“That Means Filibuster”: Race, Human Rights, and the United Nations Genocide Convention, 1945-1953 Harriet Steele History 101: American Foreign Policy Professor Daniel Robert Spring 2019 Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 The Historiography ..................................................................................................................... 2 Lemkin and the Intellectual Underpinnings of “Genocide”.......................................................... 5 The Ban on Genocide and Postwar Liberalism .......................................................................... 10 Drafting the Convention: The “Complicity” Question ............................................................... 19 Senate Deliberations: Lynching, Race Riots, and American Democracy ................................... 22 Truman, Connally, and the Korean War .................................................................................... 39 Ratification Versus Civil and Human Rights ............................................................................. 42 Halting the Debate .................................................................................................................... 50 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 55 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 57 “What gets people stirred up about the treaty is its heavy symbolism, producing reactions that are, perhaps, more interesting than the treaty itself.”1 Introduction In December 1948, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Convention defined genocide, which it banned under international law, as: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”2 Ratifying nations vowed to enforce the Convention domestically and could “call upon” the UN to enforce it abroad, when necessary.3 In order for the United States to officially become a party to the treaty, the Senate needed to ratify the Convention, with at least a two-thirds majority vote. The Senate did not ratify the Convention until 1988; some of the most crucial reasons for the delay were the relationships between the Convention’s tenants and aspects of American racism. The existing historiography on the Genocide Convention has either overlooked the role of race in shaping the politics of ratification or focused on American speculations that the Soviet 1 Arlen J. Large, “Senate is Due to Vote on a Treaty Soon—One Submitted in 1949,” Wall Street Journal (1974), quoted in Congressional Record—Senate, January 23, 1974, 466, Records Group 46, Records of the U.S. Senate, 99th Congress, Committee on Foreign Relations Treaty Files, General- Ex. O, 81-1, Box No. 10, Folder: “Record Clips,” National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. 2 “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CrimeOfGenocide.aspx. 3 “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” 1 Union would bring charges of genocide against the United States. This historiography provides an essential basis for the research in this thesis, but it omits two essential facets of the debate in American politics, from roughly 1945-1953, about an international ban on genocide. This thesis explores these two related subjects: the role of ratification proponents in deliberations about civil rights; and the relationship between the underpinnings of the Convention and those of American civil rights law. This thesis will show how prominent proponents of the ratification of the Convention in the United States often presented the Genocide Convention as a more politically palatable alternative to, and at odds with, international human rights projects. They understood ratification of the Convention as an apt plank of President Truman’s liberal platform, one that would display support for persecuted peoples abroad, while also accommodating American white supremacy, by virtue of its narrow scope. At the same time, prominent opponents of ratification viewed the Convention as a threat to legalized white supremacy, because this treaty concerning a specific problem utilized relatively new legal principles that tremendously altered the relationships between individuals and international law. Ultimately, the identifying markers of the American legal regime that enabled systemic racism—namely, state control of civil rights law, and private citizens’ non-responsibility for civil rights violations—played significant, but hitherto unappreciated roles in the debate, shaping the rhetoric of proponents and animating opposition. The Historiography This thesis draws upon three relevant schools of historiography, the intersections of which have not been fully examined. The first school primarily studies the intellectual origins of the Genocide Convention, with a particular emphasis on the work of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish legal scholar who coined the term “genocide” in his 1944 work Axis Rule in 2 Occupied Europe.4 Lemkin is a central figure in any narrative about the Convention, given his outsized role in lobbying for the creation of an international ban on genocide, and advocating for the ratification of the Convention, especially in the United States. Prominent scholars in this school of historiography include A. Dirk Moses and Martin Shaw. The works of these historians have demonstrated Lemkin’s concerns for group rights, as opposed to individual rights, and cultural preservation. Yet, this school of historiography has not examined how Lemkin’s intellectual trajectory influenced his views on American politics and civil rights, and the consequences of his views, in relation to the Genocide Convention’s fate. The second relevant school of historiography, which includes Samantha Power’s “A Problem from Hell” and Anton Weiss-Wendt’s The Soviet Union and the Gutting of the UN Genocide Convention, studies the politics of the Genocide Convention in the United States. Power’s book touches on the role of race in the Senate’s ratification debates but does not ascribe a great degree of significance to the issue. “A Problem from Hell” does not detail the debate regarding the applicability of the Convention to the plight of African Americans, arguing that the only nexus between Jim Crow and the Convention was in the minds of fearful Southern Senators, and that this issue was ultimately inconsequential to the Convention’s fate. After all, ratification proponents, including Lemkin and the National Council of Negro Women, believed that African Americans suffered from a caste system, but not genocide.5 Weiss-Wendt’s work analyzes the role of race in the Senate’s deliberations only within the paradigm of the Cold War conflict between the US and the Soviet Union. As such, Weiss-Wendt asserts: “The arguments against US ratification of the genocide treaty were articulated with brutal honesty…: while the Genocide 4 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation - Analysis of Government - Proposals for Redress, (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), 79, http://www.preventgenocide.org/lemkin/AxisRule1944-1.htm. 5 Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 67. 3 Convention contained vague formulations that could be used against the United States, it lacked the teeth to condemn the true and only perpetrator of genocide, Russia.”6 Weiss-Wendt and Power’s research underscore the need for an analysis that centers the relationship between the Convention’s framing and contemporaneous debates regarding civil rights law and race relations. The third and final school of historiography upon which this thesis draws concerns the UN’s human rights projects and American civil rights advocacy. Crucial works in this school include Mark Bradley’s The World Reimagined, Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia, and Carol Anderson’s Eyes Off the Prize. These monographs do not center on the Genocide Convention but illuminate possibilities for further research. Bradley7 and Moyn8 largely mention the Convention to distinguish it from the projects of individual human rights on which their works center. The Convention is not Anderson’s focus, but she provides context regarding the international character of the African American freedom struggle, including the NAACP’s hope to affect change through the UN. The book’s critiques of the Truman Administration’s record on human rights are important to this thesis’s analysis of the limits of liberal internationalism. The existing historiography provides a foundation for the research presented here but overlooks significant facets of the ratification debate. Scholars