Coming Undone: The American World Order, 1945-1946

When viewed from a distance of more than six decades, the Cold War has an aura of inevitability, an internal narrative logic woven together by political, military, economic, and ideological causes. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, however, conflict was not what Americans anticipated as VE day and VJ day finally arrived. In the summer of 1945, the widely held belief in the United States was that, guided by American moral leadership, the United Nations would become the guarantor of global peace and justice and the unifier of America’s one world vision. Even in that context, the Roosevelt and Truman administrations understood that the new organization’s institutional stratification prevented it from being a perfectly egalitarian congress; the design, functions, and authority of the Security Council reflected the great powers’ understanding that while all nations were equal, some – pace George Orwell’s Animal Farm – were more equal than others. Across the United States, however, such concerns of procedure and structure worried few people. Americans trusted that institutional flaws would be corrected in due course and that collaboration in the interest of peace and liberty would abound as the organization matured. Americans largely shared Senator Arthur Vandenberg prophecy that the United Nations would become a “town meeting of the world,” a forum for consensus and cooperation, rather than a place for nationalistic votes and ideological confrontation.¹

1 Arthur H.Vandenberg, The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1952), p.

173. For similar examples of such optimism, see John Foster Dulles Toward World Order: A Merrick-McDowell Lecture Delivered at Ohio Wesleyan University, March 5, 1942 (New York, 1942); Paul Winkler, “World Democracy: People’s Rights in Postwar Europe,” The Washington Post, September 11, 1944.

Even if the concrete objectives of U.S. leadership and the path forward often remained abstract and vaguely expressed, Americans expected the United Nations to direct global affairs according to American values and on American terms. Mankind’s poor record for utopian undertakings did not dim Americans’ optimism. A Saturday Evening Post columnist accurately captured the national sentiment just three weeks after

Japan’s surrender. “The history of the New World,” he wrote, “represents a bright page of progress…toward a millennium based on technology and democracy under American inspiration.” To the American “no evil on earth is incurable… [he believes] that at last the decisive hour has struck to redeem the world under American inspiration.” In his Christmas message at the end of 1945, Pope Pius XII added that the “American people have a genius for splendid and unselfish action, and into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of afflicted humanity.”²

Widespread as these views were, not everybody shared such sanguine assessments. A few intellectuals, in particular, viewed hopes of “one-worldism” with despondency. Among the most eloquent and influential of these thinkers was Reinhold Niebuhr. A former pacifist and member of the Fellowship of Socialist Christians, Niebuhr had by the Second World War become an unapologetic realist and supporter of the war effort. Unlike the Administration, he chastised notions of excessive optimism for the postwar era. His writings peeled away the layers of American exceptionalism and denounced it as dangerous and misleading. In his most powerful wartime work, The Children of Light and The Children of Darkness, Niebuhr derided prophets of an

2“American Optimism versus European Pessimism,” Saturday Evening Post, September 15, 1945;

“World’s Hope Rests on U.S. Pope Asserts,” The Washington Post, December 27, 1945

integrated peaceful world under an international organization as naïve and blind to the flaws inherent in human nature. No society, he insisted, “not even a democratic one, is great enough or good enough to make itself the final end of human existence.” People’s innate fallibility, he was convinced, exposed any noble vision to rid society of evil and any hope to ensure global freedom from war as mere fantasy. The powers of self-interest and man’s personal ambitions, he deemed, were too pervasive to secure a lasting peace.

Utopian international organizations were therefore, by extension, likely to disappoint.³ The influential and respected columnist Walter Lippmann shared many of Niebuhr’s opinions. In 1919, as a young, opinionated writer accompanying Woodrow Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference, Lippmann had hailed the League of Nations as the vehicle to save mankind. By 1945, perhaps suffering from buyer’s remorse, he instead argued that the United Nations’ Charter was out of touch with political reality. The institution’s structures, he believed, were in fundamental conflict with the organization’s lofty ambitions. He argued that postwar collaboration between the members of the Grand Alliance, rather than the pursuit of a utopian world order, represented the world’s best hope for a secure postwar peace.⁴

3 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (The University of Chicago Press, 1944), p. 133. Niebuhr wrote several news magazine articles on this issue as well. For example, see

“Idealists as Cynics,” The Nation, January 20, 1940; “The Basis of World Order,” The Nation, October 21, 1944; “A Lecture to Liberals,” The Nation, November 11, 1945. Interesting comments on Niebuhr’s views can also be found in Preston’s, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith, pp. 303-309.

4 The postwar world order was a frequent topic of Walter Lippmann’s popular column “Today and Tomorrow.” See for example his views in The Washington Post, May 8, 1945; June 5, 1945; September 25, 1945; Walter Lippmann, U.S. War Aims (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1944), pp. 164-167, 187, 190-191. For an interesting challenge to Lippmann’s realist views, see, “Questioning Mr. Lippmann on Power Politics: A Communication,” The Washington Post, September 30, 1945.

In hindsight, Niebuhr’s and Lippmann’s dour views of the American dream for the world appear prophetic. Neither the United Nations nor the United States ever lived up to the righteous mission their champions envisioned. Yet such challenges to an Americanized world order remained in the minority. Following the idea of a New Deal for the world, so deeply engrained in the American exceptionalist vision, most deemed it America’s responsibility, in conjunction with the United Nations, to establish a new moral international world order. National debates remained largely confined to the nature of this global duty. Few questioned if the responsibility was America’s. For almost a year and a half after the Second World War ended, this internationalist vision defined the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy. The Truman Administration pushed collaborative efforts for the new society of nations in a genuine effort to eliminate the catalysts of the last two wars from the world. The provision of American global leadership would ensure the reconstruction of the international economic order, global health, international control of atomic energy and weapons, and keep the world safe from war. It was a mission to internationalize Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms.” The United Nations’ ideals were to become a vehicle for America’s New Deal for the world.

Over time the different ideological visions in Washington and Moscow hampered these global efforts. In Eastern Europe, Germany, the Balkans, the Middle East, Asia, and in the United Nations Security Council, the two new superpowers found themselves at odds. However, even if in hindsight the contours of the Cold War appear clear, in the eighteen months after the Second World War ended, it is important to recognize that the particular ideology and the psychology that defined that fifty-year struggle did not yet

guide or dominate American policy. In 1939, Harry Truman had claimed that the world needed a “moral re-awakening” and that it was “the role of this Great Republic [to] save civilization.”⁵ The fulfillment of that prophecy was to come, congressman John Rankin (D-MS) explained at war’s end, by the United States leading the world on a march “to modern progress…into that golden age that Tennyson dreamed of”, when he called for a parliament of man.⁶ It was one world not a bifurcated one that America sought; a world based on international collaboration, but on American terms.

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American optimism and the sincerity of one-world collaboration is often absent in accounts of the postwar period. It is testimony to the Cold War’s grip on our understanding of the postwar period that many commentators continue to draw a straight line from early American-Soviet disagreements and discussions in the spring and summer of 1945 to Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech a year later, to the Truman Doctrine in 1947, and to American containment policy. This interpretation implies a seamless evolution of a deteriorating superpower relationship and suggests that the American wartime ideas for the postwar world were merely, as Elizabeth Borgwardt recently wrote,

“pet projects on the addled agenda of a dying president.”⁷ Whether scholars blame Moscow or Washington for the Cold War, they often trace the beginning of the Cold War

5 Harry S. Truman, “European Situation. Address in Caruthersville, MO, October 8, 1939.” HSTL, Harry S.

Truman Papers, Speech File, 1935-1945, Box 283. John Rankin, December 18, 1945, Congressional Record 79^th Congress, 1945 (United States Government Printing Office, 1945), pp. 12282-12283.

6 Born in Mississippi in the late nineteenth-century, Rankin was unsurprisingly an unapologetic racist. In the House he supported segregationist policies and frequently stood in the way of equal protection of blacks, Jews, and Japanese. As was the case for so many Americans over time, and as it indeed had been the case for the nation’s founders, Rankin appears not to have detected any inherent contradictions between his vocal support for a democratic world order and his own support for segregation at home.

7 Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World, p. 251.

to the meetings between President Truman and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov in April 1945 and to the meetings at Potsdam between the Big Three in July the same year. Even before the guns fell silent in Europe and Asia, the argument often goes, the Atlantic Charter spirit descended into superpower confrontation.⁸

The speaking notes Secretary of State Edward Stettinius prepared for Truman in advance of the Molotov-meetings certainly implied that all was not well with the Soviet-American relationship. Stettinius warned the President that the U.S. could not “be party to the formation of a Polish Government which is not representative of the Polish people”

and recommended that the President make clear that U.S. diplomats’ lack of access to Eastern European states was unacceptable. ⁹ Ambassador Averell Harriman, in Washington to assist the less experienced Truman in the talks, added that since “the Crimea Conference…the Russians have been greatly disturbed by the fact that for the first time they realized that we are determined to carry out what we said.” As if to emphasize this position, Truman replied that he would make “no concession from American principles or tradition.” He expected liberalism, not tyranny, to rule in Europe.

The Yalta agreement, as Truman understood it, was not up for debate.¹⁰ In his memoirs, Truman recalled how he dressed down Molotov during the talks and demanded that

8 See for example, John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 31. Deborah W. Larsson, Origins of Containment, pp. 155-157;

Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1977), pp. 73, 80-86; Wilfried Loth, The Division of the World, 1941-1955 (Routledge, 1988), p. 88; James McAllister, No Exit: America and the German Problem, 1943-1954 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 55-58.

9 “Memorandum for the President: Points to be Raised with Mr. Molotov, April 22, 1945.” HSTL, Harry S.

Truman Papers, President’s Secretary’s Files, Box 196 ; “Memorandum for the President, April 23, 1945,”

Ibid.

10 Minutes of the Secretary of State’s Staff Committee, April 20, 1945, FRUS, 1945, vol. V. pp. 839-842;

Memorandum of Conversation by Charles E. Bohlen, April 20, 1945, FRUS 1945, vol. V; pp. 231-234.

Moscow live up to its Yalta promises. An exasperated Soviet Foreign Minister protested, saying “I have never been talked to like that in my life.” According to Truman’s recollections, his own reply was brusque: “Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that again.”¹¹

This exchange demonstrated the new President’s determination. The available records, however, cast strong doubts regarding the accuracy of Truman’s recollections.

The American note taker and interpreter, Charles Bohlen, described Truman’s performance as firm. The comments as the President recalled them, however, are not recorded in either the American or the Soviet minutes; they only appear in memoirs written over a decade later. Indications are, in fact, that the meetings ended on a fairly good note with joint photos being taken of the participants afterward.¹² The Americans, in other words, were not anticipating the coming of the Cold War. Consciously or unconsciously, memoirists often exaggerate the quality of their own performance, of course and in light of the Cold War it was perhaps unsurprising that Truman later attempted to leave the impression that he, from the beginning, had taken a tough stance against Moscow.

Whatever the reason for Truman’s embellished reminiscence of the meetings with Molotov, his memoirs led some scholars to conclude that the U.S. here abandoned FDR’s conciliatory policy toward the Soviet Union. The most unwavering Cold War revisionists

11 Truman, Memoirs, Years of Decision, vol. I, p. 82.

12 Charles E. Bohlen, The Transformation of American Foreign Policy (W.W. Norton & Co., 1969), pp. 73-74; Geoffrey Roberts, “Sexing up the Cold War: New Evidence of the Molotov-Truman Talks of April 1945,” Cold War History, 4 (April 2004), pp. 105-125. See Roberts’ reprint of the Soviet notes, pp. 115-122. For a discussion of the inaccuracies in the recollection of the Molotov meetings, see Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman, pp. 119-123.

conclude that the President, backed by an aggressive State Department, was determined to impose his will on the Soviet Union.¹³ The use of the atomic bombs against Japan, they believe, was unnecessary to win the war, meaning that Hiroshima and Nagasaki must have served primarily to intimidate Josef Stalin and to warn the Soviets of the potential consequences if they were to step out of bounds in Europe.¹⁴

The Potsdam Conference three months later was certainly contentious at times as well but the records imply more collaboration than animosity between the three leaders.

As at Dumbarton Oaks, Yalta, and San Francisco, a desire for accord dominated the proceedings. Americans viewed disagreements as temporary and solvable. Truman might have been appalled by reports of Soviet actions in Eastern Europe, but he “felt that Stalin would eventually bow to American pressure” on the issue of Eastern Europe.¹⁵ Tense negotiations also took place regarding Germany’s future, but the perception in the American camp was that common ground would be found on both reparations and the international status of the former enemy. In his memoirs, George Kennan labeled these solutions “unreal” and “unworkable.” Nonetheless, they did reflect the President’s and the public’s perception at the time that the new order required international accord; this, of course, meant friendship with Stalin as well. “I like Stalin,” Truman wrote to his wife Bess from Potsdam. “He is straightforward. Knows what he wants and will compromise

13 For some of the most aggressive revisionist interpretations of Truman’s policies, see Offner, Another Such Victory, pp. 32-34; 71-98; Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, pp. 31-32; Thomas G. Paterson, On Every Front: The Making of the Cold War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), pp. 98-99, 112; Frank Costigliola, “After Roosevelt’s Death: Dangerous Emotions, Divisive Discourses, and the Abandoned Alliance,” Diplomatic History, vol. 34, no. 1 (January 2010), pp. 1-23.

14 The revisionist position on the bomb was made popular by Gar Alperovitz’, Atomic Diplomacy. For a damaging critique of this position, see, Samuel J. Walker, “Recent Literature on Truman’s Atomic Bomb Decision: A Search for Middle Ground,” Diplomatic History, vol. 29, no. 2 (April 2005), pp. 311-334.

15 Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, p. 42.

when he can’t get it.” In his diary Truman showed concern for Stalin’s health. He worried that if “Stalin passes” and “some demagogue on horseback gained control of the efficient Russian military he could play havoc with European peace for a while.”¹⁶

In the context of the Cold War, these meetings were neither as decisive nor as divisive as some scholars imply. That the Cold War eventually became a reality should not distract from our understanding of the extent to which the U.S. sought postwar cooperation – something its leadership had always deemed vital to the global order they expected to shape – well into 1946. The American Zeitgeist of 1945 stimulated collaboration towards peace, progress, and liberalism. This belief and hope dominated not only policy statements, but also the vast majority of letters and telegrams sent to the Truman White House from American citizens throughout this period. These correspondences show an outpouring of support for postwar reconstruction, modernization, and cooperation. One citizen, for example, praised Truman, hoping that victory would secure the global spread of the “principles and ideas of the President of the United States and the American people.” Many others called for American leadership through the U.N. and encouraged the establishment of some form of democratic world government. The consensus was that people were crying out for American leadership now that the U.S. was “at the summit of the world.” Americans liked Truman because he was “a regular guy” as a cab driver from Washington, D.C. put it and because he was

“trustworthy,” and “a man of the people.” At the same time, opinion polls show that Americans expected Truman and Americans to lead in the world. One Gallup poll taken

16 Kennan, Memoirs, pp. 258-260. For Truman’s view of Stalin, see Ferrell, Dear Bess, p. 522; Ferrell, Off the Record, Diary entries from July 17 and 30, 1945, pp. 53, 57-58.

across the United States, Canada, France, Sweden, and Denmark, unanimously concluded that the United States would be the most influential country in “world affairs after the war.” George Gallup reported in early July, a week after the end of the San Francisco Conference, that after “two months in office…a coast to coast check up shows that nearly nine out of every 10 Americans approve of the way Truman is handling his job.” Even taking a natural honeymoon period into account the number was, Gallup explained, unprecedented. It exceeded by three percentage point the national support given to

“Roosevelt in a poll on a similar question in January, 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor attack had rallied the country behind the Administration.”¹⁷

Reaching conclusions based on letters to the president and understanding the extent to which they are representative of the popular mood is methodologically complex.

However, when paired with national polls supporting similar trends and a strong affirmative media outpouring in favor of a leading American presence in the United Nations, they cannot be dismissed as insignificant. By August 1945, a majority of Americans believed that cooperation with the Soviet Union would continue, that the United Nations ought to serve as the sole arbiter of international affairs. Fifty-eight percent of Americans believed the U.N. headquarters should be in the United States. By

17 For the collection of letters and telegrams that Truman received, see HSTL, President’s Personal Files, Folder 200. Most letters and telegrams sent to Truman by American citizens were positive, particularly in the early years of his presidency. In this sense, they fairly accurately reflect his national poll numbers which were substantially higher in 1945. George Gallup, “Popularity of New President Greater Than FDR’s at Zenith,” The Washington Post, July 1, 1945; “People Feel Same Faith in Nation As Leader – It’s

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