U.S. Joins United Nations: Commitment to Global Peace

The United States Senate voted 65 to 7 on December 4, 1945, to approve American participation in the United Nations, reversing the isolationist catastrophe that had crippled the League of Nations a generation earlier. The vote came less than four months after the atomic bombings of Japan and carried the unmistakable weight of a world desperate to prevent a third global war. Senate approval was never seriously in doubt, but the lopsided margin reflected how thoroughly World War II had discredited American isolationism. The League of Nations had failed in large part because the United States refused to join. President Woodrow Wilson had championed the League at Versailles in 1919, then watched the Senate reject American membership. Without the world's emerging industrial superpower, the League lacked the authority to confront Japanese aggression in Manchuria, Italian expansion in Ethiopia, or German remilitarization. Franklin Roosevelt, who had served as Wilson's Assistant Secretary of the Navy, was determined not to repeat the mistake. Roosevelt began building support for a postwar international organization years before the war ended. The Dumbarton Oaks conference in 1944 produced the UN's basic framework. The San Francisco conference in April 1945, held just weeks after FDR's death, drafted the UN Charter. President Harry Truman, continuing Roosevelt's vision, signed the charter on June 26, 1945, and submitted it to the Senate for ratification. Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, a former isolationist who had converted to internationalism after Pearl Harbor, marshaled Republican support. The seven dissenting votes came from an unlikely coalition of progressive and conservative senators who feared the Security Council's veto power or worried about sovereignty. The UN's record over the following decades proved both its advocates and critics partially right, but the 1945 vote ensured that the United States would remain engaged in multilateral diplomacy rather than retreating behind its oceans.