CHAPTER 3
In 1942, American ecumenical Protestants launched the World Order movement. When this drive for a world government and human rights ended in 1946, it had become the largest and most sophisticated Protestant political mobilization since Prohibition. The World Order movement was led by future secretary of state John Foster Dulles, who ensured that millions of Americans were reached through rallies, parades, sermons, small discussion groups, school curricula, letter-writing campaigns, pamphlets, and books. The World Order movement would play an important role in shaping the postwar world, including the creation of the United Nations.1
But the popularity of this movement hid ongoing disagreements about what the shape of the postwar world should be.2 While Dulles concentrated on international affairs, others were refocusing ecumenical Protestants’ attention on domestic issues of long-standing concern, especially the fight against racism and poverty. Women’s groups took a leading role in pushing ecumenical Protestants toward a more progressive political stance. Shut out of key positions of power in international affairs, women like Methodist activist Thelma Stevens were nonetheless empowered by the World Order movement to push an anti-racist and pro–New Deal agenda. The World Order movement reflected the broad social vision of wartime ecumenical Protestantism and it would transform domestic politics just as it had transformed international affairs.
As this chapter shows, Dulles’s high-level diplomatic wrangling and Stevens’s grassroots mobilization against racism and poverty became deeply intertwined. Historians have recognized the outsized role of Dulles in the plans for the United Nations. By contrast, this chapter shows that the United Nations also created enthusiasm for domestic reforms. And the domestic mobilization likewise shaped the ecumenical Protestant vision of international affairs during World War II, as demands for racial justice and economic reform were incorporated into the postwar planning process under the rubric of human rights.3
Human rights, which ecumenical Protestants helped articulate and popularize during the 1940s, reflected a dual desire for a peaceful world order and for domestic reforms. Christian human rights came out of discussions of the postwar settlement and were strongly influenced by the vibrant debates of the World Order movement. Dulles created a diplomatic climate in which human rights made sense, and his allies justified human rights by appealing to the theology of personalism and the importance of religious liberty. At the same time, activists like Stevens insisted that human rights stood in opposition to racism and economic injustice. Evocations of human rights combined UN-centered visions of peaceful postwar international relations and demands for justice in the United States. By 1945, the international and local spheres of activity merged together under the rubric of human rights. In other words, without ever meeting one another, Dulles the diplomat and Stevens the activist jointly shaped the meaning of human rights, international affairs, and domestic politics.4
The Decline of the Anglo-American Alliance
John Foster Dulles understood in 1942 that his vision for a postwar world government would be exceedingly difficult to implement unless the pressure for it was international. It was hard enough to get the United States to renounce isolationism; it would be impossible to get the great powers of the world to set aside their concerns about sovereignty without an international effort by Protestants to pressure their own governments. And no two governments would be more important to establishing the postwar peace than the United States and Great Britain.
And yet Protestant leaders from the two countries had already butted heads over postwar plans. In the fall of 1941, Henry Pitney Van Dusen met with a group of British Protestants at Oxford. Van Dusen used the Dulles Commission to coordinate American policy with the British, and he worked with his relative-by-marriage William Paton to write what he hoped would be a Protestant version of the Atlantic Charter. But disagreements, even between family members, quickly appeared. Paton believed that by coordinating the policy of the two nations the United States would more fully support the British war effort and that an Anglo-American alliance would dominate the postwar peace.5 For Van Dusen, on the other hand, the creation of the postwar world needed to be a multilateral affair. He stressed to his British colleagues that China must have a big role after World War II. American ecumenical Protestants’ commitment to an inclusive, democratic postwar peace was moving them away from some of their most stalwart allies.
In March 1942, Dulles invited British representatives to make the perilous journey across the Atlantic for face-to-face meetings in Princeton, New Jersey. Like American Protestant denominations, the British Anglican Church had recently moved leftward in 1941, with William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury, calling for the creation of a welfare state. Temple did not travel to Princeton himself in 1942, but many of his close associates did, including Paton. Dulles hoped that this meeting would produce an agreement on postwar peace plans on the model of the recently concluded Delaware conference.6
Dulles became frustrated when he found that Paton was more interested in strengthening the Anglo-American war effort than in planning for a postwar settlement. To the delegates from shell-shocked Britain, the end of the war seemed like a faraway dream. And Paton was only following the lead of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who steadfastly avoided any talk of the postwar peace when victory was not yet assured and when the British were in a weak bargaining position. The Atlantic Charter, Paton pointed out, said nothing about a postwar association of nations. Paton called for a “world organisation, with Anglo-American leadership at its heart,” echoing the views expressed by both Roosevelt and Churchill early in the war.7
Dulles rejected the idea of an Anglo-American alliance, especially one that would defend the British Empire. Instead, he suggested a middle ground: rather than an Anglo-American alliance or, as demanded at Delaware, that all nations be included in the new international organization, he proposed that the group of nations that composed the wartime alliance, popularly known as the “United Nations,” be the basis for the eventual creation of an international organization.8
Dulles’s compromise was enough to gain British cooperation. British ecumenist Kenneth Grubb and historian Arnold Toynbee agreed with Dulles that a world government could not be created immediately but would have to grow organically out of the close cooperation of the United Nations, which included the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China.9 For a fleeting moment, Dulles found a way to maintain Anglo-American cooperation. But when word got back to Britain about the Princeton meeting, key religious figures were repelled by what they viewed as American naivete about international affairs.10
In July 1942, just a few months after the Princeton meeting, Dulles traveled to Britain with his colleague Walter W. Van Kirk to promote Anglo-American cooperation. Van Kirk, a Methodist and a former pacifist, had been the Federal Council of Churches’ most prominent spokesperson on international affairs, whose popular books and weekly radio program kept millions of Americans up to date on religion and foreign affairs.11 In Oxford, Van Kirk was direct in his criticism of British plans, and of Dulles’s appeasement. Van Kirk stuck to the official position of the Federal Council that “there should not be alliances or coalitions between any two or three countries, but some scheme which would take in the whole world; ‘all nations,’ not just the United Nations.” Likewise, Van Kirk pulled no punches about colonialism. Earlier, Paton had conveyed the “feeling on the part of finest Christian opinion [that] what the British Empire has been at its best should be reflected in some international system.”12 But Van Kirk shot back, suggesting “that the whole area of colonial administration might hereafter assume an international character.”13
Dulles tried to reconcile the conflicting views of American and British religious and political leaders. He outlined his evolving vision to the British churchmen and in his meetings “with most members of the British Government” during his brief visit. He argued that “there is a great opportunity in the world today to raise the moral, material and spiritual standards of life in the whole world.” The productive capacity employed for wartime purposes, Dulles believed, cleared the way for unprecedented relief work in the postwar world. He “felt sure that in order to raise the level of life in the world there would have to be such a tremendous effort made that the productive capacity of everyone could be used to the full.” Dulles “pointed out the necessity to increase the population of the world by better living conditions, education, and so on, and said that the increased numbers would provide markets for goods of every kind.”14 Better government planning after the war would ensure global prosperity.
Dulles believed that Christianity would play a central role in inspiring international cooperation after World War II ended. “In times past there had been slogans used which had inspired people—American Destiny, the White Man’s Burden, and so on, and they stood for something and gripped the imagination,” he told the Bishop of Canterbury and other listeners. Christianity calling for “a world-wide view of reconstruction and aiming at the raising of moral and cultural and spiritual standards, as well as material standards, in every country of the world” would be the next great slogan. For Dulles this global reconstruction—“something like a ‘new deal’ for the world”—would appeal to Americans by giving them a sense of purpose. It would also ensure continued cooperation of the Allies into the postwar period by creating a common mission that would benefit all nations involved. Britain and America were cooperating “because there was a vast practical task to be performed,” Dulles believed. “But the test would come when the war was over, and it would be necessary to envisage beforehand the great concrete tasks of reconstructure [sic] so that the inspiration to cooperate would continue to be felt.”15
Anglo-American tensions continued into the following year, 1943, when the Dulles Commission issued a document called the “Six Pillars of Peace.” The statement condensed the Federal Council’s earlier thirteen points and formed part of Dulles’s search for simple, captivating slogans to entice Americans to embrace internationalism. Dulles presented the Six Pillars on March 18, 1943, at a press conference while he stood next to the aging philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, who had opposed the League of Nations in the aftermath of World War I. Rockefeller dramatized his conversion to internationalism and implored the religious, educational, financial, and labor leaders gathered at the event not to repeat the same mistakes: “God forbid that we should ever follow that road again!”16
LIST 1: The Six Pillars of Peace
In 1943 the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace of the Federal Council of Churches (known popularly as the “Dulles Commission”) issued the “Six Pillars of Peace” document. It listed the following six principles to guide the postwar peace settlement.
I.Political collaboration between the United Nations and ultimately all nations.
II.Collaboration on economic and financial matters of world-wide import.
III.Adaptation of the world’s treaty structure to changing conditions.
IV.Assurance, through international organization, of ultimate autonomy for subject peoples.
V.Control of armaments.
VI. Establishment of the principle of the rights of peoples everywhere to intellectual and religious liberty.
The Dulles Commission believed that its Six Pillars of Peace were essential to eliminating the conditions that had created World War II. The first pillar called for the continued collaboration of the United Nations into the postwar period under a “political framework” that would include “in due course … neutral and enemy nations.”17 Pillars 2 through 5 dealt directly with the perceived failures of the League of Nations and the causes of World War II. The second pillar called for international regulation of economic and financial policy. The third, responding to the inflexible system of treaties under the League of Nations, called for a regular reexamination of treaties. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the owner and publisher of the New York Times, explained the importance of this pillar. The “fate of the League of Nations indicates that it might be wise not only to provide machinery for changing the peace structure, but also to make it mandatory that all nations reconsider the treaties at definite intervals,” he wrote soon after the Six Pillars had been issued.18 The fourth and fifth pillars called for autonomy for all subject peoples and for the control of armaments. The final pillar called for religious and intellectual freedom, which reflected the widespread belief that moral principles would be at the heart of any successful postwar peace. Protecting religious freedom was central to ensuring all other rights.19
To Dulles, the Six Pillars were a condensation of ideas ecumenical Protestants had endorsed, but critics charged that he was veering away from the consensus reached at the 1942 Delaware conference. The first pillar, in particular, caused a dustup. Charles F. Boss, a member of the Dulles Commission and the executive secretary of the influential Methodist Commission on World Peace, complained that it seemed to contradict the Federal Council’s position that all nations must be included in the initial formation of a world government.20 Boss passed along to Van Kirk a note of protest from a meeting of Colorado Methodists, who were upset over the abandonment of the “all-inclusiveness” message at Delaware. The letter explained that in 1942 a “sizable minority” led by Crozer Theological Seminary president James Franklin “attempted to substitute ‘The United Nations’ for ‘all nations.’ The amendment was decisively defeated.”21 Dulles had embraced the wartime alliance, known as the “United Nations,” as the basis of the new world government in his talks with the British in 1942, and this new idea made its way into the Six Pillars. Dulles was subtly reshaping the ecumenical Protestant agenda on international affairs.
As early as 1943, resentment of Dulles’s leadership was building, but it tended to remain in private correspondence. With the war raging, American isolationism still a threat, and the successful development of a broad Protestant agreement on the need for an international government, these disagreements remained in the background for the time being.
Dulles’s position may have annoyed some Methodists, but it won the approval of the Roosevelt administration. Dulles brought the Six Pillars to the attention of Roosevelt during several face-to-face meetings in 1943. The president was understandably skeptical of Dulles, who was widely believed to be the Republican secretary-of-state-in-waiting. Yet, seven months after the Six Pillars had been published, the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and a reluctant Great Britain announced in the “Moscow Declaration” that they, the “United Nations,” would continue their alliance after the war ended. These countries pledged for the first time to create a permanent international organization. It was a victory for Dulles.22
While Dulles found ways to cooperate with the Roosevelt administration, he could not get British ecumenists to join the Americans in their quest for a world government. At the press event for the Six Pillars in March 1943, the Harvard philosophy professor and human rights theorist William Ernest Hocking had told the audience he thought coordinating policy with the British should have a high priority. Hocking called on American and British groups to “join hands.” But British ecumenists could not come to an agreement with their American counterparts.23 Both groups had wanted to issue a united declaration on the postwar settlement, but a separate British statement in June 1943 announced, “It will not be possible to deal with the many and vast problems affecting the world through a single international organisation for world government.”24 The British leaders urged avoiding any sort of formal structure, which Van Dusen attributed to the British preference for “gradualism.”25 It was a disappointing moment for the Dulles Commission, which suddenly refocused its efforts away from transatlantic cooperation and toward America’s role in the postwar world. Dulles was concluding that American leadership needed to be at the heart of postwar international relations.
The Crusade for World Order
Shortly after Dulles issued the Six Pillars in March 1943, the Federal Council of Churches organized a massive publicity campaign designed to mobilize popular support on behalf of a world government.26 Organizers called the campaign the “Christian Mission on World Order,” which they launched at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine in October 1943 before taking the program on the road.27 Ecumenical leaders, senators, members of Congress, State Department officials, and business leaders composed a “flying squadron” of speakers who held large rallies in 102 cities across the country. Senators Joseph H. Ball (R-MN) and Harold Burton (R-OH), and Representatives Walter Judd (R-MN) and Jerry Voorhis (D-CA) were among those traveling from town to town urging the United States not to repeat the mistakes of the past and to call upon President Roosevelt and the Senate to embrace a new international organization. Senator Ball called these rallies “the greatest crusade since Jesus sent his twelve disciples out to preach the brotherhood of man.”28
As the dignitaries visited cities across the country in late 1943, ecumenical leaders worked to organize long-term programs in those cities. In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, for example, churches organized a series of events that continued for half a year after the November 4, 1943, visit by the flying squadron. Local church officials gave sermons and made speeches in December, created a steering committee on international affairs in January 1944, and organized education programs during February and March, rallies and conferences in April, and a final mass meeting in May 1944.29 In a city of about sixty thousand residents, Johnstown churches attracted nearly four thousand participants.30
As Walter Van Kirk explained, “The Mission did not advocate the use of the pulpit for political agitation. But it did highlight the pressing need of translating Christian principles on world order into political conduct.”31 The flying squadron encouraged Protestants at the grass roots to put pressure on politicians to create a world organization. Beginning in 1943 many local councils of churches established international affairs committees to coordinate Protestant political agitation. Noting these developments, the British Embassy in Washington, DC, reported back to London that the “influence of the crusade begun by the Protestant churches, inspired by John Foster Dulles … is not to be underestimated.”32
The Federal Council’s “mission” inspired denominations to launch their own “crusades” for world government. The Northern Baptists’ “World Order Crusade” began in early 1944 and culminated on May 7, which the denomination designated “World Order Crusade Sunday.” On that day, the denomination requested that pastors of all of their 5,500 churches ask churchgoers “to write their Senators, the Secretary of State, and the President expressing their conviction as Christian citizens ‘that their nation should join with all other nations who are willing, in some broad form of world organization.’ ”33
The Congregationalists also launched their own campaign for world order in early 1944. On May 21 Congregationalists across the country were asked to sign the “World Order Compact.” Nearly 1,100 Congregational churches participated in the effort, which was modeled on the “Mayflower Compact” of their denominational ancestors.34 The compacts were delivered to the denominational meeting in the summer of 1944, where Congressman Walter Judd, a Congregationalist, spoke in support of an international organization.35 The Congregationalists were smaller than the Northern Baptists, with about one million members compared with the Baptists’ one and a half million. But among their members were six senators, three of whom sat on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.36
Denominations that were usually reticent to take a stand on political issues joined the World Order movement as well. In 1944, the United Lutherans implemented a two-month study program, several meetings and study conferences, and four summer schools.37 The more conservative Southern Presbyterians’ program included one-day study conferences in sixty communities, study groups that met for longer periods, and a “Post-Easter Period of Commitment and Action,” which emphasized political involvement.38 Southern Baptists, who kept their distance from the ecumenical and theologically liberal Federal Council, endorsed a six-point program in 1944 remarkably similar to the Six Pillars of Peace. These six points included a world where all racial minorities were free to “exercise their God given freedom,” a world organization with the power to issue economic sanctions and take police action, an end to trade barriers, and freedom of religion.39
None of these efforts, however, matched the vigor or scope of the Methodist “Crusade for World Order,” which was conceived and organized by Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam. As the Atlanta Constitution explained, “The idea originated with him, was given its initial impetus by him, was largely planned by him, and more than by any other single individual, was implemented by him.”40 Oxnam overcame hesitation among Methodists by assuring them that this would not be a political movement. Convinced, the Council of Bishops poured enormous resources into the effort. Of the eight million members of the United Methodist Church, the largest denomination in the country, more than 200,000 churchgoers turned out to hear the crusade’s speakers. The people were given postcards and asked to write to “men in the armed forces, telling them that the people at home stand for a new world order, that religion must dominate the peace table.” Between January 30 and February 6, 1943, the Methodist leadership sent teams of two to each of the 42,000 Methodist churches in the country to discuss with churchgoers the need to write “at least once a month” to government and military officials about the need for a just and durable peace. These churchgoers were instructed not to mention the crusade or the Methodist Church but to express themselves as “Christian citizens.” The vast majority of these letters were “penciled postcards and handwritten letters,” which caught the attention of Congress. According to Robert Divine, during the crusade, “Washington received one of the largest outpourings of mail in history.”41
Methodist churches were awash in reading materials. The denomination distributed two million copies of the leaflet “Your Part,” 600,000 leaflets on “Christian Citizens’ Opinion on World Order,” and 75,000 copies of The Primer of Action. These materials urged churchgoers to get in touch with their political leaders and gave detailed instructions about whom to contact and how to address members of Congress, senators, and the president. These pamphlets were cultivating a foreign policy public at the moment when public opinion was taking on a more visible role in American politics.42
In asking churchgoers to downplay their religious affiliations and instead speak in the broad language of Christian citizenship, ecumenical leaders were expressing confidence in “Christian republicanism,” which is the idea that Christianity was the key to developing a virtuous citizenry required for a democracy to thrive. They believed that Christian values undergirded democratic governance, but that those values could be expressed in civic, nonsectarian terms. In this way ecumenical Protestants could express ownership of American politics, while also creating room for other groups to take part.43
The Methodist crusade was a vast political mobilization that reached millions of Americans. The Methodist Woman, which had a circulation of 1.3 million, devoted two issues of its magazine to the crusade. The Upper Room, with a circulation of two million (including 200,000 GIs) devoted an issue to it. The curriculum of church schools was revised for 80,000 adult classes and 40,000 youth classes, with a total of nearly 3.5 million individuals participating in discussions of world order.44 International affairs permeated nearly all aspects of Methodist life in the United States during the years 1943 and 1944.
“Right Here in the United States of America Are to Be Found Many Obstacles to World Peace”
The political mobilization for a world government created a groundswell of support for domestic reforms and empowered activists to focus attention on racism and poverty. Dulles and Oxnam inspired the World Order movement, but the day-to-day operation was handed over to “social action” groups that sought to advance their own agendas by linking their domestic concerns to the cause of a stable international order. For example, the Northern Baptists’ “World Order Crusade” was organized by their Council on Christian Social Progress, and Congregationalist efforts were coordinated by their activist Committee for Social Action. These groups had been founded in the Progressive Era or during the New Deal as small, activist wings of their denominations, whose long-standing agendas included the expansion of New Deal programs, support for labor unions, and federal anti-lynching legislation. Suddenly, during the World Order movement these left-leaning groups were propelled to the center of religious life.
Methodist women’s groups were among those that sought to mobilize the internationalist rhetoric on behalf of their own long-standing social and political concerns. The war had created new circumstances that made drastic changes possible, they believed. Foreign policy expert Vera Micheles Dean, in an essay widely circulated among women’s groups, called World War II “revolutionary in character” for its introduction of economic planning in the United States. “When the war is over, we may accept similar if less drastic controls” of the economy, she suggested. Methodist activist Thelma Stevens argued that “the war has brought together various races, cultures, and religions and welded the individual representatives into a group with common experiences and purposes. The church must stretch its muscles and be strong enough to capitalize on these enriching experiences.”45 For Methodist women, a new world order could only come about if they were successful in keeping alive the wartime spirit of cooperation and sacrifice after hostilities ceased.
Figure 5. During World War II, activist Thelma Stevens mobilized an organization of two million Methodist women to lobby for a world government, while also emphasizing the need to diminish racism and poverty in the United States. Image courtesy of the General Commission on Archives and History of the U.M.C., Madison, New Jersey.
Stevens seized upon the human rights rhetoric of the World Order movement and used it to publicize her long-standing anti-racist agenda. Like many other women, including Jane Addams and Lillian Smith, Stevens was drawn to Christian social welfare institutions because they offered one of the few life paths that allowed women to escape the demands of heterosexual marriage and domesticity. Stevens was never married. Male Protestant leaders shunned independent women and in the 1940s moved to exert greater control over women’s groups. But denominations, ecumenical groups, and missionary organizations relied on the labor of women like Stevens. And because such women worried about inviting scrutiny of their personal lives, they were both made invisible and made themselves invisible. Unlike most of the individuals mentioned in this chapter, Stevens has no archive.46
During the Great Depression Stevens had worked hard to publicize violence against African Americans and to ensure that economic aid reached poor Black people. As the director of the Methodist group representing two million women in the 1940s, Stevens was in charge of the many rallies and meetings designed to promote a world government.47 Stevens was determined to use her new resources to focus attention on Jim Crow, an issue she believed the Dulles Commission ignored. And her anti-racism was part of a broader vision of justice. The Department of Christian Social Relations, which she led, lobbied the US government during World War II to stop the conscription of women and postwar compulsory military training, and also lobbied in support of repealing the Chinese Exclusion Act, repealing the poll tax, extending Social Security to domestic and agricultural workers, passing federal anti-lynching legislation, and ensuring racially blind distribution of government services.48 Newly empowered by the World Order movement, Stevens set out to popularize her progressive agenda.
Just months after the 1942 Delaware conference, Stevens gathered women together to study the recommendations of the Dulles Commission.49 By the summer of 1943, she had put together a course of action that urged participants to study issues such as postwar peace, how to overcome racism, and how to help relocate Japanese-Americans out of internment camps. She insisted that “every course should lead to some specific action.”50
Stevens organized a study course for the years 1943–44 called “The Church and America’s Peoples.” “Last year, when some of us studied Planning for Peace,” an organizer wrote, “we discovered that right here in the United States of America are to be found many obstacles to world peace.” Linking world events to local practices, she explained that “we hope to discover ways by which the church may help to ease tensions here in the United States and make the probability of a just and enduring peace certain.”51 Stevens had Methodist women read Louis Adamic’s From Many Lands and Carey McWilliams’s Brothers Under the Skin, both of which encouraged their readers to think of America as a multicultural nation.52
Stevens shared the widespread belief that prejudice was an affliction that could be combatted with the right combination of empathy and social engineering. Her study groups began with all participants identifying their ethnic and racial roots and economic backgrounds. They talked about the difficulties their ancestors faced and addressed the problem of “intolerance” in the United States. Later meetings included a “dramatic presentation” of the successive waves of immigrants to the United States, with women dressing in costumes and imagining the perilous journey to America their ancestors took. The group would then study the facts and figures of America’s demographic diversity and survey their local community to find out which groups lived there and what challenges they faced. Local participants were encouraged to research legislation that affected nonwhites and, most importantly, to get in touch with minority groups living in the area to start joint projects.53
In 1943 Methodist women also participated in the “World Community Day” organized by the United Council of Church Women. The ecumenical group worked with denominations to appoint over a thousand local chairpersons who arranged gatherings that the United Council hoped would involve a broad cross section of the ten million women it represented.54 The event fell on November 11, then known as “Armistice Day,” and was a self-conscious attempt at diverting the holiday from a patriotic celebration of America’s war effort to a day dedicated to transcending nationalism in favor of global cooperation. Although less popular than the many civic and veteran-sponsored events on Armistice Day, the women’s World Community Day saw the participation of nearly 100,000 women in more than 1,300 locations across the country.
The women who participated in the World Community Day shared an overwhelming desire for global cooperation and a self-sacrificial economic policy in the postwar years. Each local group voted on two questions: Are you willing to tell your representatives in government to pass legislation authorizing the United States to join a world organization? Are you willing to continue rationing into the postwar period in order to help other nations recover from the war?55 Overwhelmingly, the participants said “yes” to both questions, by a margin of 58 to 1 and 41 to 1, respectively.56 The results were publicized and sent to every legislator in the House and Senate.
Stevens urged Methodist women participating in World Community Day to organize in groups without boundaries of race or religion. “This means Jews and Catholics, Negroes, Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese, or any other group living in the community” should be invited to take part. She also encouraged Methodist women to embrace political action. She told Methodist women to look at “pending legislation” to see what could be done to influence Congress: “What about the Oriental Exclusion? The Anti-Poll Tax Bill? The Federal Aid to Education Bill? The Austin-Wadsworth Bill for total conscription of manpower?”57
In 1944 Methodist women became more interested in human rights. The language of rights permeated the pages of the magazine the Methodist Woman. Stevens promoted the “nine freedoms” enumerated by the National Resource Planning Board during the year the organization was disbanded by Congress. The nine freedoms included the right to fair pay, the right to “security, with freedom from fear of old age, want, dependency, sickness, unemployment, and accident,” equality before the law, the right to rest and recreation, and the right to education.58 The increased attention to “rights” came at a moment when Methodist women became concerned about economic reconversion to a peacetime economy and wanted to make sure Americans would be guaranteed full employment and adequate housing.59
By 1944 Stevens’s economic views were in line with the most radical aspects of the New Deal. Stevens called for a “new world economy” based on the principles of the Four Freedoms and emphasized “Freedom from Want.”60 A study conference led by Stevens declared that the global economy ought to distribute goods to those who need them in order to decrease the economic competition that was widely believed to be the cause of World War II. Her vision fell just short of a welfare state but endorsed “planning on a national scale with full participation of government, labor, agriculture, and management.” She insisted that “democracy must be economic as well as political” and that “labor should be given an increasing share of responsibility for management of the plant.”61 Only such a system could limit economic competition and avert future wars.
Stevens differed from many of her male colleagues in her advocacy of women’s integration into the workforce.62 Both married and unmarried women had the right “to work in any occupation” and to receive “equal pay for equal work.” She urged the extension of state minimum-wage laws to service industries, where women often labored, and for more protective legislation for women “along such lines as hours, weight lifting, etc.” In order to accommodate women with children in the economy, Methodist women’s leaders called for maternity leave “guaranteed by legislation” and nurseries and day care centers in factories, along with counseling and education on effective parenthood, in order to ensure the integrity of the family unit. To get this done, they suggested that more women needed to be on planning boards and in charge of labor unions.63 These propositions were meant to integrate women into the workforce while accommodating their widely perceived role as the family’s caretaker. Viewed as “women’s issues” by Stevens’s male peers, these demands were largely ignored by the Federal Council, which did not make equality for women a priority at mid-century.64
By 1945 Stevens’s economic proposals were subsumed into a more general discussion of demobilization, the creation of the United Nations, and the need to reconstruct Europe and Asia. When the United Nations Organization was being debated in the spring of 1945, Methodist women rallied in support.65 At this time, the focus of Methodist women’s groups was on the need for America to join some sort of world organization, as it had been in 1942. In the interceding years, however, the World Order movement encouraged Protestant women to see world peace as intertwined with racial and economic justice. And Methodist women were encouraged to engage politically in support of their vision of social justice. Stevens used the resources of the World Order movement and the wartime enthusiasm for globalism to propose big changes for the United States at home.
The Creation of the Protestant Lobby
The modern form of Protestant lobbying was born during the World Order movement. At a time of widespread enthusiasm for the United Nations, there was little objection to using bureaucratic techniques and institutions to express religious principles in national and international politics. Ecumenical leaders wanted to keep watch over legislation affecting the postwar peace process because they believed that Washington politicians might repeat the mistakes of World War I, when the Senate rejected the League of Nations treaty. Lobbying offices began popping up on and around Capitol Hill in the 1940s. The Congregationalists, for example, opened theirs in 1944 despite long-standing opposition by some of their members to the denomination’s involvement in politics. The Federal Council’s lobbying office opened in 1945, just in time for the peace settlement. By the end of the decade, twenty offices opened in Washington, DC, which harnessed the power of the letter-writing campaigns Oxnam and Stevens had organized.66
The first Protestant lobbying offices were often no more than a room in a larger building, with a single person in charge of most of the work. The Methodists, Northern Presbyterians, Quakers, and Northern Baptists crowded together in a building on 11th Street. The Methodist activists who created the lobbying group avoided the Methodist House, one of the few religious lobbies to predate the 1940s. The Methodist House, an impressive building that sits across the street from the Supreme Court, was founded by prohibitionists and continued to be controlled by them in the 1940s. Oxnam and other Methodist activists had abandoned the issue and avoided this embarrassing constituency. Although the Methodists set up shop in smaller quarters and were further away from the Capitol, they pursued a more progressive agenda.
These early lobbies were improvised efforts in the 1940s, but they drew on the powerful connections religious groups had established with politicians in previous years. For the Congregationalists, Thomas Keehn and an advisory council made up of local leaders in Washington, DC, met regularly to discuss the latest legislation. Keehn was an ordained minister with one master’s degree in economics from Columbia University and another in social ethics from nearby Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Later in his career he would work with secular development agencies in India, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In the 1940s, however, he remained committed to religious work. Although his resources were limited at first, Keehn was able to tap into the broader national network of influential political players, like Dulles. These lobbying offices were quite effective in Congress.
Keehn’s efforts were clumsy at first. The Congregationalists decided that a two-thirds vote of the Senate was too high of a threshold for treaty ratification. They called for a constitutional amendment to lower the margin for passage to a simple majority to ensure the ratification of the UN treaty. The move proved embarrassing. But, over time, Protestant denominations became sophisticated political animals. Budgets and staffs grew, drawing praise from some and condemnation from others.
As early as 1946, a Congregationalist minister from Pittsburgh protested at a national gathering by handing out handbills that read: “When the overwhelming majority of our Congregational Christians who hold to the free American way of life, find out how their tithes and offers for ‘missions’ are being misused by [the denomination] to maintain a left wing lobby in Washington and to promote state socialism, how are they going to react? Eighty thousand dollars for political action in 1945!”67 The right-wing layman Verne P. Kaub accused Congregationalist leadership of “using missionary funds to maintain a political lobby at the national capital at a time when warnings are heard from many quarters that the church and state should remain in their separate fields.” As denominational conservatives cautioned against political advocacy, liberals pressed on. “The separation of church and state cannot mean that the church must never be concerned about government actions,” retorted Congregationalist leader Francis McPeek. “Thruout [sic] Protestantism there is a swiftly mounting interest in the political process.”68
That mounting interest centered on the United Nations and the postwar settlement. But almost as soon as these lobbying groups were established, they turned their attention to areas of concern that Stevens had stressed. Keehn’s very first action at the 79th Congress (1945–47) was in support of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, which would mitigate racial discrimination in industry. By the end of that year he had lobbied for the approval of the United Nations Organization treaty, for the continuation of price controls, for the full employment bill, and for a national minimum wage.69 Keehn’s work expressed the broad social vision articulated by Stevens during the World Order movement.
From World Government to the United Nations
As the World Order movement mobilized millions of Protestants on behalf of a world government, events clarified the shape of that institution. In 1944 the Roosevelt administration organized the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, which took place in the historic mansion in the Georgetown neighborhood in Washington, DC. The United States, the USSR, China, and Britain met there to decide on the shape of the world body. Roosevelt had previously been cool to the idea of an international organization, preferring instead an Anglo-American alliance to police the postwar world. But public opinion and political pressure, much of it generated by Stevens and Dulles, convinced Roosevelt to embrace an international organization.
The Dumbarton Oaks Conference produced an outline of what would later become the United Nations: an assembly consisting of all members, an eleven-seat Security Council with five permanent members, an Economic and Social Council, and an international court.70 But a few key issues were not settled. Most importantly, there were no provisions for voting or for vetoing proposals. Moreover, Dulles believed that there was too much reliance on force to the exclusion of law, moral aims, and other noncoercive measures he had advocated.71 Van Kirk and Charles F. Boss echoed the criticism voiced by many foreign critics that the United Nations would be a continuation of the wartime great powers alliance.72
Dulles also worried that the Dumbarton Oaks proposal would carry on the tradition of power politics by the great powers. Mobilizing his powerful connections, he convinced New York governor Thomas Dewey to speak out against the proposal. Like Roosevelt, Dewey had supported an Anglo-American pact and remained skeptical of an international organization. But as Dewey challenged Roosevelt for the presidency in 1944, he sounded more and more like Dulles, his foreign policy advisor. When some of the Dumbarton Oaks discussions were leaked to the press, Dewey announced in a speech written by Dulles, “I have been deeply disturbed … that it is planned to subject the nations of the world, great and small, permanently to the coercive power of the four nations holding this conference.”73
In a shrewd move, Roosevelt convinced Dewey to remove discussions of the United Nations from the presidential campaign, which was entering its final months in the fall of 1944. He sent Secretary of State Cordell Hull to meet with Dulles and convince him to make the issue nonpartisan for the sake of the UN’s survival. Dulles, recalling that the League of Nations failed partly because of partisanship, could hardly risk seeing years of his efforts go the way of Woodrow Wilson’s. Dulles agreed to Hull’s demands, and Roosevelt moved a step closer toward reelection. At the same time, it was understood that Roosevelt would seek input from Republicans on Dumbarton Oaks, and Dulles had plenty of input to give.
Dulles was worried that church leaders would reject the treaty because it did not resemble the world government ecumenical Protestants had been calling for. He asked the new secretary of state Edward Stettinius for help putting “the Dumbarton proposals on international organization in a favorable light before a meeting of the Council of Churches.” Stettinius reported to President Roosevelt in late 1944 that Dulles “was anxious to get a good statement from them” but “he was finding considerable opposition.”74 Hoping for consensus, the Dulles Commission quickly organized a 1945 meeting in Cleveland to take stock of Dumbarton Oaks. The city was selected because it was easily accessible by train and because they received “assurances from Cleveland that Negro delegates would not be discriminated against.” Organizers decided to discourage participation of Europeans in order to focus on America’s role in the world.75
As the Dulles Commission began planning for the Cleveland meeting, there were already signs of divisions. A preparatory group called “Commission I,” which focused on the “current situation” and was chaired by Harvard philosophy professor William Ernest Hocking, revealed disagreement on whether Dumbarton Oaks was in line with the Six Pillars. Van Kirk acted as the secretary for the group and urged Hocking to be critical of Dumbarton Oaks. “I foresee a considerable raking over the Dumbarton Oaks proposal. Care will have to be exercised not ‘to throw out the baby with the bath,’ ” Van Kirk wrote to Hocking. “I believe we would do well to embody in our statement a pretty thorough going documentation of the weak points and shortcomings of Dumbarton Oaks. The government has asked for criticism and suggestions. Let us do what we can to enlighten the Government [sic] in this respect.”76
“The discussion revealed a difference of opinion about the Dumbarton Oaks proposal,” the minutes of the Hocking group reported. “Although the preponderance of judgment seemed to be that these proposals should be supported but with a careful delineation of the Christian concerns not met by these proposals.”77 Broadus Mitchell soon emerged as the fiercest critic of Dumbarton Oaks in the group. Mitchell, who was then a New York University economist and historian, and whose socialist views culminated in a 1939 run for the governorship of Maryland on the Socialist Party ticket, urged Protestants to “refuse to commit” to a document that “promises new misfortunes.” Instead, American Protestants should “demand embodiment in the document of the principles of democracy which are proclaimed in the Atlantic Charter, the Four Freedoms, etc.” Hocking countered that the “possibilities for building and growth which the document gives us” need to be acknowledged, along with “reaffirmation of the Christian ideal in comparison with which Dumbarton Oaks is in certain respects defective.”78
Hocking delegated the task of writing a policy statement on the Dumbarton Oaks proposal to Reinhold Niebuhr, who was usually not involved in the deliberations of the Dulles Commission. Niebuhr acknowledged that the proposal “falls short in many ways of even minimal requirements for a stable and just peace” but insisted that it “be recognized as being a step in the right direction.” He dismissed criticism that Dumbarton Oaks “gives the great powers special responsibilities.” For Niebuhr, the great advantage was that it “seeks to make power and responsibility commensurate,” unlike the earlier League of Nations. But the arrangement went too far because it “does not give the small nations any significant position or power in the world organization.” The United Nations was in danger of becoming “a mere alliance of the great powers, with only the slightest trimmings of a world organization.” Moreover, Niebuhr faulted the Dumbarton Oaks proposal for only having the power to deal with military disputes and lacking provision “to deal with large scale politico-economic questions and conflicts between nations.” Additionally, he signaled that its emphasis on “regional arrangements” was “a step in the direction of ‘spheres of influence,’ ” which will “prevent a more completely mutual approach to world problems.”79
Still, Niebuhr cautioned against being too critical. A recent conflict with the Soviet Union over whether a permanent member of the Security Council should abstain from voting on matters in which they were entangled revealed that little trust had developed between the USSR, Great Britain, and the United States. Threats to the stability of the world organization come not only from domestic isolationists and nationalists but also from foreign nations. He argued that Protestants should tread carefully amid this minefield.80
Hocking agreed with Niebuhr that the Dumbarton Oaks proposal should be supported first and criticized second. However, Hocking was discouraged by what he believed was Niebuhr’s overemphasis on the fragility of the United Nations. Hocking quipped to Van Kirk that “realism leads a good man to lie down frequently when he ought to be up and kicking.”81
Others went further than Niebuhr in their criticism, pointing out, for example, that Dumbarton Oaks made no mention of a human rights charter, which ecumenical Protestants had called for back in 1942. Niebuhr, like Dulles, showed little interest in human rights. In Hocking’s group, O. Frederick Nolde was the most forceful advocate for “human rights and fundamental freedoms” to be enumerated as soon as the UN’s Economic and Social Council was established.82 Nolde had been charged with elaborating on the sixth Pillar of Peace, which called for religious liberty throughout the world, and came to believe in earlier years that a broad statement on human rights was the best means of defending religious liberty. Nolde had little experience in ecumenical politics prior to his attendance of the 1942 Delaware conference at the age of forty-two.83 But he was a quick learner, and he pushed ecumenical Protestants to support human rights as a key part of the postwar settlement ahead of the 1945 Cleveland conference.
Hocking supported Nolde’s lobbying to make human rights part of the mandate of the United Nations organization. Hocking was a philosophical personalist, which meant that he emphasized the right to develop one’s personality to its full capacity. He was also one of the earliest theorists of human rights, having written a slim volume on the subject in 1926 called Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights.84 Years later, in 1947, his former student Charles Malik asked Hocking to critique an early draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Malik was the rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights and oversaw the writing of the declaration. Looking at this draft, Hocking reminded Malik that he believed “that every human being has one ‘natural’ right.” Hocking denied “that any human being has a plurality of unconditional and inalienable rights. And I have expressed the belief that the liberal position in politics is weakened today, as it has long been weakened in law, by staking out elaborate and plural areas of individual right without showing their relation to each other and to their own central meaning, and especially by leaving indefinite the nature of their limitations.”85
Hocking’s emphasis on personality was not his invention. At the turn of the century, Boston University’s Methodist-dominated Philosophy Department had developed “personalism” into a philosophical system that placed the human personality and the dignity of the human person at the heart of ecumenical Protestant thought. The language of personality, dignity, and the human person thrived in the Methodist milieu, becoming by the 1940s “virtually the ‘party line’ of American Methodism.”86 Personalism also became widespread at international ecumenical Protestant gatherings in the 1920s and 1930s, and used by Africans and African Americans to condemn Jim Crow and colonialism.87 Max Yergan, for example, convinced an international meeting in 1928 to support the right of all to hold any profession, to have freedom of movement, to receive equal treatment before the law, and to exercise citizenship rights—all irrespective of race—by appealing to “the Fatherhood of God and the sacredness of personality,” which “are vital truths revealed in Christ.”88 While Dulles and Niebuhr were largely indifferent to human rights, they could not help but notice how popular the notion of the inherent dignity and worth of the human person had become within the Protestant establishment.
In its language, Protestant personalism mirrored Catholic personalism. Long a European tradition associated with radical politics, Catholic personalism became tied to human rights in the 1930s and 1940s through the work of French philosopher Jacques Maritain and popularized by the Christmas address of Pope Pius XII in 1942. The “rights of the human person” listed by Pius mostly focused on religious liberty.89 Pius’s address spurred American Catholics to action. In the United States, the Catholic Church was the only other religious organization capable of broad mobilization, and its less public efforts promoted the UN and a human rights charter. Of the Catholic leaders who spoke on behalf of human rights in the 1940s, however, most focused on their anti-communist and anti-secular implications. “Darwinism, Marxism, quantitative science, mobilization and the totalitarian state,” announced popular Catholic speaker Fulton Sheen in 1938, have degraded man’s “personality and his rights.”90 Catholic leaders conceived of human rights as a means of instantiating natural law principles in global governance, opposing the Soviet Union internationally, and limiting secularism domestically. Substantial theological and political differences, along with a history of mutual suspicion, prevented Catholics and ecumenical Protestants from working together in the 1940s.91 Jewish groups joined ecumenical Protestants in actively supporting the religiously neutral and anti-racist conception of human rights, but their membership and public stature was dwarfed by organizations like the Federal Council of Churches.92 In 1945, just before the United Nations was created, ecumenical Protestants focused on promoting human rights as a part of the postwar peace settlement.
For ecumenical Protestants, human rights were not just a top-down phenomenon. Philosophical debates were invigorated and transformed by a groundswell of enthusiasm for a new world government throughout the country. While the Hocking group focused on the proposal for the United Nations in light of ecumenical Protestant values, local discussion groups established during the World Order movement focused on other pressing issues. Their statements, which were written on “World Order Sunday” in November 1944 and sent to the Hocking group as it prepared its evaluation of Dumbarton Oaks, demonstrated Thelma Stevens’s success in focusing attention on issues that were secondary to many on the Dulles Commission. Because of the participatory nature of the World Order movement, local churches had a say in how human rights would be understood. Overwhelmingly, they emphasized that human rights were incompatible with racism.
When churchgoers met in Detroit, for example, they concluded that “lifting to new levels of justice and good will the relations in Detroit between the negro [sic] and the white” should have high priority. In Saginaw, Michigan, a town of about ninety thousand, the World Order meeting focused on “the serious problems of race, color, and cultural pressures.”93 To be sure, there was a lot of attention paid to international affairs. In Kalamazoo, Michigan, local leaders declared support for the United States taking “an active part in the new world order,” and they backed a “positive and creative” international organization that is “inclusive of all nations.” Yet the emphasis on doing something about racism was present in virtually every document received by Hocking. And criticism also focused on Protestant churches. In the awkwardly named town of Indiana, Pennsylvania, local leaders urged Protestants to deal with racism because “Church people are guilty of prejudice and discrimination and the Church practices segregation.”94 The links between the international situation and racial tensions at home were clearly put by a gathering in Philadelphia. “In order to clear America’s record abroad,” they wrote, “it is necessary for us to start our race problems at home on the road to solution.”95
The Hocking group’s deliberations in 1944 brought together Stevens’s criticism of racism, Nolde’s emphasis on religious liberty, and Hocking’s personalism under the rubric of human rights. The group affirmed “the dignity of the human person as the image of God” and urged “that the civic rights which derive from that dignity be set forth” in the UN charter. “We recognize that wherever human rights are suppressed, the seeds of disorder are sown. When minorities—racial, national, or religious—are oppressed, a threat to peace and order appear[s].”96 Hocking’s human rights rubric was officially taken up by the Federal Council of Churches in 1945.
The Dulles Commission advocated nine changes to the Dumbarton Oaks proposal, which the Federal Council also endorsed.97 The Dulles Commission called for the UN charter to include a preamble embodying the spirit of the Atlantic Charter, a commitment to developing international law, and for the organization to issue a human rights charter. The Dulles Commission also demanded the United Nations establish a commission on colonies, that the organization eventually include all nations, and that it give a greater role to small nations. Additionally, the major powers were to abstain from voting on (and vetoing) rulings that affected them. Changes to the UN charter were to be allowed without approval of all permanent Security Council members, the Dulles Commission urged. Lastly, it called on all countries to shrink their militaries.98
After heated debate in Cleveland in January 1945, the Federal Council of Churches voted to unconditionally endorse the United Nations Organization, while presenting their nine amendments as working policies for the meeting in San Francisco later that spring.99 Disappointed that “the proposed organization is certainly not a world government,” ecumenical Protestant leaders continued to worry about the precariousness of the world organization despite the overwhelming support it gathered in polls.100 Hocking acknowledged that in “the recent political campaign, traditional American isolationism certainly showed signs of recession,” but “there is every reason to expect a postwar reaction of some sort.” He continued to worry about isolationism. “It is hardly to be expected that a policy so deep-rooted in American history should disappear overnight,” Hocking argued.101
The debate about the United Nations raged on in the spring of 1945. Senator James M. Tunnell (D-DE) wrote to Van Kirk to condemn what he viewed as Dulles’s political partisanship.102 Others resented the close cooperation between the Protestant establishment and the Roosevelt administration. The Michigan Christian Advocate editorialized, “If we had had our way a much stronger statement in criticism of the President and our government at Washington would have been formulated.” The paper pulled no punches: “President Roosevelt and his opportunistic colleagues have all but sold out the peace and laid the foundation of World War III by their sins of omission.”103
A. J. Muste echoed these points in a letter to Hocking. Muste contrasted the Dulles Commission’s proposal with a “straight-forward, dignified and clearly religious statement” by the Catholic bishops, which withheld endorsing Dumbarton Oaks unless changes to the treaty were made. He blamed the tepid Protestant document on “the spell of the fear, assiduously cultivated in certain quarters, that if the Dumbarton Oaks organization bad as it is and in the worst possible setting is not adopted, then the end of the world will have come and the heavens will fall.” For Muste this was a symptom of an uncritical attitude by a group that had “been a mere adjunct to the State Department’s campaign to get Dumbarton Oaks adopted.”104
Hocking sympathized with Muste’s criticism. As Hocking put pen to paper, he wrote that Protestants had to fight on two fronts. The first was against an attempt to keep colonial issues out of the scope of the United Nations. The second was against the effort to keep Japan and Germany impoverished for years to come. In the final draft of the letter he sent to Muste he decided to delete mention of the colonies. By this time Dulles had temporarily resigned to advise the US delegation in San Francisco, and Hocking took over as chairman of the Dulles Commission. Hocking explained to Muste that while he agreed with Muste’s criticism, he could not make any substantive changes: “I have to answer that this Commission is handicapped by the absence of its Chairman in San Francisco … [and I do] not feel free to depart, in his absence, from the line of strategy which he proposed to us.”105 Despite his absence, Dulles continued to mute criticism of the Dumbarton Oaks proposal.
The divisions among ecumenical Protestants over Dumbarton Oaks carried over into the founding of the United Nations. Dulles came to San Francisco in 1945 to attend the founding conference of the United Nations Organization as a State Department adviser. Unofficially, he represented the Republican Party in the deliberations over the UN charter and was closely tied to influential senator Arthur H. Vandenberg (R-MI). Hoping to build popular support, the American delegation also invited several dozen NGOs to send representatives. The Federal Council of Churches sent a three-person team, composed of Walter W. Van Kirk, Methodist bishop James C. Baker, and religious liberty expert and human rights advocate O. Frederick Nolde.106 The divisions that would emerge between Dulles and Nolde at the UN conference dramatized ecumenical disagreements about the role of the new organization.
Nolde emerged as the Federal Council’s leading spokesperson at San Francisco. As the executive secretary of the Joint Committee on Religious Liberty, he had experience dealing with both church officials and state bureaucrats, and was at ease with international law. Nolde’s organization, founded jointly by the Federal Council and the Foreign Missions Conference, was established to pressure governments to grant Protestant missionaries access to Catholic and Muslim countries. By 1945, however, Nolde was ready to drop the missionary justification. According to John Nurser, Nolde came to believe that “freedom demands a broader base than can be offered by religion alone” and that human rights needed to be grounded in a “secular context.”107 The presence of a variety of religious traditions represented at the United Nations as well as the officially atheistic Soviet Union in San Francisco drove him to defend religious liberty in nonsectarian terms.108
When Nolde arrived in San Francisco in April 1945, he encountered a US delegation that was uninterested in pursuing a human rights commission.109 Working feverishly, Nolde assembled an umbrella group, which met with Secretary of State Edward Stettinius just before a key vote would be taken. One by one, the leaders of American civil society pleaded for a human rights commission.110 Judge Joseph Proskauer, the president of the American Jewish Committee, made an eloquent plea on behalf of human rights. And NAACP executive secretary Walter White urged the State Department not to forget that human rights entitled foreign peoples to self-determination. Stettinius “thought it had been an excellent meeting and he had been deeply impressed by the discussion.” He told the American delegation later that evening that “Mr. Nolde, Mr. Proskauer and others had made speeches and they presented a statement signed by a considerable group” and advocated “informing the President this evening about this matter and telling him of the sincerity with which the proposals had been put forward.” Stettinius “felt that the Delegation should make public its position.” Dulles solidified support among his colleagues and made the human rights doctrine a bipartisan position. Vandenberg agreed a public statement “would make for better public relations all around.”111 The decision was a dramatic turnaround.
Ultimately, four of the Federal Council’s nine amendments to the Dumbarton Oaks proposal made their way into the UN charter. In addition to the development of a human rights charter, Nolde successfully lobbied for a preamble that explained the United Nations’ moral aims, for the creation of a body of international law, and for a Trusteeship Council to transition some colonies toward statehood.112 Nolde’s commission “was not the only body to propose such measures,” writes Andrew Preston, “but it was among the most adept. Rarely had religious lobbying been so effective, or so consequential.”113
By May 1945, however, Dulles and Nolde were working at cross-purposes on several issues. During US delegation meetings, American officials hesitated about the possibility of the United Nations intervening in domestic matters. In April 1945, Dulles told skeptical senators and State Department officials that “the trouble with international law was that it had reserved the right of any state to do as it pleased.” He pushed the Federal Council’s position to Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Tom Connally (D-TX), who “was skeptical whether the Senate would approve the idea of permitting the Security Council to decide as to ‘domestic jurisdiction.’ ” Connally’s skepticism was echoed by Senator Vandenberg. Dulles tried to calm the senators’ fears by assuring them that UN deliberations were “just a matter of talk,” with few ramifications for the United States. But Connally thought talk “would imply responsibility and action” and Vandenberg insisted that “the Senate had always thought that the United States should decide what was within its ‘domestic jurisdiction.’ ”114
Once Dulles understood the Senate would insist on explicit protection for domestic jurisdiction, he not only dropped his objection but became the foremost advocate of strengthening the domestic jurisdiction clause. His biographer Ronald Pruessen wonders, “Did Dulles find it difficult to work as an American watchdog as far as ‘domestic jurisdiction’ was concerned? If he did, there is no evidence of it.”115 At Dulles’s initiative, the wording of the jurisdiction clause was strengthened from “solely” domestic matters to “essentially” domestic matters, weakening UN authority over the affairs of nation-states.
A similar about-face occurred with Dulles’s view on the Trusteeship Council. At first, he tried to reassure American military officials that the commission would not pose a threat to US Pacific naval bases. In the face of opposition, Dulles changed his mind and emerged as an advocate of keeping the word “independence” out of the Trusteeship Council’s mandate. As State Department minutes record, “Mr. Dulles added that the church groups with which he was associated were satisfied in all their statements with self-government or autonomy as objectives of the trusteeship system and had never insisted on independence.”116
Dulles’s machinations in San Francisco ended the possibility that Stevens’s capacious understanding of human rights would be expressed by the United Nations. As a matter of American foreign policy, human rights were put on the back burner, despite many attempts by NGOs—especially African American groups like the NAACP—to force the State Department to take the issue seriously.117 Yet they remained vital for ecumenical Protestants. Human rights provided the framework within which they understood and justified their political work on racism, economic reform, and foreign affairs. Ecumenical Protestants became one of the most important custodians of human rights in an era when human rights were largely ignored by the US government.
While the US government downplayed human rights, evangelicals opposed them outright. As the United Nations took shape, dissent was building among those Protestants who had only recently started calling themselves “evangelicals.” Carl Henry helped form the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in 1942 in opposition to the theological and political liberalism of the Federal Council of Churches. He hoped to leave behind the label “fundamentalist,” which many Americans associated with ignorance, racism, and antisemitism. Evangelicals, Henry hoped, would stick to the literal word of the Bible and continue to emphasize conversion and the superiority of the Christian faith, while also becoming more engaged in solving important social problems. The NAE occasionally expressed sympathy for racial minorities and workers in these early years. But when they talked about policies that the Federal Council supported, they turned sharply rightward, embracing the enemies of the Federal Council as their political allies and expressing harsh sentiments about nonwhites and labor unions. Opposing the liberalism of the Federal Council remained their top priority.
Evangelicals opposed the UN and human rights from the beginning. The official mouthpiece of the NAE, United Evangelical Action, called the work of the Dulles Commission an attempt “to superimpose upon the nation a great social reform without having first laid a spiritual foundation.” Lamenting the priority given to political action by church leaders, the journal cautioned, “Will these leaders never realize that the first need of the nation is that Christ shall be reborn in the hearts of its people. Then, and then only, have we any proper basis of expectation that we may meet with success in campaigns for social or political betterment.”118
This logic applied doubly to the Federal Council’s support for the United Nations. “The Ten Commandments have been in the world for three thousand five hundred years and look at the world. The Sermon on the Mount has been in the world for two thousand years and look at the world,” an NAE columnist cautioned. “Yet there are some people so foolish that they think that the San Francisco charter will do in six months what the Sermon on the Mount and the Ten Commandments failed to do in centuries.”119
Evangelicals pulled no punches about the United Nations. “From the very start we hail it as godless, as a child of illegitimate alliances, born lame and due to die in the further catastrophes that come upon the earth,” an NAE columnist wrote.120 Even Carl Henry, who wrote enviously about the fervor generated by the World Order movement, chastised ecumenical Protestants for promoting “a global peace without any reference to the vicarious atonement and redemptive work of Christ.”121
The evangelical critique of ecumenical Protestants’ alleged secularism got nowhere during the war. Dulles and Nolde could safely ignore the NAE, a new and obscure organization. The Federal Council continued to work comfortably in the “secular” world of politics. That the UN charter largely avoided any explicit reference to religion did not bother Federal Council officials much. The Dulles Commission had pushed for each UN meeting to begin with a tri-faith prayer. Their attempt signaled the growing popularity of “Judeo-Christianity” in the United States in the 1940s.122 It also signaled the limits of the Federal Council’s pluralism, which attempted to impose this American idea onto the world. Secretary of State Stettinius was understandably cool to a tri-faith prayer because of opposition from the Soviet Union. Van Kirk was “inclined to think that we had better not press the matter on Mr. Stettinius further.”123
While evangelicals would not accept a United Nations that made no mention of Jesus, ecumenical Protestants took further steps in reconciling their faith with a diverse world. When UN delegates gathered in Paris in 1947 to discuss human rights, Nolde most clearly broke with the missionary-inspired idea of the “right to persuade” that had driven some of the Protestant advocacy of religious liberty and human rights. He now opposed any mention of missions or conversion in the human rights charter, and some missionary heads applauded his resolve.124 John E. Merrill of the Foreign Missions Conference urged Nolde not to “have the opinions of Protestant Christians brought to the attention [of the United Nations] with a view to their reflection in a Bill of Rights” or to seek protection for “Protestant missionaries to proselytize in Muslim and other non-Christian countries.”125
When article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was finally passed in 1948, it reflected some of the nonsectarian character Nolde advocated. “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in a community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance,” the United Nations declared.126 The article emphasized individual autonomy instead of the rights of missionaries. As a whole, the Universal Declaration reflected some of the capaciousness of ecumenical Protestant thought during the 1940s. It listed social, economic, and political rights that appeared to indict racial and economic practices in the United States. The Universal Declaration captured a moment in time, just before the Cold War began, when an ambitious, universally inclined reform movement captured the imagination of many Americans.
Dulles’s dramatic change of heart in the spring of 1945 about “domestic jurisdiction” ensured that the UN’s Human Rights Commission would have little impact in the United States. And human rights would have virtually no role in American foreign policy during the early Cold War. But Dulles’s machinations were only half of the story. The high-stakes negotiating by elites like Dulles, Van Kirk, and Nolde, and the more mundane organizing by forgotten figures like Stevens, contributed in equal parts to a robust and permanent ecumenical Protestant presence in Congress and at the White House. Women’s groups, in particular, moved the World Order movement institutionally and ideologically toward a fuller expression of human rights. This point has been lost in most historical accounts of the era, which agree with Andrew Preston that the Federal Council “became a forum for the promotion of Dulles’s views.”127 As this chapter has shown, so many things the Federal Council said and did about human rights, colonialism, Jim Crow, and religious liberty cannot be explained through Dulles alone. For the Federal Council, ecumenical denominations, and the twenty lobbying offices they founded during the World Order movement, human rights remained central to their work. And they understood human rights in the capacious way Thelma Stevens understood them: as an indictment of so many domestic practices that Dulles had worked to keep out of the purview of the United Nations. As a consequence of both Stevens’s and Dulles’s efforts, human rights became a discourse of dissent in the early Cold War, identified more closely with religious groups and nongovernmental organizations than with the US government.
The institutions created during the World Order movement became a permanent part of the political landscape by the end of the 1940s, aligning these theological liberals more closely with political liberalism. The World Order movement also created an ideological environment in which controversial ideas seemed more reasonable because they were presented in a global context. This global outlook pushed some ecumenical Protestant activists further to the left. Nolde moved in a more secular direction and committed to a broad understanding of human rights, and Stevens criticized racism and called for economic reform. Dulles, on the other hand, moved toward anti-communism. This divergence presaged some of the fault lines along which ecumenical Protestantism would fracture during the Cold War. And the Cold War would soon take its toll on the United Nations and human rights. But the institutionalization of the World Order movement assured that the one-world idealism of the wartime years would be no fleeting moment. It would reverberate through religious groups and through American politics for years. Its most immediate impact would be on Jim Crow.