San Francisco Conference

San Francisco Conference (25 April–26 June 1945). This conference drafted the United Nations Charter. Its origins lay in a 1942 “Declaration by the United Nations” issued by twenty‐six countries that had declared war against the Axis powers, and the 1943 Moscow Declaration by the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China calling for a new international organization to replace the League of Nations. Further planning occurred at the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks conference and a draft charter was prepared at the February 1945 Yalta conference. Fifty nations attended the San Francisco Conference. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt having died two weeks earlier, President Harry S. Truman addressed the opening ceremonies. To assure bipartisan U.S. support, Truman named two prominent Republicans, Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan and lawyer John Foster Dulles, to the American delegation. The conference quickly agreed on most of the Charter's 111 articles, but in early June a dispute arose over the veto power. The draft charter approved at Yalta had granted a veto to Security Council members, but at San Francisco the Soviet delegate, Andrei Gromyko, insisted that the veto power extend even to the discussion of issues—a demand that threatened to break up the conference. The crisis was resolved only when President Truman instructed presidential aide Harry Hopkins, then in Moscow, to take the issue directly to Soviet premier Josef Stalin. Stalin agreed to modify the Soviet position, and a compromise was reached. With this hurdle passed, the delegates unanimously approved the Charter on 25 June, and signed it the following day at San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House, with Truman again in attendance. The required number of nations ratified the Charter by 24 October (United Nations Day), and the United Nations came into existence. Despite the euphoria surrounding these events, however, the United Nations soon ran afoul of Cold War conflicts, and the San Francisco Conference did not herald the new international order that many had hoped for.
See also Yalta Conference.

Bibliography

R.B. Russell , A History of the United Nations Charter: The Role of the United States, 1940–1945, 1958.
Leland M. Goodrich , The United Nations, 1959.

Norman A. Graebner