A corporate executive turned architect of the postwar international order
The Yalta Protocol preserves the signature of the American representative, “E. R. Stettinius Jr.”
Edward Stettinius was a statesman who moved from corporate management and national mobilization into the center of American diplomacy at the end of the Second World War. As administrator of Lend-Lease, he helped sustain the Allied war effort, and at Yalta he accompanied Franklin Roosevelt in negotiating the framework of postwar Europe and international organization. He signed the Yalta Protocol as the American representative and then led the United States delegation at the conference that founded the United Nations, but his effort to address growing tensions with the Soviet Union through the UN brought him into conflict with the Truman administration. His career shows how wartime coordination between corporations and the state fed into postwar multilateralism while being constrained on the threshold of the Cold War.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1926Joined General Motors as assistant to John Lee Pratt
- 1931General Motors vice president for public and industrial relations
- 1934–1938Executive at U.S. Steel, becoming board chairman in 1938
- 1939–1941Led wartime resource and production-priority bodies
- 1941–1943Administrator of Lend-Lease aid
- 1943–1944United States Under Secretary of State
- 1944–1945United States Secretary of State and American representative at Yalta
- 1945–1946First United States Ambassador to the United Nations
Related historical events
Chairing the Dumbarton Oaks Conversations and drafting the UN framework
After leaving the Lend-Lease administration to become Under Secretary of State in 1943–1944, Stettinius chaired the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks Conversations in place of the ailing Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Formally the Washington Conversations on International Peace and Security Organization, they were the first important step taken to carry out paragraph 4 of the 1943 Moscow Declaration, which recognized the need for a postwar international organization to succeed the League of Nations. The conference was led by the Four Policemen, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and China, and was held at the Dumbarton Oaks estate in Washington, D.C., from August 21 to October 7, 1944. Because the Soviets were unwilling to meet the Chinese directly, it proceeded in two phases, and Stettinius, then Under Secretary, not only chaired his own delegation as its head but also chaired the conference itself. The other delegations were led by the British Permanent Under-Secretary Alexander Cadogan, Soviet Ambassador Andrei Gromyko and Chinese Ambassador Wellington Koo. Preparations had begun in December 1943 with an “Informal Agenda Group” in the State Department; in June 1944 the “International Organization Group” refined proposals in consultation with the president, Hull, politicians and legal, military and other experts, and a draft of “Tentative Proposals for a General International Organization” dated July 18, 1944, was transmitted to the three other major powers. On October 7 the delegates agreed on a tentative set of proposals, the Proposals for the Establishment of a General International Organization. The discussions covered which states would be invited to join, the formation of the UN Security Council and the veto right to be given to its permanent members. The conference settled the framework of the organization while leaving two issues open, the voting procedure in the Security Council and Soviet pressure for the admission of all sixteen Soviet republics to the General Assembly, which were taken up at Yalta the following year. For a man who came out of corporate management, chairing this conference marked the height of his transition into the role of designing the framework of the postwar international organization.