CONFERENCES: Good and Due Form

We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined

To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind . . .

Do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.

It would never be set to music. Nevertheless, the final draft of the Preamble to the United Nations charter went a long way toward that universal appeal of language which many of the delegates, including Dean Virginia C. Gildersleeve and

Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts, thought essential.

Some of the earlier versions read like real-estate deeds. Smuts tried his hand at casting a preamble on the model of the majestic prose which opens the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The delegates liked the Smuts version. But meanwhile the preamble was being used as a sort of verbal garbage pail by all the drafting committees. Ideas which delegates wanted to introduce in other sections were put aside for inclusion in the preamble.

When these assorted bits were assembled with the Smuts version, the total made no sense. At that point Poet Archibald MacLeish, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, returned to San Francisco and was assigned the redrafting job. He tried to boil the whole thing down to 100 words, but the coordinating committee threw his version out. It was too literary.

The committee, composed mostly of lawyers, wrote the final draft. The first seven lines have real swing, and are mostly Smuts. Then the preamble hits heavy going with a phrase the Chileans insisted on, poetry or no poetry: “. . . obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law.”

Phrases and concepts were borrowed from all over. The old League of Nations preamble was there with “international peace and security.” The Kellogg Pact had its echoes. There were Lincoln’s “scourge of war” and Pope Leo XIII’s “dignity of man.” And there were fainter, but recognizable, traces of the Kuomintang party platform and of the Soviet Constitution.

The committee lawyers achieved one fine clause: “. . . to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors.” But their ending would disgrace the corporate charter of a tack factory. They wrote that “We, the peoples” had spoken at San Francisco through “representatives . . . who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form. …”