History is simply a collection of decisions we’ve made over the years. We know the roads we took to get here. Oftentimes, though, it’s easy to forget the roads we didn’t take. This is the first of a five-part series that looks at projects proposed in Virginia from the 1940s into the 1990s that were never built but which would have changed things if they had been. Today: the 1940s.
In October 1945, a letter arrived at the Charlottesville and Albemarle County Chamber of Commerce office. It came from London. It contained just two sentences. The first was a simple thank you but the second was potentially world-changing, in a literal sense: “Your proposal that the Headquarters of the·World Security Council should be in Charlottesville and Albemarle County has been circulated to the Executive Committee of the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations.”
Yes, Charlottesville and Albemarle County pitched themselves for the headquarters of the United Nations.
In our time, we are familiar with the contest among North American cities to win the location of Amazon’s HQ2, a process that Virginia eventually won. In 1945-46, there was a global equivalent of that as cities vied to host the newly formed U.N.
Charlottesville and Albemarle obviously didn’t win out, but the communities did try, and their bid was not an outlandish one.
The vision of having some international body was not a new one; that had been the idea behind the League of Nations after World War I. That failed, but the idea of creating something new first arose in June 1941 when representatives from five nations — and exiled leaders from nine others under Nazi occupation — issued what became known as the London Declaration. This was six months before Pearl Harbor, so the United States was not part of it. Once the U.S. was in the war, President Franklin Roosevelt embraced the idea, with the culmination being the initial meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco in April 1945, a time when the war was still underway.
With the war’s end — in Europe in May, in the Pacific in September — the focus turned to creating a permanent structure, both figuratively and literally.
The choices for the U.N. headquarters might seem surprisingly limited to our 21st-century eyes: either Europe or the United States. Sites in Asia, Africa, South America — or anywhere else in North America — were never considered.
Many European nations — plus Canada — pushed for Europe, specifically Geneva, Switzerland. That had been the site of the League of Nations, which still technically existed even though it had long since been considered a failure. For supporters, that was the argument in favor of Geneva. For everyone else, it was a reason to avoid Geneva — to emphasize that the U.N. was something new and different.
Much of Europe was in ruins from the war and there was too much history tied up in treaties signed in Paris over the years. The United States had the advantage of being spared from destruction; it had a modern economy (which ruled out many locations) and it wasn’t somebody’s colony (which ruled out others).
That was the backdrop for the Charlottesville-Albemarle bid. In October 1945, the chamber of commerce sent several letters to the U.N.’s Preparatory Commission in London, which was headed by Gladwyn Jebb, a longtime British diplomat who a week later would be named the U.N.’s acting secretary-general.
Thomas Farrar of the chamber made this case for Charlottesville and Albemarle: “We believe that the work of the Council would. be greatly aided in the quiet and peaceful Central Virginia countryside. The land itself is quite suitable for the erection of necessary buildings. Transportation facilities between New York and Washington are excellent. The climate is generally mild and the surrounding country-side is dotted with beautiful farms and estates.”
There was also the Thomas Jefferson connection. Farrar included one page of demographic information that played up how many people of foreign ancestry lived in Charlottesville and Albemarle and four pages of historical information about Jefferson and his connections to the region. “Ample space between the Rivanna River and the Monticello mountain is found for such structures as would be necessary for the permanent peace organization verily in the shadows of the birthplace, home and grave of the Father of True Democracy.”
Charlottesville and Albemarle weren’t the only communities who wanted the U.N., of course. In all, nearly 250 communities envisioned themselves as the U.N. headquarters, according to the book “Capital of the World: The Race to Host the United Nations” by Charlene Mires. These included major cities — Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, St. Louis — as well as lots of smaller ones that made a similar “quiet and peaceful” case to the one Charlottesville and Albemarle offered. South Dakota pitched the Black Hills. Tuskahoma, Oklahoma, the former seat of the Choctaw Nation, made its case on the grounds that it was nearly in the center of the continent. During the Amazon search, Detroit made an unusual international bid in conjunction with Windsor, Ontario, across the river. During the U.N. search, Detroit offered both Belle Isle, on the American side of the water, and Navy Island, an uninhabited island on the Canadian side.
First, though, there was the whole question of whether the U.N. should be in the United States at all. On Dec. 3, 1945, the Preparatory Commission settled that: It voted to pick a U.S. site over a European one. A week later, the Congress unanimously voted to invite the U.N. to locate in the U.S. (Thought experiment: Would there be such a unanimous vote today?) Asian nations pushed for San Francisco, because it’s on the Pacific. For the same reasons, European nations opposed it — the time zones were too different. On Dec. 22, 1945, the U.N. — “pressured” by Britain and the Soviet Union, according to the Villanova Law Review — voted to restrict the search to the East Coast to be closer to Europe.
Those two actions theoretically boosted Charlottesville’s chances but there’s no evidence it was seriously considered. Some non-white countries — India, most notably — opposed any Southern location because of segregation laws. That would have ruled out anything in Virginia. This was six years before a Little League team in Charlottesville refused to host an integrated team from Norton for the state championship. There’s a historical marker today about all that — in Norton.
For a time, Philadelphia appeared to be the front-runner. Britain and the Soviet Union, among others, endorsed the city. Even some Asian nations, such as India, were coming around to Philadelphia as sufficiently open-minded to host their delegates. However, the official search narrowed to 14 locations, all in the Northeast — but none of them Philadelphia. Or New York, for that matter. Not surprisingly, local “not in my backyard” movements arose. When Greenwich, Connecticut, appeared to be a favorite, one local resident hired “two men to pretend they were Syrians,” according to the Villanova Law Review. “Each man donned a fez and walked through downtown Greenwich with surveyor tools, chattering away in pig Latin and spooking the shopkeepers.” Rumors spread “that camels would walk down the streets.” Meanwhile, some nations wanted no part of New York or anything close to it. Syria wanted a place “nearer to God, nearer to justice.”
In the end, money talked: John D. Rockefeller swooped in and offered $8.5 million worth of land in New York City. And that was that.
There’s no indication the Charlottesville-Albemarle bid ever got further than the polite acknowledgement of its submission. But what if it had?
Coming Tuesday: A decision in the 1950s and ’60s that still shapes Virginia today.
And now, back to today’s politics
Early voting begins, gosh, next week — Sept. 19. Who’s on the ballot in your community? And where do they stand? You can find all that on our Voter Guide.
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