The economic goals had a certain precision from the start, and they were largely noncontroversial in the United States, even for political isolationists. A restructured postwar economy would permit the United States to deal equally with all states, while unfettered trade, it was believed, could only help the world's economy. Throughout the war, the State Department, the Treasury, and other executive departments engaged in numerous negotiations and conferences with allies and other friendly countries to improve wartime supply networks and war relief programs, to stabilize international monetary exchange rates, as well as to plan for postwar reconstruction needs in keeping with the principles of article VII. The American Government hoped that improved habits of world economic cooperation would develop from such efforts and would outlast the war. Wide public exposure was given to the economic war aims, in large part through the wartime economic conferences, in sharp contrast to the relative secrecy which surrounded early attempts to define the Atlantic Charter's vague postwar political aim for achieving a better world system of security.

PLANNING FOR THE POSTWAR UNITED NATIONS

In the Department of State, concrete planning studies to define America's postwar aim of constructing a new "peaceful world order" were begun almost 2 years before the United States actually entered the Second World War. Secretary Hull established an Advisory Committee on Problems of Foreign Relations in January 1940 for this purpose. Its activity lapsed in the following spring as German advances made an early peace seem unlikely.

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By war's end important new international economic agencies were operating, notably the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (initial meeting held May-June 1943; officially established October 1945) and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (officially commenced operations in November 1943). At the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods, N.H. (July 1944) plans were laid for the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

When the United States entered the war in December 1941, however, the Secretary established an extensive network of largely secret technical subcommittees and a new main Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy,10 which pursued the task until the formal foundation of the permanent United Nations near the war's end in 1945. In addition to State Department officers, participants in this process included officials of other Executive Branch departments, many experts from outside the government, and certain members of Congress, including the ranking members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee."1 Initial plans for regional groupings of states, as favored by Under Secretary of State Welles, yielded in the spring of 1943 to the policy of Secretary Hull for a single global organization of states. To this President Roosevelt gave his approval in February 1944, in preference to his own earlier ideas for a system by which the great powers would police world affairs.

At the Moscow Conference in October 1943, the United States obtained its major allies' pledges to establish a postwar international organization for peace and security to replace the League of Nations. After critical congressional consultations in May and June 1944, the State Department's comprehensive planning allowed the United States to exchange specific proposals with its allies. At the Dumbarton Oaks conversations in Washington, in August-October 1944, the Big Three established the basic framework which in turn became the United Nations Charter that 50 nations amended and approved at San Francisco between April and June 1945.

10

For details of the organization and names of members of the advisory committees consult Department of State, "Postwar Foreign Preparation."

11 Participants from the Committee on Foreign Affairs first became members of the advisory committee in January 1943. The members were Chairman Sol Bloom and Representative Luther A. Johnson, both Democrats, and Republican Representative Charles A. Eaton; those from the Foreign Relations Committee included Senators Tom Connally and Warren R. Austin, after late May 1942; and several other Senators also became members early in 1943. "Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation," pp. 74-75.

DISAPPOINTED HOPES AND CONTESTING VIEWS

Hopes that the new United Nations would serve as a neutral forum for the maintenance of peace were severely jarred by sharp disagreements among the victorious Allies at the war's end. National interests and the position of Soviet occupation armies heavily influenced the terms of settlement in Europe. The question remains, however, whether American attempts to fulfill its war aims contributed to the origins of the Cold War, which first took menacing form in Eastern Europe as World War II drew to a close. The United States wished for an open world economic system, which it argued would both aid the cause of peace and prosperity by eliminating jealous control of raw materials and markets. For much the same reason, Washington opposed the formation of regional blocs to serve as the basis for postwar organization. To other governments these goals could not appear quite so favorable as to the United States, for there was only one thriving national economy which in 1945 could take full advantage of the proposed openness of the new system, and that was America's. By virtue of its recently augmented military and political power, moreover, the United States stood to gain the most by any prohibition of exclusive bloc politics based on regional organizations. Were America's aspirations for a just international order thus unfairly shattered by an unexpected return to power politics and spheres of influence by the Soviet Union or Communist expansionism, as Cold War historiography in the West has argued? From a revisionist point of view, in contrast, the goal of equal economic opportunity in a world of unequally matched states was primarily calculated to foster the growth and stability of the dominant economy in the system-that of the United States. The United Nations would essentially serve to augment American capitalism according to this view. A third position acknowledges the economic side of Secre

tary Hull's world vision but sees the State Department as having aimed chiefly to foster a world community of nations which shared American democratic political values. In this variant of the revisionist school, economic benefits would still ultimately accrue to the United States, but these would be of secondary importance to achieving a favorable political climate.

In the two revisionist interpretations of American foreign policy at the close of World War II the distinction between long-term political and economic planning tends to blur. A stable economic order requires a stable political framework and vice versa. The degree to which the executive branch and the Congress of the American Government were in fact prepared to accept foreign regimes of the socialist and communist left as legitimate elements in such a stable world framework remains a key question in assessing the origins and nature of the Cold War. As the East-West political contest hardened in 1944 and 1945, it is at least clear that American policymakers increasingly designed the country's United Nations policy as an adjunct to its cold war strategy.

CONGRESS AND THE PUBLIC

As a pragmatic alliance for waging the war, the United Nations obtained ready support from Congress and the American public. There was far less enthusiasm, however, for the prospect of extending America's commitment beyond the war in some form of postwar organization to keep the peace. The administration initially made only vague reference to its possible postwar plans for fear not only of a possible isolationist backlash, but also for fear of encouraging the extreme internationalists, who would surrender varying amounts of national sovereignty to a world body. President Roosevelt and Secretary Hull were extremely careful to wait upon a favorable military situation and quietly to cultivate bipartisan support in

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Congress, for which purpose its members participated directly in State Department postwar planning activities. Through such policies the administration successfully avoided for its postwar plans the fate meted out to President Wilson's Covenant of the League of Nations by a jealous Senate. In mediating between administration goals and public fears, Congress in turn played an especially critical role in legitimizing the shift toward internationalism in general and for a permanent United Nations organization in particular.

Through 1943 the administration was willing to encourage only a general statement of principle on the part of Congress, such as that expressed in the Fulbright Resolution (H. Con. Res. 25, 78th Cong., 1st sess.), but even this had to wait upon a carefully worked-out endorsement of its principle by the Republican Party leaders at their Mackinac Island conference in August 1943. As the administration prepared for the Dumbarton Oaks conversations, it gave special consideration to congressional criticism, as voiced by a special senatorial Committee of Eight. When the Dumbarton talks were threatened by partisan sniping, Secretary Hull managed to compose differences with Republicans sufficiently to prevent the United Nations from becoming a divisive election issue in November that year. In the period leading up to the San Francisco Conference, held in the spring of 1945, the Administration mounted what has been termed a "blitzkrieg" in public relations on behalf of the United Nations and its Charter. The official American delegation at the conference included the two ranking members of both the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Senators Connally and Vandenberg and Congressmen Bloom and Eaton, respectively. Such solicitous concern for the responsible participation by Congress, as well as the evidence of widespread public support for a permanent United Nations by the war's end, contributed to the ease with