April 24, 2026
On April 25, 1945, delegates from fifty nations met in San Francisco to establish a permanent forum for international cooperation: the United Nations.
Even before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. In the 1941 Atlantic Charter, they declared that countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade thanks to freedom of the seas would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights.
Between 1942 and 1945, forty-seven nations signed the Declaration by United Nations, a treaty formalizing the alliance that stood against the fascist Axis powers. The treaty declared that signatories would not sign separate peace agreements with Germany, Italy, or Japan and would work together to create a world based on the 1941 Atlantic Charter.
In October 1943 the governments of the U.S., the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China declared that they would continue to cooperate with each other after the war ended, and that they recognized the need to establish an international organization, “based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states, and open to membership by all such states, large and small, for the maintenance of international peace and security.”
To create that organization, representatives from those four nations met at the Dumbarton Oaks estate in Washington, D.C., in late summer and fall 1944. They hammered out the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals for an international organization called the United Nations. Its purpose would be to maintain international peace and security by acting collectively to stop aggression and settle international disputes, to strengthen ties between nations, and to work together to solve problems.
The organization was based on “the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states,” and membership in it would be open to all such states.
In February 1945, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and General Secretary Joseph Stalin met near Yalta in Crimea to discuss the postwar world. The Allies had liberated France and Belgium, and the Germans had lost the Battle of the Bulge in late January, while Soviet forces were within 50 miles of Berlin. It was clear that the end of the war in Europe was coming.
At Yalta the three leaders hashed out the last pieces of the proposed United Nations and agreed that “a United Nations conference on the proposed world organization should be summoned for Wednesday, 25 April, 1945, and should be held in the United States of America.” Those invited to the conference would be “the United Nations as they existed on 8 Feb[ruary], 1945” and any associated nation that had “declared war on the common enemy by 1 March, 1945.”
On March 1 a visibly exhausted Roosevelt addressed the nation. “A conference of all the United Nations of the world will meet in San Francisco on April 25, 1945,” he said. “There, we all hope, and confidently expect, to execute a definite charter of organization under which the peace of the world will be preserved and the forces of aggression permanently outlawed.”
“This time we are not making the mistake of waiting until the end of the war to set up the machinery of peace. This time,” he said, in reference to the failed League of Nations after World War I, “as we fight together to win the war finally, we work together to keep it from happening again.”
Roosevelt explained: “The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man, or one party, or one Nation. It cannot be just an American peace, or a British peace, or a Russian, a French, or a Chinese peace. It cannot be a peace of large Nations—or of small Nations. It must be a peace which rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world.
“It cannot be a structure of complete perfection at first. But it can be a peace—and it will be a peace—based on the sound and just principles of the Atlantic Charter—on the concept of the dignity of the human being—and on the guarantees of tolerance and freedom of religious worship.”
Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945 and less than two weeks later, on April 25, 3,500 people arrived at the San Francisco conference: 850 delegates and their staff and advisors, along with the staff of the conference. To follow developments, more than 2,500 reporters and observers were also there.
The conference organizers divided the delegates into committees to figure out how, exactly, to make the United Nations work. Together they wrote, and then adopted unanimously, the United Nations charter.
“We the peoples of the United Nations,” the preamble to that document began, are determined “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” The document declares the signers “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” It calls for the maintenance of international treaties and international law.
The preamble also called for countries to live in peace with each other, uniting their strength to maintain international peace and security and making sure that “armed force shall not be used” unless it is in the common interest. As Roosevelt and Churchill had called for in the 1941 Atlantic Charter, it called for nations to work together “for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples.”
“To accomplish these aims,” the signatories announced, “[we] have resolved to combine our efforts.”
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Notes:
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/moscow.asp
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1943v01/d684
https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:21796682
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/moscow.asp
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-congress-the-yalta-conference
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/yalta.asp
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/history-of-the-un/san-francisco-conference
"To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war...."
What a wonderful and necessary tribute to the United Nations and the ideals behind its founding. With each passing generation that much removed from direct memory of conflagration, it becomes even more important to recall, to honor, to emulate. Thank you, Heather.
How devastating it is that Trump has made America a violator of the principles of the UN Charter--an aggressor nation.