188 e lusive v ictories
Arthur Vandenburg, appointing him to the U.S. delegation to the April
1945 San Francisco conference to fi nalize the organization’s charter. Th is
time around there would be no Henry Cabot Lodge.
Th e administration’s timing, moreover, was exquisite: the campaign
to win public support came at a time when Americans were tired of war
and thus open to ways to prevent another, and before the squabbling
that resumes among allies at the end of a confl ict had left the public
jaded about the possibilities for international cooperation. (Possibly this
consideration also entered into Roosevelt’s determination to minimize
diff erences with Stalin over Eastern Europe.) By the time of the San
Francisco conference, more than 80 percent of Americans who had
heard of the United Nations supported American participation. And
the consequences went beyond mere membership in the new interna-
tional body. As a recent study of the administration’s campaign to win
public support concludes, “In essence, Roosevelt made American entry
into the United Nations a national referendum on the postwar posture
of the United States and its willingness to prevent World War III.”
Th is national commitment to backstop an international organization
for collective security set apart Roosevelt’s peace-building eff orts from
Wilson’s.
Th e United Nations, moreover, was but one support beam in an
extraordinary framework of international organizations designed to
promote free trade and an international market economy. Before the
war ended, the United States took the lead in establishing the Interna-
tional Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Th ese were followed by the
Marshall Plan, for which Congress appropriated $17 billion in 1948, and
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the following year. Clem-
enceau’s and Lloyd George’s old nightmare—of the European democ-
racies abandoned by the United States while a powerful adversary
lurked across the border—lay banished for good. Of course, the new
structures did not refl ect pure altruism on the part of Roosevelt or other
American policy makers. Th e economic institutions established at war’s
end helped assure strong overseas markets for American goods at a time
when no competitor could hope to compete with American industry.
Once seen by American business as its archenemy, the Roosevelt admin-
istration laid the groundwork for an unprecedented era of global Amer-
ican economic hegemony.