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Introduction The Origins of a Crusade A s t h e C h r i s t m a s - t i m e c h i l l of the 1948 winter descended upon the city of Chicago, a middle-aged man with spectacles and a high forehead, looking appropriately professorial, addressed the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. James Simsarian, a State Department liaison to the American delegation at the United Nations, delivered a summary of recent United Nations work in the field of human rights. He began with the most recent accomplishment: the unanimous approval of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which he described as “a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.” He spent much of the remainder of his address lambasting the Soviet Union for its attempts to delay and sabotage the document. Citing the numerous (and unsuccessful) amendments the Soviet delegation had offered to allow governments to ban Fascist speech and enact restrictions on other freedoms, Simsarian pronounced the duty of the United States to “make it clear time and time again to the totalitarian states that countries with free people cannot compromise with the principles of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” He did admit, though, that his own nation was “far from perfect,” but as its own human rights record improved, the country could provide leadership at the United Nations on principles such as the rule of law, individual liberties, economic freedoms, and impartial justice. The best way to attain this goal was to head the effort to draft a precedentsetting binding international bill of individual rights.1 Within five years, Simsarian’s optimistic narrative lay in tatters. Upon taking office in 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles withdrew the country from further involvement in 4 A M O S T U N C E R T A I N C R U S A D E drafting human rights treaties. “We do not ourselves look upon a treaty as the means which we would now select as the proper and most effective way to spread throughout the world the goals of human liberty,” Dulles wrote to Eisenhower in 1953. The main cause for the policy shift lay not with Soviet obstructionist amendments to those treaties, but with domestic fears of what those binding agreements could do to rectify America’s “less than perfect” human rights record. Worried that treaties would enforce the principles of freedom, liberty, and equality at home, Eisenhower and Dulles halted American efforts on a covenant partially in order to protect Jim Crow segregation in the South. The change in policy cannot, however, be understood solely by examining domestic and foreign events in the years following World War II. Such an endeavor would merely affirm Simsarian’s rhetoric of the United States as a traditional crusader for human rights, applaud the Universal Declaration as an American-inspired victory, and criticize Eisenhower and Dulles for unprincipled, unnecessary , and reactionary unilateralism.2 An alternative interpretation, which examines the dilemmas and paradoxes confronted by State Department officials and non-governmental associations during World War II, views the human rights advocacy by the United States as flawed and conservative in nature from the start, the Universal Declaration as its logical and ambivalent handiwork, and Eisenhower ’s skepticism as overlapping that of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. This longer view more accurately situates and illuminates the role of human rights issues in American diplomacy, for it allows an examination of how consistently policymakers of both political parties used soaring national ideals to unify and give purpose to foreign policy during World War II and the Cold War, while allowing other prioritized domestic and foreign matters to weaken actual human rights commitments. Such consistent expediency had human costs, though, in prolonging racial discrimination in the United States and in helping to postpone human rights accountability in the larger world for decades. The irony of the United States abandoning a global cause that it once championed in theory in order to commit human rights abuses at home, moreover , is not rooted only in the recent past. In the opening years of a new century, the administration of George W. Bush embraced this contradictory policy in the war against Islamic fundamentalism by rhetorically promoting democratization abroad while employing torture, indefinite incommunicado detention without trial, and prejudiced military commissions in direct contravention of international legal norms, including the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against...

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