The Evening Star (January 7, 1946)
World security effort of League is recalled as UNO meeting nears
By Charles Foltz, Associated Press foreign correspondent
This is the first of a series of stories on the League of Nations effort as it relates to the United Nations attempt to establish collective security.
The Versailles Peace Treaty and the covenant of the League of Nations went into force January 10, 1920. On the same day this year, exactly 26 years later, the United Nations general assembly meets for the first time.
Bad Augury? Those who knew the old League and now work for the new think not. They think it rather a reminder of old pitfalls of the 21-year road to war, a repetition of which they now seek to avoid.
The giants who built that League – Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau – are dead and only a few of the delegates who worked with them work now for the new UNO.
One is South Africa’s Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts, fighting exponent of world cooperation against aggression. He told the Associated Press that he considered the UNO charter a far better weapon against aggression than the covenant he helped draft in 1919.
Another is China’s Wellington Koo, one of the lesser delegates at the conferences when the League was born. While his countrymen died under Japanese bombs, he pleaded passionately in the League councils and assemblies for help he knew they could not give.
Appeal is recalled
Seven years ago, after one of those appeals, he made a prediction: “China will fight on. Soon the world will be at war. You will win and we will win. Then we will meet here in Geneva again and forge a league with such strength in its arms that no nation will dare to defy it.”
He was the first chairman of the committee in London which this winter turned San Francisco’s world charter into a living organization.
Many other delegates on the new UNO committees remember what happened to the League. Those from Czechoslovakia and Ethiopia remember how futile were their appeals to the old League against aggressors who swallowed them up. Albania and the Spanish Republicans appealed uselessly too. Austria didn’t even have time to appeal.
All that was at Geneva. The great League palace, occupied for the first time in 1937, stands empty on the shores of Lake Leman. It is modem and well equipped, still a fine home for any international organization.
Roosevelt excluded Geneva
Franklin D. Roosevelt just before his death told a friend that he had made a list of 12 possible sites for the League, excluding Geneva.
“I went over them all and found objections to each one. Finally I put down Geneva. Despite the curse of the League, perhaps because of the League curse, we might go back there.”
The UNO will not go back. At least it will not establish its headquarters at Geneva, though the Swiss city might serve as the European regional headquarters.
Chief opponent to Geneva was Russia. One reason was that the Soviet Union has no relations with Switzerland. Another was undoubtedly that one of the last acts of the League was to condemn Russia as an aggressor for her attack on Finland. Russia was the only country ever expelled from the League.
Delegates to the League during its last days did little but go through the motions of condemning aggression. Economic sanctions had proved unworkable against Italy because even the League members did not apply them.
So through the late thirties the delegates played golf by day and gossiped by night, leaving their assistants to attend all but the big meetings. One afternoon in 1938 I sat in a meeting of the Disarmament Conference at which little of the proceedings could be heard; the Swiss Army planes on patrol along the border of belligerent France made too much noise. Next day I left for Munich, where Hitler dictated to Chamberlain and Daladier while Goering, chief of the powerful Luftwaffe, laughed scornfully over his beer.
The Luftwaffe is powerful no longer and its commander sits with Nuernberg’s war criminals.
The memories of Munich, Geneva and many another European international conferences, voluntary or obligatory, were undoubtedly on the minds of the delegates to the preparatory meeting in London this winter who were to choose a home for the UNO.
By a narrow margin they rejected a proposal to establish the headquarters in Europe, decided to make the United States their home. That emphasized one great strength of the new UNO over the old League.
Wilson summoned the first League Assembly to meet in Geneva. Forty-one states sent delegates, but the United States did not.
This time the United States is not only in the new organization but plays a leading part.