5 THE PRESIDENT’S GHOST

One of the few luxuries Franklin Delano Roosevelt allowed himself during wartime was the private projection room arranged for him at the White House. Roosevelt loved movies. He was the first president to cultivate friendships with film stars and knew enough Hollywood gossip to ask Helen Gahagan Douglas what really happened with Anatole Litvak and Paulette Goddard under the table at Ciro’s.[1] For a man who couldn’t walk without braces or travel without a cavalcade, films were a rare form of escape.

But his selection one night in January 1945, was decidedly strange. With family and friends gathered around him, Roosevelt demanded a screening of Darryl Zanuck’s new Technicolor biopic Wilson. As the former assistant secretary of the navy during the last war, FDR knew the plot better than most. When violins swell and Wilson declares to a recalcitrant Republican delegation, “America has but two choices, gentlemen. Accept the League of Nations or live with a gun in its hand,” one can easily imagine FDR nodding in that characteristic manner of his, bringing his own hand down with an affirmative thump on the armrest. Yet his guests were anxious. They watched the president on the screen grow frail, isolated, ultimately undone by a paralytic stroke and his enemies in Congress. His grand dreams for a new world order were reduced to ruins. “By God, that isn’t going to happen to me,” the current president muttered.[2]

It was happening. Roosevelt was dying. Everyone in the screening room knew it. Even Wilson’s widow, Edith, took labor secretary Frances Perkins aside a few weeks later and said, “Oh, Mrs. Perkins, did you get a good look at the President? Oh, it frightened me. He looks exactly as my husband looked when he went into his decline.”[3] Franklin Roosevelt lived with Wilson’s ghost every single day. An almost inconceivable confluence of circumstances contrived to bring him in 1945 to exactly the same pivotal moment as his predecessor in 1918.

FDR might have seen his role in Shakespearean terms: the son avenging his father’s disgrace. Or, as a great believer in destiny and divine providence, he might have thought that God had placed him there at that moment to do his work. There is a messianic zeal underlying his fight for the United Nations that one struggles to find in his other administrative endeavors. Indeed, it runs at crosscurrents with his perceived nature. Roosevelt was often cast as a pragmatist surrounded by dreamers. “I did not choose the tools with which I must work,” he once explained wearily. “Had I been permitted to choose them I would have selected quite different ones.”[4] He had little patience for ideologues. His creed was action, not theory; try something, and if it doesn’t work, try something else. Even his secretary of war, Henry Stimson, said that following Roosevelt’s thought processes was like chasing a beam of sunlight around an empty room.[5] Yet in 1945 FDR was the consummate idealist, preaching a form of world government more radical and far reaching than Wilson could have imagined. On few other subjects during his presidency was he less equivocal or more consistent. Thus one might begin to trace the reintroduction of natural law principles back into geopolitics simply by reviewing a record of Roosevelt’s speeches from 1937 to 1945.

This requires a little explaining. At no time did Franklin Roosevelt explicitly reference natural law; instead he spoke of an “international morality” and universal human rights.

On the other hand, if there is a natural law independent from states, it must supersede. Justice and right must be common to all, regardless of status or nationality. This argument, taken to its logical conclusion, allows (indeed mandates) recognition of universal human rights. It also provides the legal foundation to hold functionaries of the state criminally liable if their actions violate such rights. Thus both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Nuremberg Tribunals rest on the same legal foundation of natural law.

While Franklin Roosevelt did not live to see either, no single person had a greater impact on their creation. If it seems unusual to frame the story of natural law and human rights in the twentieth century largely around one man, it is equally unusual for any individual—even a sovereign—to so completely and deliberately alter the law’s trajectory. It is strange, therefore, that while FDR’s role in the founding of the UN has been the subject of many books and articles, his equally vital role in human rights legislation seems overlooked. He is given proper credit for the Four Freedoms speech and the Atlantic Charter, but aside from these and a handful of other speeches, little is said.

The story of natural law and human rights is, of course, much bigger than Franklin or Eleanor Roosevelt. Renaissance jurists and philosophers, and others after them, wrote of a future utopia when all the world might exist under a single, perfect law. They assumed, however, that, as law was a reflection of society, this happy state could only arrive when society itself had evolved to a similar perfection. The idea that such a law might appear after the most destructive conflict in human history, and as a direct result of the atrocities inflicted during that conflict, was inconceivable. When Enlightenment scholars spoke of the rights of man, they acknowledged that every sovereign had the duty to grant (or not impede) those rights for their subjects. It was even presumed that a people might overthrow their sovereign if such rights were not given. Yet few contemplated the possibility that one state might hold the leaders of another criminally liable for breach, or that an international body might one day establish and impose universal legal norms.

In the aftermath of the Great War, that narrative changed. Inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to establish the League of Nations, a small but motivated group of activists and academics saw the league’s potential to evolve into something more: world government. Collective security was a necessary first step, but only the beginning. Particular attention was given to Wilson’s attempt to include language in the league charter offering protection for minority groups.[10] Of note also were the ongoing efforts of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in encouraging the community of nations to establish basic standards of living.[11] Yet neither the league nor the ILO could properly be understood as a foundation of universal human rights, any more than could the pleasant but vague language of the era, such as the Kellogg-Briand Pact’s stated intention, in 1928, “to promote the welfare of mankind.”[12]

One obvious problem with establishing a universal law was that each group—religious, social, political—in each nation had its own conception of what “basic” human rights consisted of. In the United States alone there was a plethora. Religious leaders saw it as “God’s law”; patriotic Americans (especially in Congress) saw it as the Bill of Rights; socialists saw it as the welfare of the worker; etc., etc. Only a small coterie of academics saw universal human rights as a species of natural law—but they became crucial later, as we shall see.

It was Franklin Roosevelt who gave both shape and direction to this amorphous public sentiment, leading to an entirely novel understanding of natural law. First, he reduced the concept of right from its innumerable possibilities down to four basic freedoms. Second, he used the power of his office to promote recognition of those freedoms at home and abroad. Third, he employed diplomacy to engineer the creation of an international organization whose mandate included protection of human rights, with the United States occupying a principal role.

As assistant secretary of the navy, Roosevelt was a late and reluctant convert to the concept of the League of Nations. “Last spring,” he declared in his first major address on the subject in March of 1919, “I thought the League of Nations merely a beautiful dream, a Utopia.”[13] Yet there is some evidence that even in 1919 Roosevelt saw its potential to evolve. In July of that year he gave a speech before the League to Enforce Peace that offered an interesting analogy:

When the federal constitution was adopted it was called impractical and illegal. Yet it was adopted with faith in its authors. Should we not have equal faith in the authors of this treaty of peace with its clause for the League of Nations? If it is adopted we will have given the world something besides Magna Carta and the federal constitution. It will be a document that will make the world a safe place to live for ages to come.[14]

The comparison is a strange one. The Magna Carta and the US Constitution were not treaties, but foundations of law. By placing the league within this pantheon, Roosevelt appears to be suggesting it too will serve as a legal foundation. But for what, exactly? Making “the world a safe place to live” implies more than merely preventing war. Stranger still is the implication that the league is somehow perceived as “illegal.” By whose law? And what would be illegal about the maintenance of peace? A possible answer to these conundrums is that Roosevelt saw the league as the beginning of a new international law.[15] There is other evidence for this contention. In all, FDR gave nearly eight hundred speeches in support of the league; much of the language was boilerplate, but occasionally he grapples with something larger. Accepting his party’s nomination for vice president in 1920, he lectured:

We must open our eyes and see that modern civilization has become so complex and the lives of civilized men so interwoven with the lives of other men in other countries as to make it impossible to be in this world and not of it…. We cannot anchor our ship of state in this world tempest nor can we return to the placid harbor of long ago. We must go forward or founder.[16]

On the one hand this was an attack on isolationism, yet the focus of this passage is not on the interconnectedness of governments or trading partners but rather “the lives of civilized men.” Reducing vast societal forces down to the ordinariness of daily life would later become a hallmark of FDR’s fireside chats, but there is interesting ambiguity here. Are the “other men in other countries” also civilized? If so, what is the nature of this civilization that binds them? If not, is it the responsibility of the civilized men to make them so, as this passage seems to imply? Either way, it is impossible not to read within this excerpt some undercurrents of natural law philosophy, in either its classical or nineteenth-century form. Progress, Roosevelt is saying, is a collective effort. Likewise there is a haunting echo in this speech of the very last one Roosevelt wrote, which lay on his desk in Warm Springs, Georgia, as its author expired upstairs: “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with a strong and active faith.”[17]

Progress and faith. In Roosevelt’s mind they were inextricably linked and might have occupied much of the landscape of the “thickly forested interior” within his soul that he revealed to almost no one. “His religious faith,” speechwriter Robert Sherwood wrote, “was the strongest, most mysterious force within him.”[18] Mysterious perhaps, but not unknowable. At Groton School young Franklin fell under the tutelage of Reverend Endicott Peabody, a staunch advocate of “muscular Christianity.” By this Victorian creed all life’s struggles were sent by God to test man’s ability to master them, and himself.[19] For Franklin, the lesson stuck. “He believed in God and in his guidance,” Eleanor Roosevelt would write. “He felt that human beings were given tasks to perform and with those tasks the ability and strength to put them through.”[20] The president would later credit Endicott Peabody as the most important man in his life besides his own father.

The core of Rooseveltian philosophy lay in his belief that humanity evolved toward a greater end, directed by its own essential goodness and intelligence—hence his reminder to have “faith in the authors” of the league—and by a divine hand. In a 1943 speech, for example, Roosevelt pitched the United Nations as a means whereby “mankind may enjoy in peace and in freedom the unprecedented blessings which Divine Providence through the progress of civilization has put within reach.”[21] Whether or not he read Cicero or Aquinas (though, with the benefit of a Harvard education and legal training from Columbia, he probably did), Roosevelt intuited the fundamental precept of Aquinian natural law: that God instilled in humankind an instinct for justice, which if allowed to fully develop would lead ultimately to utopia.[22] Again and again (to borrow his own phrase) Roosevelt reaffirmed this correlation between faith, progress, and civilization. In his last inaugural address, delivered just weeks after Dr. Peabody’s death, Roosevelt expressed it succinctly: “I remember that my old schoolmaster, Dr. Peabody, said in days that seemed to us then to be secure and untroubled, �?Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights—then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.’ ”[23]

Just as fervent as Franklin Roosevelt’s faith in human progress was his conviction that the United States had a unique role in that “upward trend.” In a 1920 stump speech in Mitchell, South Dakota, Roosevelt declared, “The United States has an opportunity to write the title of the ensuing chapter of history either as �?America leads the world toward a New Era’ or �?America abandons her Faith.’ ”[24] For FDR the fight for the league became something greater than wrangling over a peace treaty: it was about a vision of the future and the United States’ role in hastening that vision into reality. “The younger nations are looking to the United States for justice and liberty, and ours is the task to see that the safety of these nations is wrapped up.”[25] Justice and liberty, of course, are legal concepts, and the United States’ role in safeguarding them in other nations was left vague. In a speech entitled “The National Emergency of Peace Times” he was more explicit: “We have taken on for all time a new relationship, recognized by the fact of our entry into the war for civilization, the duty we owe to other peoples and nations and which they owe to us.”[26]

Thus, as early as 1919 these crucial elements may be found in Roosevelt’s character and speeches: 1) a recognition of the interrelatedness of all “civilized” persons; 2) an acceptance of the responsibility for states, especially the United States, to foster that interrelationship and, by extension, civilization itself; 3) a genuine belief in American exceptionalism; 4) a staunch belief in universal human progress buttressed by his own “strong and active” personal faith. Combined, these elements would form the moral foundation of FDR’s push for the United Nations and universal human rights.

In later years, some would accuse Roosevelt of pressing for the UN out of revenge for Wilson’s humiliation. They were not entirely wrong. At the 1920 Democratic Convention in San Francisco, a demonstration in favor of the departing president was met with stony silence by the New York delegation until Roosevelt himself wrested the banner from Tammany hands and led an insurgent parade up the aisles.[27] His boss at the Department of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, noted years later that among FDR’s most prized possessions as president was the desk on which Wilson had written the first draft of his league covenant.[28] Yet Roosevelt the pragmatist was also conscious of Wilson’s failings. When asked years later about the failure of the league, he answered glibly, “That needs a politician like me.”[29] Someone, in other words, who could do the things Wilson could not: obfuscate, compromise, wait on events, and hide his true intentions until a favorable climate matured.

For all his earlier fervor, Roosevelt allowed the league to recede from his thoughts until a second world crisis once again brought it forward. But there were glimmerings. In 1923, responding to a contest in the Saturday Evening Post for the best essay on international cooperation (with a cash prize of $100,000), Roosevelt drafted a proposed “Society of Nations” that looked remarkably like the existing league, with a few technical alterations.[30] The whole project, in fact, might have been a form of recuperative therapy: he had been diagnosed with polio months before, and Eleanor later admitted that “the writing of the peace plan was proposed largely as something to keep alive his interest in outside affairs during the first years of adjustment, when it would have been easy for him to become a self-centered invalid.”[31] The futility of the project was underscored by the fact that, since Eleanor herself served on the prize committee, her husband’s contribution was necessarily void. Of more interest than his proposal was the letter he wrote to publisher Edward Bok, who sponsored the contest. Despite his own entry, Roosevelt had publicly scoffed at the idea that any plan—even his—could be a “short cut to Eutopia” (given the Eurocentric nature of the league, this might or might not have been a typo).[32] Yet in his private letter to Bok, Roosevelt admitted to “malice aforethought” in this declaration. “Public opinion must be educated to expect necessarily complicated machinery,” he wrote, instead of “the mere establishment of a formula.”[33] Cognizance of public opinion, and the willing manipulation of it, would be hallmarks of FDR’s own attempts to create a second, successful league.

Judging from his own words, however, it was decades before the thought entered Roosevelt’s mind once again. In this he was in the majority. The trajectory of events by the mid-1930s had moved so completely away from Wilson’s promised “utopia” as to make any serious proponent of democratic world government naïve at best. Despite his earlier musings about the comity between “civilized men,” when confronted with mounting evidence of brutality within the Nazi state, Roosevelt’s response was initially muted. He liked to keep lines of communication open, and filing meaningless protests bound to fall on deaf ears was not his style of politics (again in contrast to his mentor, Wilson). Immersed in its own problems since the start of the Great Depression, the United States had little interest in assuming the role of global nanny.[34] Moreover, even if Roosevelt had wished to intervene, there were few practicable avenues. King Leopold II’s horrors in the Congo led to demands that he be tried for “crimes against humanity,” but outcry remained limited to newspaper editors and Leopold died in his bed.[35] Similar cries had come at the end of the First World War, insisting Kaiser Wilhelm II be charged with a host of offenses. The delegates at Versailles adopted a Napoleonic approach instead and sent him into exile. There was simply no precedent for policing the internal affairs of another nation or holding its leaders criminally accountable. As the Nazi state grew and consolidated, the Roosevelt administration initially employed a cautious policy of watching and waiting. But that was to change.

As early as 1937, Franklin Roosevelt evinced a remarkably clear-eyed understanding of the dangers Nazism posed, not merely to global security but to the upward trajectory of human progress described by Dr. Peabody—an evolution whose benchmarks were measured in adherence to natural law. In a Chicago speech given on October 5 of that year, he warned: “The landmarks and traditions which have marked the progress of civilization toward a condition of law, order and justice are being wiped away,” and called upon Americans to join with other nations to “work together for the triumph of law and moral principles in order that peace, justice and confidence may prevail in the world.”[36] This was no empty rhetoric. The “Quarantine” speech, as it came to be known, laid the foundations of an argument Roosevelt would return to many times in the coming years. Interdependent economies, fluid borders, and even technological advances like airplanes and railroads meant that no nation could live in isolation from its peers. States were bound by invisible cords in a vast, intricate network; when one cord strained or snapped it disturbed the whole. Thus any turbulence—even if confined within the borders of a single nation—was as relevant to the American citizen as the price of corn in Iowa: “There can be no stability or peace either within nations or between nations except under laws and moral standards adhered to by all…. It is, therefore, a matter of vital interest and concern to the people of the United States that the sanctity of international treaties and the maintenance of international morality be restored.”

Roosevelt’s conception of law was both new and ancient. Its novelty lay in challenging the oldest precept of diplomacy: that every state had absolute sovereignty over laws and policies within its borders. The president was not (yet) suggesting the United States might intervene militarily or otherwise to stop an atrocity, but rather that it exert whatever influence it could to induce all nations to adopt a universal standard of law to prevent such atrocities before they occurred. Equally novel was the presumption that this was not a new departure but recognition of an existing reality. In the president’s depiction, trade and travel had succeeded where the league failed: a global community already existed.

What this community lacked, however, was a universal standard by which to function. In supplying that standard, the president reached past centuries of realpolitik, all the way to the Renaissance. Placing “law and moral principles” in an overall rubric of “international morality,” Roosevelt resurrected humanist visions of a holistic code of justice based on natural law. Further, by drawing a direct line between a single domestic disturbance and the collective harmony of nations, the Quarantine speech raised ancient echoes of the “King’s Peace.” In medieval England the sovereign was responsible for preserving the peace; disturbance of that peace upset the delicate balance and harmony within the kingdom. Therefore, any crime was considered not merely an assault on the victim but on the “King’s Peace” and thus the community as a whole.[37] Roosevelt had, almost offhandedly, extended the King’s Peace to cover the entire world.

If the president’s call for an “international morality” seems naïve, it must be understood in context. Until the twentieth century, the basic precepts of natural law had never been so thoroughly subverted; indeed, one of the most sinister aspects of Nazism was its ability to cloak unconscionable acts in the raiment of familiar legal language. Article 4 of the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935, for example, states: “Jews are forbidden to fly the Reich or national flag or display Reich colors; They are, on the other hand, permitted to display the Jewish colors. The exercise of this right is protected by the state.”[38] While expressly denying Jews a vital element of participation in the Reich (at a time when displaying the swastika on storefronts, houses, or upon one’s person was all but required), the law appears to be making a “separate but equal” distinction. Naturally, display of “Jewish colors” would further distinguish the Jews, making them easier to identify. But the most revealing passage comes at the end. In the Nazi state there were no rights under law but rather privileges granted by the state and conditional on the individual’s continued, active display of fealty. Voting, citizenship, marriage, worship, education, employment—any and all participation in society—were privileges, not rights.[39] Hence, when we find language suggesting that the “right” to display Jewish colors shall be “protected by the state,” it is impossible not to conclude that the purpose of this language was to placate the reader into a false sense of security with the deliberate use of natural law language.

Roosevelt was not alone is seeing past this subterfuge. Journalists, diplomats, and even tourists had long warned that the seeming orderliness of the Third Reich concealed a callous disregard for the rule of law.[40] While Nazi “ideology” was chaotic and contradictory, its legal philosophy was brutally simple; it was, in fact, the embodiment of Xenophon’s precept that whatever the state wills is law. Legal theorists had long pondered the ethical implications of that idea, yet assumed that other factors—the benevolence of the ruler, volatility of the governed, or the basic goodness of humankind—would ultimately restrain the state and its leaders from their worst impulses. Even Cicero had counseled against resisting an unjust magistrate; since human nature was inherently good, he argued, evil must be an aberration. Therefore the wisest counsel was to have patience and wait for the natural balance to be restored. Nazism proved the fallacy of this belief. Under the Reich, the will of the state was omnipresent, immovable, and unrestrained.

Indeed, the counterexample of Nazism seemed to bring the original beauty of natural law into stark relief by contrast. Writing for the Notre Dame Law Review in 1939, Professor Brendan F. Brown guided his readers through an examination of “Natural Law and the Law-Making Function in American Jurisprudence” before ultimately revealing his true purpose at the conclusion. Casting aside the veneer of academic detachment, his article became a jeremiad:

The chaotic stage through which the whole world seems to be passing at the present time, largely as a result of rejecting natural law philosophy in international relations, the complete breakdown of the natural law mode of thought as the basis of international law, the rejection of the natural law category in the totalitarian countries…in short the elimination of natural law philosophy from both the international and national orders, with results which are obviously disastrous to the happiness of man…must be apparent to all American jurists. The lesson learned from this should be utilized now—the lesson that the annihilation of the jus natural…must place men on a purely animal or physical plane, wherein the savagery of the jungle will be imitated with consummate astuteness.[41]

The implication here, as with the Quarantine speech, is that the current state cannot persist indefinitely. There could be no coexistence between Nazi law and natural law, since one was the logical and political negation of the other. They could not occupy the same era, much less the same hemisphere, without coming into conflict. For Dr. Brown and many others, the nature of that conflict was Manichaean: civilization on one side and “the savagery of the jungle” on the other.

Ironically, just as the specter of Nazism brought forth a spirited defense of natural law, the darkened political landscape also awakened dreams of a new world order. On the eve of conflict in 1939, a book titled Union Now suddenly skyrocketed to the top of the best-seller lists. Clarence Streit, a New York Times reporter who had spent much of his career covering the League of Nations, offered a clinical autopsy of its failure. The league was weak, inadequate, and poorly structured, and thus incapable of responding to German aggression—the very purpose for which it was created. Yet in contrast to the majority of the league’s critics who called for disbandment, Streit argued instead that it be strengthened. The league must become a federation with a single currency, postal service, economy, defense force, and most importantly, law. Streit likened his proposed reform to the transition from Articles of Confederation to the US Constitution. Just as the Constitution allowed the United States to consolidate itself under a single federal government and present a united front to the world, so too would the reorganized league strengthen each of the member nations through their participation in the collective.[42]

Although Roosevelt probably never read Union Now or Dr. Brown’s article, both are indicative of the public debate that underlay his State of the Union speech delivered on January 6, 1941. The war, rapidly assuming its ultimate dimensions as a global struggle between democracy and totalitarianism, all but necessitated consideration of the world that would come after. Instead of the vague “future,” people now spoke of the “postwar world.” The same week as Roosevelt drafted his address, Eleanor finished reading Henry Jesson’s And Beacons Burn Again: Letters from an English Soldier, which framed the European war as a coming triumph of liberalism over tyranny. “Justice for all,” Eleanor wrote approvingly in her column, “security in certain living standards, a recognition of the dignity and the right of an individual human being without regard to his race, creed or color—these are the things for which vast numbers of our citizens will willingly sacrifice themselves.”[43]

Her husband’s thoughts were similarly occupied as he drafted his address. It is worth noting that Roosevelt’s speeches were collaborative efforts. While the president approved and contributed to every speech, it is not always possible to discern which language is uniquely his own. The 1941 State of the Union had been through several drafts, much of it concerning taxes and armaments. During their last planning session, speechwriter Sam Rosenman recalled, Roosevelt suddenly went quiet. He stared for a moment at the ceiling, then began to dictate what he called his “peroration.”[44] The words appeared in the final text virtually unchanged. “In the future days,” he declared, “which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded on four essential freedoms.”[45] These were freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. How exactly he arrived at these four is a matter of debate. Some point whimsically to a cluster of statuary at the 1939 World’s Fair that featured four allegorical freedoms, including speech and worship (want and fear, however, replaced by assembly and the press). These were also cornerstones of the US Bill of Rights. The other two are somewhat murkier. Freedom from want likely drew its inspiration from the New Deal, though in his speech Roosevelt refers vaguely to “economic understandings” between nations. Freedom from fear was the most expressly political: Roosevelt refers not to the fear individuals might have of their governments but rather to the fear of invasion by a conquering nation. It is unique among the freedoms in that it does not refer to the relationship between the citizen and their government but rather the citizens of one nation with those of another.[46]

The Four Freedoms were not legal definitions and were not meant to be so. But they were not empty words either. For all its vagaries, the January 6 speech marks the first time a head of state publicly committed his nation to promoting universal human rights. Roosevelt left no doubt on that point. Each freedom closed with the same ringing coda: “Everywhere in the world!” The exclamation point can be heard in sound recordings of the address. Roosevelt nearly shouts the phrase, as if underscoring a promise made.

Historians largely regard the Four Freedoms speech as a mixture of high idealism and shrewd politics: by offering his own vision of a postwar world, Roosevelt was attempting to convince the American public (which still, as late as 1941, overwhelmingly favored neutrality) that its interests were inextricably bound with the global conflict.[47] This is certainly true, but there are other currents within the speech. Earlier in his address, Roosevelt castigates the Axis powers for “their new one-way international law, which lacks mutuality in its observance, and, therefore, becomes an instrument of oppression.” The Four Freedoms, drawn expressly from natural law philosophy and applied universally, amount to an alternative international law that would be, in contrast, mutual and an instrument of liberation.

That the United States should take the lead in shaping the postwar moral order was foreordained: “Just as our national policy in internal affairs has been based upon a decent respect for the rights and the dignity of all our fellow men within our gates, so our national policy in foreign affairs has been based on a decent respect for the rights and dignity of all nations, large and small. And the justice of morality must and will win in the end.” Left unsaid, however, was that America had faced this test before and failed. Three weeks before Pearl Harbor, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles gave an address at a memorial for President Wilson and took the opportunity to drive the point home in sentiments that his boss, another old Wilsonian internationalist, indubitably endorsed: “The heart-wrenching question which every American citizen must ask himself on this day of commemoration is whether the world in which we have to live would have come to this desperate pass had the United States been willing in those years which followed 1919 to play its full part in striving to bring about a new world order based on justice.”[48]

Roosevelt was determined not to let past become present. This is made explicit in the conclusion of his speech, remarkable both for the breadth of its pledge and lack of ambiguity:

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb. To that new order we oppose the greater conception—the moral order…. 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.

It was consistent with President Roosevelt’s optimistic nature to see calamity as opportunity. In contrast to earlier speeches, where he spoke vaguely of hopes for the future, the Four Freedoms speech adds a crucial time line: victory in Europe would doom the “new order of tyranny,” and an equally new “moral order” would emerge. This transformation seems almost mystical. The triumph of democracy over fascism is symbolically linked to the triumph of “faith in freedom under the guidance of God” over godless tyranny. The faithful, therefore, would inherit the task of reshaping the world by the grace of God after his design.

This was FDR’s version of a natural law argument. While legal scholars have long maintained that natural law may exist without the presence of God, for Roosevelt that was not the case. Perhaps as a legacy of Dr. Peabody, the president construed morality in Judeo-Christian terms. Thus the concluding paragraph reads like a logical proof from Aquinas: the right to freedom, being given by God, must be universal. Therefore any state that denies human rights defies God’s will. This idea was not original to Roosevelt. A similar view was propounded by William Henry Seward in his famous 1850 antislavery speech before the Senate. The Constitution was the ultimate source of American law, and the Constitution allowed slavery. “But there is a higher law than the Constitution,” Seward told his listeners, “which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes. The territory is a part, no inconsiderable part, of the common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of the universe. We are his stewards, and must so discharge our trust as to secure in the highest attainable degree their happiness.”[49] Roosevelt would have understood and agreed with these sentiments.

It is telling that among the first major groups to respond to FDR’s call for action was the Federal Council of Churches, which incorporated the Four Freedoms into its thirteen “Guiding Principles” for a new world order. Soon after, representatives of the Catholic and Jewish faiths likewise lent their support.[50] Their endorsement was encouraging but also potentially problematic. Some listeners might interpret FDR’s frequent invocation of the divine and “international morality” as advocacy of a postwar world governed by a form of biblical law; certainly he did nothing to discourage this reading. As one author notes, such groups “had now received a mandate to press with holy fervor” and did so.[51]

A notable example was the Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, representing twenty-five Protestant denominations and over ten million parishioners. John Foster Dulles, future secretary of state under President Eisenhower, served in 1942 as its chairman. While not a zealot, Dulles was a man of deep faith who regarded the present war in spiritual terms as the ultimate struggle between the forces of God and Satan.[52] Victory for the Allies was victory for God; naturally, the postwar world would be refashioned under God’s law. Along with American League of Nations director Clark Eichelberger, Dulles produced a thirteen-part radio series on NBC in the summer of 1943, bringing this view to the American public. Justice and Human Rights reached some four million households. For those without a radio, Dulles and Eichelberger distributed a printed pamphlet, Winning the War on the Spiritual Front, encouraging Americans to form local organizations in support of human rights and, of course, write their representatives in Congress. Their efforts ultimately bore fruit. In June 1943 Dulles met personally with the president and presented him with a “Statement of Political Propositions,” including “the right of individuals everywhere to religious and intellectual liberty.”[53] He left convinced that Roosevelt was in complete sympathy with his biblical view of universal law. That might have been the case, but it was also true that Roosevelt had a gift for making every supplicant in his office feel the same.

Having dedicated his own nation to the cause of human rights, FDR then took the first tentative steps toward gaining international support. Elements of the Four Freedoms resurfaced in the Atlantic Charter issued jointly with Winston Churchill on August 11, 1941.[54] The two leaders pledged to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” and “afford assurance that all the men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.”[55] In his message to Congress ten days later, Roosevelt added: “It is also unnecessary for me to point out that the declaration of principles includes of necessity the world need for freedom of religion and freedom of information. No society of the world organized under the announced principles could survive without these freedoms which are a part of the whole freedom for which we strive.”[56] On January 1, 1942, similar language was incorporated into the Declaration by the United Nations. Drafted by Roosevelt and Churchill, endorsed by all the Allies and eventually over forty other nations, the declaration would become the basis for the UN and its foundational charter. It declared that the purpose of the Allies was “to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands.” The declaration, scarcely a page long, nevertheless formally bound all its signatories to uphold for themselves and the global community the basic principles of natural law.[57]

Though the Atlantic Charter and the Declaration of the United Nations were scarcely five months apart, the symbolic weight behind their words is radically different. America’s entry into the war transformed the conversation on human rights. Until then, Roosevelt had to trust in God’s will and (even less reliably) British acquiescence to see his Four Freedoms become a universal standard of law. Now, as dominant partner, the United States would have a powerful role in reshaping the postwar world.[58] Among the first to realize the potential of this mandate was Secretary of State Cordell Hull. In a speech delivered to a worldwide radio audience titled “The War and Human Freedom,” Hull predicted that after victory, with much of the world lying in ruins, it would be the job of the Allies—especially the Americans—to reconstruct the “political, economic and spiritual foundations” of each defeated nation and of society as a whole. Like Roosevelt, Hull saw opportunity in calamity. Not since the empires of the last century had any nation attempted to refashion the legal landscape of the world in its own image; what the imperialists did by force the Americans would do out of altruism—and necessity.[59]

Religious leaders saw a postwar world governed by biblical law; Secretary Hull balanced this with the Bill of Rights. After the war, he declared, “there will lie before all countries the great constructive task of building human freedom and Christian morality on firmer and broader foundations than ever before. This task, too, will of necessity call for national and international action.”[60] If listeners momentarily boggled at the thought of China or Saudi Arabia being rebuilt on the basis of Christian morality, Hull went on to reveal where his own preference lay:

Within each nation, liberty under law is an essential requirement of progress. The spirit of liberty, when deeply embedded in the minds and hearts of the people, is the most powerful remedy for racial animosities, religious intolerance, ignorance, and all the other evils which prevent men from uniting in a brotherhood of truly civilized existence.

It might be wondered what an African American listening in South Carolina made of Hull’s assurance that the spirit of liberty remedied racial animosities, but that was not the audience the secretary had in mind. A civilized world, Hull insisted, could only be one in which “there is acceptance of human rights and human freedoms” by every nation. The United States pledged itself to ensuring that every person on earth should live by the same freedoms as its own citizens. This sounded good enough, but the implication was clear: American rights were human rights, and vice versa. Though well intentioned, this kind of thinking was hardly distinguishable from those earnest moralists in the British Empire (a few of whom, in 1942, might still have been above ground) who saw their solemn duty to spread English common law throughout the world.

If Secretary Hull conflated human rights with American values, he was in accord not only with the majority of the American public but his boss as well. It was Roosevelt who declared in 1920 that the “younger nations are looking to the United States for justice and liberty” and reinforced that sentiment in his third inaugural address with the assertion that “democracy alone, of all forms of government, enlists the full force of men’s enlightened will…. Democracy alone has constructed an unlimited civilization capable of infinite progress in the improvement of human life…for it is the most humane, the most advanced, and in the end the most unconquerable of all forms of human society.”[61] This was, of course, what his audience wanted to hear. Roosevelt needed the public to abandon its hidebound isolationism and embrace a new globalist role for the United States. If Christian faith moved them to support human rights, so be it. If patriotism worked, that was fine by him too. Lest this seem cynical, it is worth remembering that just as Roosevelt shared a Judeo-Christian worldview with men like John Foster Dulles, he was no less sincere in his belief in American exceptionalism. For him democracy, liberty, and right were not only symbiotic but synonymous. The “upward trend” of human progress was, necessarily, a democratic one. Therefore, as the world’s most powerful democracy, America was also the most advanced along that path to perfection:

The democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history. It is human history. It permeated the ancient life of early peoples. It blazed anew in the Middle Ages. It was written in Magna Carta…. Its vitality was written into our own Mayflower Compact, into the Declaration of Independence, into the Constitution of the United States, into the Gettysburg Address. Those who first came here to carry out the longings of their spirit, and the millions who followed, and the stock that sprang from them—all have moved forward constantly and consistently toward an ideal which in itself has gained stature and clarity with each generation.

Shortly after America’s entry into the conflict, Roosevelt ordered Hull to supervise the drafting of an international bill of rights. This would, he hoped, serve as the foundation for a worldwide organization committed to upholding those rights. It was also the first time any head of state had made international human rights law a national policy. The State Department responded enthusiastically, incorporating the project within its overall postwar planning division. Secretary Hull had closed his address by calling upon “parents, and teachers, and clergymen, and all those within each nation that provide spiritual, moral and intellectual guidance” to determine, as he loftily described it, “the fundamental policies which will chart for mankind a wise course based on enduring spiritual values.” Yet the men and women actually engaged in this task were determined that it reflect US law as closely as possible. Hull conscripted a number of prominent academics and jurists, including Adolf Berle, one of FDR’s former “brain trust,” and Green Hackworth, who would eventually become the first American judge on the International Court of Justice.[62] In early 1942, the Council on Foreign Relations proposed a new postwar league that would “encourage, in every feasible way, adherence to a charter of individual rights.”[63] The newly formed and pithily titled Subcommittee on Political Problems began work on the document itself.

Framers drew from predictable sources: the American Constitution, Magna Carta, sundry European civil codes, the 1689 English Bill of Rights, Blackstone and Coke, the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and of course the Four Freedoms and Atlantic Charter. This was a formidable list, though the dearth of non-Western texts is regrettable. Each committee member also added his or her own contributions: philosophical, economic, and political. Worse yet, when the project became publicly known, the committee was inundated with suggestions. Law professor Percy Bordwell wrote a personal letter to the president proposing a “Constitution for the United Nations” that borrowed heavily from the American model and from Streit’s Union Now. (Roosevelt, who doubtless remembered his own pipe-dream plan of 1923, responded politely.)[64] As a result, early drafts were vast, unwieldy compendiums, some running up to thirty pages in length. Nor was there any attempt to differentiate between types of rights: Locke and Rousseau rubbed shoulders metaphorically with John L. Lewis and Albert Schweitzer. In nearly every case of conflict, however, deference to existing US law prevailed.

The final result was a disappointment. As Rowland Brucken writes, it was little more than a restatement of the American Bill of Rights with odious, hedging language designed to excuse America’s ongoing abuses against African Americans and roughly 100,000 Asian Americans confined to internment camps.[65] An early draft had called for an international tribunal to adjudicate human rights abuses; this was struck down as being too controversial. The committee was wary of the so-called Dixiecrats, Southern Democratic members of Congress whose support was crucial to FDR and who regarded any outside interference with segregation much the same as their antebellum predecessors had with slavery. Their influence—or, more accurately, intransigence—seemed to permeate the entire State Department. Independent of the Subcommittee on Political Problems, a second group created by Secretary Hull in advance of the 1943 Quebec Conference produced a much shorter draft titled “Staff Charter of the United Nations,” which committed signatory nations to “agree to give legislative effect” to a Declaration of Human Rights. Its language proscribing “discrimination as to nationality, language, race, political opinion or other belief,” however, was undercut by addenda pledging that nothing in the charter would “interfere with the laws of some of our states for the segregation of races.”[66] If nothing else, the collective efforts of both committees revealed the enormous difficulties inherent in drafting a universal bill of rights.

Endless squabbles over which provisions should be included—with religion and politics staking their respective claims—obscured a fundamental truth. At its core, the question of what constitutes a universal human right was the same question scholars had asked for millennia: what constitutes a natural law? The answer would have momentous consequences for the law and for society itself.

One man who understood the stakes was international law professor Quincy Wright. In an article entitled “Human Rights and the World Order,” published in April 1943, Wright built a powerful case for the international bill of rights by placing it in its proper historical and legal context. He began by quoting Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles: “This is a war which cannot be regarded as won until the fundamental rights of the peoples of the earth are secured.” Given this declaration, Wright posed the following questions: 1) What commitments has the United Nations made for securing human rights after victory? 2) Is it important that the world order concern itself with human rights? 3) What specific human rights should be recognized by the world order? 4) How can the world order protect human rights? As to the first, Wright analyzed the speeches of Roosevelt, Vice President Henry Wallace, and others, determining that these amounted to a definite commitment that could only be fulfilled by a world organization. As to the second, he was affirmative: “Recognition that the individual is a subject of international law…has become in the modern world an essential condition…of social and political stability and of human welfare and progress.”[67] Intended or not, this was an erudite restatement of Roosevelt’s own view of the international community.

But it is Wright’s analysis of the third query that merits particular attention. He posited two parallel trajectories: first, the development of natural law from antiquity to the present; second, the gradually evolving interdependence of nations Roosevelt frequently referenced in his own speeches. It was no longer possible, Wright concluded, for an individual to exist solely as a citizen of his or her own nation; they also belonged to the world. As such, they existed under two distinct yet complementary legal systems, similar to the American distinction between state and federal law. In advocating universal human rights, Roosevelt was in effect transposing natural law onto the world stage. Therefore the “rights” of each individual should be those that centuries of inquiry on natural law had winnowed down: life, liberty, property.

Professor Wright was more than a detached academic. As early as 1939 he, Clark Eichelberger, and Columbia law professor James T. Shotwell formed the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace, which was endorsed by both Roosevelt and Secretary Hull and reported directly to the State Department. Wright’s article became the basis of the commission’s final plan. Although Professor Wright’s insights appear to have made little impact on the Subcommittee for Political Problems, his presence would be felt in time. By the war’s end, Wright emerged as among the most prominent and respected advocates for human rights law. In 1945 he had the unique honor of serving both as an adviser to Justice Robert Jackson at the Nuremberg Tribunals and as a delegate to the San Francisco conference that founded the United Nations. In both arenas, as shall be seen, he was an ardent and successful advocate for natural law.[68]

Perhaps one reason for the State Department’s indifferent response was that by late 1943 its own work had become something of a political land mine. Even as Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms gained more adherents at home and around the world, countervailing forces mobilized in response. Squawking Dixiecrats were only the beginning. As Franklin Roosevelt began laying the groundwork for the United Nations, his machinations for an “international morality” entered their most delicate and dangerous phase.

It was clear to President Roosevelt and his advisers that universal human rights required a postwar international organization for enforcement. Consequently his foreign policy aims in this regard were twofold: gain domestic and international support for the United Nations and likewise for its mandate to protect basic rights. These goals were intertwined and, ultimately, conflicting.

The seeds of discord were sown in Argentina in 1941. The original Atlantic Charter, drafted by British aide Alexander Cadogan at Churchill’s request, called for an “effective international organization” to sustain the peace postwar. Surprisingly, Roosevelt demurred. The American people, he said, would bristle at anything that sounded too much like the League of Nations.[69] This was a valid point, but it is likely Roosevelt was more concerned that what Churchill meant by an “international organization” was along the lines of Clarence Streit’s Anglo-American dominion—one that kept the British Empire intact. This became clear when the two men traveled together through the Virginia countryside in January 1942. In the front seat of the president’s Packard, Churchill declared expansively, “After the war we’ve got to form an Anglo-American alliance to meet the problems of the world!” Roosevelt characteristically nodded and answered, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Overhearing this exchange, Eleanor was horrified. Any postwar world with the British Empire intact was anathema to her, and to most Americans. “You know, Winston,” she interjected, “when Franklin says yes, yes, yes it doesn’t mean he agrees with you. It means he’s listening.”[70]

A month later Clark Eichelberger, then serving as chairman of the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace (the same commission cofounded by Quincy Wright), sought an audience with the president. The commission wished to present Roosevelt with a “blueprint of the future on the basis of the Atlantic Charter and United Nations,” with specific proposals for protecting human rights. Roosevelt refused to meet and dictated a curt reply: “Tell him I would like to see him some day and for heaven’s sake not to do anything specific at this time…as things are changing every day.”[71] They were indeed. Preliminary negotiations with the Soviets revealed their deep suspicion of any form of international organization whatsoever; discussion of human rights would be not only futile but nullifying. Even in Washington, familiar obstacles appeared. When Chairman Hackworth presented a draft of the international bill of rights to Undersecretary of State Welles, the response was chilling: “[He] could not foresee this Government’s ever agreeing to enter into any international obligation which would let other governments determine what its relationship with its citizens should be.”[72] By “citizens,” Welles meant “nonwhite citizens.”

Britain would agree to nothing that compromised sovereignty over its empire; Congress would accept nothing that interfered with segregation; the Soviet Union wouldn’t accept anything at all. Yet the president was undiscouraged. In April 1943, William Hassett recorded in his diary an interesting exchange. “We got to talking about future organization of the United Nations to maintain the peace of the world…. No one ever mentions these days the possibility of resurrecting the League of Nations. It seems dead for keeps.” Roosevelt disagreed. “The President said the policy of policing the world [was] not insurmountable…. The League must be judged for what it did not attempt—for sidestepping every responsibility and moral obligation.” It was a familiar theme of the president: the league failed because it lacked an “international morality”—it was an organization without a soul. Clearly Roosevelt would not allow the same for the United Nations. The very next exchange revealed just how expansive his vision was. “The President [was] nettled today over Mark Sullivan’s article today warning against postwar planning…. Plain to see he [Roosevelt] has old-age security in mind for the whole world.”[73]

Throughout 1943 and 1944, Roosevelt charted a careful course: employing every diplomatic tool at his disposal to line up support of the United Nations, while referring to it primarily as a peacekeeping organization. In December 1943 Roosevelt demanded from the State Department its latest UN plans, including an international court of justice. A human rights commission, however, was considered “politically unacceptable”; rights were relegated to an “agency for co-operation in…social activities,” which made them sound like sporting matches.[74] This raised the ire of Professor Wright, who proposed instead an international commission of jurists to oversee human rights violations. This too was rejected. Roosevelt also enlisted Cordell Hull to play the familiar role of heavy. One month after the president pledged the United States to uphold “moral security in a family of nations,” Hull released a statement to reassert that nothing in the United Nations would compromise national sovereignty. As a result, one author writes, “colonial powers and American white supremacists did not need to fear investigation, condemnation, or invalidation of their repressive systems.”[75]

Roosevelt himself sometimes seemed alarmed by the depth of the wellspring he had tapped into. Having launched a crusade, he was frequently compelled to restrain his crusaders from charging on ahead into (as he saw it) political disaster. Ironically, this would lead scholars to question the fervency of his own commitment. In FDR and the Creation of the U.N., authors Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley provide a comprehensive account of the machinations leading to the 1945 San Francisco UN conference, with only a cursory mention of human rights.[76] The implication is that it was largely absent from the deliberations, and indeed from Roosevelt’s mind. Rowland Brucken expresses a more nuanced appraisal, writing that Roosevelt’s approach consisted of “the issuing of grand statements of humanitarian war aims such as the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter, and the preparation of early proposals for a postwar community that lacked reference to such principles.”[77] In fact, Brucken argues, FDR quashed any State Department proposal that made specific reference to human rights or international law beyond peacekeeping. The accepted truth is that this is yet another example of Roosevelt’s guile; or, more charitably, the dichotomy between the idealist and the politician.

These arguments are not without merit. FDR spoke in grand generalizations about human rights but often appeared ambivalent about the specifics. To some extent this posture was necessary: the president had to sway multiple audiences, many of them hostile. He needed to remain flexible and not be chained to any categorical absolutes—even those he drafted himself. The 1941 Atlantic Charter, the language of which expressly framed the war as a struggle for civilization and committed the Allies to upholding international human rights after victory, was dismissed by the president at a press conference in 1944 as “a mere memorandum.” He even went so far as to employ the old lawyer’s dodge of saying it couldn’t be a binding contract since none of the parties actually signed. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Churchill offered his own aphorism: “The Atlantic Charter is not a law,” he said. “It is a star.”[78] Nevertheless, even as Roosevelt remained annoyingly (and necessarily) vague, he could take comfort from the knowledge that his State Department was hard at work drafting an international bill of rights.

In the end, Roosevelt’s caution paid dividends. Arthur Vandenberg, the senior senator from Michigan, had once been both an ardent isolationist and one of FDR’s severest critics. Suddenly and shockingly he experienced a change of heart, endorsing the United Nations and becoming an invaluable conduit between the administration and isolationist members of Congress.[79] More encouraging news came in October 1943, when negotiations between Secretary Hull and Soviet foreign minister V. M. Molotov produced the Moscow Declaration, which called for “the necessity of establishing at the earliest practicable date a general international organization…for the maintenance of international peace and security.”[80]

This rapprochement went only so far. Roosevelt knew he risked losing congressional support—especially from the Dixiecrats—if there was even a suggestion that the UN might meddle in domestic policies. At a press conference on May 30, 1944, he made light of the idea. The UN was for “general world peace,” he said, not “decid[ing] whether we were to build a new dam on the Conestoga Creek.”[81] It would not compromise “the integrity of the United States in any shape, manner or form.” If the Dixiecrats were wary of this vague assurance, the Soviets were more so. They even disliked the term “United Nations,” preferring “International Security Organization.”[82] At the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, convened in August 1944, the Russian delegation arrived with a clear mandate. “The primary and indeed only task” of the United Nations would be peacekeeping and security. Referencing a recent article in a Leningrad newspaper, they added that it “will be much easier to observe the success or failure of an organization for security if it is not burdened with an endless number of superfluous functions.”[83] Among these, of course, were human rights.

But the American delegation had its instructions as well. Roosevelt planned to move incrementally, garnering support for the United Nations as a peacekeeping organization while at the same time gently prodding the issue of human rights from periphery to center. The Atlantic Charter and Declaration of the United Nations had been the first steps; the “Proposal for the Establishment of a General International Organization,” agreed upon at Dumbarton Oaks, was another. Edward Stettinius, acting on instructions from the president, lobbied hard at the conference for human rights to be included among the primary purposes of the United Nations. Britain and the USSR jointly refused, but finally consented to their inclusion among so-called economic and social questions. Stettinius confided to his diary that the president “seemed gratified by these developments and felt the inclusion of the human rights sentence was extremely vital. He seems rather surprised that the Soviets had yielded on this point.”[84]

The modest success of Dumbarton Oaks left Roosevelt buoyant. Shortly after the conference concluded, the president addressed a vast crowd at Soldier Field in Chicago, on one of the coldest October nights ever recorded. “Some people,” he told them, “have sneered…at the ideals of the Atlantic Charter, the ideals of the Four Freedoms. They have said they were the dreams of starry-eyed New Dealers, that it is silly to talk of them because we cannot attain these ideals tomorrow or the next day. The American people have greater faith than that.”[85]

Roosevelt was returning to an old theme: the inevitability of human progress and America’s role in its advancement. By the end of 1944, his political intuition told him that public opinion had come to accept the idea of international human rights. Having stonewalled the academics for months, he now gratefully accepted Quincy Wright’s suggested addition to the UN charter calling for a declaration of human rights. He also personally read the American Law Institute’s proposed international bill of rights, forwarded to him by his press secretary, Stephen Early. Proponents of natural law pressed their advantage. On February 4, Wright’s Commission to Study the Organization of Peace bought time on CBS to announce its endorsement of a human rights commission; the statement—signed by 150 academics, activists, and jurists—was read by former Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis. From the opposite end of the political spectrum came a similar proposal from none other than Herbert Hoover.[86] Quincy Wright even managed to apply a donnish form of academic pressure, agreeing to review a collection of former undersecretary of state Sumner Welles’s speeches, which had been published in 1943 in book form as The World of the Four Freedoms. Praising Welles as “a liberal in the Wilsonian tradition,” he went on to subtly bind the present administration to the promises of its former representative:

These addresses are the words of a diplomat, not of an economist or a political scientist, but they provide the elements of a coherent policy linking American ideals with a realistic comprehension of world conditions. In the main, they point to objectives. Some of them, however, include practical proposals which Mr. Welles, on behalf of the United States government, made before inter-American conferences, thus indicating his realization of the kind of implementation necessary to realize these objectives.[87]

Professor Wright, for one, was prepared to regard the Four Freedoms (and their subsequent reiteration) as a binding pledge to natural law. Much of the international community shared this view and evinced a desire to take their own part in achieving universal human rights. The Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace, convened in Mexico City in February 1945, affirmed the principles of the Atlantic Charter and drafted its own code of human rights, which would eventually become the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man. In the months leading up to the first UN conference, scheduled for April 25 in San Francisco, dozens of nations contributed memoranda affirming their commitment to universal human rights postwar. Egypt and New Zealand jointly called for “respect for human rights and freedoms,” while Poland, Denmark, and Norway insisted that both the Atlantic Charter and the 1942 United Nations Declaration be incorporated within the proposed UN charter.[88]

Naturally there were difficulties. The British continued to worry about their empire: India and South Africa were intent on sending separate delegations to San Francisco. The USSR was already committed to being as obstructionist as possible on every point. Even those countries favorable to the idea of universal human rights would inevitably have differing ideas of what such rights comprised. In his State of the Union message delivered on January 6, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt acknowledged these differences: “Nations, like individuals, do not always see alike or think alike, and international cooperation and progress are not helped by any nation assuming that it has a monopoly of wisdom or of virtue.”[89] After the frustrating and exhausting Yalta conference, he was even more circumspect. Addressing Congress for the last time on March 1, he admitted that the framework for the United Nations was far from finished. “It cannot be a structure complete. It cannot be what some people think—a structure of complete perfection at first.” The last two words were vintage Roosevelt: patient but optimistic.

Imperfections and delays were only to be expected from a project so new in world history, so vast in scope. “No plan is perfect. Whatever is adopted at San Francisco will doubtless have to be amended time and again over the years, just as our own Constitution has been.” But of the final outcome he had no doubt. The postwar world would be “based on the sound and just principles of the Atlantic Charter, on the conception and dignity of the human being, and on the guarantees of tolerance and freedom of religious worship.”[90]

By this time there was no need to awaken the American public to their international responsibilities, nor motivate them to support the Allied cause. In reminding Congress of his pledge for universal human rights, he could have no motive other than to speak the truth as he saw it. Roosevelt closed his address to Congress by enjoining all Americans to “begin to build, under God, that better world in which our children and grandchildren—yours and mine, the children and grandchildren of the whole world—must live, and can live.” The ellipses were an improvisation. At the very last, Roosevelt transformed a typical bromide about “our children’s future” into something else: recasting America’s responsibility not only to its own citizens but to all the citizens of the world, born and unborn.

A few weeks later President Roosevelt departed for Warm Springs, Georgia. The last cabinet member to see him was labor secretary Frances Perkins. She found the president “lively and full of pep,” excited about going south. But it transpired that his excitement was twofold. “All I am going to do while I’m there,” FDR told her of Warm Springs, “is work on my speech for the United Nations. Then I’m going to fly out there and make that speech—but I’m not going to stay, Frances, I’m not going to stay. I am going to make the speech…meet the delegates, and then I am going to come right back.”

“But why not stay a while?”

“No,” Roosevelt answered, “I want this thing done without me. It’s all fixed, it’s all arranged and it will be much better if I did not take part in it and sort of bully it through.”[91]

The exchange is revealing. By the spring of 1945, Roosevelt believed he had successfully laid the foundation for a new international law and was prepared to gradually step aside. That was not to say he wanted no further role; his instructions to the American delegation were extensive. First, the promotion of human rights would be included as a central purpose of the United Nations—no longer peripheral, as it had been at Dumbarton Oaks. Second, they were to insist upon the creation of a Human Rights Commission with authority to receive and respond to individual claims of abuse. Third, the General Assembly would, at the earliest possible time, enact a universal declaration of human rights that would serve the same function for the world as the Bill of Rights did for the United States.[92] Edward Stettinius, who had replaced Cordell Hull as secretary of state, would carry with him to San Francisco the staff charter of the United Nations (which had presumably sat dormant in a filing cabinet since 1943) as a useful guide.[93]

Nevertheless, Roosevelt recognized that while he had given form to the idea of universal human rights with his Four Freedoms and Atlantic Charter, the task ahead would be the work of committees, not individuals. Plus, he was tired. In her diary, longtime friend Daisy Suckley recorded a conversation with Dr. Bruenn, the president’s physician. It was clear, she told him, that FDR’s “one really great wish is to get this international organization for peace started…nothing else counts next to that.” Could not someone say to him, “You want to carry out the United Nations plan? Well, without your health you will not be able to do it. Therefore—take care of yourself.”[94] This advice, if it was ever tendered, came too late. Roosevelt arrived in Warm Springs on March 30. He immediately surrounded himself with drafts of previous speeches, State Department memoranda on the United Nations, even a proposed seating chart for delegates and a detailed map of San Francisco.[95] On the night of April 6, Suckley wrote that Roosevelt talked “seriously about the San Francisco Conference, and his part in World Peace,” yet confided that he would “probably resign sometime next year, when the peace organization—the United Nations—is well started.”[96]

Less than a week later, he was dead. His last official act was to direct aide William Hassett to inform the postmaster general that the president, an avid philatelist, would like to purchase the first issue of a new stamp to be released that week. It displayed a laurel branch against a royal blue background with the words: “Towards a United Nations, April 25, 1945.”[97]

“Franklin Roosevelt at rest in Hyde Park,” a writer for the New Republic declared, “is a more powerful force for America’s participation in a world organization than was President Roosevelt in the White House.”[98] Certainly the president’s ghost loomed large over the San Francisco conference, convened just eleven days after the funeral. Addressing delegates over the wireless, President Harry Truman eulogized the man most responsible for gathering them there:

In the name of a great humanitarian—one who surely is with us today in spirit—I earnestly appeal to each and every one of you to rise above personal interests, and adhere to those lofty principles, which benefit all mankind.

Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his life while trying to perpetuate these high ideals. This Conference owes its existence, in a large part, to the vision, foresight, and determination of Franklin Roosevelt.[99]

In fact, Roosevelt’s spirit was as present in Truman’s speech as at the conference itself. The new president began in his very first line by employing a favorite phrase of his predecessor to describe natural law: “The world has experienced a revival of an old faith in the everlasting moral force of justice.” The similarity is not to be wondered at. Truman’s address was written primarily by Sam Rosenman, the same speechwriter who was present when Roosevelt dictated his Four Freedoms. Rosenman had served FDR since the latter was governor of New York. Few men better knew Roosevelt’s mind, and there is no question that when he began drafting the San Francisco speech, Rosenman intuited exactly what his old boss wanted to say.[100] Something of Roosevelt’s rhythm and cadence burrowed itself into Rosenman’s writing, which sounded oddly stilted as it emerged from the wireless in a flat Missouri monotone. Reading the text instead of hearing it, it is easy to imagine Roosevelt’s voice rising with the words: “We must build a new world—a far better world—one in which the eternal dignity of man is respected.” In every sense, this was the speech Franklin Roosevelt would have given, had he lived.

It is fitting, then, to consider this as a coda to Roosevelt’s efforts on behalf of human rights and, by extension, natural law. Certainly the results of the conference were all he could have hoped. The charter of the United Nations pledged in its preamble “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, and in the equal rights of men and women of nations large and small.”[101] Cordell Hull, who had supervised the drafting of the very first international bill of rights, channeled Roosevelt’s own philosophy to describe the charter as “one of the great milestones in man’s upward climb toward a truly civilized existence,” while Harry Truman hailed the UN’s forthcoming bill of rights as soon to “be as much a part of international life as our own Bill of Rights is part of our Constitution.”[102]

But the New Republic was wrong: Franklin Roosevelt in the White House had every bit as much of an impact on human rights as his posthumous spirit. It was he who had set the great diplomatic and bureaucratic machine in motion, and he who monitored it as it gathered steam. Roosevelt conditioned a reluctant American public to accept a postwar world in which the United States had a permanent commitment to universal law. If his conception of an “international morality” seemed vague, it had to be. Religious leaders read it one way, politicians another, academics another still. Roosevelt encouraged them all but committed himself to none. In this manner he was able to garner broad support for a truly radical idea—the internationalization of natural law—by framing it within familiar religious and political contexts.

How much of this was deliberate policy versus his own convictions is impossible to know. Roosevelt genuinely believed in God’s law and in the American system of rights. But he was also a trained lawyer, advised by some of the greatest legal minds of the day. Judging by his own words, he very likely saw divine law, natural law, and the Bill of Rights as essentially synonymous—all part of mankind’s “upward trend.” His call for universal rights struck a chord with a global community that was engaged in an epic struggle with tyranny; much as emancipation gave moral and spiritual validation to the Union cause during the Civil War, Roosevelt’s vision of a free, democratic, and just postwar world transformed the Second World War into a crusade.[103] Thus the Four Freedoms were echoed by scores of other nations and embraced by a heterodox cross section of American society. They were even immortalized in a series of illustrations by the artist Norman Rockwell in the Saturday Evening Post, appearing between February 20 and March 25, 1943; millions of Americans promptly demanded reprints to display in their own homes.[104]

Convincing the Allies to accept universal human rights as both an inevitable and necessary war aim required an even greater diplomatic balance. Here his audience was no less skeptical than the isolationists and segregationists in Congress. Neither Britain nor the Soviet Union would consent to any document that compromised even fractionally their legal dominion over their territories. Consequently the president employed his frequent strategy of moving in two directions at once: issuing soaring proclamations of a postwar world based on essential freedoms while privately tamping down expectations and employing Secretary Hull to assure his fellow statesmen that the only real purpose of the United Nations was security. Prevarications like these have led historians to look at actions rather than words: discounting the political philosophy of the Four Freedoms in favor of a minute examination of the boardroom and back-room politicking between the Big Three and their plenipotentiaries.

Another reading of the evidence, however, suggests that in judging Roosevelt’s words and actions toward the end of his life, we should give equal weight to both. He understood, as few could, the power of speech. Having brought his voice into the homes of millions of Americans, he meticulously reviewed every address before delivering it. In plain terms, he knew what he was saying, and he knew people expected him to deliver. Moreover, a crucial element of Roosevelt’s political acumen was his ability to learn from mistakes: his own and others’. Woodrow Wilson failed with his League of Nations because, like most academics, he believed the rightness of his argument spoke for itself, quod erat demonstrandum. FDR harbored no such delusions. “It’s a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you’re trying to lead,” he once said, “and find no-one there.”[105] He had to move incrementally, sometimes even in reverse, in order to placate and reassure those who might otherwise thwart his ambitions.

Nor can we appreciate the significance of Roosevelt’s reintroduction of natural law absent the unique historical circumstances surrounding it. His efforts coincided with—indeed responded to—the greatest atrocities ever perpetrated by a state. The causal relationship between them is crucial. While jurists had long dreamed of a global community governed by universal principles of justice, it may be truly said that natural law only triumphed when the consequences of its inverse were made horrifically plain. As Justice Robert Jackson declared at the Nuremberg Tribunals, “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”[106]

Roosevelt saw opportunity in calamity. Confronted with the barbarity and lawlessness of Nazism, he was among the first to recognize that the postwar world would need “a revival of an old faith in the everlasting moral force of justice.” Roosevelt began laying plans for that revival several years before the first American boots touched European soil. As president, he was able to call upon the entire State Department to give tangible form to his ideas and provide a blueprint for the postwar “moral order” he envisioned. They, in turn, enlisted the services of numerous legal scholars, many of whom—including Quincy Wright—would later serve as key functionaries in the United Nations. The result of their collective labors was the first international bill of rights ever conceived. Flawed and limited though it was, as a precursor to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights this document stands alongside Roosevelt’s speeches and diplomacy as an extraordinary example of the melding of natural law and statecraft.

There is evidence that Roosevelt himself understood the magnitude of what he was attempting. In October 1944, he gave an address at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. It was a smaller crowd than usual and the president felt relaxed, even chatty. He riffed. His subject was American foreign policy—past, present, and future. Of the past, he was rueful and self-aware: “After the last war—in the political campaign of 1920—the isolationist Old Guard professed to be enthusiastic about international cooperation. And I remember very well, because I was running on the issue at that time.”[107] Of the present, he was cautiously hopeful. The greatest mistake America could make in the present war was ignoring the lessons of the last, most particularly on human rights: “A quarter of a century ago we helped to save our freedom, but we failed to organize the kind of world in which future generations could live—with freedom. Opportunity knocks again. There is no guarantee that opportunity will knock a third time.” In a meandering thirty-minute address he bounced from topic to topic, from isolationists in Congress to the guilt of the German people. Of the latter, he offered a defense that not only foreshadowed Justice Jackson’s address at Nuremberg but also clearly displayed an awareness and acceptance of natural law: “I should be false to the very foundations of my religious and political convictions if I should ever relinquish the hope—or even the faith—that in all peoples, without exception, there live some instinct for truth, some attraction toward justice, some passion for peace—buried as they may be in the German case under a brutal regime.”

Yet in his conclusion Franklin Roosevelt looked to the future, and revealed something truly remarkable. Absent was the soaring optimism of the Four Freedoms speech, where universal human rights were “no vision of a distant millennium” but “a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.” Absent too was the chest-thumping patriotism of the third inaugural, where he hailed American democracy as the author of “an unlimited civilization capable of infinite progress in the improvement of human life.” The man in the Waldorf was more circumspect. He knew that universal justice would not be the work of one lifetime. He knew too that even as he called for a world free from intolerance, want, and fear, those qualities were still very much present in his own country. For all his faith in the upward slope of humankind, experience taught him it was a long, even endless, slog. At the historic moment when natural law became the basis for worldwide human rights, its chief proponent offered a candid view of the struggle that still resonates today:

We are not fighting for and we shall not attain a Utopia. Indeed, in our own land, the work to be done is never finished. We have yet to realize the full and equal enjoyment of our freedom. So, in embarking on the building of a world fellowship, we have set ourselves a long and arduous task, which will challenge our patience, our intelligence, our imagination as well as our faith…. We shall bear our full responsibility, exercise our full influence, and bring our full help and encouragement to all who aspire to peace and freedom. We now are, and we shall continue to be, strong brothers in the family of mankind—the family of the children of God.