A Most Uncertain Crusade: The United States, the United Nations, and Human Rights, 1941–1953

5. United Nations Success Breeds Failure at Home, 1945–1950

C hapter 5 United Nations Success Breeds Failure at Home, 1945–1950 A s t h e U n i t e d Nat i o n s C o m m i s s i o n on Human Rights (UNCHR) drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and early versions of the covenant, other agencies pieced together the organization’s first human rights treaty. Memories of the Holocaust and of other atrocities committed during World War II led member states to draft an agreement to punish those who tried to destroy religious, national, racial, or ethnic groups. The State Department consistently supported what would become the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide , and its U.N. delegation was very influential throughout the drafting process. As with the Universal Declaration and the covenants, American diplomats demanded that the Genocide Convention incorporate a conservative American jurisprudence that placed a premium on defending national sovereignty. Unlike with the covenant, though, the State Department successfully fought for language that limited the scope, application, and enforcement of the document in order to minimize any domestic legal obligations. The final draft, approved unanimously by the U.N. General Assembly on December 9, 1948, defined “genocide,” declared its practice to be a violation of international law, and proposed that perpetrators be punished by national courts or by a special international tribunal. President Harry S. Truman submitted the Genocide Convention to the Senate for ratification, and he expected its quick approval. Ironically, given the heavy American handprint on the Genocide Convention and the Truman administration’s strong endorsement, the treaty 172 A M O S T U N C E R T A I N C R U S A D E never passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A coalition of conservative Southern Democrats and isolationist-oriented Republicans, supported by the American Bar Association (ABA), interpreted the convention as a dangerous assault on the American Constitution and national sovereignty. Castigating the performance of America’s U.N. delegation, Senators Tom Connally (D-TX), Walter George (D-GA), and Alexander Wiley (R-WI) denigrated the convention as Communist-inspired propaganda designed to eclipse the constitutional rights of states and individuals and make its citizens vulnerable to scurrilous charges of genocide. Their successful drive to bury the convention in the Foreign Relations Committee provided the inspiration, political experience, and language for a movement led by Senator John Bricker (R-OH) to restrict the ability of all treaties to invalidate domestic laws. Although Bricker’s crusade failed, sympathetic lawyers, private organizations, and powerful senators forced President Dwight D. Eisenhower to abandon the Genocide Convention in 1953. As a result, the United States increasingly lost its leadership role in the U.N. human rights movement during the early Cold War years. Genocide was by no means a new occurrence in world history, but the Holocaust and other wartime atrocities generated an unprecedented transnational movement to make it a violation of international law and punish its perpetrators. In the summer of 1944, Soviet troops approached Majdanek, a forced labor camp near Lublin, Poland. The Soviet advance occurred so rapidly that the German guards had little time to destroy the facility, leaving the gas chambers as evidence of the estimated 80,000 individuals who died there. In the coming weeks, the Red Army overran the extermination camps of Belzek, Sobibor, and Treblinka, whose crematoria had processed the remains of 1.5 million victims of the Nazi killing machine . American forces, a month before the end of the war in Europe, occupied Buchenwald, whose 20,000 survivors told of horrendous conditions that had killed 56,000 of their fellow prisoners. Across Europe, scenes of the dead, the dying, and the emaciated confronted Allied soldiers. On the other side of the world, Japanese atrocities, such as the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, and the murders of millions of civilians in occupied Southeast Asia, also evoked feelings of anger, disgust, and disbelief. A consensus quickly arose between President Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Premier Joseph Stalin that Axis leaders must be held accountable for committing crimes against humanity. Gathering information about atrocities and punishing their perpetrators would be a short-term and reactive response; what was also needed was a way to guard against such barbarity ever recurring. A group of Western-trained United Nations Success Breeds Failure at Home, 1945–1950 173...