V o L u m e I : a d

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, as before

Hull was often excluded from major meetings, including the 1942 Casa-

blanca conference, the 1943 Cairo and Tehran conferences, and the 1944

Quebec summit meeting of Allied leaders. He opposed the Casablanca deci-

sion to demand the unconditional surrender of the Axis nations, believing

that this would encourage them to continue the war. He also opposed the

1944 Morgenthau Plan to partition a defeated Germany and eradicate its

industrial capacity and, with the assistance of Secretary of War Henry L.

Stimson, succeeded in obtaining the scheme’s ultimate rejection.

Hull put great effort into establishing the 1942 United Nations (UN)

alliance of anti-Axis nations. Following his Wilsonian instincts, he then con-

centrated on planning for the postwar UN international security organization

that would replace the defunct League of Nations. Under his guidance, the

State Department drafted the proposals for the UN Charter accepted at the

1944 Dumbarton Oaks Conference and adroitly won bipartisan congressional

support for these. Addressing Congress in late 1943, Hull overoptimistically

stated that the projected new organization would eliminate spheres of influ-

ence, the balance of power, and international alliances and rivalries. He shared

Roosevelt’s anticolonial outlook and also his belief that the United States

should treat China as a great power and thereby encourage it to become one.

Increasingly poor health led Hull to resign after the November 1944

presidential election. Consulted on the terms of the July 1945 Potsdam Dec-

laration urging Japan to surrender, he insisted that it include no promise to

retain the emperor. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945, he lived quietly

in retirement, producing lengthy memoirs. Suffering from strokes and heart

problems, Hull died at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland on 23 July 1955.

Priscilla Roberts

See also

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano; Stimson, Henry Lewis; United Nations

References

Gellman, Irwin F. Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Hull, Cordell. Memoirs of Cordell Hull. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1948.

Pratt, Julius W. Cordell Hull, 1933–44. 2 vols. New York: Cooper Square, 1964.

Schlesinger, Stephen C. Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations; A Story of

Superpowers, Secret Agents, Wartime Allies and Enemies, and Their Quest for a Peace-

ful World. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2003.

Utley, Jonathan G. Going to War with Japan, 1937–1941. Knoxville: University of Ten-

nessee Press, 1985.

Rights are rule-governed powers of some people to activate duties that others

owe them but cannot extinguish unilaterally. Duties may be to act or refrain

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Human Rights

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from acting. For example, the right to free speech confers the duty on people

to refrain from interfering with each other’s expression of opinion according

to rules that exclude, say, speech that constitutes a clear and present danger.

Some philosophers posit that rights must protect legitimate interests and

create an inviolable, morally justified cordon around a person. For example,

each person has a legitimate interest in receiving due process; it is morally

justified. The right to due process creates a protective cordon around each

one of us. By contrast, an effort to silence all people who happen to disagree

with a particular person is illegitimate. It is not morally justified, and so there

is no protective cordon around that person.

Human rights are those that each person possesses by virtue of his or her

humanity; for example, the right to life or free expression. By contrast, civil

rights are those that some people retain by virtue of being citizens; for exam-

ple, the right to vote freely in an election. Special rights are ones that we

enjoy because of our particular situation in the world; for example, a right to

inherit from our particular parents or wear the specific shirt we bought.

The idea of universal human rights that are equally applicable to all

human beings without distinction of citizenship, culture, geographical loca-

tion, or historical context has been philosophically and politically controver-

sial. The Westphalian Order that ended the Thirty Years’ War in Europe in

1648 gave extensive powers to sovereign rulers, most notably to determine

the state’s religion. Modern state sovereignty resolved the religious conflicts

in Europe but also removed the legal grounds for the intervention of one

state in the internal affairs of another, particularly in the case of human rights

abuses.

The Anglo-American tradition of political philosophy connects the legit-

imacy of the sovereign state with its duty to guarantee rights. Thomas Hobbes

suggested that the state is based on a social contract wherein the sovereign

state guarantees to its subjects a right to life in return for all their other native

natural rights. John Locke assigned to the state the duty of guaranteeing the

rights of its citizens. When the American colonists set out to justify their

claim for independence, they formulated their arguments in Lockean terms

as a reaction to the king’s violation of their rights, the same rights that he was

supposed to guarantee. Shortly thereafter, the French Revolution codified

human rights for the first time in a political document, the Declaration of the

Rights of Man and Citizen (1793). However, this declaration was issued during

the Reign of Terror (1793–1794), which witnessed the worst excesses of the

French Revolution. For the next century and a half, the concept of human

rights hardly played a role in international politics, with the possible excep-

tion of certain aspects of the struggle against slavery and the slave trade. Still,

the democratic emphasis on rights within the context of the Cold War was a

natural development of tradition that did not quite exist in Eastern Europe.

World War II brought human rights to the forefront of international pol-

itics. On the one hand, the unique wickedness of Nazism made the war

against it a moral one rather than just a clash of nations and their interests.

The positive content of that moral struggle was couched, especially by Amer-

icans, in terms of universal human rights. On the other hand, the tentative

Human Rights

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