Capital of the World

Front matter

CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

PRAISE FOR CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

Charlene Mires provides a fascinating account of the enthusiastic effort to establish a home for the fledgling United Nations at the end of World War II. She creates a powerful sense of suspense as she describes the intense competition among boosters from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and even the Black Hills of South Dakota. In lively and elegant prose, from the first sentence to the last, she captures the contradictory visions of the “Capital of the World” that persisted from beginning to end.

Contents

PART | FROM WAR TO PEACE 1 INSPIRATION 9 2 HOPE 29

PART Il THE NEW WORLD 4 BLITZ 81 5 SHOWTIME! 107

PART Ill AMERICAN DREAMS 7 STUMBLE 145 8 SCRAMBLE 170

Introduction

OCTOBER 24, 1949, in New York City was a day of symbolism and silences.

At East Forty-Second Street facing the East River, a sleek slab of a building reached toward the sky, its upper floors still under construction. Seventeen acres, previously a district of stinking slaughterhouses, had been cleared of all traces of earlier times. Where livestock once lumbered through the streets, ten thousand people now sat in wooden folding chairs facing the flags of fifty-nine nations and a platform draped in blue. Onstage, President Harry S. Truman and New York governor Thomas E. Dewey appeared to chat amiably despite their rivalry in the 1948 presidential election. Diplomats from both sides of the Iron Curtain shook hands while a municipal band played a jaunty rendition of The Sidewalks of New York (“east side, west side, all around the town . ..”). They gathered on this construction site to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the United Nations and an event that many considered to be a milestone in the history of the world—the laying of the granite cornerstone for the UN’s permanent headquarters in New York. The dignitaries spoke of hopes for lasting peace. The New York Times wrote of the ghostly presence of thousands of wartime dead whose sacrifices led to this day.'

Occasionally, speakers on this occasion also described the UN’s headquarters as the “world capitol” and New York, by extension, as “the capital of the world.” From 1944 through 1946, as the world pivoted from the Second World War to an unsteady peace, the birth of the United Nations sparked a much more ambitious idea: that a new Capital of the World should be created to serve as a permanent center of international diplomacy. It was imagined as something like a perpetual world’s fair, or perhaps a cluster of fashionable embassy buildings, or even an entirely new city where the UN's staff could live and work in modern buildings symbolizing a bright, unencumbered future. How this idea took root, gained momentum in a rush of postwar civic boosterism, but ultimately lost its luster is the subject of this book. This is in part a history of the earliest days of the United Nations, but it is also a story of individuals and communities, their aspirations, and how they imagined their place in the world at a time of local, national, and international change.’

The idea of a world capital runs deep in history, dating to at least 27 BCE, when the historian Titus Livy described Rome as caput orbis terrarum. Later centers of commerce and culture, such as London and Paris, also became widely regarded as Capitals of the World. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the world capital idea evolved in ways both trivial and grand. While civic boosters deployed the phrase to promote claims to distinction (thus Chicago, “chewing gum capital of the world”), journalists used “capital of the world” as shorthand for any location where international diplomats gathered. The Hague and Washington, D.C., each became “capital of the world,” when they hosted diplomatic conferences, and the phrase also was applied to Geneva when it became home to the League of Nations.’

The world capital idea also began to take shape physically during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. World’s fairs, which began with the Crystal Palace exhibition in London in 1851, and the Olympic games, which were revived in their modern form in 1896, temporarily transformed host cities into places for international exchange and competition, often creating landscapes or structures that remained as lasting monuments to shining moments on the world stage.* Meanwhile, diplomatic conferences and the international peace movement inspired proposals for buildings or even cities to promote global understanding. The international conference held in The Hague in 1899 spurred discussion of a “World Centre of Peace” on the scale of a city, although an architectural competition led instead to a Renaissance-inspired Peace Palace. Another idea came forward early in the twentieth century from Hendrik C. Andersen, an American sculptor living in Rome, who waged a campaign to create a “world centre for communication.” He tried to interest the League of Nations in the elaborate drawings he commissioned for this permanent gathering place for international organizations, but in Geneva the league opted instead for the Palais des Nations, a headquarters complex rather than a new city.

Although these precedents existed, the birth of the United Nations at the end of World War II inspired fresh public interest in the world capital idea and an outburst of civic boosterism that was spontaneous, widespread, and extraordinary. As might be expected, the competitors included big cities such as New York and Chicago, which by the 1940s already were considered “world cities” by virtue of their size and concentrations of political, cultural, and economic power.’ But the UN prospect also sparked remarkably widespread campaigning by smaller cities and towns. With bold ideas — but with no invitation whatsoever from the United Nations — public officials, business leaders, and everyday citizens composed letters and telegrams, formed committees, and created promotional campaigns. Architects and other visionaries imagined literal sites, spaces, and symbols to house and inspire the work of world peace. Ultimately, Americans in more than two hundred cities and towns seized upon this transitional moment in history to suggest — quite seriously — that their own hometowns or regions would be the best possible choice as the future Capital of the World.’

The Black Hills of South Dakota, perhaps? Tuskahoma or Stillwater, Oklahoma? Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis, Denver, or San Francisco? Why did postwar civic leaders devise detailed promotional campaigns, which the United Nations had not requested? What motivated them to engage architects to plan the world capital, when the idea was no more than speculation? What possessed them to travel to war-ravaged London to force their ideas on the UN, against the advice of the United States government? Why did they insist that every diplomatic response they received (“your inquiry will be directed to the proper authorities”) meant that they were still in the running to become the Capital of the World?

And how, after all this, did the United Nations at first choose a site including part of Greenwich, Connecticut — one of the few locations in the United States where it was not wanted —and then finally end up in New York City, a place where many of the world’s diplomats adamantly did not want to be? Was it really as simple as it seemed, that an $8.5 million gift from John D. Rockefeller Jr. diverted the United Nations at the last minute to New York from Philadelphia?

Such questions had no place at the laying of the UN headquarters cornerstone in 1949. The event’s printed program recounted a sequence of decisions that seemed to lead inevitably to the headquarters complex in midtown Manhattan.’ Deposited into the cornerstone for posterity along with copies of the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the program’s account left out the long and treacherous journey that led the United Nations to New York. In fact, finding a meeting place had been a difficult, frustrating, and sometimes comic struggle that had threatened to undermine the effectiveness of the organization in its earliest days. For world leaders and diplomats, the choice was a high-stakes question of whether Europe or the United States would dominate international affairs in the postwar era.’ For Americans feeling their nation’s rise to world prominence, the prospect of a new world capital proved impossible to resist. At a time when most Americans embraced the United Nations as not only desirable but essential for the survival of the world, providing the organization with a suitable home followed naturally from years of sacrifice and patriotic duty. Such a world capital might bring lasting peace, and if the honor also conveyed worldwide attention, prestige, and an economic boost besides, who was to argue?”

With so much of the world struggling to recover from wartime destruction, it was a predominantly American crusade. Discussion and speculation about the traditional European centers of diplomacy continued, and some letters to the United Nations suggested sites outside the United States, but these did not spring from organized promotional campaigns. Among several invitations from Canada, the most active campaigns, in Sault Ste. Marie and Niagara Falls, Ontario, were partnerships initiated by the adjacent U.S. towns of the same name. In contrast to Canada, where regulations discouraged competitive boosterism by local governments, a deep history of unrestricted self-promotion in the United States fed popular interest in the new prospect of becoming the Capital of the World. In the century prior to World War II, railroad companies and land speculators had promoted new towns in the American West; corporations had created public relations departments; and chambers of commerce had become involved in recruiting new businesses, conventions, and tourists. By the 19208, college courses and handbooks provided training for aspiring public relations professionals. Advertising became a function of the federal government, from the propaganda generated by the Office of War Information during the First World War to promotion of public works programs during the Great Depression. The promotion ethic was so integral to American life by the 1940s that it infused popular culture in tunes such as “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” and “Accentuate the Positive.” On the crest of these developments, Americans at the end of World War II did not shy from competing with each other for such as prize as becoming the United Nations’ home."

Civic boosters, often with the support of hometown newspapers, reached outward from American cities and towns and forged connections among local, national, and international concerns.” In the process, they escalated the United Nations’ need for a meeting place into a more dramatic search for the Capital of the World, but they also set in motion a sequence of events that revealed the limits of American internationalism. When the abstract notion of a Capital of the World approached reality for some communities, the potential threat to tradition, self-government, and private property — real or imagined — triggered strong resistance. As this unfolded in the suburbs of New York City, the defense of home played a pivotal and underappreciated role in driving the United Nations to Manhattan and demolishing the dream of creating a Capital of the World.”

At the heart of this story are individuals who had lived through times of great change and believed that they, in turn, could create change in the world. The civic leaders who leapt into the world capital competition were the parent generation of World War II, who tended the home front while sending sons and daughters off to war with pride and apprehension. Born during the last decades of the nineteenth century or around the turn of the twentieth, they were enmeshed in processes that later became understood as globalization. Their experiences of time and space had been transformed by mass transportation systems, automobiles, home telephones, mail-order catalogs, radio, newsreels, and highly competitive daily newspapers. As a result, they inhabited not only a confined local place (their hometowns) but an expanded, more global space extending as far as technology, migration, and mass culture could go.* More than their own parents, this generation traveled to seek jobs, to attend college, for business, or for vacation. Even without leaving the United States, they could glimpse the wider world at one of the eras enormously popular world’s fairs. The outside world also came closer to home with the immigrants who surged into the United States until Congress imposed quotas in 1924. Perhaps most importantly, many in this generation had served in the Spanish-American War or the Great War of 1914-18 — supposedly the war to end all wars— only to see their sons and daughters engaged in a world war once again in the 19408. Victory in 1945 did not erase the memory of violence and frustration that many of them carried into the postwar years. The atomic bomb created new urgency to take action to secure a peaceful world.

Civic leaders among this generation—the parent generation of World War II—seized upon the dream of creating a Capital of the World. They chased it beyond reason, although it seemed perfectly reasonable to them at the time. At the end of the Second World War, when so much had been risked, so much lost, and so much achieved, it seemed to be possible, even imperative, to dream.

PART |

This page intentionally left blank

DURING THE SECOND WEEK of September 1944, the United States Army Air Force delivered a telegram with tragic news to Paul and Lucy Bellamy of Rapid City, South Dakota. Just a few days short of their fortieth wedding anniversary, the Bellamys learned that their younger son, Lieutenant Paul Herbert Bellamy, had died on August 26 in a midair collision seventeen thousand feet over England. Herb, twenty-two years old, had been the lead pilot of two groups of B-17 Flying Fortresses. In flight, Bellamy’s crew observed a plane above them getting close — closer — too close! —to their own ship. The first engineer shouted a warning, but apparently Bellamy did not hear. The engineer and bombardier both raced toward the cockpit, intending to grab the controls and dive the plane. But it was too late. The planes collided and exploded, and Herb and his copilot went down with the ship.’ Half a world away from the physical remains of his son, Paul Bellamy searched for channels for his grief. His thoughts raced over his son’s short life—the baby, the playful boy, the teenager, the groom, the volunteer pilot in training at the air base on the outskirts of Rapid City, perhaps a future father, perhaps a future partner in business. Bellamy felt compelled to document this moment, to try to make sense of it, to do something. Immediately, he sat down and composed a tribute to his son. In the space of a few minutes of dictation, Bellamy found his way toward explaining his son's death as one among many heroic casualties of war — “the thousands of other American boys of the best blood and breeding, the most precocious and persistent, the most ambitious, were beside him in training and in combat.” Bellamy, himself a veteran of the Spanish-American War in the Philippines, struggled to justify this terrible loss. Why did it take the tragedies of war to make those left behind stop and examine their priorities? How could the survivors be worthy of the sacrifices of their sons and daughters? As he began the work necessary to return his son's remains to the United States, Bellamy also thought about new business ventures that would carry out the young man’s hopes and ambitions.”

Then, on November 3, 1944, after nearly two months of restless pride, grief, and determination, Paul Bellamy rose to offer a resolution to the Rapid City Chamber of Commerce. He was a fixture at these monthly meetings at the Alex Johnson Hotel. At sixty-five years of age, as the long-time proprietor of the Bellamy Transportation Company, he was known for lending a helping hand to any venture that would boost the fortunes of Rapid City and the Black Hills. He had been involved in the planning for the highways that snaked through the hills, for Mount Rushmore, and for the Badlands National Park. With his fleet of automobiles, trucks, and tourist buses, he catered to everyday travelers and celebrities. He had driven the architect Frank Lloyd Wright through the scenic Badlands, Calvin Coolidge to his lakeside “summer White House” in the Black Hills, and Franklin Roosevelt to Mount Rushmore to dedicate the carving of Thomas Jefferson?

As Bellamy joined his friends at the November meeting of the chamber of commerce, the war had not yet ended but diplomats had gathered at Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington, D.C., to create the foundation for a postwar security organization — soon to become known as the United Nations Organization, and then simply the United Nations. These were international events, but for Bellamy they entwined with the fresh memory of loss and prospects for local opportunity. He spoke to his neighbors about the importance of the UN for “conciliation, arbitration, demonstration and action of united armed forces in future international disputes,” and he reasoned that the United States would play a leading role. Therefore, the United Nations should have its headquarters in the United States —and, he proposed, what better place than the Black Hills of South Dakota? For generations, boosters had attracted settlers to the American West with claims that even the most remote places could become accessible hubs of economic prosperity. Bellamy launched a similar argument for the world security organization. “It would seem appropriate that such headquarters should be located reasonably close to the center of the United States,” he reasoned. The Black Hills, conveniently positioned near this idealized center, would offer a suitable year-round climate, quality of life, recreation facilities, and water supply needed for such a headquarters and its staff. “Therefore, be it resolved,” he declared, “that the advantages of Rapid City, the Black Hills and western South Dakota be submitted and offered to the proper authorities as a location for the proposed headquarters of the United Nations.”

Paul Bellamy, in the driver's seat, escorts Franklin Roosevelt to Mount Rushmore in 1936, culminating one of the many booster projects that drew attention and tourism to the Black Hills in South Dakota prior to the Second World War. (Paul E. Bellamy Papers, Richardson Collection, University Libraries, University of South Dakota)

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Bellamy’s proposal was that his neighbors did not consider it the least bit remarkable. The boosters of the Black Hills had cultivated a tourism industry in this remote southwest corner of South Dakota, they had attracted international publicity with Mount Rushmore and Calvin Coolidge’s summer in residence, and they had lured an army air force base to the outskirts of Rapid City. In November 1944, the “United Nations” still referred to the Allies battling the Axis powers; the Dumbarton Oaks conference had just finished its work for a UN organization after the war. To invite these world leaders to the Black Hills seemed to be not much more than another gracious extension of hospitality — indeed, one that might generate more publicity and help revive tourism after the war.

The Rapid City Chamber of Commerce readily approved the resolution offered by their bereaved friend. The local newspapers duly reported the action, and South Dakota congressman Karl Mundt promised to steer the idea into the proper channels. For the moment, Bellamy trusted the elected representatives of South Dakota to follow through. But he had taken the first step on a journey that would lead him halfway around the world and into the realms of presidents, diplomats, celebrities, and millionaires.’

DETROIT

During the same week that Paul Bellamy learned of his son’s death, interest in the future home of the United Nations also was gaining traction more than a thousand miles away in Detroit, one of the Second World War’s “arsenals of democracy.’ The notion first occurred to J. Lee Barrett, a former president of the Detroit Automobile Club who had built a career in professional civic boosterism, one of the twentieth century’s expanding fields of employment. Working for the Detroit Convention and Tourist Bureau in 1944, he was the first among many in this professional booster class to sniff out the potential benefits of the “World Peace Organization,’ then under discussion at Dumbarton Oaks. He was only doing his job, albeit at a new height of ambition, when he proposed his city as an ideal location for the postwar headquarters for peace. On September 12, 1944, members of the Detroit City Council took up the idea and endorsed it unanimously. Their reasoning began with Detroit’s international location on the peaceful boundary between the United States and Canada, an ideal location for “a living monument to World Peace.” Aided by Barrett’s public relations skills, the council’s resolution sang with the enhanced status that came with

Detroit’s role in helping to win the Second World War: “Detroit, with its manufacturing genius of skilled workmen and engineers in mass production, has turned the tide of war into victory for the Allied Nations.” Along with civic pride, this statement implied a concern for economic stability after the war, a challenge soon to be confronted throughout the nation in the conversion to a peacetime economy. Perhaps in addition to securing the peace, the United Nations would convey economic benefits as well as prestige.°

In the time-honored tradition of boosterism, Detroit’s invitation stressed the city’s many advantages while leaving out some inconvenient details. Detroit’s promoters envisioned the United Nations on Belle Isle, an island park in the Detroit River that they described as a property of one thousand acres “located on the International Boundary” between the United States and Canada and offering “an ideal location for the permanent home of the new World Peace Organization.” The proposal stressed the U.S.-Canadian border as an inspirational symbol of peaceful coexistence between two nations. A building on Belle Isle would be “a living monument to World Peace which has been so ably demonstrated here.”

This idyllic vision left out another well-known association of Belle Isle, the race riot that had started there and spread into other areas of the city in June 1943. Fighting between blacks and whites lasted thirty-six hours and resulted in the deaths of forty-three people. Fueled by inequalities in the city, with its growing wartime population and limited housing, such racial tensions pointed to the greatest challenges that lay ahead for preventing Detroit’s postwar decline.’ By averting their gaze from local problems to international possibilities, Detroit’s boosters chose to imagine Belle Isle as a symbol of the peaceful border between the United States and Canada rather than a reminder of issues needing resolution at home. As a meeting place for the United Nations, this physical reminder of conflict might be converted into a place of peace.’ The city of Detroit sent its invitation to the diplomats at Dumbarton Oaks and to the U.S. secretary of state and then, like Paul Bellamy in South Dakota, simply waited.

YALTA

On the night of February 8, 1945, in a former tsarist palace overlooking the Black Sea, President Roosevelt’s secretary of state awoke at 3:00 a.m. with a vision of San Francisco. He recalled the city as he had known it before the war: grand hotels with views over glittering hillsides, fine restaurants, nightclubs, cable cars, and Pacific breezes, all infused by the international flavors of Chinatown, Fisherman’s Wharf, and ships carrying goods and people through the Golden Gate. Such a soothing memory slid into the consciousness of Edward Reilly Stettinius Jr. just in time to solve a pressing need. Stettinius, at age forty-four, a former public relations man for General Motors and chairman of U.S. Steel, was one of the nation’s most improbable secretaries of state. Although not a seasoned statesman, here he was, in Livadia Palace near Yalta in the Soviet Union, for the Crimean Conference among the Big Three—the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. Through the winter of 1944-45, Allied armies had closed in on Germany, and now their commanders gathered to map a strategy for ending war and securing the peace. This presented Stettinius with a problem to solve: Where would the Allies’ diplomats be able to gather to begin to create a postwar security organization? And in the midst of war, how in the world would they get there?

The president of the United States, the increasingly frail Franklin Roosevelt, slept down the hall, in the former bedroom of Tsar Nicholas II. Getting FDR to Yalta had required an eight-day voyage across the Atlantic on the cruiser USS Quincy, a layover in Malta in the Mediterranean, a seven-hour overnight flight by military DC-3, and, finally, five hours of driving across plains and mountains to the once-fashionable “Russian Riviera” Although the nations of the world were locked together in a global war, physical distances between them remained great. The British team had joined the Americans for preliminary talks in Malta and then for carefully charted flights to the East. From the start, Prime Minister Winston Churchill had despised the idea of this remote location three thousand miles from London; en route, one plane carrying British advisers crashed into the Mediterranean, killing five members of the prime minister's staff and casting a pall of personal loss over the urgency of world events. Even for Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, who had insisted that Roosevelt and Churchill come to him so that he could simultaneously direct the Soviets’ military offensive, the conference required a 900-mile trip from Moscow on an armored train.”

On Thursday, February 8, Stettinius went to bed with many unresolved issues on his mind. This conference, taking place as American and British armies closed in on Germany from the west and the Soviets advanced from the east, wrestled with vital issues that would shape the postwar world. The war's imminent conclusion in Europe demanded that decisions be made about the final, coordinated assault on Germany and about that nation’s future occupation by the Allies. Agreements needed to be reached on borders and a future government for Poland, which had been liberated by the Soviets from Nazi control. Roosevelt had risked this journey with two great desires: a pledge from the Soviets to enter the war against Japan and a foundation for future cooperation among the world’s powers. Already, five days of talks had elapsed, only three lay ahead, and much remained to be done. The foreign ministers — Stettinius and his more experienced counterparts, British foreign minister Anthony Eden and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov— grappled with the issues by day, then reported to the Big Three leaders.”

Details remained to be settled for creating the new United Nations organization, which Roosevelt had been nurturing toward existence throughout the war.” It was to be the successor to the League of Nations, which the United States had never joined. The basic framework had been hammered out the previous autumn at Dumbarton Oaks, but difficult issues had been deferred. Now, at Yalta, the Soviets finally agreed to a voting procedure for the organization’s Security Council, where the major powers of 1945 would wield authority over matters that threatened world peace. Stalin and Molotov also gave up their insistence that all sixteen of the Soviet Union's republics should be represented in the organization’s Assembly. Instead, they pressed for three seats—for the Soviet Union, Ukraine, and Byelorussia (White Russia).

The questions of when, how, and where to gather the Allied nations to launch such an organization were technical matters, but critical. The foreign ministers decided that the meeting should include all the nations that had agreed to the 1942 “United Nations Declaration” of commitment to the war against the Axis powers. They selected a starting date— April 25, 1945— and accepted Stettinius’s invitation to hold the event in the United States. But where? FDR had once confided to his previous secretary of state, Cordell Hull, that he imagined the permanent home of the United Nations on an island in the Azores or possibly in Hawaii. Through the evening, Stettinius pondered the possibilities that had come forward through the channels of the State Department, where the question had been considered for months without a conclusion. Should he recommend New York or Philadelphia, or a resort like Atlantic City, Hot Springs in Virginia, or Pinehurst in North Carolina? Only partly in jest, Stettinius had suggested the resort at French Lick, Indiana, so that the heartland of American isolationism would be drawn into the orbit of international diplomacy. That night, after a lengthy ceremonial dinner, Stettinius conferred with

Roosevelt at the president’s bedside. “Go back to work, Ed,” the president said, “and come up with a better suggestion.”*

At Yalta, the view of azure sky, sea, and hemlock trees reminded Stettinius of the Pacific Coast and prompted the idea that came to him in the middle of the night: San Francisco. The northern California city, with its many fine hotels, its accommodating Opera House, and its government conveniently in the hands of his friend, Mayor Roger Lapham, would be such a gracious, impressive setting.

Stettinius awoke the next morning with the confidence of a public relations man who had hit upon a brilliant idea. He imagined statesmen from Europe traveling across the United States and gaining new appreciation for the nation’s beauty, size, and strength. Gathered in San Francisco, the leaders of the world would shift their attentions toward the continuing war in the Pacific. If the Nazis had collapsed in Europe by then, which seemed likely, the Allies would need new resolve to finish the job against Japan. They would find it in the city by the bay, where naval vessels shipped out to meet the enemy and returned in victory or as battered hulks bearing the wounded and the dead. Logistics would be crucial, especially in a city already serving a critical role as a port for the Pacific war. On Friday, amid the continuing discussions of Poland and the postwar fate of Germany, Stettinius sought out the military commanders on hand at Yalta and won their support.”