Fifty nations signed the charter creating the United Nations in San Francisco on June 26, 1945, after two months of negotiation; the organization it created did not legally exist until October 24, once five wartime powers had ratified it

Fifty nations signed the charter of a new world organization in San Francisco on June 26, 1945. The organization it described did not yet exist.

Why wasn't a signature enough?

The United Nations Conference on International Organization had run since April 25, drafting and arguing over a document meant to succeed the League of Nations, which had failed to stop the war still being fought in the Pacific that spring. Putting a name to the charter committed each government to it; ratifying the charter, back home in each of those fifty capitals, was the step that actually gave it force.

The charter said so itself. It would take effect only once the Soviet Union, Nationalist China, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States (the charter's five permanent Security Council powers) had deposited their ratifications with the U.S. State Department, along with a majority of the other signing governments.

That took months no ceremony could shorten. The U.S. Senate alone voted on July 28, 89 to 2, a lopsided margin on a treaty that handed away a real slice of American sovereignty. Other parliaments moved on their own schedules.

The last ratification the charter needed was deposited on October 24, 1945. That is the day the United Nations Organization itself later designated as United Nations Day, and the date it marks as its founding, not the afternoon in San Francisco when the signatures went on the page.

A name three years older than the organization

The words "United Nations" were not coined in 1945 at all.

Franklin Roosevelt chose the phrase on New Year's Day of 1942 for something much narrower: the Declaration by United Nations, a one-page pledge signed in Washington by twenty-six governments already at war with the Axis, promising none of them would make a separate peace. The signers ranged from major combatants to governments-in-exile with almost nothing left to govern.

That declaration built no institution: it had no Secretary-General, no charter, and no headquarters, just a shared pledge and a name that stuck around for three years before anyone used it for a peacetime organization. By the time the San Francisco delegates needed something to call what they were drafting, "United Nations" was already familiar enough that Roosevelt is said to have insisted on it over the State Department's flatter working title, something closer to "International Organization."

An office in a former weapons factory

Even after October 24, the new organization had nowhere permanent to sit.

Its early administrative staff worked first out of Hunter College in the Bronx, and then, once that lease ran out, out of a converted Sperry Gyroscope plant in Lake Success on Long Island: a building that had turned out gun sights and navigation instruments for the U.S. military only a year or two earlier. The General Assembly itself met a short drive away, in a former ice-skating arena at Flushing Meadows that contractors rebuilt into a chamber in three weeks flat.

Lake Success held the organization's main offices from August 1946 until May 1951, nearly five years. Manhattan's marble-and-glass headquarters, on an East River site bought that December with an $8.5 million gift from John D. Rockefeller Jr., was still an architect's model for most of that stretch: a design team led by Wallace Harrison, with Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer both contributing, wasn't finished until 1952. Trygve Lie, a Norwegian foreign minister chosen as a compromise candidate acceptable to both Washington and Moscow, ran the Secretariat as its first Secretary-General for most of that stretch from a converted factory floor.

Idealism, then paralysis

The charter's stated purpose was blunt: to save future generations from the scourge of war. Within two years, the Security Council built to enforce that promise was already paralyzed by the veto its five permanent members held over one another, as the wartime alliance that had written the charter turned into the Cold War.

Historian Stephen Schlesinger, whose Act of Creation is the standard account of the San Francisco conference, has argued that the delegates understood the veto as the price of admission rather than a design flaw: without it, the Soviet Union would not have joined at all, and an organization missing a major power would have repeated the exact weakness that killed the League of Nations. Whether that trade was worth what it cost the Security Council for the next four decades is still argued by people who study the organization for a living.

What does it run now?

The UN today counts 193 member states and coordinates agencies, including UNICEF and the World Health Organization, that most people encounter years before they ever hear the phrase "Security Council." It also draws steady criticism, from very different directions, for being unable to stop wars it was built to prevent. Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Syria get cited most often, and each failure traces back to the same veto that let the organization exist in 1945 in the first place.

Does the design still hold?

Proposals to add permanent Security Council seats have circulated for decades; none has gathered the support it would need to amend the charter that has governed the vote since 1945. Brazil, Germany, India, and Japan have each pushed for a seat, and each push has stalled on the very veto power its backers would need to change.

Eighty years on, the organization still runs on rules five wartime allies wrote for themselves during the summer they were still fighting, on the bet that whoever held that vote in 1945 would be worth trusting with it indefinitely. The next serious push to change the charter will have to argue, to a Security Council that can block it unanimously, that the bet no longer pays off.

Sources

• United Nations, "The San Francisco Conference" and "History of the UN Charter," un.org
• U.S. National Archives, "Charter of the United Nations (1945)," milestone documents collection
• Stephen C. Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations (Westview Press, 2003)
• U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, "Milestones: The Founding of the United Nations, 1945"
• UN Photo / United Nations Archives, records on the Lake Success and Flushing Meadows facilities