YALTA CONFERENCE, 1945. During World War II, the leaders of the “big three”—the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met at Yalta in the Crimea from 3 to 14 February 1945 to coordinate the Allied war effort and prepare for the postwar world. With the Red Army 40 miles from Berlin, the principal issue was the future of Germany, and it was agreed that the Allies would require unconditional surrender, the postwar occupation of Germany by all three plus France, the demilitarization and de-Nazification of Germany, the trial of wartime leaders and war criminals, and a program of reparations, largely to be paid to the USSR. Various territorial concessions were made to the Soviet Union in Asia, including the return of southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands and the leasing of Port Arthur as a Soviet naval base. Stalin agreed that the USSR would enter the war against Japan within three months of the defeat of Germany.
The Soviet Union was also granted much of eastern Poland as its territory, and Poland was compensated by being given German lands in the west. In return, Stalin accepted the inclusion of a “Declaration on Liberated Europe” that promised “free and unfettered” elections with democratic institutions to be established in Eastern Europe and a broadening of the Provisional Polish Government that had been established by the Soviet forces. No definition of these terms was agreed upon nor was there precise agreement on the amount of reparations to be paid by Germany. These issues were the focus of postwar disagreements and paved the way for the Cold War. However, the participants at Yalta did agree on tentative plans for a United Nations and a Security Council consisting of the United States, Great Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union plus six elected nations on a rotating basis.
YOUNG, OWEN D. (1874–1962). A graduate of Boston Law School and a corporation lawyer, Owen Young joined General Electric (GE) as general counsel and vice president in 1913. He settled strikes in several GE plants during World War I, and in 1919 he served on the Second Industrial Conference. In 1921, he chaired the Subcommittee on Business Cycles and Unemployment of President Warren Harding’s Unemployment Conference. From 1925 to 1928, Young chaired the International Chamber of Commerce.
In 1919, GE joined with Westinghouse, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), and Western Electric to form a company to prevent the British Marconi Company from monopolizing long-distance radio communication. The result was the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which with Young as chairman until 1929, pooled U.S. radio technology and equipment. Young entered into agreements with foreign companies dividing the world into radio zones to facilitate communication. Under his leadership, RCA became the largest radio company in the world. In 1926, Young also helped to establish the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and in 1928 the movie chain Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO).
In 1922, Young became chair of the board of GE with Gerard Swope as president. The two men were associated with the introduction of programs of “welfare capitalism,” which did much to influence labor relations during the 1920s.
Young was a representative to the Reparations Conference in 1924 and was instrumental in securing the acceptance of the Dawes Plan, and in 1929 he chaired the meetings where the Young Plan was agreed upon as a way to scale down German reparations payments. President Herbert Hoover appointed Young to the President’s Committee on Recent Economic Changes in 1929 and as chair of the Committee on Mobilization of Relief Resources of the President’s Unemployment Relief Commission in 1931. He chaired the American Youth Commission from 1936 to 1942 and was a member of the New York Regional Committee of the War Manpower Commission in 1942. Having retired from GE in 1939, Young returned as acting chair to supervise the manufacture of war orders in 1942. He finally retired in 1944 but after the war served on President Harry S. Truman’s Advisory Committee on Foreign Aid in 1947, helping pave the way for the Marshall Plan. Young also chaired the New York Commission on the Need for a State University in 1946. He retired to concentrate on dairy farming.
YOUNGSTOWN SHEET & TUBE CO. V. SAWYER (343 U.S. 579 1952). In Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer on 2 June 1952, the Supreme Court found that President Harry S. Truman had acted unconstitutionally when he ordered the seizure of steel mills in an industrial dispute and, although such powers were inherent within the authority given the executive, the action had not been expressly approved by Congress. The court upheld an earlier ruling in the U.S. District Court.