>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

>> Carolyn Brown: Well, good afternoon, everyone.
I am Carolyn Brown.
I direct the Office of Scholarly Programs
in the John W. Kluge Center here at the Library of Congress.
And it gives me great pleasure to welcome you here this afternoon
for a lecture by Elizabeth Borgwardt, on human rights
and nongovernmental organizations.
And the time period is 1945, just as the United Nations was forming.
This is a special occasion because this lecture is given in conjunction
with the decolonization seminar,
which you will hear more about in a minute.
But before we begin, if you have a cell phone
or some other electrical device that is not on mute, and that can go off
and disturb things, if you would please turn it off
or put it away [laughter].   It's nice tinkling sounds.

Okay. This lecture is presented jointly
by the National History Center
and the John W. Kluge Center here at the Library.
The National History Center promotes research, teaching and learning
in all fields of history.
It was created by the American Historical Association
in the year 2002 as a public trust dedicated to the study and teaching
of history, as well as the advancement of historical knowledge
and government business and for the public at large.
Needless to say, for more information,
you can go to their webpage, not surprisingly,
www.nationalhistorycenter.org.
The Kluge Center was created as a venue on Capitol Hill
where the world of scholarship and public affairs would --
could come together where some
of the finest scholars might have opportunities to --
for informal conversations with the public policy community.
It was established in 2000 for a very generous endowment
by John W. Kluge, and we have essentially two groups of scholars,
very senior, highly accomplished scholars like, say,
people at the top of their game, as well as, the rising generation
of young fellows who we hope one
of these days we'll see back as senior scholars.
The center sponsors lectures, small conferences, and I'm happy to say,
over the years, seminars in conjunction
with either American Historical Association
or National History Center and, occasionally, other organizations.
I would be remiss if I didn't also offer thanks
to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which has funded this series
of seminars over the years.   This is the eighth year.

It's hard to believe but it is indeed the eighth year
and also would want to thank Dr. Roger Louis
who was the intellectual engine behind all this as well as the,
clever person who secured the funding.
So, we are -- it's a wonderful partnership.
As I said, this particular partnership is in its eighth year,
and it just gets better and better and I'm told
that the seminar participants, you would think
after so many years they might slide off in quality?
No. You're a great group.   I keep hearing that.

Just a few quick words.
We think of decolonization as that critical period after World War II
when the former colonial powers relinquished their colonies
and a huge number of independent states came on to the world stage.
It's easy to think of it in terms of European terms and miss the fact
that the Japanese Empire, at the same time --
maybe we don't think of the Japanese as having an empire,
but in fact they did -- also lost their colonies.
And introducing our speaker today is Prof. Lori Watt who's the authority
on this particular phenomenon, the loss of the Japanese Empire.
Lori has, I think, most of you know,
was a member of the seminar a few years ago
and now she's back as a faculty member.
She also teaches at the Washington University in St. Louis,
an associate professor in the Department of History,
and therefore is a colleague of our speaker today.
So, it seemed appropriate to ask Prof. Lori Watt
to do the official introduction.   So, I turn this over to Dr. Watt.

[ Applause ]   >> Lori Watt: Hi.

Thank you, Carolyn.
It's a privilege to be here at the Kluge Center and it's a privilege
to introduce today's speaker, Elizabeth Borgwardt,
Associate Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis.
We've been colleagues at Wash U since she arrived in 2006.
Professor Borgwardt has a very interesting academic background.
She went to Cambridge University in the UK as an undergraduate,
and then she went on to Harvard Law,
subsequently practicing law for a few years.
But then, her inner historian came bursting out [laughter]
and she earned a PhD in history at Stanford working with David Kennedy.
She then taught history at the University of Utah before coming
to St. Louis, Washington University in St. Louis.
Liz's first book, "A New Deal for the World --
America's Vision for Human Rights," showcases one
of her main intellectual concerns, and that is,
she likes to trace the history of how ideas become institutionalized.
In this book, she shows how the ideas associated
with FDR's new deal, become institutionalized in world bodies,
in the realm of economics in Bretton Woods, in the realm of politics
at the United Nations, and in the legal realm at the Nuremberg Trial.
The book is a wonderful book.   It won several prizes.

It's great scholarship, and as I know
from experience, it's good for teaching.
It includes a lot of funny people saying funny things,
believe it or not.   She's got a real knack for dialogue.

The book contains the seeds of her current manuscript,
'The Nuremberg Idea -- Thinking Humanity
in History, Law and Politics."
Liz is foremost -- the forefront in the field of human rights history.
Professor Borgwardt has received many fellowships.
She publishes widely and speaks at a range of events.
She is currently a Cummings Foundation fellow at the Center
for Advanced Holocaust Studies here in Washington,
DC where she's working with the newly released papers
of a young German-American prosecutor at Nuremberg.
And in closing, I would like to highlight one other realm
in which she stands out, and this is as an inspiring teacher.
And my evidence for this is a crowd of students
from Washington University in St. Louis who have come today
to hear the lecture and with this, I ask you to join me
in welcoming Professor Borgwardt.   [ Applause ]

>> Sorry.
>> Elizabeth Borgwardt: Lori, thank you.
That was great.
Wow. Just not going to say anything now -- it will just ruin it.
Thank you, Professor Watt, for that introduction.
Good afternoon!
I'd like to thank Professor -- more thank yous --
Professor Roger Louis and also, Dr. Marian Barber
and Professors Jim Grossman and Lori Watt for this nice invitation.
So, this little talk is called "Present of the Creation?
Human Rights, NGOs and the Trusteeship Debate
at the 1945 UN San Francisco Conference."
And it's basically the story of how human rights came
in to the United Nations Charter -- the 1945 United Nations Charter.
This talk is kicking off a series of public lectures that is embedded
in this ongoing seminar in the history of decolonization as noted,
and those participants are here and they're all working
on various fascinating papers on this topic.
And it emerged that a related subfield that was interesting
to many of them was human rights --
ideas, institutions, and social movements.
So, that's what I'm here to offer.
And I always like to start with a little vignette, and then grow it
out to encompass some larger themes.
So, topics to look out for going forward include the rise
of nongovernmental organizations in diplomacy,
the role of public opinion, the role of other constraints
such as unintended consequences in policy making, and a little bit
on imperialism and decolonization at the end, okay?
I'm sorry if that amounts to false advertising for some of you,
but I came up with the title first then wrote the talks,
so that happens a lot.
So, even though I keep a pretty tight focus
on the immediate postwar moment, I'm hopeful that you'll see angles
in this story that interests you.
The entrance to the Garden Room at the Fairmont Hotel
in San Francisco bears an unusual commemorative plaque, right?
This is a little room where you can go and have tea or rent it
for special parties or whatever, and it has a plaque on it that says
"25th April to 26th June 1945 in this room met the consultants
of 42 national organizations assigned
to the United States delegation at the conference
on international organization
in which the United Nations Charter was drafted."
Okay. So, that's our 1945 UN Charter.
"Their contribution is particularly reflected in the charter provisions
for humans rights, and the United Nations consultation
with private organizations."   That's it.

The plaque is widely held to memorialize a particular meeting
that took place on May 2, 1945.
Accounts of this meeting describe a dramatic confrontation
between Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr.,
head of the US delegation to the United Nations Conference,
and representatives of the 42 US nongovernmental organizations chosen
by the state department and designated as official consultants.
There are several iconic and triumphalist accounts
of this encounter in memoirs by participants such as Frederick Nolde
of the Federal Council of Churches,
as well as in later secondary sources.
They describe a scenario where ordinary citizens who happen
to be leaders of grass root civic groups spoke truth to power,
focusing on their dissatisfaction with the absence
of human rights provisions in the draft version of the UN Charter.
Alerted in advance to a high profile opportunity for advocacy,
several of the groups had hastily drafted a letter demanding
that these NGOs agitate more forcefully for the inclusion
of human rights provisions in the draft UN Charter,
as well as for the creation of a human rights commission.
At a later meeting that same day,
Secretary Stettinius offered his pessimistic assessment
of this human rights agenda, noting that he --
and I'm going to quote a lot in this presentation so I'll just try
and let you know with my voice when I'm quoting, okay,
rather than doing a little air quotes thing, but --
so Stettinius said that he
and others had struggled exceedingly hard the previous summer to get
as much into the Dumbarton Oaks proposals,
an early four-paragraph draft of the UN Charter, about which more later,
on the question of human rights as was possible.
As Nolde wrote in his memoir,
"Stettinius felt there was little hope of securing anything more."
According to Nolde and other NGO representatives present
at the meeting, an inspiring speech from another grass roots leader,
Judge Joseph Proskauer transformed this discouraging dynamic.
As Proskauer breathlessly recounted, I'm so tempted
to read this breathlessly but I just - "I said that the voice
of America was speaking in this room as it had never before spoken
in any international gathering."
That voice was saying to the American delegation,
"If you make a fight for these human rights proposals and win,
there will be glory for all.
If you make a fight for it and lose, we will back you up to the limit.
If you fail to make a fight for it, you will have lost the support
of American opinion and justly lost it.
In that event, you will never get the charter ratified."
But then, other NGO leaders spoke, some equally eloquently after which
"Stettinius rose to his feet impulsively," according
to Proskauer, and explained that he had no idea of the intensity
of feeling on the subject.
The Secretary of State then committed to try
to persuade the rest of the US delegation
and to use American leverage
to secure agreement from other delegations.
"I have never seen democracy in action demonstrated so forcefully,"
observed Walter [inaudible], a Stettinius aid who was present
at the meeting, to other NGO leaders later on the conference.
"It is the participation meeting that we had in this room
when Mr. Nolde first introduced the matter
which really changed his history at this point."
Ultimately, according to this narrative,
the human rights provisions triumphed in later drafts
of the charter along with new explicit provisions acknowledging
the important consultative role of NGOs as Stettinius himself explained
in his own description of the role
of these consulting organizations at San Francisco.
What are now called NGOs, groups growing up between the state
and the market, have existed since before there were states
and markets between which to grow.
Well, NGO numbers exploded in the 1980s, both in terms of the number
of groups worldwide, and the robustness
of the transnational connections among them.
The 1945 San Francisco charter nevertheless marks a turning point
where the NGO role becomes recognizably modern.
In addition to formally acknowledging an NGO role
in an international instrument not unique to the UN Charter,
the process of the conference itself, and most importantly,
the state departments preconference preparation, enshrined NGOs
as an important moving force behind what were then recently transformed
ideas about public opinion.
However, a more critical and textured counter-narrative
of the Fairmont Garden Room meeting, specifically, and the role of NGOs
at San Francisco generally,
is offered by the historians Carol Anderson, Kirsten Sellars
and Penny Von Eschen, and is attempted
in some of my own recent work.
These analyses dispute what Sellars astutely summarizes
as "the general thrust of these recollections that the consultants
at the Garden Room meeting had singlehandedly persuaded the
secretary to back the human rights provisions."
By contrast, these revisionist accounts depict a more cynical
and savvy state department staff
that had been busily co-opting internationalist NGOs in the US
since at least the late 1944.
It seems most unlikely that these staffers
and their superiors would have changed course at the 11th hour,
except perhaps in the most superficial --
at the most superficial and cosmetic level based
on a meeting lasting less than half an hour.
Such analysis suggests
that Stettinius' team was already committed
to those human rights provisions depicted
as dramatic concessions flowing from the Garden Room meeting,
such as the creation of a human rights commission
as part of the UN system.
The state department saw advantages in letting the NGOs take credit
for an 11th hour intervention, right down to the detail
of having Archibald MacLeish, right, former Librarian
of Congress 1939, 1944; poet; playwright.
Any Archibald MacLeish fans in the house?
All right.   Okay. One person.

Yeah. Who was then served as Assistant Secretary of State
for Public Affairs sitting down next to Frederick Nolde
in the consultants meeting and urging Nolde to speak.
What this more recent counter-narrative [inaudible]
examined, however, is the broader overarching dynamic,
how these NGOs may have, on some level, lost the battle in terms
of not really being particularly influential in their efforts
to insert or strengthen humans rights provisions in the charter,
and basically being manipulated by the state department,
but how ultimately they may have won the war.
Well, the explosive growth of NGOs
in the postwar era will likely never challenge the dominant structure
of nation states.
Nevertheless, NGOs have arguably transformed the international
landscape, and as sociologist Saskia Sassen notes, "are becoming a force
that can undermine the exclusive authority of the state
over its nationals, resulting in what she calls significant shifts
in the architecture of political membership."
Okay. I think that's such an evocative phrase, "the architecture
of political membership."
And so, social scientists tend to refer to this as the "taming
of sovereignty," right, as opposed to overclaiming
by saying it somehow displaces sovereignty.
In addition to challenging state-centric models
of international relations, NGOs have contributed to the monitoring
and implementation of treaties, have helped to generate
and guide a transnational public discourse and debate
around global problems, and have often brought together
constituencies that would otherwise lack face
to face or other obvious ties.
Right? You know this because you run an NGO.
In the late summer of 1944, here in DC,
the estate of Dumbarton Oaks was the site
for the first Big Four negotiations, so called,
to plan a postwar organization for collective security.
The proposal that came out of this meeting between the United States,
Britain, the Soviet Union and, belatedly, China,
was the first multilateral draft
of what would become the United Nations Charter.
The Dumbarton Oaks planners on the US side believed
that they had learned the essential lessons of the First World War
on how to devise a postwar multilateral order.
Start planning while hostilities are still continuing,
make the plan identifiably and organically American led,
use experts and technicians, so called,
to make the process appear less politicized,
and separate the actual peace treaty from the machinery
for resolving later disputes.   All right.

So you think of -- if you think about that, the list, right,
it's basically reverse engineering the perceived mistakes
of the postwar settlement of the World War I era.
"The Dumbarton Oaks meetings were officially captioned
as conversations, at least in part in order
to convince the small states," right, "and that's the language
from the era that this meeting would be very informal
and that nothing would be decided without them."
That's a contemporary account by the journalist Frank Donovan.
The initial American proposal deployed as the discussion draft
at Dumbarton Oaks contained only a single vague reference
to human rights.
Roosevelt approved the draft through his chief of staff,
Admiral William D. Leahy.
And Leahy indicated that he was opposed to any
such social uplift frills being woven into the organization
because the real job of this organization was to prevent war.
The American delegation did offer human rights-related proposal
debated at Dumbarton Oaks, but tellingly,
the same proposal emphasized the protection of domestic jurisdiction,
right, what lawyers referred to as "a protective veil of sovereignty"
to be drawn over a state's internal practices, such as Jim Crow Laws
in the case of the United States, for instance, right,
even as it advocated human rights.
The international organization should refrain from intervention
and the internal affairs of any states the proposal began.
States must be responsible for arranging their domestic affairs
so as not to endanger international peace and security, and to this end,
to respect the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all people.
Eventually, this reference migrated to become part of the mission
of the economic and social council, which had been added
over British and Soviet objections.
So the list of the organization's purposes
and principles did not mention human rights.
There was no human rights role for the general assembly,
and there was no dedicated human rights commission as one
of the subsidiary organizations.
In the splendid isolation of Dumbarton Oaks,
the sequestered diplomats were earnestly debating how early --
discussing how early organizations for collective security, namely,
the league of nations, had foundered for one
of public understanding and support.
Their own secretive process for reaching consensus
in many ways replicated the very element of remoteness
that they sought to avoid and that apparently went unremarked
by these insiders.
Is my former student, Devon Reston, here?
No? Okay. So his grandfather, Scotty Reston of the New York Times,
leaked these proposals as they were being debated
through a Chinese intern who had been also an intern
at the New York Times, an intern on the Chinese delegation
who would also be an intern at the New York Times and led
to a tremendous sort of outpouring and kind of backlash about the lack
of human rights proposals in these -- in this draft.
And this increasingly vocal cohort
of outsiders had definitely noticed the disjuncture between the rhetoric
of democracy, inclusion and sovereign equality, and the reality
of deference to experts, exclusivity and perceived great power arrogance.
The gap between rhetoric and reality widely noted by at least some
of the players at the time was becoming a kind of engine
of historical change in its own right.
So, struggling to learn lessons Versailles and perhaps some
of the lessons from Dumbarton Oaks,
the state department acted accordingly
in its preparations for San Francisco.
Okay. So, now it's the winter of '44, spring of '45,
"They're determined not to pull another Woodrow Wilson,"
in the words of state -- I know, harsh, right --
in the words of State Department Public Relations Consultant John
Sloan Dickey.
The department sought proactively to develop a public consensus in favor
of the Dumbarton Oaks proposals such as strategy, emphasize alliances
with willing NGOs such as the American Federation of Labor,
the Federal Council of Churches, the National League of Women Voters,
United States Chambers of Commerce.
Andrew Delios [assumed spelling] here, right, working on Chambers
of Commerce in another context.
And also, they emphasized alliances with overtly internationalist groups
such as, the university's committee on postwar problems
and the commission to study the Organization of Peace.
These associations could, in turn, be relied upon
to mobilize individuals,
a responsibility they took very seriously.
As the President of the Kiwanis International explained
at a January 1945 meeting celebrating his organizations 35th
anniversary -- sorry, 30th anniversary,
"The task of all Kiwanians and like service groups was to build a strong
and vocal public opinion that demands a lasting peace.
We must use our 2250 Kiwanis Clubs as forums and platforms to mold
in each community a public opinion that will be powerful
and insistent in this fateful year."
The state department approach was in keeping with new thinking
about the science of measuring public opinion.
Along with ideas about the way opinions
about public policy were formulated
and by extension might fruitfully be guided.
The study of public opinion had been systematized in 1935
when George Gallup and Elmer Roper began using statistical sampling
in their surveys and widely disseminated the results.
Gallup founded the American Institute for Public Opinion in 1935
and the same year, Roper launched the Fortune Magazine survey based
on scientifically designed national samples.
Pre-released data from Gallup, Roper,
and the Princeton Public Opinion polls were widely circulated
within the Roosevelt White House after that date,
and played an influential role in planning memoranda
that were circulated among aids and sent on to the president as lists
and notes attached to the archived memo's show.
Indeed, copies of the polls themselves were often appended
to the memos directly and then sent to NPR -- to FDR [laughter].
See what's on my mind.
By the second Roosevelt Administration,
policy makers had a new and iterative way to talk
about the development of public opinion.
So, some polls were devised to sound out certain kinds of policies
in advance of their promulgation.
So you've got polls basically as trial balloons
and then the policies were in turn reshaped to bring them closer
to the preferences expressed in these poll numbers, right,
so polls as virtual focus groups.
The very demographic group designated as the "intent
of public," okay, which is a good 1940s term,
had itself change composition considerably during the war.
This heterogeneous group situated in between elite opinion makers
and mass culture included people
who read a so-called middlebrow periodical such as Readers Digest
or the Saturday Evening Post in addition
to a daily metropolitan newspaper.
Just a few percentage points increase
in this group could consolidate a critical mass favoring multilateral
approaches to US postwar foreign policy,
a mass that was either absent or quiescent
in the wake of World War I.
And actually, there's a very exciting dissertation that's
about to be published by a Harvard PhD named [inaudible]
about how public opinion was actually much more internationalist
in the wake of World War I
than senators popularly took into account.
Right? But what did senators have to look at in those years?
Right? They had their mail coming in
and those were the most motivated people who were
against the league, were writing to them.
You know, sort of how could they know, how could they get
under the surface of that public opinion, and he thinks he's come
up with a way of showing this, but there's a -- now, there's a device,
right, that's ready and able to be used in the wake of World War II.
To advance this public relations offensive,
a reorganized state department that had never before concerned itself
with is public image -- pause for laughter
from the state department people here --
planned to use its newly created Office of Public Information
in order to take out the word on the content
of the Dumbarton Oaks proposals, and I mean,
I think that evangelical language is deliberate.
The department distributed a series of publicity packages to the press
and to sympathetic NGOs, a series of frequently asked questions
with answers and hundreds of thousands of copies
of the proposals themselves, over 2.2 million publications in all.
The department stretched itself thin
to send approximately 60 senior officials as speakers
to major NGO conferences, as well as,
arranging off-the-record briefings to flatter responsible
and important organizations and opinion leaders.
The state department had hosted five NGO summits
of about 90 organizations each by end of 1944.
And they called this whole package of initiatives
"Operation -- Soapbox [laughter]."
These strenuous efforts yielded gratifying results culminating
in a National Dumbarton Oaks Week of April 17, 1945.
They attended parades, rallies, shop window exhibits, school projects,
radio programs and religious services unfolded
in the emotional atmosphere of the immediate aftermath
of President Roosevelt's death on April 12 --
unexpected death on April 12, right?   So that date is also important.

Recall that FDR would've been the only American president
that citizens under 30 -- at least in their capacity
as voters would have known.
State Department polls suggested that roughly 60%
of the US public knew at least something about these proposals
as the San Francisco conference was opening.
Over 80% of those questions also answered "Yes" to the question,
"Do you think the United States should join a world organization
with police power to maintain world peace?"
Of these affirmative responses,
over 80% thought it was very important that the US participate.
So, an image-conscious senator, right,
which is every senator [laughter], considering how to vote
on international issues in the late 1944, early 1945, would have looked
out and seen a very different landscape
than the one he would've seen in 1919 or even 1935, right?
But, as the historian Sarah Igo and Susan Herbst have pointed
out in a field of public opinion generally,
that landscape was being cultivated and shaped even
as it was being surveyed.
Strong unilateralists, often referred to as "isolationists"
in this era and who tended to refer the moniker "nationalist,"
were predictably horrified by the assumptions embedded
in the Dumbarton Oaks proposals.
Their criticisms tended to center around a perceived giveaway
of American sovereignty to a gang of old world exploiters, and notably,
their criticisms tended to take on an anti-imperialist overlay.
As early as 1943, unilateralist senate leader
and perennial presidential hopeful, Robert A. Taft of Ohio and son
of President William H. Taft, was complaining that
"new deal postwar planners envisioned a world
where our fingers will be in every pie, our military forces will work
with our commercial forces to obtain as much of the world trade
as we can lay our hands on.
We will occupy all the strategic points in the world and try
to maintain a force so preponderant that none dare attack us.
How long can nations restrain themselves from using such force?
Potential power over other nations, however benevolent its purpose,
leads inevitably to imperialism."
Taft dismissed of the possibility of turning the resources
of sovereign states over to what he termed "President [inaudible],"
a program which he observes scornfully may appear
to the do-gooders who regard it as the manifest destiny of America
to confer the benefits of the new deal on every hot-and-tot.
He got a feel for the hot-and-tots in this era
because they were rhetorical device for just about everybody.
Voices on the left were just as dismissive, right?
Perennial socialist presidential candidate, Norman Thomas scoffed
that the cure for a dangerous isolationism is not a more dangerous
membership in an international gang of exploiters.
And the National Council of Negro Women was more moderate
in tone but just as dismayed.
This -- I think this merits quoting at length, actually,
given present company they issued a pamphlet that said,
"The world powers now preparing a blueprint
for the postwar world must recognize
that no lasting peace can be possible until the world is purged
of its traditional concepts on practices of racial superiority,
imperialist domination and economic exploitation."
This statement continued, "The non-white populations of the world,
the oppressed and underprivileged of every complexion
who have contributed unstintingly
to the inevitable victory must be liberated
and given full opportunity for development.
The character of the New World Organization must include provisions
for the ultimate self-government of the dependent peoples
and for the full political economic and social emancipation of racial
and cultural minorities."
And I'm trying not to read too much into this,
but this particular pamphlet was issued by another NGO as a sort
of summary of NGO opinion,
and that's by far the most radical statement in this pamphlet
and it's not in the table of contents, which, I don't know,
I thought was kind of interesting.
But, maybe that's my innate conspiracy theorist.
Other groups echoed these concerns, usually less eloquently,
and several focused on proposals for appending an international bill
of rights to any proposed international charter.
So, I turned to that idea now of, you know,
what would an international bill of rights look like
and there are critiques of the draft charter, one of them --
one in particular by the Federal Council of Churches
in America recommended that the churches support the Dumbarton Oaks
proposals as an important step in the direction of world cooperation,
while proposing the following measures for their improvement,
and they focused on three areas -- developing international law,

founding a special agency to lead to the liberation
of colonial independent areas, and a clearer statement of human rights
and fundamental freedoms, again, this idea of appending a bill
of rights -- bill of human rights to the UN Charter.
So many of these so-called smaller states, again,
small only by the criterion of great power status, right,
like Brazil also expressed disappointment over the timidity
of the Dumbarton Oaks draft and their concerns paralleled many
of these critical voices within the US.
Okay. So, I'm an Americanist but I was trying
to branch out a little bit, right?
On the initiative of Mexican Foreign Minister Ezequiel Padilla,
members of the Pan-American Union met at Chapultepec Castle
in Mexico City in February 1945 to offer a critique of the draft
in advance of the full UN conference later in the spring.
And the Chapultepec conference was part of a venerable tradition
of intra-American consultations dating back
to 19th century expression
of Pan-American solidarity institutionalized
and extended after 1890.
And these periodic conferences involved a series
of multilateral statements pledging things like cooperation,
mutual respect, trying to sort of tame the Colossus of the North.
But, in 1945, the Pan-American Union invited members who were cooperating
in the war effort, okay, which is significant because that's the way
of excluding Argentina where the fascist leaning government
of General [inaudible] has siezed power in 1944.
So there are 19 Latin American participants
and they're airing these longstanding concerns
about preservation of sovereignty, nonintervention,
but they're also very worried
about the US abandoning regional approaches to security in favor
of this universal organization with no Latin American member
in a security council that's a total black box for them and untested.
So, they're worried about that and they're also --
the other main concern that they're worried about is the lack of vision
for human rights, any kind of vision for human rights
in the Dumbarton Oaks draft.
So, they draft a declaration of the rights and duties of man
and conference president Padilla who had -- who's a lawyer.
He's formerly serviced Mexico's attorney general.
He was also a revolutionary leader under [inaudible] and he explains
that wartime solidarity needs to be converted into a solidarity
of peace, a solidarity that continues --
considers the poverty of the people,
its social instability, its malnutrition.
His proposals included inserting more specific human rights
provisions and the principles and purposes of the organization,
creating an international agency charged with promoting intellectual
and moral cooperation around human rights ideas,
and expanding the jurisdiction
of the international tribunal associated with the organization.
So, if you think back to my earlier quote from Admiral Leahy
about how we don't want any of that stuff in this charter
because we're concerned with preventing war.
Okay? This is a very different vision
of what it's going to take to prevent war.
Right? And so, that's one of the reasons why I'm so interested
in this moment because that's kind of all up for grabs.
And there are other -- its' not exclusively Latin Americans --
Latin American representatives who are meeting, who are very upset
about the Dumbarton Oaks draft, but there's representatives
of the British Commonwealth meet in April 1945 in London, Egypt, Greece,
Lebanon, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, Poland, Denmark.
They're all offering basically these draft provisions
for human rights to go into the charter.
Republican internationalist John Foster Dulles summed up that,
"The Dumbarton Oaks proposals had the defects which usually occur
when a few big powers get together to decide how to run the world.
They generally and naturally conclude that the best
of all possible worlds is one in which they will run [laughter] --
one in which they will run."
Once the San Francisco conference was underway,
the limits of public diplomacy
in advancing a human rights agenda were most sharply delineated
around issues of race, and that's what I turn to now that pressure
from domestic groups and from, again,
these so-called "smaller countries"
for charter revisions favoring human rights, racial equality,
augmentation of social and economic provisions,
or anti-colonial approaches
and encountered three formidable obstacles.

Number one was the fact that the US delegation included Texas Senator
Tom Connally [laughter], an ardent segregationist and chair
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Okay. Connally had been chosen to chair the US delegation
because he would be steering the UN Charter, which was, of course,
a treaty through its all-important senate ratification process.
State department officials understood that when you had men
like Connally on the delegation, you didn't go sailing off into the blue.
Okay. This is a quote from the Times,
"You had to keep your eye all the time on not
to putting too much limitation on American sovereignty.
In practice, trimming those sales meant squelching any kind
of charter provision that might result in interference
with the state's rights, orientation of segregationist Southern senators,
right, to whom the Democratic Party in the 1940s was enthrall."
Okay? And there's a very interesting new book on this very subject
by Ira Katznelson called "Freedom from Fear," about the control
of the Southern senators and their influence
on the racial legacy, some of the new deal.
The US military posed the second major obstacle to the development
of any kind of charter provisions emphasizing human rights
and the democratic equality of peoples.
American negotiators influenced the development
of the charter's trusteeship system for colonized peoples,
a topic that was avoided entirely at Dumbarton Oaks.
With an eye to preserving American prerogatives in the territories
of -- that the United States had captured from the Japanese
in the Pacific, a state department official explained
that the US military needed to have a free hand in the Pacific
to use these islands as we saw fit.
The ensuing diplomatic machinations involved re-designating these
islands as so-called "strategic trust territories."
Okay. That's not a thing [laughter].
They just pulled that out of somewhere, okay?
So, and transferring their oversight from the trusteeship council
to the security council, which has an American veto, right,
and then it has its own provisions where they can refuse inspections
and it's a completely different regime
than the idea behind the trusteeship council,
which is to bring populations toward self-determination and,
ultimately, independence.
And this is actually coming from the Green Hackworth papers
that are right here in the Library of Congress.
So, if you think about it, this set of maneuvers meant
that the US delegation basically sacrificed whatever moral authority
or leadership credibility it might have drawn
from FDR's wartime anti-colonialist rhetoric,
and forfeited the opportunity to design a trusteeship regime
that would support colonized peoples
in progressing towards independence, right?
And so we have [inaudible] is here, is working on how this moment
when the UN gives Somalia back to Italy as a trusteeship territory,
you know, and the Somalians are kind of saying, "What?"
But that -- you know, that comes out of this moment where the opportunity
or the possibility of American leadership is really sacrificed.
The third major obstacle to the US delegations advocacy
for international human rights provisions was the advent
of heightened US-Soviet tensions, which played out in San Francisco
in various procedural and substantive disputes
over things like, you know, seating the delegates from Poland
and Argentina who was going to chair the conference itself as well
as things like voting and veto rights.
This tense and adversarial atmosphere served
to draw the United States closer to the European colonial powers, right,
as a way of isolating the Soviet Union.
So, now they're not going to go against these European powers
as much as they otherwise might have, or things were looking
as if they might be during the war.
The NGO contingent in San Francisco, right, remember those guys
from the beginning of the talk?
However scrappy, well informed and motivated, we're arguably no match
for such a potent combination of domestic political
and geostrategic concerns.
The presence of these NGO consultants certainly did not change
Stettinius' view that, then again, these are his words
that the American delegation's job in San Francisco was
to create a charter, not to take up subjects like the negro question.
Walter White, an NGO representative as executive secretary
of the NAACP was soon lamenting that the NGO's role in San Francisco was
to serve merely as a window dressing.
So, to wrap up, what is missing from my own revisionist work and from
that of Anderson, Von Eschen and Sellars is the long view, I think,
in some ways how the spectacular and explosive growth of NGOs
in the postwar era might appropriately prompt us to continue
to interrogate these kind of, you know, micro-level analysis
of who was playing whom in the spring and summer of 1945,
that San Francisco conference may indeed have marked a kind
of turning point for the role of NGOs in international society,
just not in the kind of linear and triumphalist way depicted in some
of the less nuanced and textured historical work,
which may have been relying too uncritically
on self-grandiosing memoirs.
The UN Charter itself was out of date, right,
from the moment it was signed.
Looking backwards as it did to problems with the league
and the League of Nations and to the relative unity
of the wartime alliance.
As a constitutional system, the UN Charter's general architecture
and specific provisions failed to account for the three major factors
that were to transform the international politics
of the second half of the 20th century.
First, as noted, right, the harshly bipolar and thoroughgoing nature
of the already vigorous Cold War, entering a new stage of intensity
in the run up to Churchill's Iron Curtain speech
in Fulton, Missouri in March 1946.   Where's our Fulton guy?

Anywhere? Anywhere?
Okay. Secondly, the rapid pace and wide extent
of decolonization creating many
of the 97 additional member states joining the United Nations before
1980, most of which were not readily able
to be manipulated by the United States.
A third unanticipated factor might be summarized
as the associations resulting in what Saskia Sassen calls
"the new geographies of power."
Such groupings include, but are not limited, to NGOs,
and feature post-San Francisco institutions
such as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe,
the World Trade Organization or NATO, not delineated
or even particularly contemplated by the UN system
and exerting various governance functions outside of that system.
NGOs have reshaped human rights practices
in myriad ways since the 1940s.
They have been contributed in important ways to deal
with legitimizing regimes in the Middle East, Eastern Europe,
the Soviet Union, apartheid-era South Africa,
and South American dictatorships.
And they fit into a burgeoning field of human rights history,
sketching a landscape bristling with a veritable forest
of human rights-related ideas, institutions, politics and culture.
Much of the scholarship, however, takes the existence of this kind
of figurative forest for granted and seems devoted
to attacking the sturdiness, shade or root systems of individual trees.
The central problem of human rights scholarship, to my mind
and not exclusively in history, right,
but also in political science, law, sociology,
is where did this forest come from, especially if there are
such thoroughgoing problems
with each individual element comprising it?
The rhetoric of human rights may not reflect much of a relationship
with realities, but then, why do even human rights abusers feel
or compelled to adopt the language of international human rights?
Why do chronic abusers regularly sign
on to human rights-related treaties, conventions and institutions?
And why are human rights-driven slogans
such as protecting the human rights of women
under the Taliban consistently use
to bolster what is sometimes missing legitimacy
for various kinds of policies.
So, the underlying traction and legitimacy
of international human rights claims is not captured by --
with these histories that gloss over the problems with individual trees.
I'm focused only on the forest.
These sunny narratives have their hardboiled
and pessimistic opposite numbers, right,
that problematize their subjects
by debunking hypocritical human rights myths and affect suggesting
that the forest is not worth cultivating, or indeed,
that there is no larger context beyond an aggregation
of individual episodes.
Neither approach captures the underlying dynamic
which is a transnational movement or network of related movements,
which somehow manages to be greater than the sum of its parts.
Thank you very much.   [ Applause ]

Thanks! That's very nice.   So, we have some time for questions.

I think I was told we could go to about -- we got, what, 5:20 or so?
All right.
So, there's -- anyway, there's a microphone
and [inaudible] do you want to?   It'll come to you [laughter].

>> Thank you.   My name is Aida [assumed spelling],

and I just wondered maybe you've mentioned
that you're an Americanist, I don't know to the extent you'd be able
to answer this, but I was just wondering what non-US NGOs might
have had to do with the development of the charter on human rights
and what -- like either for or against it,
whether other delegations had strong civil societies that were advocating
for the inclusion or exclusion of human rights and how
that might have affected things.   >> Oh, that's a great question.

And, I mean, the NGO presence,
the international NGO presence was not parallel
to the American because, again, the state department had this device
of making their own hand-selected group of NGOs into observers --
or consultants, actually, official consultants.
And then there was also an additional extra people
who were called observers and there wasn't really an analogous process
for visitors.
So -- but, I mean, there was tremendous representation
by the international press, and so, they were really a kind
of channel for, and, you know -- I mean, different newspapers
or publications would represent different points of view.
And they became really a wonderful channel for funneling this agitation
which was, you know, strong reactions outside of San Francisco
and outside of the US to being disappointed
in the Dumbarton Oaks drafts.
But, in terms of what the delegates talk about, I mean,
from all different countries, right?   They talk about these earlier --

things like the Chapultepec statement,
you know, which is not NGOs.
Even though there were NGO presences at some of these --
I don't know what you want to call them --
preliminary conferences, right?
So, I think they felt there was a channel for that to come in,
but it was totally different than the setup for the Americans.
Is this something you work on?   Okay [laughter].

>> How N were the NGOs in 1945, you know?
In the modern world we have [inaudible] and bingos and things
like that, so how -- and certainly, by 1950,
you had NGOs being sponsored by the CIA and stuff like that,
so how N were [multiple speakers] 1945.
>> Elizabeth Borgwardt: How N were the NGOs?
I love that.   That's great.

It's like the title of a song or something.
But, yeah, they were both pretty N and pretty co-opted, okay,
so they were kind of both.
And, I mean, you had a spectrum from, say, the US Chamber
of Commerce to the National Lawyers Guild, okay?
So that's -- in some circles, that's a big spectrum,
but in other circles, not so much.
Okay? So it was -- I think they were -- there was concern with, you know,
the perceived legitimacy of these groups
that they would actually be representing real people,
and it's before really, you know, you've got [inaudible], you know.
It's -- so, the idea is that they can be packaged as, you know, again,
citizens who are speaking truth to power.
These are great questions.
>> Sonya Michelle: Sonya Michelle [assumed spelling]
from the University of Maryland.
Thank you so much for this talk, it's really...
>> Elizabeth Borgwardt: Yeah.   Do please say who you are, sorry.

>> Sonya Michelle: Very interesting.   I have a couple of questions.

One is, was -- Eleanor Roosevelt did play a big --
I know she became our first representative to the UN,
did she also play a role in this and --
or was she was still recovering from FDR's death, I guess?
Yeah. Okay.   So forget about that [laughter].

But in a way, you sort of ended where we want to sort of started,
which is this -- I mean, you...   >> [Multiple speakers].

>> Elizabeth Borgwardt: Speak for yourself.
Okay. All right.   Yes [laughter].

>> Sonya Michelle: Yes, I'm sorry.   Yes, I am.

So...
>> Elizabeth Borgwardt: No, I know what you mean.
>> Sonya Michelle: You know, you're tantalizing us
with these future role, the soon-to-be role of the NGOs
like you have in -- you know,
you sort of explaining why they didn't play much of a role
at this time but you're suggesting that in later chapters,
they played a great role.
So I wonder if, I mean, maybe this isn't a fair question,
but I wonder if you could give us some signpost, or if you were going
to direct people to do the subsequent history of NGOs,
what would be the major -- how would you periodize it,
what would be the major places to look things, to look at.
I mean, how important with things like the convergence
of the non-aligned nations, things like that.
I mean, what are the kind of signposts along the way?
>> Elizabeth Borgwardt: Oh, this is a fantastic question and I am
so tempted to give it to Professor Michael Barnett who is right here
from GW who writes on this very subject.
But, I mean, I think that I'm less interested in periodization
than a lot of people, okay?
But I think that you can make, you know, I mean there are key moments
in the 1970s, you know -- 1970s, I mean, on the domestic US --
let me just take the domestic US side for a minute, okay?
You've got this explosive growth that comes out of --
I mean, a traditional explanation is so unsatisfying,
it was kind of like, "Well, white activists felt kicked
out of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War had ended,
so how to fill the empty hours?
You know, well, I think I'll join Amnesty International,"
and [laughter] -- but there's all kinds of things going
on domestically in the US that facilitate this explosion,
including things like changes to the tax laws, right,
where you get 501[C][3] organizations, so you don't have
to go to a meeting in a dark basement to have the identity
of someone who is part of Amnesty International, right?
You can write a check and slap a sticker on your car.
Also, the so-called Watergate Babies in Congress start --
initiate the state department reporting system on human rights
on everyone except the United States on human rights record,
but that starts later under the Obama administration, but still --
that there wasn't even that before.
Okay? So, you've got a number of different political and,
I would say, even cultural elements coming together.
I mean, I just can't answer it better, right, on the US side.
But, a sociologist friend at the University of Michigan,
Kiyoteru Tsutsui, who works on international NGOs --
human rights NGOs now, and how they have taken --
so taken advantage of the internet, you know, to use this almost kind
of empty language of international human rights, in, you know,
[inaudible] or whoever, because they know
that it will appear to international donors.
And so, it's kind of an open question about, well,
maybe that's a very savvy move on their part, in other words,
just sort of partake of this language, and adopt it creatively
for their own purposes, as opposed to envisioning that as some kind
of Western construct that's superimposed on them.
So, I mean, I agree the Non-Aligned Movement is very important
because it changes the whole dynamic of the UN, right,
that then has this official role for nongovernmental organizations.
But you've got this kind of punctuated equilibrium,
Bruce Mazlish -- the international historian Bruce Mazlish who talks
about like a J curve or something where it's like a hockey stick,
you know, and then after the so-called collapse of communism,
there's just -- a huge explosion [inaudible] tracks the numbers
of NGOs.
And then, what are we calling an NGO modernly?
Because actually, that's a definite --
I've noticed in my own presentation, a definition that I no longer use
about growing up between states and markets, because I think we have
to include corporations now.
It's not just, you know, pressure groups
as they would've been called in the '40s.
I think the international corporation is a --
it's a different kind of NGO, but it's definitely an NGO.
>> Hello. Thank you for this great talk.
My name is [inaudible] and I might have decolonization footnote.
Did you come across a petition of the West Indies National Council?
>> Elizabeth Borgwardt: No, I didn't, but that,
I mean, there's so much there.   >> Yeah...

>> Elizabeth Borgwardt: But tell me what --
I mean, you seem familiar with it.
Tell me what is in it that triggered it for you?
>> Right. It was a pressure group of different colonies
and colonial movements in the Anglophone Caribbean,
and they sent some representatives to the conference
and they were very much disappointed
that the colonial question did not get very much highlighted,
and also in the press afterwards.
So, there was a great deal of disappointment
that there was this shift that you mentioned
from the [inaudible] during the world war
where people really felt the US was apart the anti-colonial nationalist
movements in the colonies and the papers
of the West Indies National Council are actually right here also
in the Library of Congress and the manuscript book [multiple speakers].
>> Elizabeth Borgwardt: Oh great.   Yeah. I'll see you there [laughter].

I can give you some of the Green Hackworth papers there.
>> Probably you don't even need that [laughter].
>> Elizabeth Borgwardt: Say who you are.
>> I'm [inaudible] I'm also with the seminar.
I am very curious about the question of the public kind
of take the conversation back to the beginning, and also to tie it
to the N question or -- so,
but the idea is you're revising a fully accepted kind of revision,
that we ask the question about how much the public is a part
of that, right...   >> [Inaudible] the mic, please.

>> Oh, okay.
But, the question that I'm trying to think
about is are we to be fully cynical?
And are we to kind of not think about the public.
And I understand that [inaudible] is problematic in the understanding
of 40 well-chosen organization NGOs, and that is --
but can we not really talk about that?
And I'm thinking here, like, for instance,
about reading Mark Mazower's article that [inaudible] rights charter.
And then, there's kind of a disappearance of several actors
that several of us in the conference talked about --
in the summer talked about.
Are you taking it to that extreme or can we kind of find a middle ground.
>> Elizabeth Borgwardt: Oh, that's great.
Lori? That's great.
And it is a very textured and nuanced question because, you know,
very often, the version --
a question that I'll get will be something like --
about a question relating to cynicism
that I get will be something like, you know,
"Aren't human rights just a mask for imperialism?"
And it's kind of like, "Well,
what's the most important part of that sentence?
Right? It's probably the word "just," okay, that they are a mask
for imperialism on some level."
But there are other things, too, right?
And, again, in a domestic context, question that I get was --
I tend to get is like, "Isn't the new deal just a mask
for stabilizing capitalism?"
And it's kind of like, "Yes, it is that and it's other things, too."
Okay. So, I'm interested in these kind
of particularly fluid historical moments when the content
of otherwise empty phrases gets filled in by politics and culture
in a different way, and sometimes an unexpected way.
And so, this article that Lina [assumed spelling] referenced
by the historian at Columbia, Mark Mazower, he actually refers
to exactly what I do, okay, which is to contextualize law in the politics
and culture of its time as an academic ghetto
within an academic ghetto that like [laughter] nobody cares about.
Okay? Nobody cares about it in law schools.
Historians don't care about it.   Nobody cares about it.

So, I mean, I think that's where I'm coming from with that.
It is a very hard line to find of kind of how much cynicism
on some level, and I'll get questions
about the International Bill of Human Rights
which is now an aggregation of several UN documents, notably,
the 1948 universal declaration.
And the question is like rhetoric or reality, you know,
like that's the question.   And I kind of feel like, "Wow, yeah.

Okay. That's 75% rhetoric and 25% reality;
and that's my final answer [laughter]."
You know, it's -- and, I mean, part of my point at looking --
in looking at public opinion at all, is to emphasize that it's dynamic,
you know, like when I was talking about the poles
that there's this kind of feedback effect.
And so, you know, where do those opinions come
from that Roosevelt thinks that he now needs to listen to?
So, these are great questions.   Thank you.

Try to keep my answers shorter.
>> Hi. Thank you for the terrific talk.
>> Elizabeth Borgwardt: Say who you are.
>> Michael Barnett: Michael Barnett, George Washington University.
One of the questions I have is, to what extent is there a tension
between the discourse in movements of human rights and the discourse
of movements of decolonization?
Because, one of the stories that, at least,
is told among political scientists,
of which I'm one [laughter], is that...
>> Elizabeth Borgwardt: That's okay, Michael.
>> Michael Barnett: Thank you.
I feel a lot of love in the room [laughter].
Is that -- in the decolonization movement, it was also very much cast
in terms of antihuman rights in part
because the colonial powers themselves were using the club
of human rights as a way of trying to stall decolonization
on the grounds that we can't decolonize
until they're self-governing and part of being self-governing is
to accept the terms of human rights.
And so, there's this tension that goes on in the 1950s
and in the 1960s between decolonization in human rights
as it's practiced at the United Nations.
And I'm wondering to what extent you find evidence of that already
at this moment of creation?
>> Elizabeth Borgwardt: That's a great question.
And the best way I can get my arms around such a big question is
to kind of take it down to a particular thinker from this era
who is Raphael Lemkin, right the corner of the term "genocide."
And he's an adviser -- he's a lawyer and he's an advisor
at the Nuremberg Trials among many other things.
And so, he's interested in group rights, which, on some level,
come out of the League of Nations mandate system.
And so he -- when he talks about atrocity crimes,
he talks about the culture --
the concept of cultural pluralism suggests
that by destroying a nation, its cultural heritage disappears
and world culture and politics become impoverished,
so that that's why you need self-determination, too, you know,
as part of this package, and that's why it should be, you know --
but he's very suspicious of calling that human rights just
because he doesn't want it to get lost that, you know,
we're talking about eradicating groups
and like the most serious kinds of crimes.
Whereas by contrast, you get a thinker from the exact same era,
Hannah Arendt, who's saying, "Well..."
she frames it in terms of individuals that she says that,
you know, individual human beings didn't kill other individual human
beings for human reasons, but that an organized attempt was made
to eradicate the concept of the human being.
Okay? So they're both -- I mean, just --
rather than talking about all human rights, now I'm just --
I'm talking about atrocity crimes
because there was this disjuncture --
you know, there were so many different ways of talking about it.
And, I think this is a moment of transition to --
from focusing on groups to focusing more on the kind of insight that,
you know, each individual human being is an object of moral concern
in the international system and we just sort of lack the mechanisms
to get through to them by --
again, by sort of penetrating that veil of sovereignty.
I think that there's tension, that's a great characterization,
as opposed to complete opposition, for instance,
Sam Moyn gave this lecture last year, right, where he talked
about how decolonization, movements for self-determination have nothing
to do with human rights, and are, in fact, opposed.
And I don't really buy that.   I mean, think if you taught --

unless, our historic collectors themselves have incredible false
consciousness, many of them definitely frame what they're doing
as part of a human rights moment.
>> Well, I can assure you that we in the decolonization seminar are going
to answer all of the questions [laughter]
that you have just raised.
And your talk spoke very well to many of the themes
that we're working on here -- the founding of the United Nations,
how human rights fared in the postwar world,
role of civil society, civic organizations, decolonization
and the ever-present rhetoric versus reality...
>> Elizabeth Borgwardt: There we go.   >> ...which we all grapple with.

I think we better wrap up here.   There's a nice reception afterwards.

I know Professor Borgwardt would be willing to answer more questions.
>> Elizabeth Borgwardt: Definitely.
If you didn't get to ask your question, sorry.
It's also very hot here, so I'm sure we all like something to drink.
>> So, please join me in thanking Professor Borgwardt [applause]
for her talk today.   >> Elizabeth Borgwardt: Thank you.

Thanks a lot.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.