Abstract
On 8 November 1945, the Reverend W. S. Boyd of Morgantown, West Virginia, appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to speak in favor of the creation of a Department of Peace. While the hearings were merely scheduled as a courtesy to a long-time colleague, the setting gave Boyd an opportunity to describe his hopes for the post-war order. The United States, he said, remained a young and vital nation: ‘In the brief period of our national existence it has already become tradition with us to be imaginative and daring and resourceful in the achievement of the goals we set for ourselves. We have become specialists in the impossible’. Indeed, such resourcefulness would be required to handle the difficult challenges of the coming years. The end of the war, Boyd commented, must be followed by greater gains for the ‘little people’ of the world. ‘Sooner or later, we will have to make good on our promises of freedom and justice and equal opportunity and perpetual peace’. 1 As the Reverend Boyd looked outward, beyond his own hemisphere, toward the little people — the poor, the dispossessed, the colonized — perhaps he realized how intently they were staring back.
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Notes
House Committee on Foreign Affairs, To Create a Department of Peace, Hearings 79th Cong., 1st sess., 1945, pp. 32–3.
Sumner Welles, The Time for Decision ( New York: Harper, 1944 ), p. 299;idem, ‘Problems of Dependent Peoples’, Washington Post, 28 March 1945; idem, ‘Britain’s Empire’, Washington Post, 8 August 1945.
H. A. Wieschhoff, Colonial Policies in Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, The University Museum, 1944 ), pp. 73–4, 101;
Rupert Emerson, ‘Nationalist Movements in Southeast Asia’, in John Carter Vincent et al. (eds), America’s Future in the Pacific ( New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1947 ), p. 136.
John Carter Vincent, ‘Our Far Eastern Policies in Relation to Our Overall National Objectives’, in America’s Future in the Pacific pp. 5–6;Philip Jessup to Joseph Ballantine, 14 October 1949, Box 47, General Correspondence 1919–1958, Philip C. Jessup Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Like many Western observers, Jessup was fond of using the obstetrical metaphor regarding Third World areas; see his The Birth of Nations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).
Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull 2 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 2: p. 1478; Mundt remark, 9 November 1945, Committee on International Relations, Selected Executive Session Hearings of the Committee, 1943–50, vol. 2: Problems of World War II and its Aftermath, pt. 2: p. 453;
Edward R. Stettinius, ‘The Economic Basis for Lasting Peace’, Department of State Bulletin 12 (8 April 1945): pp. 599, 596–7.
‘Radio Address on the Seventh Anniversary of the Philippines Commonwealth Government’, 15 November 1942, in Samuel I. Rosenman, Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 14 vols (New York: Harper, 1950 ), 11: p. 475.
William A. Hoisington, Jr., The Casablanca Connection: French Colonial Policy, 1936–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984 ), pp. 190, 194.
William L. Langer, Our Vichy Gamble ( 1947; reprint, Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1965 ), p. 112;
Julian G. Hurstfield, America and the French Nation, 1939–1945 ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986 ), p. 143.
Robert Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors ( Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964 ), p. 92.
Kenneth Pendar, Adventure in Diplomacy: Our French Dilemma (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1945), pp. 10, 20–22; Hurstfield, America and the French Nation, p. 24. Regarding Arab attitudes, Pendar noted: ‘They loved America and, like most unsophisticated foreigners, had a touching idea that we were all-good and all-powerful’ (p. 39).
See Hoisington, Casablanca Connection, pp. 207–8, and R. T. Thomas, Britain and Vichy: The Dilemma of Anglo-French Relations, 1940–42 ( New York: St Martin’s Press, 1979 ), p. 108.
James J. Dougherty, The Politics of Wartime Aid: American Economic Assistance to France and French Northwest Africa, 1940–1946 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978 ), pp. 5, 77 (quote), 68, 103, 118;
Mohamed Khenouf and Michael Brett, ‘Algerian Nationalism and the Allied Military Strategy and Propaganda during the Second World War: The Background to Sétif’, in David Killingray and Richard Rathbone (eds), Africa and the Second World War ( New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986 ), pp. 268–9.
Arthur Layton Funk, The Politics of TORCH: The Allied Landings and the Algiers Putsch, 1942 ( Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1974 ), p. 254.
Arthur H. Vandenberg, Jr., ed., The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), p. 134; the remarks were made as part of Vandenberg’s Senate speech of 10 January 1945 announcing his new-found internationalism.
The first quoted phrase is from ‘Manifestations of Anti-American Sentiment in Selected African Areas’, 27 January 1944, R&A report no. 1471, p. 4, OSS, RG 59, DSNA; Khenouf and Brett, ‘Algerian Nationalism’, p. 269. Edward Behr, The Algerian Problem (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), p. 50, noted that American troops ‘spread their own native brand of orthodox American anti-colonialism’.
Roosevelt to Churchill, 3 March 1944, R-485, in Warren F. Kimball (ed.), hurchill & Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, 3 vols (Princeton University Press, 1984), 3: p. 14; Churchill to Roosevelt, 4 March 1944, C-601, ibid., p. 17.
A. B. Gaunson, The Anglo-French Clash in Lebanon and Syria, 1940–45 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987), p. 6.
Gaunson, Anglo-French Clash in Lebanon and Syria, pp. 24, 78. The official historian of British policy in this period noted that as of late June 1941, ‘It was … clear that General de Gaulle regarded the Free French as full inheritors of the rights exercised by the Vichy authorities and that, in view of the unpopularity of the French régime, his unwillingness to recognise the existence of an Arab problem might have serious consequences’; Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1970), 1: p. 569.
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© 1990 Scott L. Bills
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Bills, S.L. (1990). Rivalry in the Mediterranean, 1945: French North Africa and the Levant. In: Empire and Cold War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20969-9_2
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