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

Conclusion: The Impact of a Crusade, 1953–2011

Conclusion The Impact of a Crusade, 1953–2011 What has been accomplished? This: we have kept a vision alive; we have held to a great ideal, we have established a continuity, and some day when unity and co-operation come, the importance of all these early steps will be recognized. —W.E.B. Du Bois1 B e tw e e n 1 9 4 1 a n d 1 9 5 3 , the United States government, often prodded by non-governmental organizations and in response to perceived diplomatic and domestic political interests, led a worldwide crusade for the international protection of human rights. The campaign, launched by President Franklin Roosevelt in the dark days of World War II as the British and the Chinese directly faced the forces of Fascism alone, derived as much from current events as from an American ideology as old as the Puritans. Beginning with their seventeenth-century mission to found in Massachusetts Bay a “city on a hill,” the religious dissenters bestowed upon what would become the United States a perceived twentieth-century God-given duty to spread the blessings of liberty and freedom across the seas. Historians have given several contextual names to this evangelical impulse, from “Manifest Destiny” in the mid-1800s, to “imperialism” and the “white man’s burden” in the late nineteenth century, and “Wilsonian Conclusion 249 internationalism” during the World War I era. Two decades later, speaking before a joint session of Congress in a muted atmosphere of solemn anticipation, Roosevelt conjured up this exceptionalist history. In this time of Fascist advance, the president explained, This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.2 As historians Michael Hunt, John Dower, and Anders Stephanson have shown, ideologies are malleable, organic, and contain internal contradictions . Thus presidents from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson to Woodrow Wilson believed in spreading freedom and liberty even as they defended white supremacy, sexual inequality, and colonialism. Few politicians can afford to be true believers and not compromise on even essential principles, and ideologies provide broad road maps rather than arrows pointing to single courses of action. Wilson’s embrace of self-determination did not encompass peoples in Asia and Africa who had begun to organize nationalist movements, and his desire to liberate ethnic and national minorities from dictatorial oppression applied only to Europe and not to African Americans in the southern region of his own nation. Likewise, in the period during and after World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt , Harry S. Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower found it extremely difficult to advocate for global human rights while protecting or condoning domestic racial segregation, disenfranchisement, legal and economic inequality, and colonialism. These leaders at first attempted to keep the racial status quo at home intact by trying ironically to incorporate protections for Jim Crow within human rights treaties. When underdeveloped nations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East rebelled by seeking to include enforceable political, economic, social, and cultural rights, Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and their legal advisors were unwilling to alter the essential underpinnings of U.S. policy.3 The Roosevelt administration employed the soaring rhetoric of human rights to unify and prepare a nation for war and plan for its aftermath. In the Four Freedoms speech, the Atlantic Charter, and the Declaration of the United Nations, Franklin Roosevelt outlined an expansive postwar vision in which all governments would acquire some responsibility to grant political, civil, and economic rights. He firmly believed that heads of state 250 A M O S T U N C E R T A I N C R U S A D E who treated their own citizens peacefully and humanely would behave similarly toward peoples in other nations. The previous 30 years had provided too much evidence of the converse, as the leaders of Germany, Italy, and Japan had launched waves of repression at home before embarking on overseas conquests. He asked the State Department to translate this abstract vision into pragmatic proposals that would avoid the same type of isolationist backlash that had slain the League of Nations. Roosevelt’s bold words inspired American religious and...