Historical Marker Tells of Political Dilemmas, Inspirations
A Look at History
Mackinac Conference
By Frank Straus

Next to the east end of Mackinac Island’s Grand Hotel, near Cadotte Avenue, is a state historical marker that must puzzle many of the people who see it. Titled “Mackinac Conference,” the tablet bears an inscription that reads:

“On September 6, 1943, Michigan’s Republican United States senator, Arthur H. Vandenberg, chaired the meeting of the Post War Advisory Council. Republican National Committee Chairman, Harrison Spangler, created the council to draw up a foreign policy plank for the 1944 party platform. Fearing a split between isolationists and internationalists, Spangler wanted a unified policy statement on treaty ratification and the proposed world peace organization. The resulting plank cleared the way for later Republican congressional support of the United Nations and ultimately the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Among those attending the public sessions were Governors Warren of California, Dewey of New York, Kelly of Michigan, Green of Illinois and Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio.”

This bare and bureaucratic summary of the Mackinac Conference perhaps inevitably ignores the high emotions of the time and the dilemmas that the men mentioned, the inner circle of the Republican party of their day, had to face. The conference was held during World War II. During the war, the American people, united in their desire to defeat Hitler and everything he stood for, were deeply divided over their own leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR’s party, the Democrats, controlled the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court. At the same time, many Republicans considered Roosevelt to be an extremist and a traitor to his background. Given a leg up by his upper-class birth and Ivy League education, Roosevelt had developed a populist image that had helped him win repeated election to the presidency.

FDR’s success only stoked dislike of him by his opponents. Nor, by 1943, were these opponents in a weak position. Polls showed wide popular dislike of FDR and his perceived ineptitude at leading the war effort. Some thoughtful opponents were dismayed by the damage done during the war to American civil liberties. Many Japanese-Americans were, during the war, detained without trial at the pleasure of the President. Roosevelt’s Supreme Court refused to take effective action to help these detainees. As a result of these trends, by 1943 the opposition party was enjoying a significant upswing in American public support. Many states, such as Michigan, were led by governors from the opposition party.

Yet this upswing only sharpened the dilemma facing the opposition Republicans. Should they play to their “political base,” and restrict their issue positions to uncompromising opposition to the President and his policies? Or should they try to be more far-sighted and develop a platform of ideas that would help to win the war and create a more peaceful world afterwards?

It was no accident that the fateful conference of party elders was held at Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, the home turf of one of the group’s senior senators, Arthur H. Vandenburg of Michigan. Vandenburg, of Grand Rapids, had started his political career far to one side of the political spectrum. An “isolationist,” he had argued against world trade (with its threats to American jobs) and fought against dangerous American meddling in the affairs of other nations.

Pearl Harbor permanently changed the world-views of Vandenburg and many other Americans, both Democrats and Republicans. They came to believe that it was necessary for the United States to cultivate interrelationships with other nations and peoples if it was itself to have a reasonable prospect for long-term survival. The Republicans among them also believed, however, that the high-flown rhetoric of President Roosevelt concealed a dangerous ineptitude and lack of realism in seeing to it that this international work was carried out in accordance with the world as it actually was.

The American future “grows darker hourly as a result of the Russian attitude” toward the U.S., complained Vandenburg in a letter written two weeks before the conference. Furthermore, the senator fully shared the fear growing among his party-mates as a result of the Democrats’ dominance in Washington, D.C. Franklin D. Roosevelt was preparing to run again for re-election, and “we must beat the 4th Term. It is the ‘last roundup’ for the American way of life.”

The comforting atmosphere of Grand Hotel may have reassured some of the party summit’s participants that their values had a chance of playing a role in shaping the war effort and the place of America in a postwar world. At any rate, Senator Vandenburg took care not only to host the conference but also to draft a resolution which he asked his fellow guests to sign. The tone of this resolution can be gauged from another letter which Vandenberg wrote to one of the party’s money-men, banking CEO Thomas W. Lamont, at this time:

“I am hunting for the middle ground between those extremists at one end of the line who would cheerfully give America away and those extremists at the other end of the line who would attempt a total isolation which has come to be an impossibility.”

What the Michigan senator called “a rule of common sense” took hold among the guests at Grand Hotel, and almost all of them signed a paper calling for “cooperative organization among sovereign nations . . . to attain permanent peace with organized justice in a free world.”

Returning to the Senate floor, Vandenburg soon trumpeted this agreement as the “Mackinac Charter.” Most of the specific words of the “Mackinac Charter,” after a brief flurry in the newspapers of September 1943, faded and were forgotten, although the phrase “the free world” would have a long life ahead of it. Even more important than this evocative phrase, perhaps, was the senator’s insistence that they could find a way out of the dark fears of the future which many Americans held at that time, by a simple and uncompromising devotion to the idea of international law based upon the principle of treating others as one would be oneself treated.

Vandenberg hinted to the Senate that something more than human would help a nation and a people who obeyed international law:

“The Mackinac Charter has done one basic, superlatively important thing - which is sadly needed if we are to have any sort of common national vision in foreign policy. For the first time, it has plainly been put down in black and white the indispensable doctrine that Americans can be faithful to the primary institutions and interests of our own United States, and still be equally loyal to the essential postwar international cooperations which are required to end military aggression for keeps and to create a post-war world in which organized justice shall protect freemen. . . . Indeed, their appropriate world duties can become part of their American allegiance when the result is a body of international law and practice which bless us fully as much as they bless others. In my view, this is what the average American has been waiting to hear. . . .”

The newfound bipartisan consensus on the platform of international law and reciprocity would help carry American arms to victory on the field of battle in World War II. It would help to shape that part of the postwar “free world” that would take sides with America in 1945 - when Senator Vandenberg’s fears about Russia would begin to come true. It would help pick the minority party off the carpet of American politics, and re-establish it as a player in a healthy two-party system that would be based, in its better moments, not on hatred and “dirty tricks,” but on reciprocity and mutual respect.

During the years after the war, Senator Vandenberg became acquainted with a Grand Rapids man who had just returned from Navy service, Gerald Ford. Taking a liking to the young lawyer, Vandenberg mentored Ford and helped him win election to the federal House in 1948, thus starting his protégé’s climb up the ladder of American politics. In 1951, Senator Vandenberg died of cancer. The concept of “a body of international law and practice which bless us fully as much as they bless others” lived on after him.