The Particularist Pursuit of American Universalism: The American Jewish Committee’s 1944 ‘Declaration on Human Rights’

Abstract

This article recovers a forgotten episode in the history of human rights: the 1944 ‘Declaration on Human Rights' sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. With an unprecedented media campaign and endorsements from ‘1300 distinguished Americans of all faiths,' the 1944 ‘Declaration' at first glance appears to be a prime example of wartime pluralist consensus and liberal internationalism in the USA. Yet as a closer examination of the document’s genesis and reception reveal, the document actually generated a striking array of polar-opposite reactions, including support from conservative isolationists, criticism from civil libertarians, and sharply split reactions from fellow Jewish groups and Catholic organizations. In recapturing this story of political conflict and ideological confusion, I propose to disentangle the stories of liberal internationalism and human rights. Rather than view mid-twentieth-century human rights history as a tale of the 1940s emergence of global civil society and US ethical cosmopolitanism before the arrival of Cold War politics, we do better to see it more as a story of faltering attempts to forge a language of US universalism that would appeal to the moral imagination of the USA.