THE ENDURING IDEAL OF peace, combined with the immediate fact of war, shaped wartime religious thinking more than anything else. Pacifists were active in their support of peace, of course, but they were mostly ignored by the administration. Instead, most of the interwar peace crusaders and isolationists supported the war effort. But as we have seen, many remained ambivalent and did not give the Roosevelt administration carte blanche. On the issue of postwar order, they demanded that FDR fulfill Woodrow Wilson’s promise and fight a war to end all wars. War might be an ugly necessity in this instance, they agreed, but the real challenge would begin when the guns fell silent.
As in World War I, liberal Protestants played a large role in planning for a postwar world order. As one of the closest chroniclers of American internationalists has noted, “Virtually all were old-stock Protestant Americans.” And as before, the Federal Council of Churches assumed the mantle of leadership. The FCC had opposed intervention well into 1941, and while Pearl Harbor may have changed its stance on the war it did nothing to dilute the FCC’s pacific impulses. Thus most members of the Federal Council supported the war, and urged the United States to pursue a total victory, but they did so with certain caveats. The first was that Roosevelt should aim not simply to defeat Germany, Italy, and Japan but begin constructing an architecture for permanent peace. The second was that the war must be waged justly, proportionately, and not in a spirit of rancor or vengeance; this was a lesson learned from the misplaced patriotic fervor of the Great War. The FCC’s third caveat expressed the conflicted exceptionalism of American liberals: the United States must fight the war and fashion a peace along internationalist lines of global interdependency, as a nation among nations; but that, as the world’s most powerful democracy, America had a responsibility to take the lead in building a better world. Overall, then, the spirit of Walter Van Kirk and the pacifists lived on, but in harness to that of Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian realists.1
…
TO FURTHER THEIR AIMS, in 1940 the Federal Council established the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace. Over the next five years, this small group would become one of the most influential nongovernmental organizations in U.S. foreign policy. But rather than turn the Commission over to one of its illustrious theologians or preachers, the Federal Council entrusted its vision to a legalistic Presbyterian layman, John Foster Dulles. It was a momentous decision.
A cultural Calvinist of the most stubborn, puritanical kind, Dulles was not exactly blessed with charisma. After a 1942 meeting in London, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who would spar with Dulles throughout the 1940s and ’50s, called him “the wooliest type of useless pontificating American. Heaven help us!” Later, a frustrated Eden called Dulles a “preacher in a world of politics” who often “had little regard for the consequence of his words.” Churchill memorably classified Dulles as “the only case of a bull I know who carries his china closet with him.” When he was secretary of state, Dulles’s special assistant described his negotiating style as “carefully weighing every word and putting it down on the table exactly next to the last word.” Time reported that colleagues referred to him as “dull, duller, Dulles.” Yet this stern, dour, pedantic Wall Street lawyer was an ideal choice to head the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace, for he possessed a brilliant mind, religious faith, diplomatic experience, and sterling political connections.2
Dulles was a devout Christian who came from a family in which religion played a major formative role. His grandfather was a Presbyterian missionary to India who lived in Madras and died in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Dulles was the son of a Presbyterian minister, like Woodrow Wilson, and grew up in Watertown, New York, listening to his father’s weekly Sunday sermons, studying the Bible before and after school, and singing morning hymns on the front porch during the summer. Also like Wilson, Dulles experienced the Presbyterian milieu as a young undergraduate at Princeton. In fact, Wilson was president of the university during Dulles’s time at Princeton, and he attended Wilson’s lectures on constitutional government. After graduation, Dulles decided, contrary to his family’s expectations, that he would not enter the ministry but instead become a lawyer. “I think I could make a greater contribution as a Christian lawyer and a Christian layman than I would as a Christian minister,” he told his parents. His prescience soon became apparent: after law school at George Washington University, family connections secured him a job at Sullivan and Cromwell, one of Wall Street’s most prestigious firms. There, he would specialize in matters of international law.3
Crucially, this Christian lawyer was a liberal Protestant. The distinction is important, for had Dulles been a theological conservative, much less a fundamentalist, he would not have become involved with the Federal Council and most likely would not have become a prominent diplomat. In Watertown, Reverend Dulles had firmly sided with the modernists. He took his Bible seriously and ensured that his children knew it intimately, but he did not take it literally. Later, during the fundamentalist-modernist battles of the 1920s, John Foster Dulles represented Harry Emerson Fosdick in a heresy trial before the Judicial Commission of the Presbyterian General Assembly. Dulles, then, was a modernist: pious, but accepting of secular society and scientific empiricism, and he did not believe that the Bible expressed the inerrant word of God. And while he was a proud Presbyterian, he was also, as his father had been, strongly ecumenical. This too was a badge of theological liberalism. Beginning in the late 1930s, after a period in which he became busy with his legal career and allowed his religious observance to lapse, Dulles became very active in church activities, not only within the Presbyterian Church but within Protestantism more generally; in 1947, an Episcopal newspaper anointed him “the most influential layman in the world.” He was not just a Christian; nor was he simply a mainline Protestant—every Dulles biographer has recognized these influences. More precisely, and much more importantly, he was an ecumenical Christian. Indeed, it was his participation in the 1937 Oxford Conference, and its interdenominational cooperative spirit, that had regalvanized his faith after a period of spiritually aimless uncertainty.4
On foreign policy, Dulles possessed impeccable, impressive credentials. On his mother’s side, both his grandfather (John W. Foster) and uncle (Robert Lansing) had been secretaries of state; both had also been successful lawyers. Unusually for diplomats of the era—who were often political appointees with more business acumen than diplomatic expertise—John W. Foster enjoyed a long and distinguished career in foreign service; in 1907, during his senior year at Princeton, young Dulles accompanied his grandfather to the Second Hague Peace Conference—where, not unusually, he was representing not the U.S. government, but the Chinese. In 1919, Dulles accompanied Lansing—his “Uncle Bert”—to the Paris Peace Conference as an official member of the U.S. delegation. In Paris, he was witness not only to the polished intricacies of diplomacy, but also to his uncle’s reservations and clashes with Wilson over the League of Nations.5
Diplomat, international lawyer, modernist Protestant, influential layman, ecumenist—uniquely, Dulles embodied the characteristics and background best suited to advance the cause of ecumenical internationalism. It is not difficult to see why the Federal Council turned to him to lead their deliberations on the purpose of the war and the planning of the peace.
BUT DULLES was not widely known at first, at least not for his religious work, and certainly not outside the United States. Thus his participation in the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work Conference, held at Oxford in 1937, marked something of a debut on the world Protestant stage. As a lay delegate of some importance in American legal and political circles, Dulles was asked to give a nationally broadcast address about Oxford over the NBC radio network shortly before sailing for England. Henry Sloane Coffin had organized the radio talks as a way to promote a better Christian understanding of world politics, and he was hoping Dulles would be able to broaden this message beyond the avid churchgoing crowd. Though he lumped Soviet communism, German Nazism, and Italian Fascism together as “a false god” that had “deified” the state, Dulles pointedly did not advocate an American response, and instead called for greater sacrifice among American Christians to reduce their sins of nationalism and racial pride.6
In Oxford, Dulles gave this view a fuller airing. Echoing Niebuhr’s call that sin could never be overcome, he told the assembled ministers, theologians, and divinity professors that war was an endemic part of the human condition. But he also believed war could one day be ended. Pacifists had erred by attempting to meet the problem of war head on, by “abolishing” or “outlawing” it through agreements like the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact. Dulles chided that such a quixotic approach was always bound to fail. Here, his childhood observances of his father’s sermons proved helpful. “The river which periodically bursts its banks we do not hold in check by a frontal dam,” he explained in a simple analogy typical of a Sunday sermon. “We go back toward the sources and canalize them so as to effect a peaceful diffusion.” The solution was not to outlaw war by mere declaration, but to provide other, more productive outlets for human energy. Dulles believed that in world politics, national sovereignty functioned like a dam, artificially blocking people’s aspirations and building up international tensions. So, just as he would not dam but “canalize” a river in order to tame it, he called for the dismantling of the inviolable sovereignty of nation-states. He acknowledged that the total eradication of national sovereignty was impractical and infeasible, but he urged its dilution to a level much weaker than had ever existed in the modern world. American federalism offered one possible model: after all, the United States was nothing more than a collection of previously sovereign states that had ceded some, but not all, of their autonomy to a centralized federal government. This was the worldview of an ecumenical internationalist.7
Overall, however, Dulles’s application of religion to foreign policy was confused in the years before Pearl Harbor, and in the end only Pearl Harbor could clarify it. In part this stemmed from his attempts to fit his long-standing political views into a religious framework. He had already worked out intricate theories of foreign policy; now they were being shaped to correspond with his faith, and the result was not always coherent. He often used a Christian realist diagnosis to arrive at a liberal pacifist conclusion, and vice versa. He had a neo-orthodox appreciation of sin and a realist’s grasp of the role of power in geopolitics, and he had little faith in the persuasiveness of moral authority or public opinion. Treaties were not sacrosanct, he warned: “history teaches that few treaties survive after they cease to become mutually advantageous. If they do survive, it is only because one party has such superior power that it is useless for the other to seek to extricate itself.” And he was never a pacifist. Even in the period of disillusionment following the Great War, Dulles agreed with his fellow liberal Protestants that war was unchristian, but he pointedly refused to accept the conclusion that war and preparations for war were therefore “at all times and under all circumstances, evils which no Christian should at any time countenance.”8
Yet unlike the realists, Dulles did not see the point of American belligerency until after Pearl Harbor. Though he predicted as early as October 1939 that the United States would enter the war, he felt that war was an abhorrence that should be avoided at almost any cost. “War has become so totalitarian and destructive that it is no longer tolerable,” he proclaimed. “Space distances have largely lost their meaning” because “the world has been shrunk” due to “inventions of science” and “a steady increase in population and population pressures.” He would go to great lengths to avoid war. In July 1939, at a meeting in Geneva with a group of European clergy, he defended appeasement and, according to one participant, “was ready to make considerable concessions” to Germany. He was hostile to Germany’s aims, but he was not especially alarmed by Hitler’s broken promises. Moreover, Dulles emphatically rejected Niebuhr’s doctrine of the lesser evil. “I cannot believe that it is ever a Christian duty to choose that which is evil,” he wrote Coffin in May 1940. “If the doctrines of Nazism are to be defeated, Christians at least should … try to defeat them in Christian ways and not on the theory that good will come out of evil. I have not lost faith in the power and methods which Christ taught.” And he made it clear that he thought an American alliance with Britain and France would itself be an act of evil because it would mean “an effective guaranty of the British and French empires.”9
Dulles placed Christianity at the very heart of his worldview, and thus at the center of planning for the postwar world. If peace were to be “just and durable,” it would also have to be Christian, or at least based on Christian principles that could then be applied more broadly. Dulles liked to contrast the endlessly pedantic wrangling of diplomats with the goal-oriented approach and cooperative spirit of the churches, particularly ecumenical bodies. One of the reasons the Oxford Conference made such an impact upon him was his participation, shortly before Oxford, in the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, a Paris-based meeting held under the auspices of the League of Nations. The delegates in Paris were intellectually “barren” and “permeated with extreme nationalism.” The contrast with Oxford, where people from “many nations, races, and creeds” were able to discuss their problems “frankly,” was stark. To Dulles, the message was clear. While the diplomats’ “self-interest” was “not to be discarded,” it would only move the world forward if it was “enlightened self-interest. And if we are to be enlightened, we must have and use those qualities of mind and soul that Christ taught.” Without religious faith and Christian ethics, world order would lack a moral foundation, as Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the communist Soviet Union had proven. Thus Christianity could act as the “solvent of world conflict.” While it was not the only spiritual force in the world, it was, said Dulles, the most widely practiced faith by the widest variety of peoples. It was a transnational force that transcended international borders and national sovereignties. If “a religion itself seeks universality, and if it seeks to spiritualize desires and inculcate a willingness to sacrifice, then it cannot fail to project more broadly the ethical solution,” he wrote in his 1939 book War, Peace and Change. “Few religions conceive of their deity as concerned with the welfare of all mankind. Christianity has attained, at least in theory, the concept of a god whose interest is universal.” Naturally, Dulles pointed to the Protestant ecumenical movement as the most universalizing force within Christianity.10
WHEN THE AMERICAN war began—a war he unhesitatingly and fully supported after Pearl Harbor despite his earlier doubts—Dulles stood at the crux of Protestant idealism and realism. This explains much of his appeal to a wide variety of religious constituencies and his ability to bridge the various political factions within liberal Protestantism and produce a consensus document. He was a devout Christian, a staunch internationalist, was sympathetic to neo-orthodoxy and Christian realism, but had also opposed U.S. intervention: he could work with almost anyone.
Largely at the behest of his friend and fellow Presbyterian Henry P. Van Dusen, Dulles was named head of the FCC’s Commission on a Just and Durable Peace in December 1940 after presenting an outline of his worldview to the biennial meeting of the FCC. Without Dulles, the Commission would have been just another Protestant study group; with him, it became one of the most important nongovernment organizations for thinking and planning on the postwar world order. It was actually the Dulles Commission, “really a one man show” according to Van Dusen, and “a rubber stamp for John Foster Dulles’ ideas.” He had in fact been drafted precisely for such a role. Even though Dulles had opposed intervention, he was enough of a realist and diplomat to know that winning both the war and the peace was paramount. Van Dusen worried about the “pacifist-isolationists” who would inevitably be in “full weight” on the Commission and who could “strangle realistic discussion.” Even those Commission members who had recently abandoned their pacifism, like Walter Van Kirk, could not be fully trusted. In helping to orchestrate Dulles’s appointment as chair, Van Dusen hoped to neutralize the pacifists while also taking advantage of their passion for a new world order.11
Ever interested in foreign affairs, desperate to make an impact on the Roosevelt administration’s internationalist policies, and unimpressed with other nongovernmental organizations planning for the postwar world, Dulles effectively turned the Commission into his own private think tank. He did not run it on his own; nor did he ignore the advice of his Commission colleagues. But its findings almost always reflected his own views. In turn, the FCC as a whole, which adopted almost all of the Commission’s recommendations, became a forum for the promotion of Dulles’s views. His lieutenant on the Commission was none other than Walter Van Kirk, the interwar peace prophet who abandoned his pacifism in 1940 so long as force was used for “establishing justice.” Dulles and Van Kirk invited a wide variety of people onto the Commission, from realists to erstwhile pacifists. But Dulles was clearly in charge. Interwar pacifists Harry Emerson Fosdick—who continued to be a pacifist through the war—and Roswell P. Barnes often took part in the Commission’s deliberations. Reinhold Niebuhr was also invited to join, but, busy with his own activities, only occasionally took part in the Commission’s discussions.12
The Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace held its first meeting in New York in March 1941. Dulles announced that its main goal was to “arouse Christians” to their “responsibility” for world peace. More specifically, he said that the Commission would pursue two equally important objectives: first, to devise a suitable framework for a “just and durable” postwar world order that would, despite its Christian core, be applicable to all; and second, to build support among American Christians for a new, internationalist world order that would include the United States. Members of the Commission, like all American internationalists, were terrified by a possible return to isolationism after the war. This prospect also kept the latent pacifism and idealism of several Commission members in check. None had been isolationists, but many—such as Van Kirk—had been pacifists or—like Dulles himself—anti-interventionists. They saw their mission as one of drawing up an ethical, peaceful world order that was both workable and palatable to most Americans. It was a daunting task, but the churches felt up to it. A week after this first meeting, the FCC printed 450,000 copies of a handbook produced by the Commission, “A Just and Durable Peace,” and distributed them throughout the country.13
To Dulles and his fellow FCC commissioners, an international organization that managed a system of world federalism was indispensable to a just and durable peace. Dulles had already outlined his reasons for a federated world at Oxford: only the dilution of national sovereignty could provide for a healthy flow of people, goods, and ideas across the world. Blocking these natural flows would either create pressure or stagnation; Dulles identified both as causes of war. But the unshakeable belief in international organization—indeed, in a federal world government—among liberal Protestants was also deeply rooted in their ecumenical ideology. Integration was assumed to be a means of conflict resolution because it facilitated communication and understanding. Barriers to integration, be they national or denominational, only created fear and distrust, and eventually conflict. At home, on religious matters, this was the need fulfilled by the Federal Council of Churches. It served as a neutral meeting place for disparate groups—Protestant denominations—each with their own agenda and interests. The FCC did not require denominations to forfeit all of their identities, but it did require them to sacrifice a small piece of their individual identities in the name of a common good. In U.S. domestic politics, moreover, as Dulles and fellow Commission members Richard Fagley and Justin Wroe Nixon pointed out, the relationship between the federal government and the states functioned along the same lines. Regarding world politics, the “Federal” Council’s own name is telling: ecumenists argued that global anarchy would be tamed and world peace managed by a federated union of nations rather than a unitary world state. Now, with the world in crisis, it was their moment “to create a world-wide community in Jesus Christ, transcending nation, race, and class.”14
However, when Roosevelt and Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter on August 14, 1941, Dulles and the Commission were deeply disappointed. The Charter’s eight declarations of “common principles”—including national self-determination, free trade, and freedom of the seas—certainly appealed to Dulles, but they were vague and imprecise, expressions of idealistic intent rather than a detailed plan of action. They were, in Dulles’s words, “tentative and incomplete.” And none of them addressed what most American internationalists believed was the most important ingredient for postwar peace: a new league of nations. But at least Roosevelt was thinking internationally. Dulles’s criticisms of the Atlantic Charter were therefore pointed but intended to be constructive. Published by the Commission, through the FCC, Dulles’s “Long Range Peace Objectives,” released a month after the Atlantic Charter, chided Roosevelt and Churchill for their hypocrisy—though he did not use that term—of calling for measures when the “United States has in the past been a principal violator of good international practice.” Great Britain, of course, was probably even worse, with its imperial possessions and preferential trading system. Dulles then criticized Roosevelt and Churchill for failing to mention international organization. World peace would only come when Americans “use our power, not to perpetuate itself, but to create, support, and eventually give way to international institutions drawing their vitality from the whole family of nations.” The Atlantic Charter merely proclaimed a vague desire to return to the world as it existed before 1929, or 1933, even 1939. It was therefore not a revolutionary document but a conservative one. To Dulles, the failure to address international organization was rooted in an even greater failure to think about the fallacies of the world system as it was and had been. “It has been demonstrated, beyond doubt, that the old system of many disconnected sovereignties, each a law unto itself, inevitably breeds war,” he concluded. “We must not keep humanity chained to such a wheel.”15
Such extremes of thought were not unusual for Dulles during the war. It is interesting that while he derided plans to abolish war as unrealistic, he himself was insistent upon abolishing the system of sovereign nation-states that had prevailed for the past three centuries. While some Europeans viewed the war as a larger and more violent version of previous wars, Dulles and other Americans perceived it in millennial terms, as ushering in a totally new epoch. The war “is not just one more war in the history of the world,” ran a typical wartime statement by the FCC, but instead was “bringing with it the liquidation of the old and the birth of a new world order.” The Europeans found such thinking alarming, but due to U.S. power and American Protestantism’s dominance of transatlantic ecumenical and missionary councils, they could do little to stand in its way. But even back in the United States, the Commission formed the vanguard of internationalist thinking. Unlikely as it was, Dulles had become a radical.16
In July 1942, Dulles and Van Kirk traveled together to Britain, to see the war up close and compare notes on postwar planning with their Protestant brethren in Oxford and with Cabinet ministers and government officials in London. Included on Dulles’s itinerary was a meeting with Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden (it was this encounter that led Eden to dismiss Dulles as a “pontificating American”). While Van Kirk concentrated on religious matters, especially the ecumenical initiative, Dulles focused mostly on questions of war and peace. To his dismay, he found members of the Cabinet focused almost solely on winning the war against Germany; it seemed nobody had time or energy for postwar planning. Aside from victory, the British were preoccupied with maintaining their economic system of imperial preferences and protecting the integrity of the Empire itself, even though both were quickly becoming obsolete, even dangerous, in the modern world. Dulles also found it disconcerting that Britons did not appreciate the revolutionary character of the war, the “fundamental changes” that required “new planning and the birth of a new faith.” Most disappointing was that he found “virtually no thinking about a revived League of Nations.”17
At Balliol College, Oxford, Dulles and Van Kirk held meetings with British ministers and church officials, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Chichester. Also present was the historian Arnold Toynbee, a deeply religious man. Dulles spoke bluntly. He said that the problems likely to emerge after the war were “insoluble except in terms of the type of spiritual approach which Christianity was able to give.” But he lamented that not enough people, particularly in Britain, shared this view; he also worried that too many Europeans thought the world could return to a status quo ante after the defeat of the Nazis. If this happened, warned Dulles, “if we relapsed into the same state of mind as that of the interwar period, we should certainly lose the third world war.” He then pointed to the new world order that was forming before their very eyes, whether they could see it or not: the legitimacy of colonialism was eroding, which created “the necessity of getting non-Christian assent to the proposals which we as Christians made.” The ability to provide for the basic welfare of humanity was becoming easier, which made it “necessary for us to do something to raise that standard of life” in the non-Western world. Call it liberal empire or progressive imperialism, but the great powers had to begin acting out of concern for the welfare of others, and not simply dominate them. Given that he was a Republican who was close to the likely 1944 GOP presidential nominee, New York Governor Thomas Dewey, the most startling part of Dulles’s appeal was his invocation of the New Deal to describe postwar planning. They needed some sort of new, regulatory order, “something like a ‘new deal’ … There was a great opportunity in the world today to raise the moral, material and spiritual standards of life in the whole world and in this there was a tremendous amount of work to be done.” Pointing to the need to spread the West’s prosperity more widely, Dulles closed with a progressive call to alms: “if a man became content with the world as it was, he had ceased, in fact, to be a Christian.”18
His tour of England convinced Dulles that the world would not change—and thus would not survive, at least peacefully—without American leadership. The Soviets were too atheistic, autocratic, and economically stifled, while the British were contaminated by imperialism and exhausted by war. Only the Americans, imperfect as they were, could save the world from itself. Only the United States could bring about a truly new world order. Dulles was realistic in that he recognized the need for compromise and, if necessary, gradual reform, but he was determined that victory over Germany and Japan would also bring with it the chance to build a federal world system. Now he and the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace just had to spread the word.
THEY DID SO through the best means available to the Federal Council: publish a book, donate several hundreds of thousands of copies to churches nationwide as well as offer it for sale to the general public, and instruct member clergy to use it as the basis for their sermons on the war. Accordingly, in March 1943, before a “distinguished audience” of leaders in finance, industry, labor, religion, government, and higher education, the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace hosted a book launch on the sixty-fourth floor of Rockefeller Center’s RCA Building. The book, Six Pillars of Peace, aimed to improve upon the generalities of the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms by laying out the essential principles that would need to form the core elements of any postwar system. The first pillar, international organization, was the most important because all others would emanate from it and be managed by it. The second was more complicated: providing for economic justice by limiting the ability of states to pass domestic laws that would have global ramifications; clearly, Dulles and the Commission had the protectionist measures of the 1930s in mind. The third pillar called for political reform of the world system by making treaties more flexible to reflect changing circumstances. The fourth, fifth, and sixth pillars upheld more familiar goals of liberal Protestants: decolonization, disarmament, and the protection of individual freedoms, especially religious and intellectual liberty. Most of Six Pillars of Peace elaborated on these themes and linked them through the solution to them all, and Dulles’s particular concern: the dilution of all national sovereignty.19
Six Pillars of Peace provided Dulles and the Commission with a major voice in postwar planning. The FCC’s national and international reach ensured that it received attention: an initial print run sold more than eighteen thousand copies, while over a hundred regional newspapers ran feature stories on the Dulles plan. And Six Pillars did receive widespread attention, not merely for the prominence of its chair or the institutional strength of its sponsor but simply because it was one of the only substantive plans for U.S. postwar planning. The New York Herald Tribune featured an explanation of the six pillars on its front page. The New York Times also devoted it considerable attention and, in addition to giving it front-page coverage and printing an article by Dulles, published favorable assessments by Harry Emerson Fosdick; Minnesota Senator Joseph Ball, a Republican internationalist and leading proponent of international organization; Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, the Roosevelt administration’s leading advocate for world government; and New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey. The Times of London, the quasi-official newspaper of the British establishment, prominently featured Six Pillars. Time reported that Dulles had devised a plan for “American participation in an international alliance of all nations to preserve the postwar peace” and printed abridged versions of each of the six pillars. As the British Embassy in Washington, which tracked Dulles and the Commission closely throughout the war, reported to London, the “influence of the crusade begun by the Protestant churches, inspired by John Foster Dulles … is not to be underestimated.”20
In political terms as well, Six Pillars of Peace catapulted the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace into an important role. Dulles himself was an emerging political player, a longtime Republican with close personal and political ties to Thomas Dewey. But Dulles’s political ties and ambitions, either to run for office himself or to become Dewey’s secretary of state, proved both a blessing and a curse for the Commission: Dulles’s stature and the success of Six Pillars ensured it would receive a hearing from the Roosevelt administration, but it also meant that the Democrats in the White House and State Department would instinctively distrust Dulles and his motives. Still, Dulles worked with the Roosevelt administration as closely as he could. Welles had acted as an unofficial consultant to the Commission during the writing of Six Pillars. A week after the lavish Rockefeller Center book launch, President Roosevelt himself met with Dulles, Reverend Barnes, and Henry St. George Tucker, the president of the Federal Council and presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, to discuss postwar planning. Roosevelt agreed with the six pillars in general but reminded them of the need to be realistic. He was a firm believer in the need for some form of postwar international cooperation, but he feared repeating Wilson’s fatal mistake: a refusal to compromise on the specific workings of the system, both with domestic critics and international leaders.21
Next came several meetings between Dulles and either Roosevelt or Secretary of State Cordell Hull. In their Oval Office meeting, FDR and Dulles had agreed upon the need to be realistic in order to compromise. But it soon became clear that the president was acting much too realistically for the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace, and not necessarily as a way to facilitate compromise. In November 1943, the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and Nationalist China issued the Moscow Declaration, which vowed that Grand Alliance cooperation would continue after the war in the name of keeping the peace. Just as important for American internationalists, the Declaration also marked the first time the Allies jointly pledged to establish a permanent international organization to maintain peace. Dulles publicly supported the Moscow Declaration’s call for a permanent United Nations, which had been established earlier in 1943 as a way to manage wartime relief efforts, but privately he seethed at the Declaration’s blatant reliance on traditional great power politics. In particular, Dulles bridled at the great powers’ insistence that postwar peace would be “based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states” and that they would “consult with one another and as occasion requires with other members of the United Nations, with a view to joint action on behalf of the community of nations.” In January 1944, the Commission issued a statement of reservations about the Moscow Declaration; a month later, Dulles gave a speech criticizing the administration’s plans for the “perpetuation of any given status quo” as “wholly unrealistic.” This earned Dulles and Tucker another invitation to the White House, where Roosevelt tried to mollify them, with little success. They urged FDR instead to seek a peace that was “curative and creative,” not simply reactive. To keep up the pressure, the Commission orchestrated a petition, signed by 1,251 prominent clergy and laypeople, calling for the immediate establishment of a permanent United Nations Council to begin preparing for peace.22
DULLES WAS BECOMING a problem for Roosevelt: 1944 was a presidential election year, and FDR planned to run for an unprecedented fourth term. Not everyone was pleased with this, including some Democrats. As the popular governor of a populous state, Dewey was the presumed GOP nominee, and he stood a good chance of upsetting Roosevelt. Dulles had to tread a fine line between his nonpartisan role on the Commission and his political commitments to Dewey, which by April 1944 included drafting Dewey’s foreign policy speeches. Unsurprisingly, the Roosevelt administration perceived Dulles’s critique of its policies not merely as a contribution to the debate on postwar planning but as a real political threat at the beginning of what was going to be a long and fiercely contested presidential election campaign. In August, after wrapping up the Republican nomination, Dewey attacked Roosevelt’s diplomacy on precisely the grounds Dulles and the Commission had criticized the Moscow Declaration—as a sordid sellout to the kind of great power politics at which the British and Soviets excelled. This was no coincidence: Dulles had helped Dewey write the speech. Hull lamented that Dewey’s speech “suddenly shattered” the bipartisan spirit that had thus far underpinned postwar planning.23
Duly alarmed, Roosevelt sent Secretary of State Hull to deal with these troublesome Republicans. Hull was ideally placed to settle the dispute, and in Roosevelt’s favor, for he had earned a reputation in Washington as a practitioner of bipartisan foreign policy. For Hull, more than most others, politics truly did stop at the water’s edge, but he was not naïve enough to assume that domestic politics always was kept out of foreign affairs—hence his role as an intermediary between Roosevelt and Dewey. Dewey would not meet with Hull, which would have made him look like FDR’s supplicant rather than his equal. In his place as Hull’s interlocutor, Dewey sent the one man he could trust on foreign policy as well as politics: Dulles. Dulles, of course, was not only temperamentally stubborn but also an international lawyer with vast experience in the art of the deal. Hull and Dulles entered into several days of difficult negotiations; one afternoon was devoted to a tedious argument over the meaning of the words “bipartisan” and “nonpartisan,” with an exasperated Hull at one point brandishing a dictionary. “I had hoped that we would agree within a few hours,” Dulles said of the negotiations. “Actually, we had three days of almost continuous conference. The Secretary seemed to me very stubborn. Perhaps I seemed that way to him.”24
In the end, they agreed to keep discussions of postwar planning “nonpartisan”—that is, completely out of politics, as opposed to the “bipartisanship” of two parties actively working together—for the duration of the campaign. Dulles may have been a shrewd negotiator, but Hull realized he had the upper hand. Dulles had been working for a postwar international organization, and hopefully a world federation, for four years, and would not do anything to jeopardize its fulfillment. “I emphasized to Dulles that Governor Dewey was in a position where he might destroy the movement under way to get a postwar security organization,” Hull told Dulles, who of course was leading that very movement. “I added that Dulles had a real opportunity to help put over this project which meant so much to mankind.” Or as Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long commented, without Dewey’s approval there would be no Senate approval, and “without that approval and our cooperation this time there will be no World Organization and we might as well get ready for World War III and the end.” It was a masterstroke, but Hull did not gloat. A month later, at the conclusion of the Dumbarton Oaks conference in Washington that began constructing the United Nations Organization, he ensured that Dewey and Dulles were kept fully informed.25
Hull had won a major victory for internationalism, for he not only neutralized Dewey over the issue, he had also cornered Dulles and the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace into supporting the Roosevelt administration’s postwar planning. This was significant because the peace planning at Dumbarton Oaks—with a permanent Security Council consisting of five great powers and an international police force to ensure the maintenance of peace—strikingly resembled the Moscow Declaration. Yet the Commission meekly issued a statement urging Americans to support Dumbarton Oaks. “There must be world organization,” it declared. Without it, the “underlying causes of war,” such as the “quest for power, economic and political maladjustment, exploitation in colonial relationships, racial discrimination and the denial … of spiritual and intellectual freedoms” would not ease. The Commission came to terms with the use of force to maintain peace. It was only after Roosevelt’s victory in the November election that Dulles felt free to attack Dumbarton Oaks as only a “beginning” to postwar planning because it “partakes too much of a military alliance.”26
ONE PART OF the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace’s mandate was to contribute specific proposals, grounded in Christian ethics, to the national debate on the structure of postwar peace. But the other part, equally important, was for Commission members to help build support for international organization among the American people, especially in the Protestant churches. And at this, they were wildly successful. There was already support, but there was also much opposition, and even much of the support was neither deep nor committed. Partly in response to the urgings of the FCC and the Commission, partly out of their own fervency for global cooperation, the Protestant churches mobilized themselves behind plans for a just and durable peace based upon a new world order.
As always, the liberal Protestant churches were boisterous in their support for a permanent United Nations. As early as January 1942, the ministers of the famous Old South Church in Boston and the Fourth Presbyterian Church of New York called for a “Superstate of Free Peoples” and a “World Brotherhood in God.” Appeals to racial and religious tolerance were by now ritualistic for most liberals, but between 1943 and 1945 they mustered the old enthusiasm for an equitable world order one more time. National bodies, such as the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, endorsed world security through racial tolerance. Central to this message was the need to extend Christian love not just to allies but former enemies; also central was the old missionary paternalism that was strongly progressive as well. Anything less would ensure a new world war. “As we form our attitudes toward the other nations of the earth,” preached a Congregationalist in Connecticut, “it will not be enough to ask, ‘Will this step be good for the United States?’ We must also ask, ‘Will it be good for our brethren? Will it be good for England and France, for Russia and China? Yes, will it be good for Italy and Germany and Japan? Will it be good for India and Africa and all the other little people who are now exploited and oppressed?’ ” The worry was not over the need for a progressive international organization. It was, said a United Methodist bishop, that there “are too many people who are talking about a new world order after the war but are not willing to make any sacrifice to obtain” it.27
In the last two years of the war, liberal Protestant churches and interdenominational organizations mobilized as one in support of collective security and resource sharing under the management of a world government. In terms of funding and organization, their efforts in World War II dwarfed even those during the Great War. With Sumner Welles featured as the keynote speaker, in October 1943 over five thousand Protestants gathered at New York’s Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine to launch the Christian Mission on World Order. This three-week campaign, devoted entirely to promoting Six Pillars of Peace, toured 102 cities and led to the observance of World Order Sunday by thousands of churches nationwide. World Order Sunday even attracted the support of the Southern Presbyterians, normally the careful guardians of denominational and national sovereignty.28
Encouraged by the results, individual denominations joined in with their own missions. Under the energetic leadership of Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, a key Dulles ally and frequent collaborator with the Commission, the Methodists mounted a “Crusade for a New World Order” in January 1944. Every Methodist church in America was encouraged to write their local congressman and plead for a postwar united nations. This was no small undertaking, but the Methodists were confident they could pull it off; they had, after all, done something similar in leading the temperance campaign and could call upon the energies of over 8,000,000 members in 41,000 churches. According to the historian Robert Divine, Oxnam’s Crusade achieved “spectacular results” that included “one of the largest outpourings of mail in [the] history” of Congress. The Northern Baptist Convention followed with its own World Order Crusade, designed to build support for “a world organization in which every nation is invited to participate” and “which will face realistically all problems that relate to human well-being.” After the Baptists came the Congregational Church with its World Order Compact, built on the pro–world government conclusions of its in-house study group, the Council for Social Action, and modeled on the Mayflower Compact of 1620.29
Of course, interdenominational and ecumenical groups joined in as well. The Federal Council sponsored World Order Day, to be held on November 12, 1944. Using St. Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians admonishing Christians to wield the sword of the spirit and don the shield of faith, the FCC called upon its 150,000 member churches to “unite their forces in a common effort to win the peace” based upon “a world settlement consistent with Christian principles.” Other groups followed suit. The United Council of Church Women began campaigning for “world community” in 1944, while the World Council of Churches acted as a broker for world government from its wartime headquarters in Switzerland.30
But the most important thing about this new peace crusade was that this time others joined in. Indeed, if there was ever a consensus moment in American religious politics, it was over the need for a federal world order. Vice President Henry A. Wallace, a Social Gospeler by temperament and upbringing, supported an explicitly faith-based internationalism as the path to world peace. More surprising were Southern Protestants, who normally defended the principles of identity and autonomy but were just as enthusiastic about world order as liberal Northerners like Wallace. In the spring of 1944, John W. Frazer, pastor of the First Methodist Church of Opelika, Alabama, even established a new organization to further the cause. His proposed group, the Southern Council of Churchmen, would build local support “in setting up a Post War World built upon the Atlantic Charter and other principles of International justice.” “Does a Persons Race Preclude Membership?” asked an SCC promotional flyer. “No!” The SCC quickly added members from across the Deep South, earning rare regional praise as politically active civic-minded ministers. Decades later, Southerners would turn angrily against politically minded ministers who marched against Jim Crow, but this time the confluence of national and international progressivisms led many to support racial tolerance. It seemed that the only thing distinctively Southern about the SCC’s manifesto was its vehement rejection of pacifism.31
Distrust of pacifism aside, it is striking that many Protestant clergy from Jim Crow states were unequivocal in calling for a global peace based on religious—and racial—tolerance. “As we struggle against racial hatreds, poverty and disease,” said the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, “we prepare in the sorrow of the present a bulwark of faith for the world of the future.” While the Southern Baptist Convention, assembled for its annual conference in Atlanta in 1944, disavowed any official role in peace planning so as not to violate the separation of church and state, it passed a world peace platform nonetheless. Given segregation’s grip on Southern society, the result was astonishing. To the Southern Baptists, Christ’s command to “love thy neighbor as thyself” was a clear “condemnation of the policy of isolation on the part of any nation. No nation is justified in seeking to separate itself from the rest of the world,” proclaimed the habitually separatist Baptists. “We are inevitably members of one another.” They called for an international organization with economic sanctions and police power at its disposal to enforce the peace, and they called for national self-determination and decolonization. But then the Southern Baptists went further still:
Believing in the worth of every individual, we deplore race prejudices and hatreds as undermining the respect to which every individual is entitled, and as destroying the spirit of good will, which must be the foundation of enduring peace. This is true whether we consider racial tensions in our nation or in international relationships.
Elsewhere, Southern ministers made appeals to a world order based on economic justice that harked back to the South’s Populist glory days. “Let me be specific,” wrote Reverend Lawrence Lay of Britton, Oklahoma, in response to a survey by another FCC commission. “I will attempt it by stating a specific core from which may radiate a thousand specific principles for which Christians can and must fight to the last ditch or all is lost. All the natural resources of this earth belong to all the people of the earth.”32
Catholics were also strong proponents of the United Nations. Pope Pius XII had issued his own program, Six Conditions of a Just Peace, which dovetailed with both the Atlantic Charter and the FCC’s Six Pillars. The Holy See and the White House had had their differences over wartime strategy, and they would have more during the Cold War. But on the need for the United Nations, they were of one mind. With Washington and the Vatican in agreement, the National Catholic Welfare Conference issued the Bishops’ Statement on International Order, a strongly internationalist document. But even before, American Catholics, led by John Ryan and the Catholic Association for International Peace, had spent the war calling for the establishment of a just peace based on international organization and multilateral cooperation. Moreover, for social justice Catholics the pursuit of a more equitable and peaceful international order was an integral part of improving American society at home, especially on industrial and racial questions. In 1945, both the Catholic Association for International Peace and the National Catholic Welfare Conference would send high-powered delegations to the UN Conference in San Francisco, where they made important contributions to the codification of international law and a balancing between individual political rights and group social and economic rights.33
As staunch progressives and internationalists, and as charter members of Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, Jews were natural proponents of the United Nations as well. As the victims of Russian and German aggression during the past half century, they were also apt to support an organization that would curtail the sovereignty and power of tyrannies and keep their ambitions in check. But Zionism complicated matters. The desire to build a Jewish homeland reflected a very old-fashioned type of nationalism that ran counter to the “one world” internationalist visions of the UN’s supporters. In the future, who would need nationalism in a world of diluted sovereignty and global governance? Not coincidentally, Jews who opposed Zionism proved to be some of the UN’s most impassioned supporters. Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, president of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, was one of the leading voices of Conservative Judaism and a long-standing opponent of Zionism. When he looked at the causes of the war, he saw the specter of aggressive nationalism; when he peered into a future of peace, he saw only the bonds of universal tolerance. “The creation of an enduring peace presupposes an active cooperative relationship among nations and peoples, which makes the question of statehood less and less relevant,” he wrote in 1943. On the other hand, “emphasis on national sovereignty anywhere must be fatal to civilization.” Jews, including Zionists, overwhelmingly supported the creation of a permanent United Nations, but already the question of statehood in Palestine was complicating the postwar world.34
Thus the desire for international peace managed by the United Nations was, at least among religious Americans, nearly universal: not just interdenominational, but interfaith. In October 1943, hundreds of leaders from all of America’s major faiths signed an “Interfaith Declaration on World Peace” that promoted the new internationalism. “For the first time in our history,” wrote one of the declaration’s key authors, Episcopal Bishop of Albany George Ashton Oldham, to President Roosevelt, “we have secured the collaboration of not only Protestants and Jews, but of leading members of the Hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.” He did not exaggerate. Though serious Protestant-Catholic tensions would survive the war and continue into the postwar era, there was active collaboration for world order among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. As evidence, Oldham sent FDR a seven-point plan for world peace signed by leading figures from all three faiths. Led by Roosevelt and his promotion of interfaith tolerance, the war marked a coming of age for American civil religion, and nearly everyone espoused the same message of global tolerance and pluralistic harmony.35
NEARLY EVERYONE, that is, but not quite everyone. Evangelicals and Southern Baptists, most Catholics and Jews, and of course mainline Protestants were now all staunch internationalists. But Protestant fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals could not bring themselves to support the construction of a regulatory global state that would herald the birth of a new world order. True to their theology, premillennial dispensationalists claimed that postwar planning was futile because the end times were approaching. Indeed, proclaimed M. G. Hatcher, a fundamentalist Baptist preacher from Muscatine, Iowa, “Scripture does prophecy” the establishment of world government, which “will make it possible for the World Dictator, the Anti-Christ, to take over control.” The wartime United Nations was thus the first step in creating “a reign of suffering and terror as the world has never known.” The logic of premillennialism was not entirely consistent—if world government would hasten the end times, and with them the Second Coming of Christ and the salvation of the faithful, why not encourage it?—but this did nothing to allay Christian conservatives’ fears of international organization.36
Moreover, conservative anti-statism, based upon reflexive fears of regulation and government interference with matters that rightfully belonged to the family and the church, surged whenever people spoke of a federated world order. To many conservatives, a United Nations probably meant world government, and world government would mean foreign interference in American life. William L. Blessing, a self-styled savior of true Christianity from Denver, equated the “God-denying, Christ-rejecting, Holy Ghost–blaspheming, Bible-hating atheistic” Federal Council of Churches with the “anti-Christ world order” of a postwar international organization. Gerald Smith, an extremist preacher and sometime fringe candidate for president, mounted a protest against the planned “superstate” and “world police force” that would take away the liberties of ordinary Americans. Dan Gilbert, a Congregational fundamentalist, accused Dulles of “wiping out of the independence and sovereignty of nations” and planning a “scheme for world-wide socialism.” Gilbert also equated the evils of the UN with those of the FCC. Just as the Federal Council “makes itself the mouthpiece for almost every secular and religious group,” so too would the United Nations include every voice on every issue from all over the world, no matter how blasphemous or sinful. The FCC’s superstructure simply ignored “the great company of millions of Bible-believers who are denominationally tied to its organization,” robbing them of their voice and their autonomy. This, Gilbert charged, was just what the UN would do to Americans.37
BUT EVEN SOME LIBERAL PROTESTANTS—those who had adopted neoorthodoxy—could see the wisdom of such logic. H. Richard Niebuhr, Reinhold’s brother and professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School, was one of the leading architects of Christian realism and neo-orthodox theology in the United States, and his belief in original sin and humanity’s innate capacity for evil made him skeptical that a world state was the best thing for peace. “Perhaps you took for granted that world government would be responsible and limited government, but these things must not be taken for granted,” he warned Richard Fagley of the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace shortly after the war. “Better to die than to submit to tyranny—that motto applies to world government as well as to any other.” Niebuhr agreed upon the need for the United Nations, but one that was constrained by its members, just as the U.S. government was kept in check by its reliance upon the consent of the governed. Dulles could safely ignore the fundamentalists’ fears; Richard Niebuhr’s hit closer to home, and he knew he would have to address it sooner or later.38
Older brother Reinhold’s contribution to the debate on world order was more constructive because it was more amenable to the idea of international organization. With other realists, such as Henry Van Dusen, John C. Bennett, and Paul Tillich, Niebuhr cooperated with Dulles and the Commission and attended many of its meetings. He also shared Dulles’s concerns about Dumbarton Oaks. In keeping with his realism, Niebuhr did not believe that international organization could eliminate war; he doubted it could even eliminate the competitive nature of states. Like all realists, Christian or otherwise, Niebuhr believed the international system was inherently, irredeemably anarchic. Only a world state, an international leviathan, could bring it under control, but this was unwise and even dangerous because to be effective it would have to wield absolute, dictatorial authority. Yet Niebuhr also agreed that international organization was necessary for the maintenance of peace and that any postwar settlement would need to be based in large part upon the establishment of an international confederation. For Niebuhr, as for Dulles and the ecumenists in general, the shrinkage of the world due to modern weapons technology had made war too dangerous, and potentially apocalyptic, to continue unregulated by the international community. But the rise of American power and the nature of the world system meant that the responsibility of establishing a new world order rested with the United States. “There is a fateful significance,” Niebuhr wrote in 1943 in an article that called attention to the Dulles Commission’s efforts,
in the fact that America’s coming of age coincides with that period of world history when the paramount problem is the creation of some kind of world community. The world must find a way of avoiding complete anarchy in its international life; and America must find a way of using its great power responsibly.
The most “urgent problem” facing the world was “the establishment of a tolerable system of mutual security” that would “avoid both a tyrannical unification of the world and the alternative anarchy,” but such a system would be possible only “if each nation is ready to make commitments, commensurate with its power.” The stakes could not be higher. “If America fails to do this, the world is lost for decades to come,” Niebuhr concluded. “America must not fail.”39
Niebuhr complemented Dulles’s work by popularizing world order beyond the leadership circles of the ecumenical movement. Dulles may have had access to the corridors of power in Washington and New York, but Niebuhr was a public intellectual of international scope who wrote not only in religious periodicals but national newsmagazines. During the war, Niebuhr used Christianity and Crisis as a platform for international organization. The editors proclaimed they were “committed to the realization of a community of nations founded in justice,” and their articles continually promoted the establishment of a postwar international organization. Perhaps uniquely among major periodicals, the magazine also linked the guiding premises of ecumenism to a framework of collective security. Yet, ever the realist, Niebuhr warned against the American “tendency to oscillate between utopianism and disillusionment” that would result from a demand for “a world state or nothing.” While international organization might be necessary, its powers would have to be limited to account, to some extent, for national priorities and the inevitability of power politics. Thus Niebuhr’s overall contribution to the cause of ecumenical internationalism was to merge it with the realities of power by making it less innately pacific and more beholden to American leadership. As he argued toward the end of the war, a “global civilization requires a collective and mutual defense.” In a word, ecumenical internationalism was becoming realistic.40
AS THE WAR drew to a close, and as the Allies planned to meet in San Francisco to transform the United Nations from a wartime alliance to an organization for the maintenance of postwar peace, Dulles and the Commission hoped to play a part in framing the American approach to world order. But thanks to his ties to the Republican Party, it was unlikely that the Roosevelt administration would consult Dulles. The State Department suspected him as the source of damaging leaks during the campaign and were reluctant to entrust him with a role in San Francisco. But Roosevelt was also determined to avoid what everyone acknowledged had been one of Woodrow Wilson’s signature errors in 1919—a lack of bipartisanship—and sought Republican participation to prevent politics from sabotaging the conference. And so, also thanks to his ties to the Republican Party, especially to Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the party’s leading voice on foreign affairs, Dulles was invited to join the U.S. delegation. Vandenberg, who had drafted the GOP’s foreign policy platform for the 1944 National Convention, was “greatly impressed” by Dulles’s advice and negotiations with Hull, and found him “totally trust-worthy.” A formerly hard-core isolationist who had converted to a cautious internationalism during the war, Vandenberg wanted to be on hand to ensure that the president signed a treaty that all Americans, conservatives included, could support. The historical irony was rich, and would not have been lost on Dulles: his “Uncle Bert,” Robert Lansing, had raised precisely these concerns twenty-six years earlier.41
Though it would turn out to be a temporary departure, Dulles resigned from the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace and made his way to San Francisco. “The Conference will need Christian prayers and the guidance of Christian judgment,” he wrote Van Kirk. To further this lofty goal, he wrote a prayer to the other members of the U.S. delegation “that the movement toward world organization shall be advanced … in such a way as to invoke the moral and creative forces of mankind and not rely on repressive force.” Christianity did in fact play a role, though thanks less to Dulles and more to the great powers’ revolutionary decision to admit nongovernmental organizations to provide expert testimony and advice. This opened the door to many NGOs, though none had the Federal Council of Churches’ national and international scope or massive membership (approximately twenty-five million). The Commission was invited to attend, along with other FCC bodies. Most important was the role played by O. Frederick Nolde of the Joint Committee on Religious Liberty, a body set up by the FCC and the Foreign Missions Conference. Nolde was tasked with pushing for the inclusion of explicit human rights provisions in the UN Charter, specifically religious liberty, which, he argued, “affects all other human rights.” This was a crucial fact neglected by other NGOs. “Unless man can move and speak and act in accordance with the dictates of his conscience, limited only by the well-being of his neighbor, he has no freedom,” Nolde explained. As the source of conscience, religious liberty therefore held “a primary place among all human rights.”42
Yet things did not quite turn out the way Dulles envisioned. His ecumenical internationalism rose and fell with the war itself, soaring and then peaking with American entry in 1941 and victory in 1945. With the end of the war in Europe, around the time of his departure for San Francisco, the specter of Nazism disappeared. Ominously, a new specter was emerging that would haunt Dulles for the rest of his life and completely twist his worldview.
For Dulles, Soviet communism had always been an evil at least as great as Nazism, and much greater than fascism. Its looming presence at San Francisco, not to mention in Eastern Europe, led him to recommend modifications that diluted the powers of the United Nations. The issue at hand centered on whether the members of the UN legally had the right to withdraw from the organization—a secessionist clause. Normally, Dulles would have summarily dismissed the very concept of withdrawal; as secession had once threatened the Union, it would just as surely undermine the UN. But now, faced with what seemed to be Stalin’s betrayals of promises made at the Yalta Conference to respect Polish independence after the war, Dulles told Vandenberg that the United States “must have a withdrawal clause.” Dulles had previously been unconvinced, but “he has now come to the conclusion that it must be made specific. We dealt in blunt, plain realism,” Vandenberg confided to his diary that night. “Since coming to Frisco, our relations with Russia have worsened all over the world (as well as here). Russian pledges at Yalta are being everywhere defied. Yet we are proposing to enter a Peace Partnership with her based upon mutual faith—and she is getting a ‘veto’ … upon our freedom of action all round the globe to a substantial degree.” Alarmed by the prospect of American interests being tethered to a Soviet-driven agenda at the UN, Dulles drafted a withdrawal clause.43
This must have been a painful moment for Dulles, who had worked tirelessly for an organization like the United Nations for the past five years. Now, at what should have been his moment of triumph, he was instead determined to shorten its reach. “Dulles said he has been reluctantly driven to the conclusion,” Vandenberg wrote, “that America cannot enter such an arrangement without a definite right of withdrawal because we cannot foresee the future.” But Dulles had foreseen the future: during the war, he prophesied a world flourishing in a just and durable peace; now, he foresaw a new apocalypse if atheistic, materialistic, autocratic, militaristic communism was not stopped. America—Dulles—had made the mistake of appeasing evil once. It must not do so again.44
Another specter appeared alongside the Soviets, though, and it too led Dulles to distort his commitment to one world: the Democrats. As his most perceptive biographer has shown, Dulles’s work with Dewey awakened within him a previously dormant instinct for political partisanship. His closeness to Dewey and Vandenberg led most political observers to assume that Dulles would become the next secretary of state if the GOP captured the White House in 1944 or 1948. And while Dulles may have been a devoted internationalist, not everyone in the Republican Party was. Even those who had recently converted to the cause, like Vandenberg, still retained the conservative impulse to protect American sovereignty even as it moved to become a full member of the global community. At San Francisco, Dulles was not merely a member of the U.S. delegation—he was a member of Vandenberg’s Republican cohort, there to advise the senator and other Republicans on how best to build the UN without violating American autonomy or sovereignty.45
Initially, Dulles tried to stick to his internationalist principles, but each time they ran up against the hard realities of international and domestic politics. For example, he defended regional security arrangements, such as the Monroe Doctrine and the Inter-American System, even though they undermined the universalism that should have provided the UN’s very foundation. He also said that while he favored the unlimited “compulsory jurisdiction” of the World Court in theory and was confident that international law would evolve to a point where all cases would automatically come before the World Court, he opposed it in practice and felt it should not be codified in the UN Charter.46
More startling were his efforts to remove matters of purely “domestic jurisdiction” from the UN mandate, which would allow countries to violate human rights domestically so long as the consequences did not spill beyond their borders. In 1944, as head of the Commission, he had vigorously opposed “domestic jurisdiction,” but in 1945, as a member of the GOP, he supported it. Interestingly, in one of his first meetings with the U.S. delegation in San Francisco, Dulles “objected” to removing domestic jurisdiction because it was “a contradiction in terms to say that a matter which threatened the peace of the world was solely a matter of ‘domestic jurisdiction.’ How could that be?” Vandenberg coolly explained that “without it there would be no possibility of getting the Charter approved by the United States Senate.” From then on, Dulles was a staunch supporter of domestic jurisdiction. And yet its recognition would not only ensure the UN Charter’s passage by an otherwise skeptical U.S. Senate, it would also have the unfortunate effect of protecting the Jim Crow South from international law and American industry from international labor standards, though these were not Dulles’s motives. Perhaps it was pure politics; perhaps it was the fear of communism; or perhaps it was the ghost of Robert Lansing reminding his nephew that Wilson had failed by a refusal to compromise. But for a man who had campaigned for international organization first and foremost upon the belief that national sovereignty was the main cause of international conflict and war, it was a shocking defection from principle.47
Nonetheless, despite such compromises, the assembled delegates in San Francisco established the United Nations, and with it the political framework for a world community that was based on consensus and voluntary membership rather than imperial coercion. It was a momentous occasion. “If it were not for the churches of this country,” Dulles reflected with evident pride in 1947, “there probably would not be a United Nations today.” This extravagant claim obviously goes too far, but Dulles’s pride was not entirely without justification. The publicity generated by the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace was an invaluable tool for educating both the public and elites about world order. The various FCC conferences, books, sermons, and pamphlets had spread the message to an audience wider than any other. Church and missionary links between the United States and the rest of the world ensured a symmetry of views that transcended national borders. Most important was the effect on the American people, whose support was crucial and who had absorbed the message of ecumenical internationalism. A 1941 Gallup poll listed “international federation” and “reform based on toleration and Christian principles” as the two most popular solutions to the problem of war. Thanks in large part to the FCC, by April 1945 some polls recorded 90 percent approval ratings for the establishment of a permanent United Nations. The difference between 1945 and 1919 was dramatic, and much of it had to do with the organizational effort of the churches. Rather than presenting arms or calling for peace at any price, they prepared the way for a new world order. The triumph of “anti-isolationist opinion” in America, observed the British Embassy, was due to the efforts of two groups of people: congressional internationalists, especially in the Senate; and “Dulles’s influential conference of various churchmen’s and Wilsonian organizations, which led to defeat of the extreme anti-imperialist and near-isolationist positions of the Christian Century group.”48
The Commission on a Just and Durable Peace attended the San Francisco Conference and, like other NGOs, was invited to submit proposals. It, along with Nolde’s Joint Committee on Religious Liberty, proposed nine items for inclusion into the UN Charter, of which four—a statement of moral aims; the codification of international law; a commitment to decolonization through trusteeship; and a declaration of fundamental human rights—were accepted. The Commission was not the only body to propose such measures, of course, but it was among the most adept. Rarely had religious lobbying been so effective, or so consequential.49