Minister Chamberlain's War Cabinet, Churchill advocated the pre-emptive occupation of the Norwegian iron-ore port of Narvik and the iron mines in Kiruna, Sweden, but his proposal was rejected by the War Cabinet. When Germany invaded the Netherlands and Belgium in May 1940, Chamberlain resigned as prime minister, and King George VI asked Churchill at the age of 66 to assume the position. In June the Germans took control of France. In September Germany, Italy, and Japan joined together in the Tripartite Pact, fully establishing the military alliance known as the Axis Powers.

The American journalist Edward R. Murrow stated that as the wartime prime minister of British, Churchill "mobilized the English language and sent it into battle." In his first speech to Parliament, Churchill said, "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat." In a later speech he said: "We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." And in another: "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour'." And regard to the bombing of London by the German air force in the Battle of Britain, he said: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

Following the refusal by Britain and Australia to grant landing rights to Pan American Airlines along the route from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia, in 1934 Roosevelt issued an executive order that placed several Pacific atolls under the control of the United States Navy. He did the same with several islands in the Pacific administered by Britain in 1935, 1936, and 1938. Britain didn't protest these moves, because she believed she would need the US as an ally in the future. In September 1940 the United States signed an agreement with Britain in which Britain granted the US long-term leases on a several British bases on British territories in the Western Hemisphere in exchange for outdated US destroyers. In March 1941 Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to divided the world into three areas of strategic responsibility with the US and Britain being responsible jointly for the Atlantic Ocean and Europe, the British responsible for a "middle area" from the Mediterranean to Singapore, and the US responsible for the Pacific. In late 1941 the United States reached an agreement with the British Commonwealth governments in the Pacific for bases on islands (including Christmas Island) on the route between Honolulu and the Philippines. These agreements put the United States on a collision course with Japanese expansion in the Pacific region.


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As early as the fall of 1939, the State Department had established an in-house research group headed by Cordell Hull's personal assistant, Leo Pasvolsky, a Russian-born Jewish economist, to plan for a global security plan if the United States were to become involved in the war. Pasvolsky's recommended the creation of an Advisory Committee on Problems of Foreign Relations, established in December 1939, and headed by Undersecretary of State Sumner Wells. This advisory committee began to plan for a new international body to replace the League of Nations. However, the outbreak of war in Europe put the committee on hold. In the fall of 1940 Pasvolsky proposed the revival of the planning board.
Roosevelt was elected for an unprecedented third term in November 1940, because of the uncertainty in Europe. While the United States remained officially neutral, Roosevelt in December 1940 gave a radio address in which he declared that America would become the "Arsenal of Democracy" by supplying munitions to Britain and France. "The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting. They ask us for the implements of war, the planes, the tanks, the guns, the freighters which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security. Emphatically, we must get these weapons to them, get them to them in sufficient volume and quickly enough so that we and our children will be saved the agony and suffering of war which others have had to endure. . . . We must be the great arsenal of democracy. For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war."
In his State of the Union Address in January 1941 Roosevelt made the case for continued aid to Great Britain in what has become known as his "Four Freedoms" speech. "In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms: The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world." One month after Roosevelt's Four Freedom's Speech, Secretary Hull created the Division of Special Research to develop plans for a world assembly under "a future world order." Pasvolsky was appointed chief of the new division, but again it made little or no progress.

This was followed in March 1941 with Congressional approval of the Lend-Lease Act, a subterfuge to circumvent the Neutrality Acts of 1935 to 1939 that prohibited selling arms on credit or lending money to belligerent nations. The law allowed the government to sell, lease, or lend military supplies to Great Britain and China and later the Soviet Union. Roosevelt explained it as comparable to lending a garden hose to a neighbor to put out a fire. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked the American naval base on at Pearl Harbor in what Roosevelt described as "a day that will live in infamy," and the next day Congress declared war on Japan. On December 11 Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, and a few hours later the United States declared war on Germany and Italy.

After the issuing of the Atlantic Charter in August 1941, which made mention of establishing of an "effective international organization," Pasvolsky, Cordell Hull, and Assistant Secretary of State Sumner Welles convinced Roosevelt to establish a new Advisory Committee in the State Department on Post-war Foreign Policy. This committee met for the first time in February 1942. The committee consisted of fourteen members, including Pasvolsky, Dean Acheson, Herbert Feis (all government officials), Norman Davis (president of the Council on Foreign Relations and chairman of the American Red Cross, Hamilton Fish Armstrong (editor of Foreign Affairs), and Anne O-Hare McCormick (member of the New York Times's editorial staff). The Committee established subcommittees, one of which was on the creation of an international organization.


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Rutgers historian Lloyd Gardner notes that prior to the meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill in the North Atlantic there were rumors that the Soviet Union and Great Britain might reach an agreement recognizing the Soviet conquest of the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuanian prior to the German invasion of Russia. Russia had not been involved in the Atlantic Charter, and therefore, as Roosevelt admitted in a news conference, it was not necessarily bound by it. Nor did Churchill consider the charter to be binding on the British Empire. "At every juncture during the war," writes Gardner, "when questions of the Atlantic Charter's applicability arose as a central issue in both the public policy debate and private diplomatic correspondence, these British and Russian 'reservations' presented American policymakers with a dilemma. . . . Try as they might, Roosevelt and his advisers could neither escape the ideas of the charter nor the reality of Great Power politics." Roosevelt tried to resolve this dilemma in a way that would not betray the principles proclaimed in the Atlantic Charter at the same time keep together the wartime the alliance between the Big Three Powers of Russia, Britain, and the United States.

Two weeks after Pearl Harbor December 1941 Churchill met with Roosevelt at the so-called Arcadia Conference. The Soviets wanted the British and Americans to open a second front in Europe to take the pressure off the German advance in Russia. Churchill was opposed to the second front in Europe. Instead Churchill proposed that the United States should participate with Great Britain in a joint invasion of North Africa. This, of course, would protect the British interest in the Suez Canal. Churchill suggested that once North Africa was under Allied control, an invasion of the European continent could be undertaken in 1943.

Also, at the conference Roosevelt proposed a "Declaration by United Nations" stating that the war aims should be guided by the principles in the Atlantic Charter. This was the first use of the named "United Nations," and it formed the basis for the organization that was to follow. It stated:

Having subscribed to a common program of purposes and principles embodied in the Joint Declaration of the President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister of Great Britain dated August 14, 1941, known as the Atlantic Charter,
Being convinced that complete victory over their enemies is essential to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands, and that they are now engaged in a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world,
Declare:
(1) Each Government pledges itself to employ its full resources, military or economic, against those members of the Tripartite Pact and its adherents with which such government is at war.
(2) Each Government pledges itself to cooperate with the Governments signatory hereto and not to make a separate armistice or peace with the enemies.
The foregoing declaration may be adhered to by other nations which are, or which may be, rendering material assistance and contributions in the struggle for victory over Hitlerism.

The declaration was signed twenty-six nations, including the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, China, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Poland, South Africa, Yugoslavia, and India.

Roosevelt was disillusioned by the fact that the League of Nations was ineffective in stopping German, Italy, and Japanese aggression in the 1930s, so he wanted to make sure that the four major powers of China, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States should provide the security for any future world organization. He stated this in his remarks on January 1, 1942, when he signed the United Nations Declaration. The following April in an interview with the Saturday Evening Post, Roosevelt reiterated his belief that the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China should become the "Four Policemen" of the post-war world. Nor did he want a future United Nations to be written into the peace treaty, as Wilson had done.


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In February 1942, the Japanese conquered Singapore, and in March they took Rangoon, Burma. Both Britain and the US feared that India would be next. Even before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had supported independence for India on the grounds that it would be a stronger ally against Japanese expansionism. FDR felt it was important to obtain the support of Gandhi's Congress Party by promising India the right to self-government. Churchill was adamantly against this, and Roosevelt decided not to press the issue. In March 1942, FDR issued a Declaration on National Liberation, in which he applied the principles of the Atlantic Charter to a procedure and timetable for eventual self-government for the "dependent peoples" of colonial powers. FDR told the Pacific War Council that he wanted France's colonies in the Pacific to be brought under a UN trusteeship for between 25 to 30 years. He held out the possibility that Indochina might be brought under the auspices of China. He also told the Council that the UN should take control of Japan's mandates to the Caroline, Mariana, and Marshall islands.

In an effort to pressure Great Britain to make good on its 1940 promise of independence for India, Chiang Kai-shek the leader of the Nationalist forces in China with Roosevelt's support visited India in February 1942 in an unsuccessful attempt to get Mohandas K. Gandhi and Pandit Nehru, the leaders of the Congress party, to support the war. Britain sent Sir Stafford Cripps to India in March with the offer of self-government after the war. However, Churchill and Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy of India, undermined Cripps' efforts. Faced a possible invasion of India by Japan, Churchill decided not the press the issue. Roosevelt even tried to get Soviet support for his anti-colonial efforts. In May-June 1942 on the visit of Soviet Foreign Minister V. Molotov to Washington to discuss opening a second front on the European continent, Roosevelt proposed replacing the League of Nations mandate system with temporary trusteeships for colonies such as Siam (Thailand), the Malay States, and the Dutch East Indies. In July Mahatma Gandhi wrote to Roosevelt that "I venture to think that the Allied declaration that the Allies are fighting to make the world safe for freedom of the individual and for democracy sounds hollow, so long as India, and for that matter, Africa are exploited by Great Britain, and America has the Negro problem in her own home." Roosevelt responded with a copy of a speech by Secretary of State Cordell Hull stating America's concern about the welfare of all peoples.


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In June 1942 Churchill met again with Roosevelt in Washington. Roosevelt proposed an invasion of Morocco and Algeria, the French colonies in northern Africa held by the collaborationist Vichy government. Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall considered an invasion of Africa as a waste of time. A few days after Churchill left Washington, German general Erwin Rommel sent troops from Libya into Egypt in an effort to capture the Suez Canal. This put the British even more dependent on the United States. In July an American delegation consisting of General Marshall, Admiral Ernest J. King (commander in chief of the Atlantic fleet), and Harry Hopkins was sent to London to reach an agreement on joint Anglo-American operational plans for 1942. Although Churchill wanted to send British troops to retake its former colony of Burma from the Japanese, Britain and America agreed to focus on a joint Anglo-American invasion of North Africa.

In August Churchill went to Moscow to tell Stalin about the agreement between Britain and the United States to invade North Africa. Stalin was willing to accept this as an alternative to the second front in France, but when Churchill floated the idea of dividing spheres of influence in the Balkans after the war between Russia and England, Stalin demurred. In his Mansion House (home of the Lord Mayor of London) "Blood, Tears, Toil, and Sweat" Speech on November 10, 1942, delivered on the eve of Operation Torch (the invasion of North Africa)" Churchill also said: "I have not become the king's first minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire!"

At a meeting of the Pacific War Council in March 1943, Roosevelt stated that Indochina should not be given back to France after the war. In August the Southeast Asia Command (SEAC), headed by British Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, was established, which included Thailand and Indochina. Chiang Kai-shek was initially opposed to shifting Thailand from China's control to SEAC's, but he finally agreed providing that China was consulted prior to any military or political activity in the region. Chiang wanted Indochina to be granted independence immediately after the war and not go through an intermediate period as a trusteeship under international supervision.


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In January 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill met in Casablanca, Morocco, to discuss next steps in the war. Roosevelt had made the mistake in May 1942 of promising the Russian foreign minister V. M. Molotov that the United States and Britain would open a second front before the end of the year. This turned out to be not possible militarily, and Stalin refused to attend the Casablanca Conference as a result. On Churchill's first night in Casablanca he had drinks and dinner with Roosevelt at his villa. According to Elliott Roosevelt, after dinner FDR and Churchill spoke into the morning hours with only Hopkins, Harriman, and Elliott Roosevelt present. Later, FDR confided to his son his thoughts about how the colonial system exploited the resource of India, Burma, and Java without putting back anything, such education, a higher standard of living, or improved health. FDR also said that India should be made a commonwealth immediately and in five to ten years be able to decide themselves on complete independence. At Casablanca the question also came up who would represent France in the North African territories liberated from then Vichy government. Roosevelt favored Admiral Jean-Francois Darlan, head of the French navy. Churchill wanted Charles de Gaulle. It was only because of General Eisenhower's intervention that FDR allowed de Gaulle to lead the liberation of Paris in August 1944.


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During the Casablanca Conference, FDR and Churchill made a side trip on January 22 to Rabat, the capital of Morocco, to visit with the sultan of Morocco. According to Elliott Roosevelt, at a dinner under a tent that FDR hosted for the sultan and his son, the sultan expressed the desire to obtain financial assistance to modernize health and education in his country. In Churchill's presence, FDR told the sultan that Morocco should not allow outside powers to obtain concessions that would drain his country's resources. The sultan asked about the French government, and FDR answered that in the post-war world "the colonial question" would be sharply different than before the war. FDR referred to French and British financiers draining the riches of their colonies, but that Moroccan engineers and scientists could be trained at American universities. Under such an arrangement American companies could have access to French Moroccan oil, but Morocco would retain control over its own resources. According to Elliott Roosevelt, Churchill was not pleased with the direction the conversation took.


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Churchill and Roosevelt met again in Cairo in November 1943.
FDR wanted to bring China under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek into the Big Four, already including USSR, Britain, and the US, by restoring to China the Chinese territories of Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores, which had been conquered by Japan. Roosevelt cultivated a friendship with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, despite evidence of corruption within the Kuomintang regime, hoping that China would support the idea of place Indochina in a trusteeship for French Indochina after the war. He also wanted to restore Hong Kong to China, become a trustee of islands in the Pacific, and to mutually police Indochina. Thus, China would become a counterweight to Russia and Britain in the Far East. Chiang was willing to endorse the idea of trusteeships for islands in the Pacific, but not on the Asian mainland. FDR thought he gained China's support on a trusteeship for Indochina at a dinner meeting with Chiang Kai-shek and his wife. But Chiang refused to accept FDR proposal that Hong Kong become a free port after it was returned to China.

According to Thompson, this was intended to dilute the British influence in Asia, which angered Churchill who protested that the U.S. wanted to replace Britain as the dominant influence in China after the war. Churchill told Roosevelt that he feared that China might annex the former French colony of Indochina after the war. Roosevelt reportedly said to Churchill that he (Churchill) had a 400 year history of "acquisitive instinct" in his blood, and so he (Churchill) didn't understand that a county might not acquire land even if it could. "A new period has opened in the world's history," Roosevelt said, "and you will have to adjust to it." While he decided not to press Britain too hard in regard to Indian independence and he was willing from mid-1944 to allow the French to resume control over Indochina, for which he earlier proposed a UN trusteeship, he was still morally committed to self-determination as a long-term goal. He also thought that anti-colonialism would benefit the United States in securing commercial and strategic interests overseas.


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From Cairo, Roosevelt and Churchill flew to Tehran, Iran, on November 27, 1943, to meet with Stalin. Chiang was not invited to the Teheran conference. When FDR met Stalin for the first time in Tehran, Stalin told him that he didn't want to shed blood to restore Indochina to France. Roosevelt agreed, stating "that after 100 years of French rule in Indochina, the inhabitants were worse off than they had been before." Stalin also gave his support to the idea of international trusteeships. At dinner that evening with Churchill present, Stalin restated his opposition to France's regaining its empire and Roosevelt restated his support for international trusteeships. Churchill said that Britain had no desire to acquire new territory after the war, the Big Four (Britain, Russia, France, and the U.S.) would have the responsibility to maintain postwar peace, but some strategic places should remain under individual control. The next evening FDR said that strategic place near Germany and Japan should be place under trusteeships, and Churchill responded that "nothing would be taken away from England without war." Roosevelt brought up the topic of the future of the Baltic republics that had been occupied by the USSR at the beginning of the war. While he said he would not go to war with the Soviet Union over this, Roosevelt did say that public opinion would warrant a referendum on self-determination.

Roosevelt later expanded his idea of international trusteeships to include Korea and the islands south of the Equator. He thought that Korea was not yet ready for complete sovereignty, but would be so in about forty years. Churchill responded to FDR's comments about British misrule of the colony of Gambia in western Africa by suggesting an international committee should investigate the conditions of African Americans in the American South. FDR told Churchill in the presence of Stalin and Chiang that he (Churchill) was outvoted three to one. FDR later told Frances Perkins, his secretary of labor, that he was intentionally "chummy" with Stalin and teased Churchill in front of Stalin in an attempt to win over Stalin. According to Thompson, this had no effect on Stalin.

The conference produced a promise that Britain and the US. would invade France in the coming year and that a United Nations would be created after the war. Thompson argues that the conference "revealed several fissures" between the Soviet Union, Britain, and the U.S. During the summer and fall of 1943 Churchill pressed for an Allied military invasion in the Mediterranean region and in the Balkans. The U.S. War Department was suspicious of these plans, thinking Churchill wanted to use American military power to secure the British Empire in the eastern Mediterranean.

Not wanting to make the same mistakes that Wilson had made at Versailles, in the fall of 1943 Roosevelt had Congress pass two resolutions favoring an international organization. Hull then had Pasvolsky reinstitute an informal group to draft a proposal for the international body. It proposed a Security Council to handle security matters (in which the Big Four would have a veto), a General Assembly made up of member nations, a Secretariat to handle administrative matters, several UN agencies, and a World Court. This was a change from Roosevelt's original concept of having the Four Policemen take responsibility for security matters. Roosevelt approved this change in February 1944. Also, unlike the League of Nations in which both its council and assembly had responsibility for security, the only the Security Council of the new body would have that responsibility.

In April 1944 Hull met with a small group of Republican and Democrat members of the Foreign Relations Committee, including the conservative Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg from Michigan and Senator Tom Connally of Texas, both of whom wanted the Big Five powers would to retain a veto in the Security Council. When the State Department finally developed a plan for the United Nations in April 1944, the Big Four were designated as permanent members of its Security Council with a veto power over actions of organization. The veto provision would eliminate the objection that the Senate Republicans had to Article X of the League of Nations charter, which resulted in the United States failing to ratify the League. Roosevelt instructed Secretary of State Cordell Hull to invite the Big Four to Dumbarton Oaks, outside Washington, DC, to discuss the matter.

The formal drafting of the charter would take place at the Dumbarton Oaks estate outside Washington, DC, in August 1944. The Russians, however, objected to the presence of the Chinese, because they had not yet declared war on Japan. So Roosevelt proposed two successive meetings, the first with the British and Russians, and the second with the British and the Chinese. Undersecretary of State Stettinius led the U.S. delegation to Dumbarton Oaks, but Pasvolsky became "a dominant figure," according to Scheslinger. One of the things Pasvolsky helped resolve was language that did not "preclude the existence of regional arrangements or agencies," to placate the British. This also accommodated the existence of the Pan-American Congress. Another revision was the proposal that the General Council have eleven members of which five would have permanent seats, which had been the structure of the League of Nations. A third issue was the Russian proposal that the five permanent members of the Security Council have an absolute veto on all matters, including the discussion of any issue. Churchill later supported Stalin on this issue. The Russians also insisted that all sixteen Soviet republics become members. The Soviet delegation under Andrei Gromyko also opposed the membership of Argentina on the grounds that it had not declared war on the Axis Powers.

Roosevelt and his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, were advocates of free trade. The Export-Import Bank helped finance trade with the Soviet Union (recognized by FDR in 1930), then with Cuba, and finally to Americans willing to invest in the French and British empires. The Reciprocal Trade Act (June 1934) granted the president authority to reduce American tariffs providing the other country reciprocated. On July 1, 1944, 45 nations meet for a conference on the reconstruction of the international economic system at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. At the conference, the American delegation led by Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau proposed an International Bank for Reconstruction (now known as the World Bank) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). According to Thompson, "both banks were intended to create just what Cordell Hull had been calling for throughout the preceding decade: an open international marketplace with a minimum of state interference and certainly no high tariffs." John Maynard Keynes, who led the British delegation, opposed the American plan because he knew "that the Roosevelt administration was going to use the World Bank and the IMF, along with the almighty dollar, to force the British Empire into opening itself to American trade and investment." In order to avoid the mistakes made by Wilson on the League of Nations the State Department launched a public relations campaign headed by Archibald MacLeish, then the Librarian of Congress for the Dumbarton Oaks proposal in the fall of 1944.


Cordell Hull (left) and Sumner Welles (right)
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Sumner Welles, who had been running the State Department, while Hull was recuperating from illness, became active in the United Nations subcommittee. However, a disagreement developed between Welles, who favored an executive committee of the four major powers, five regional representatives, and a larger body consisting of all member states, and Pasvolsky, who favored a more centralized body without a regional component. When he returned from his sick leave, Hull sided with Pasvolsky as did President Roosevelt. However, the matter still was not settled. In June Welles established another special subcommittee which continued the dispute between the two visions for the international organization. Winston Churchill, in Schlesinger's words, "as a balance-of-power partisan," preferred regional councils for Asia, Europe, and the Americas, and Roosevelt became undecided as to which to direction to go.


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There was a major rivalry between Welles and Hull. Welles was close to Roosevelt, both having gone to Groton and Harvard. Hull was a former senator from Tennessee. Needing Hull to get a UN resolution through the Senate, Roosevelt accepted Welles resignation in August, 1943. Edward Stettinius, who had been the chairman of U.S. Steel and the administrator of the Lend-Lease Program, was appointed as undersecretary of state to replace Welles in September. In November 1944 Secretary of State Cordell Hull resigned and he was succeeded by Undersecretary Edward Stettinius.


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FDR didn't recognize Charles de Gaulle as the leader of France, but in the summer of 1944 the British helped Gaullist agents get a foothold in Indochina by permitting French military personnel to participate in the Southeast Asia Command. Roosevelt stated to Secretary of State Cordell Hull that he did not want Indochina returned to France after the war; rather he favored an international trusteeship. However, after the German counteroffensive at the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, Eisenhower pleaded for the arming of eight French divisions. This changed France's role in the victory and qualified them for their own zone of occupation in postwar Germany. In September 1944 Roosevelt approved a memorandum stressing the importance of "early" announcements about the future independence of countries in Southeast Asia, including specific dates for self-government, specific steps to be taken, and a pledge of equal trade with other nations. Churchill responded: "There must be no question of our being hustled or seduced into declarations affecting British sovereignty in any of the Dominions or Colonies." He made reference to his earlier statement that he had "not become His Majesty's Prime Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire."

Roosevelt had contemplated the idea of stripping France of its colonies by awarding trusteeships to China for Indochina, to the US for Senegal, to Britain for North Africa, and to Australia for New Caledonia. De Gaulle replied to Roosevelt by asking how could France, America's ally, recover her "vigor, her self-reliance and consequently, her role" in the world "if she loses her African and Asian territories—in short, if the settlement of the war definitively imposes upon her the psychology of the vanquished?" Towards the end of the war FDR softened his attitude toward the French in Indochina by agreeing to French operations against the Japanese in Southeast Asia.

From August 21 through October 7, 1944, the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and China met at a mansion named Dumbarton Oaks owned by Harvard University in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC, at the invitation of Harvard's president James B. Conant. There the delegates agreed to a tentative set of proposals to establish an international organization named the United Nations to maintain peace and security in the post-war world. The organization was to include a General Assembly and a Security Council. The Assembly would only have advisory powers to the Security Council. It was agreed that the Security Council would consist of the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China as permanent members. France could become a permanent member eventually. The Council would also include six additional nations elected by the Assembly for terms of two years. But two issues remained unresolved. Russia had argued that since four of the self-governing Dominions of the British Commonwealth (New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and South Africa) were given separate seats in the General Assembly, the sixteen Republics of the Soviet Union also should have separate seats in the General Assembly. The second was the specifics of the voting procedure in the Security Council. According to Churchill: "The Kremlin had no intention of joining an international body on which they would be out-voted by a host of small Powers, who, though they could not influence the course of the war, would certainly claim equal status in the victory."


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In February 1945 Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at the Russian resort town of Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula on the shores of the Black Sea. Roosevelt wanted Russia to enter the war against Japanese in Manchuria, and Stalin wanted something in return. In a secret protocol FDR agreed that the Soviet Union could retain the Kurile Islands, Lower Sakhalin, leases to Port Arthur and Dairen, control of the railroads in eastern China and southern Manchuria, and the independence from China of Outer Mongolia. In return, Stalin agreed to go to war against Japan within two to three months after the defeat of Germany. Russia also agreed to recognize the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek instead of the Communist forces under Mao Tse-tung. Roosevelt and Stalin reached an informal agreement between themselves that Korea would be a buffer between the American sphere of influence in the Pacific and China and the Soviet sphere in Siberia.
Stalin had expressed his concern that the USSR had been ousted from the League of Nations in 1939 after it had invaded Finland, and he was concerned that limiting the veto would not protect Russia against this happening again. Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt agreed that in a future United Nations the five permanent members of the Security Council should have an absolute veto over "substantive" matters (such as the enforcement, investigation, and settlement of disputes) but not over "procedural" issues (such as what issues could be discussed) which would require a majority of the eleven members of the Security Council. However, a permanent member would have to abstain from matters in which it was a party. In addition, Stalin agreed the USSR was willing to settle for at least two additional Soviet republics (Ukraine and Byelorussia, or Belarus today) becoming member nations. Churchill supported the Russian proposal, because of the issue of representation of British Commonwealth nations. As a result, Roosevelt felt he had to accept the Russian proposal.

The Soviets had already approved the principle of trusteeships by the time of the Yalta conference, and they wanted it included in the Charter of the United Nations. Roosevelt met privately with Stalin and obtained his support for trusteeships. He also promised Russia access to Darien as a warm-water port, but providing that the city be under international control. But Roosevelt wanted the United States to occupy "as guardian" to the Caroline, Mariana, and Marshall islands in the North Pacific that had been a Japanese mandate after World War I. The islands were to retain their sovereignty, and those that were not ready of independence would be supervised by international regional commissions.

Churchill took exception to a report by US Secretary of State Edward Stettinius suggesting UN supervision by the United Nations of the trusteeships to be established after the war. According to the American minutes, Churchill "said that under no circumstances would he ever consent to forty or fifty nations thrusting interfering fingers into the life's existence of the British Empire." Upon hearing this Stalin rose from his chair, paced back and forth, beaming and applauding.

France had been excluded from the Yalta Conference was also concerned that its colonies might become U.N. trusteeships. The British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had assured the French that the trusteeships would not apply to Europe or to colonies belonging to Allied countries. Both Eden and Prime Minister Winston Churchill also assured the French that it would continue to have a "privileged position" in Syria and Lebanon. Stettinius told Churchill that the trusteeship plan applied only to colonies taken from the Axis Powers and those that voluntarily wanted to become trusteeships. With this understanding Churchill initialed the memo that placed the trusteeship protocol into the UN Charter. In essence, this meant Roosevelt was willing to allow France to become one of the postwar powers at the insistence of the British.

Finally, they agreed that an organization conference should meet in San Francisco on April 25 to draft a charter for the United Nations. They decided that only nations that had declared war on at least one of the Axis powers by March first be invited to the conference to establish the United Nations to be held in San Francisco.


FDR and King Saud, February 1945,
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On his way back from the Yalta Conference, at which Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin determined the map of the post-war world, FDR stopped off at the Suez Canal, where on February 20, 1945, he met onboard the presidential yacht the Quincy with King Farouk of Egypt (then a British protectorate), Haile Selassie, King of Ethiopia (liberated by the British from Italian occupation), and King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. There Roosevelt agreed to provide military assistance and Lend-Lease aid to Saudi Arabia in exchange for American drilling rights to the Saudi oil fields. Roosevelt had not mentioned this meeting to Churchill until the last day of the Yalta conference and Churchill was said to be "thoroughly nettled." According to Thompson "America would replace Great Britain as the controller of Arabia oil" and in this strategic corner of the world "the Pax Britannica had been replaced by the Pax Americana."


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Like Woodrow Wilson at Versailles, FDR was in poor health at the Yalta Conference. In his last press conference in April 1945, in Warm Springs, Georgia, Roosevelt appeared with Philippine President Sergio Osmena and announced that as soon as the Philippines were free from Japanese troops, the U.S. would be granted immediate independence. He also stated that the U.S. bases on specific islands in the Pacific would be administered as United Nations trusteeships. Roosevelt died at the age of sixty-three on April 12, 1945 at Warm Springs, Georgia, and his Vice President, Harry S. Truman of Missouri, became president. There developed a dispute within the Truman administration between the War and Navy departments that wanted to retain control of all the Japanese island conquered during the war and the Interior Department that was opposed to "annexation" and wanted the matter discussed at San Francisco. Stettinius took the side of the Interior Department. Finally, Stettinius reached a compromise with the military leaders under which certain "strategic" trust territories would be used only for military bases and would be exempt from U.N. oversight. The other territories would become trusteeships.

On April 25, 1945 forty-six nations that had declared war on Germany and Japan and had endorsed the United Nations Resolution met in San Francisco to draft the United Nations charter. The American Secretary of State Edward Stettinius led the American delegation. Unlike Woodrow Wilson at the peace conference at Versailles in 1919, FDR made sure that Republicans were part of the delegation, including John Forster Dulles and Michigan Senator Arthur H. Vanderburgh, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John Gaddis argues that the United States consciously attempted to avoid the mistakes made by Wilson at the end of World War One. Rather than make promises for a post-war settlement that the defeated nations would complain were not part of the peace treaty as Wilson had done with the Fourteen Points, FDR decided that the United States would hold out for unconditional surrender of the Axis powers.

Alger Hiss, who had attended the Yalta Conference, served as the acting Secretary General at the conference. He was later accused of having been a Communist spy in the 1930s by an admitted Communist spy named Whittaker Chambers, who was an editor at Time magazine. In 1948 Hiss was indicted for perjury for denying under oath before the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had never seen Chambers in 1938 nor passed on secret files to Chambers. His first trial ended in a hung jury, but he was convicted in a second trial in 1950 and served forty-four months in prison. However, Schlesinger notes, there was no evidence of wrong doing while he chaired the U.N. conference in 1945.

France was invited to the conference in San Francisco was one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, thus making the Big Four into the Big Five. However, General Charles De Gaulle was angry at the fact that France had been excluded from the Yalta Conference initially declined the seat on the Security Council. It was only as the conference was about to begin that reconsidered its earlier refusal. Stalin did not send his foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov to San Francisco, but instead his ambassador to the United States Andrei Gromyko, because he apparently was angry about not granting immediate U.N. membership to Ukraine and Belarus and over the arguments about Poland. Just before the San Francisco conference, the American ambassador to the USSR, Averell Harriman, the son of Edward H. Harriman, the present of the Union Pacific Railroad, convinced Stalin to send Molotov to the U.N. conference.

At the conference the Latin American nations objected to the seating of Belarus and Ukraine unless Argentina was seated as well. While Argentina eventually did declare war on the Axis power, it missed the March first deadline established at Yalta by one month. Truman finally agreed to allow Belarus, Ukraine, and Argentina to be seated at the U.N. conference at a later date, but not permitted to sign the original United Nations Declaration. Once Belarus and Ukraine were approved for membership, Molotov argued that the Soviet Union would not support Argentina being seated unless Poland was as well. When the matter was put to a vote before the Plenary Session the body voted to admit Argentina despite Russia's objections.

The most important issue that arose in the amending process was to find a way to satisfy Latin American countries that didn't want it regional alliances to be subject to Security Council veto. Nelson Rockefeller championed the position of the Latin American countries, but Pasvolsky and Stettinius were against it. The compromise that was finally reached was to include three new articles on the United Nations Charter: Article 51 that confirmed the concept of collective self-defense; Article 52 that recognized the right of member states to form regional associations to settle disputes; and Article 53 that permitted regional associations to take action against former Axis powers without having to get the approval of the Security Council. "Curiously enough, Pasvolsky's foreboding about the possible Balkanization of the United Nations through regional agencies . . . over the years did not come to pass as he . . . foresaw," writes Schlesinger. "On the contrary, most regional groupings usually proved ineffectual." Article 51 laid the legal groundwork for the creation of a number of regional security pacts, such as NATO, SEATO, and the Warsaw Pact. In 1947 the Latin American countries met in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to establish the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistant (also known as the Rio Treaty) and in 1948 in Bogotá, Colombia, to establish the Organization of American States (the OAS).

In late May 1945 Truman sent former Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins to Moscow to obtain Stalin's approval of the principle that the veto could not be invoked to prevent discussion of issues involving one of the Big Five powers as opposed to having an absolute veto, which was the position Gromyko had taken in San Francisco. When the United Nations charter came to a vote in the Senate in July 1945, it was passed by a vote of 89 to 2. The two votes against the bill were Republican senators William Langer of North Dakota and Henrik Shipstead of Minnesota.

Despite its good intentions, there were certain flaws and contradictions in the U.N Charter. For example, Article 1 of the U.N. Charter makes reference to one of the purposes of the United Nations is "To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace." Yet
Article 2 states that: "The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members" and that "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.
. . ." Furthermore the same Article states that; "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 or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement . . ." In other words, the charter legally established the existing boundaries of nations as the new status quo, and any attempt to change them either by outside nations or by secessionist groups within existing nations as either aggression or interference with the internal affairs of its member nations.

Another flaw is that although Roosevelt sought to avoid some of Woodrow Wilson's mistakes in acquiescing to a victor's peace after World War I, the United Nations was also a victor's peace in the sense that the so-called "Four Policemen" (i.e., the United States, Great Britain, and Russia) and later France made permanent members of the Security Council with an absolute veto over national security matters. During the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West and the that followed World War II and the Communist takeover of China in 1949, this condition hobbled the United Nations from effectively dealing with the principles of "equal rights and self-determination of peoples" for which it was founded. The only exception was in July 1950 when the Security Council passed a resolution authorizing the use of force against the invasion of South Korea by North Korea. The only reason it passed was because the Soviet Union was boycotting the session over the refusal of the Security Council to give the Chinese seat to Communist China as opposed to the Nationalist government on the island of Taiwan.

Notwithstanding these shortcoming, by the time of Roosevelt's fourth inauguration in January, 1945, America was stronger than ever before. "In the nineteenth century," writes Thompson, "the world had been Europe-centered, Great Britain-protected, and London-financed. Now, by the time of Roosevelt's last inaugural, the world had become North Atlantic-centered, United States-protected, and New York-financed. The British Empire had been replaced by what in effect was the American Empire." Paul Orders writes that Franklin Delano Roosevelt felt strongly that World War II signaled the end of European colonialism. While he decided not to press Britain too hard in regard to Indian independence and Roosevelt was willing from mid-1944 to allow the French to resume control over Indochina, for which he earlier proposed a UN trusteeship, he was still morally committed to self-determination as a long-term goal. He also thought that anti-colonialism would benefit the United States in securing commercial and strategic interests overseas. World War Two increased British debt to the United States. Under the Lend-Lease program, the US provided Britain and her allies with arms on credit worth $26 billion. By the end of the war Britain owned foreign creditors more than $40 billion. Niall Ferguson writes that, "Exhausted by the costs of victory, denied the fresh start that followed defeat for Japan and Germany, Britain was simply no longer able to bear the costs of Empire."

Subsequent events led to the end of British and French colonialism in the post-war world. In November 1947 the United Nations General Assembly approved Resolution 181 ending the British mandate in Palestine and partitioning Palestine into independent "Arab and Jewish States." This was the international recognition of a "Jewish state" rather than a "Jewish homeland" in Palestine. Arabs in Palestine and the Arab states did not approve the resolution, and Israel's declaration of independence in May 1948 led to the First Arab Israeli War and removal, both voluntarily and involuntarily, of most of the Palestinian Arabs to refugee camps (See, The Jewish State, Arab Nationalism, and the Sinai: Part 1-The Jewish State).

While India was not a United Nations mandate, in July 1947 the British government voted to partition India into the two independent dominions of Pakistan and, effective August 14 and August 15, respectively. Here too Britain's withdraw from its royal colony resulted in violence and the forcible relocation of Muslim and Hindu populations (See, Dividing the Subcontinent).

After France was occupied by Germany in July 1940, Syria and Lebanon came under the rule the collaboration Vichy government. Concerned about the threat to its mandate to Palestine, the British and the Free French sent troops into Syria and Lebanon and took control in June 1941. George Catroux, the General Delegate General of Free France for Syria, declared the independence of the Republic of Syria in September 1941. General Charles de Gaulle, the head of the Free French government in exile, decided in November 1941 to recognize the independence of Lebanon. In November 1943 the Lebanese government unilaterally declared the end of the French mandate, and France under international pressure accepted its independence. But in May 1945 French troops landed in Beirut, Lebanon, in an effort to restore French administration over Lebanon and Syria. French troops shelled the Syrian parliament in Damascus, but British Prime Minister Winston Churchill demanded a ceasefire. The League of Arab States Council in June supported Syrian independence and demanded the withdrawal of French troops. The Republic of Syria achieved its full independence in August 1945, and the last French troops withdrew in April 1946 (See, Sunni Versus Shi'a: Part 2-Syria and Sunni Versus Shi'a: Part 4-Lebanon).
France lost its mandate for Indochina in a Communist rebellion led by Ho Chi Minh between 1946 and 1954, when under the Geneva Accords the country was temporarily divided into the Communist North and the non-Communist South. In the name of anti-Communism the United States took up the fight abandoned by the French in the 1950s resulting in the 1960s in the Vietnam War ending in 1975 with the American withdrawal and the Communist takeover of the South and the unification of the country (See, China, Korea, and Indochina: Part 3-The Conflict in Vietnam).

Algeria had been colony of France since 1830. The French colonists (many of whom were Italian, Maltese, and Spanish) became known as the colons (colonists) or pieds noirs (literally, black feet). In 1848 the French government declared Algeria an integral parts of France as the departments (local administrative units) of Algiers, Oran, and Constantine with representation of the colonists, but not the native Muslim population, in the French parliament. During the 1920s and 1930s various nationalist groups, most notably the National Liberation Front (FLN) and the National Algerian Movements, were formed in opposition to French rule. However, during World War II the colons sided with the Vichy government, while the Algerian Muslims took the Free French side. In November 1942 Algeria fell to the Allied forces and the Free French regained control. With the Allied victory in Europe in May 1945, violence erupted in Algeria between the Muslim and colon populations, but the colons and a few "meritorious" Muslims remained in power. In November 1954 the FLN launched a series of attacks initiated a war for independence, which lasted until March 1962, when a cease-fire was signed at Evian, France. The Evian Accords called for a referendum on self-determination, which was held July 1st, and on July 3rd France declared Algeria an independent nation.

Thus, until and through World War II the United States continued what historian William Appleman Williams has called "imperial anti-colonialism," that is, an empire based on free-trade and self-determination. Woodrow Wilson was unable to convince the victors of World War I to establish a "Peace Without Victory" at Versailles, and the United States Senate refused to ratify the League of Nations. Roosevelt tried to force Great Britain and France to give up control of their colonies in the Atlantic Charter and United Nations trusteeships. But in the United Nations he created an organization in the victorious nations of the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, France, and Nationalist China (later Communist China) as permanent members of the Security Council had an absolute veto. By restricting the organization from intervening in the internal affairs of existing nations, the UN provides a justification in international law to maintain the arbitrary boundaries of nations that existed at the end of the war. In the second half of the twentieth century anti-Communism, rather than self-determination, became the founding principle of American foreign policy, just as anti-terrorism has become the same in the twenty-first century. And the United Nations, despite being created on the principles of self-determination and the peaceful resolution of world conflicts, has become ineffective achieving either.