Cordell Hull: The hero of peace behind the scene Essay

Cordell Hull, a Tennessee native, October 2, 1871; son of William and Elizabeth (Riley) Hull; was considered one of America’s greatest Secretary of States. Prior to becoming Secretary of State in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s cabinet, where he served during the very critical years of the Great Depression and World War II, 1933 to 1944, he was a U.S. Senator and congressman for 24 years. As a young army captain he fought in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Cordell Hull’s most remarkable achievements were in the area of international economics where his special knowledge in that field left a lasting impact on the United States’ relations with other countries for many years after he died. He had dealt with the threats of war with the axis powers, the merit of the U.S. assuming the role of an isolationist nation by avoiding foreign entanglements, and the conciliation of aggressive nations in Europe and Asia. Hull advocated the revival of world trade as a key means for lifting the country out of the depression and as a way to attain global peace. His influence upon Congress to do away with high protective tariffs were enormous and he lobbied for the passage of Reciprocal Trade Agreements in 1934. Tariffs were reduced on certain goods up to 50% through special treaties, granting â€Å"most-favored-nation† terms with friendly nation anxious to do business with the U.S. Hull also created the Export-Import Bank, a government agency that allowed nations to borrow money in order to buy American products. In the interest of peace he helped start the United Nations. Franklin D. Roosevelt called him the â€Å"Father of the United Nations.† (Resnick 70) The man of peace Cordell Hull has devoted his entire life to the stabilization of international relations, best known to the public as his untiring efforts in the field of commercial policy, efforts inspired by his desire to counteract autarchic tendencies both in the U.S.A. and abroad. Of these efforts, which considerably influenced national policies during the period between the wars and especially at the end of the twenties, he says: â€Å"there can be no real progress toward confidence or peace or permanent trade recovery while retaliations and bitter trade controversies rage.† Confidence and peace between nations have constituted his goal in all spheres of his activity. This is the driving spirit behind this fight against isolationism at home, his efforts to create a peace bloc of States on the American continents, and his work for the United Nation Organization.   Hull reopened the question of taxation, after the victory of the democrats in 1912, managed to secure the introduction of income tax. He certainly saw it as a means of increasing federal income, but his first concern was with the effects of this tax as against those of the tariffs. He was convinced that protectionism created monopoly and enriched the few at the expense of the many, and that such system could not be reconciled with the free competition in which he believed. By the end of the war, his view on economic policy could be expressed as follows: High tariffs are barriers obstructing the development of trade and friendship between nations, thereby becoming barriers also to lasting international peace. As early as 1917, he put forward the idea of an international agreement to govern the methods employed in commercial competition. The task of reducing trade restrictions was taken up in the League of Nations and the basis for the work of the following years established at the great world conference in 1927 at Geneva. The culmination of these efforts was the World Economic Conference in London in 1933 which Hull himself attended, this time as secretary of state which ended as failure. It may think it was a mistake to lay so much stress on the question of stabilization of currency form the very beginning; it was then that led to Roosevelt’s famous telegram in which he rejected the plan for currency stabilization on the grounds that, a nation’s prosperity depends more upon a healthy internal economic structure than it does upon the price of its currency in relation to the price of currencies of other nations. This attitude, which prevailed in the United States, brought Hull’s work in this direction to a halt. Yet Hull did not give up, even though the London conference was a setback for his ideas. Despite this failure, in November of that year he headed the American Delegation to the Seventh Pan-American Conference, held in Montevideo, and won the trust of the Latin American diplomats, laying the foundation for the â€Å"Good Neighbor† Policy, followed up in the Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace held in Buenos Aires (1936) , the eighth Pan- American Conference in Lima (1938), the second consecutive Meeting of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the American Republics in Havana (1940) (Haberman 289). Father of income tax Cordell Hull was the principal architect of the Income Tax of 1913. In structuring this tax, he used as his prototype the Income Tax of 1894. He believed that a tax on consumption unjustly burdened the working people. He aspired to create an institutional structure that would shift the burden from those citizens with the least ability to pay with the ones with the most. Given authority through the Trade Agreements Act of 1934, he negotiated reciprocal trade agreements with numerous countries, lowering tariffs and stimulating trade. He secured the passage of a bill empowering the president to lower tariffs by fifty percent and to reduce import restrictions for countries prepared to grant similar concessions to the United States. He was eventually able to conclude no fewer than twenty-seven trade agreements on the basis of this bill (Joseph 187). This law, which was subject to a time limitation, was last renewed in 1945 and authorized the president to reduce tariffs by forty-five percent. This was, of course, materialized after Hull had retired, but it represented nevertheless a victory for his policy. All of this marked a radical change in the economic policy of the United States; it is an affirmation of England’s policy during the free trade period, taking as a model the Cobden Treaty of 1860 of which the most favored nation clause formed an integral part. Although the change is partly due to the acceptance of the United States as a creditor nation, it signifies something more profound for Hull: it is his immutable belief that it will clear the way for improved international relations and remove one of the causes of war . Hull attacked not only the tariff bill but the whole theory of protection. In particular, he attempted to point out what he considered to be the fallacy of protection for the American farmer. He told the House that 334,000,000 acres of land in the United States were planted, in 1928, to crops valued at $7,000,000,000, which actually got some benefit form tariff protection. The conclusion he drew from these statistics was that, under any system of tariffs designed to protect the farmer against foreign competition, only an infinitesimal percentage of American agriculture could benefit, by the very nature of American production, consisting so largely, in acreage and value, of commodities such as corn, wheat, oats, barley, rye, cotton, tobacco, and fruits, of which large surpluses were exported every year and which had nothing to fear from competitive imports. Hulls claimed that the general tariff rates, which the Republicans were trying to boost, were already higher that those of any country except Spain and that the United States stood twelfth among the nations of the world in per capita exports and only fourteenth in per capita imports .   The principles of Montevideo, including the abrogation of the Platt Amendment, the new treaty with Panama, the withdrawal of the marines from Haiti, and progress on the inter-American highway. The sum total of the accomplishments was among the contribution of the greatest nation in the world to the maintenance and promotion of peace throughout a world which gave every evidence of tottering on the brick of war (Hinton 187). Father of United Nation After World War II broke out in Europe he asked for support to the Allies and recommended the revision of the Neutrality Act, which kept the United States out of being involved in the warfare. After U.S. involvement in war, he worked to develop cooperation among the Allies, through his visits in Moscow in 1943, and started to create a peace plan that supported the establishment of a world organization to maintain peace. Knowing that Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations did not succeed, in part, because of political partisanship in the United States, Hull led successful conventions on the formulation of a new international organization and submitted the â€Å"Charter of the United Nations† in August, 1943. Before the Charter could even be approved in 1944 in San Francisco, Hull had to resign office due to weakening health. Tuberculosis and heart disease were his hindrance for him to continue his work to which Hull was used to. The Roosevelt administration received much of the attention and praise for the establishment of the United Nations, owed and giving much of the credit to Hull. Before Hull resigned in November of 1944, Roosevelt offered Hull the opportunity to run as his vice president, which Hull declined because of his health condition. Roosevelt was so grateful to Hull that he nominated his Secretary of State for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1945, the Nobel Committee awarded Cordell Hull the Prize for his work in the Western Hemispheres, for his remarkable work on International Trade Agreements, and for his hard work in establishing the United Nations (â€Å"Cordell Hull: 1945†). Works Cited Cordell Hull 1945. 1 December 2007 http://www.cordellhullmuseum.com/about.htm Haberman, Frederick W. Nobel Lectures in Peace. World Scientific, 1999. Hinton, Harold B. Cordell Hull – a Biography. READ BOOKS, 2007. Joseph, Richard J. The Origins of the American Income Tax: The Revenue Act of 1894 and Its Aftermath. Syracuse University Press, 2004. Resnick, Abraham. They Too Influenced a Nation’s History: The Unique Contributions of 105 Lesser-Known Americans. iUniverse, 2003.