Cordell Hull

Secretary of State

• Born: October 2, 1871
• Birthplace: Near Byrdstown, Overton (now Pickett) County, Tennessee
• Died: July 23, 1955
• Place of death: Bethesda, Maryland

American secretary of state (1933-1944)

Serving as secretary of state longer than any person in American history, Hull shaped the world of diplomacy along the lines of his Jeffersonian and Wilsonian principles. His commitment to President Woodrow Wilson’s dream of a world organization helped make the United Nations a reality.

Areas of achievement Government and politics, diplomacy

Early Life

Cordell Hull (kohr-DEHL huhl) spent his boyhood in the lovely Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee. Born at the dawn of the industrial era, he absorbed the values of individualism and entrepreneurial activity. His father, William Hull, made a sizable fortune as a merchandiser and a supplier of logs. His mother, the former Elizabeth Riley, imbued him with strong religious (Baptist) and humanitarian sentiments.

Both parents encouraged Cordell and his two older brothers to obtain a formal education. A combination of private tutoring and local schooling eventually led him to normal schools at Bowling Green, Kentucky, and the National Normal University at Lebanon, Ohio. In 1889, illness ended his general education. He did, however, read law on his own, and he became an attorney after completing a ten-month course (in five months) at Cumberland Law School. His next step was into politics.

Before his twentieth birthday, Hull had already become the Democratic Party chair of his county, entering the Tennessee state legislature two years later. His debating skills served him well. Hull enlisted in the army when the Spanish-American War began in 1898, although the war ended before he saw battle. By 1903, the young lawyer had been appointed to a Tennessee judicial seat (he would be called Judge for the remainder of his life), and he moved to Congress three years later.

By age thirty-six, when he moved to Washington, Hull had exhibited his ambition, his devotion to law and public life, and his principled approach to politics. Even his critics recognized his abilities. He possessed a fine intelligence and a courtly appearance, both of which served as important political assets. He was more reserved than most of his colleagues appreciated, and he combined a strong ethical sense with the moralistic outlook typical of the Progressive period. He was one of the best lawyers in Congress by the time he arrived in 1906, but he was also legalistic in ways that would later inhibit his political effectiveness.

Life’s Work

Hull spent a quarter of a century in Congress. He served in the House of Representatives from 1907 until 1930 (except for a two-year period from 1921 to 1923), and then in the Senate until President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt offered him the post of secretary of state. As a congressman, he sat on the Ways and Means Committee, where he specialized in tax and tariff matters during a period when federal spending soared. Hull fought for an income tax even before the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and he became one of President Woodrow Wilson’s chief congressional allies in the pursuit of a low tariff.

Indeed, the horrors of World War I helped to fix Hull’s attention on low tariffs for the remainder of his public career. Like many others in his Progressive generation, Hull believed that the chief cause of war was economic injustice, which he ascribed to tariff barriers that inhibited international commerce. Combined with his faith in the sanctity of law and respect for written agreements and treaties, Hull’s approach to international affairs had largely crystallized by the time Germany surrendered in 1918.

It was Hull’s tenure as secretary of state, though, that secured his place in history. Hull was a compromise candidate for that post following Roosevelt’s victory in 1932. He had already earned Roosevelt’s gratitude following his outspoken support for United States’ entry into the League of Nations when Roosevelt ran for the office of vice president in 1920, and he ably chaired the Democratic National Committee for the next three years while serving on that body during most of the decade. Hull had few enemies. After 1930, his articulate opposition to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which disastrously raised rates to the highest levels in American history, guaranteed him national prominence.

Hull’s long service as secretary of state obscures the degree to which his record was decidedly mixed. He came to his post with many assets, including an excellent relationship with Congress, a conscientious attitude toward his work, and genuine respect for the professionals in the State Department and the Foreign Service. However, he was handicapped by his moralistic rigidity in a field that placed a premium on compromise, by his limited experience in foreign policy, and by his somewhat formal and distant relationship with the president. Consequently, Hull never achieved the influence in the foreign policy area that he desired. Roosevelt often relied on friends and personal envoys rather than on his secretary of state. The president even bypassed the department entirely at certain critical moments, leaving Hull uninformed and embarrassed. This sort of thing plagued Hull as early as 1933, when Roosevelt undermined his efforts at international cooperation at the London Economic Conference, and as late as 1944, when the secretary of the treasury, but not the secretary of state, joined Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at the Second Quebec Conference to formulate the famous Morgenthau Plan. Bitterly opposed by Hull, the plan aimed to turn post-World War II Germany into an agricultural society.

Indeed, Hull’s chief assistants in the State Department were Roosevelt loyalists, who had been appointed largely without consulting the new secretary in 1933, and Roosevelt often relied on Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., or Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles in formulating foreign policy. Hull’s memoirs occasionally reflect his dismay at these arrangements. The fact of the matter is that Roosevelt devalued Hull’s contributions. Like his cousin Theodore before him, Roosevelt insisted on being his own secretary of state, particularly during the period after 1939, when the line between diplomatic and military affairs was blurred.

Nevertheless, Hull rarely considered resignation from an administration for which, in fact, he had only limited ideological sympathy. His optimism, loyalty, congeniality, and fascination with power kept him in the Cabinet. He often lamented the influence of those whom he considered radicals and extreme New Dealers. His Jeffersonian suspicion of large government kept him something of an outsider in the administration. Despite this fact, he continued to have a cordial, if not close, relationship with the president, and he had an excellent working relationship with conservative Cabinet members such as Henry Stimson in the War Department and Frank Knox in the Navy Department.

Hull may have had limited influence within the Roosevelt administration, but his long tenure in the State Department resulted in some notable successes. Perhaps most important was his sponsorship of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, which Congress passed in 1934. Hull’s support for this measure which permitted the president to negotiate lower tariffs on a bilateral basis stemmed from his belief that lower rates would contribute to both international peace and economic recovery. Based on this act, the secretary helped to negotiate twenty-one agreements that moderated rates from the high Smoot-Hawley levels of the Hoover years. Moreover, the measure shifted tariff authority from the Congress to the executive, a change congenial to Hull, who was very much influenced by the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century.

Hull’s two other chief accomplishments centered on improving relations with Latin America and strengthening the framework of international organizations. He was a prime mover behind Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, which sought to reverse years of American bullying in Central and South America. Hull continued the policy enunciated in the Clark Memorandum of 1930, which renounced the use of military intervention in Latin America. Much of Hull’s work was formalized at a series of conferences, the most dramatic of which was held in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1933. Hull eventually strengthened the relationship of the United States with all Latin American nations except Argentina. He relaxed the heavy hand of American economic imperialism in the hemisphere, and he built a basis for military cooperation during World War II.

Hull was in every sense a Wilsonian in supporting international cooperation through a world organization. He strongly supported the United States’ entry into the International Labor Organization in 1934, and he deeply regretted the Senate’s rejection of World Court membership for the United States the following year. His most gratifying work as secretary of state was his effort to create a successor organization to the League of Nations. He helped to author the Charter of the United Nations, and he was instrumental in sidetracking regional agreements as a substitute for a genuine world organization. Moreover, Hull’s political skills helped to prevent the Republicans from making the United Nations into a partisan issue during the presidential campaign of 1944. He had learned the lessons of 1919.

These successes must be balanced against his most significant failure, for Hull and Roosevelt did little to prevent the drift toward war in 1939. Partly handcuffed by the degree to which most Americans were preoccupied with the economic crisis, Hull maintained a policy toward the future Axis powers that relied excessively on a rigid repetition of moral principles that he assumed to be the universal basis for international conduct. He never understood the degree to which Axis leaders held his principles in contempt, nor the degree to which American interests in distant areas might justifiably be compromised to prevent war.

Significance

For all of Hull’s success in such areas as trade, international organization, and good-neighbor relations, his service as secretary of state was marked more by failure than success. His approach to world affairs had been shaped excessively by the moralistic attitudes of the Progressives. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were unimpressed by his moral pronouncements. Hull’s genuine fear of war contributed to lukewarm support for the pre-1939 appeasement policy of Great Britain and France. Hull was more assertive toward Japan, but without the support of the Allied powers, he was unwilling to take any action of a decisive nature before 1940, and neither was Roosevelt. American policy was neither courageous nor distinguished before World War II.

Once the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hull’s influence further declined. Roosevelt utilized personal envoys such as Harry Hopkins to sidestep the State Department during the war. The president cultivated a personal relationship with Allied heads of state such as Joseph Stalin and Churchill, therefore diluting the contributions of his secretary of state. By the time that Hull left office for health reasons in November, 1944, the center of foreign policy decision was no longer in the State Department. Cordell Hull must accept his share of responsibility for this development.

Bibliography

Drummond, Donald F. “Cordell Hull.” In An Uncertain Tradition: American Secretaries of State in the Twentieth Century, edited by Norman Graebner. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961. This is the most skillful short study of Hull. The author admires Hull’s opposition to fascism but believes that his rigid emphasis on principle often rendered his diplomacy ineffective.

Hull, Cordell. The Memoirs of Cordell Hull. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1948. Hull’s own highly detailed and somewhat dull account of his public life. These volumes gloss over the rivalry for influence within the Roosevelt administration, but they nevertheless offer a wealth of valuable information.

Jablon, Howard. “Cordell Hull, His ’Associates,’ and Relations with Japan, 1933-1936.” Mid-America 56 (1974): 160-174. The author argues that Hull’s policy toward Japan was merely an extension of Henry L. Stimson’s Non-Recognition Policy. Hull, says Jablon, relied excessively on his advisers and an approach that elevated principle over any serious assessment of Japanese interests.

Pratt, Julius. Cordell Hull: 1933-44. New York: Cooper Square, 1964. The best and most comprehensive study of Hull as secretary of state. Pratt is often uncritical of Hull, but, like most other historians, he faults Hull’s excessive moralism. The book is organized topically.

Rofe, J. Simon. Franklin Roosevelt’s Foreign Policy and the Welles Mission. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Examines Sumner Welles’s efforts in early 1940 to forestall a European war, and how his failed attempt widened his disagreements with Hull and other State Department officials.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: February 25, 1913: U.S. Federal Income Tax Is Authorized; October 29, 1929-1939: Great Depression; March 4, 1933-1945: Good Neighbor Policy; November 16, 1933: United States Recognizes Russia’s Bolshevik Regime; August 31, 1935-November 4, 1939: Neutrality Acts; November 11, 1936: Reciprocal Trade Act; December, 1936: Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace; January 6, 1937: Embargo on Arms to Spain; March 18, 1938: Mexico Nationalizes Foreign Oil Properties.

1941-1970: December 7, 1941: Bombing of Pearl Harbor; April 25-June 26, 1945: United Nations Charter Convention; October 30, 1947: General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Is Signed.