The United Nations General Assembly Hall in New York. A large hall with approximately 150 delegations sitting at tables and facing a speaker’s dais.
5 August 2021
The name of the international organization arose out of World War II, although there were precursor uses of the phrase united nations to refer to various real and proposed collective security arrangements before that. And there are many earlier simple co-locations of the two words referring to various informal groupings of countries.
Earlier precursor uses probably exist, but I stopped my searching when I found this use of united nations in the San Francisco Chronicle of 19 September 1935. It’s not clear if the writer is using the phrase to refer to the then-existing League of Nations or to another, proposed organization:
The policeman’s club is a weapon of peace, to quell the breakers of the peace. So, if their will to peace is “ferocious” enough, will the club of the united nations against the maker of separate national war.
But a month later we get this in an article in the Springfield Republican with a dateline of 26 October 1935 that uses united nations as a clear reference to the League of Nations:
The United States definitely refused today to join the League of Nation’s economic sanctions boycott on Italy, but expressed sympathy for any decision or action the 60 united nations of the world may take peacefully to settle the Italo-Ethiopian conflict.
A 5 February 1936 letter to the Richmond Times-Dispatch uses the capitalized United Nations to refer to the League of Nations, indicating that the term had become semi-official:
If Al Smith can bring this nation back to the Constitution with hoop skirts, bustles, birds of paradise, nature’s fertility of the soil, horse-and-buggy stability, demijohns, and laugh off our obligations like the foreign nations have done by us, he will have accomplished the seven wonders of the world, and should be sent to Geneva as co-ordinator of the United Nations.
And in 1935 John Francis Goldsmith penned a speculative fiction novel, President Randolph, As I Knew Him, about a world government called the United Nations. In the novel, set in 1957, the newly inaugurated U.S. President Randolph says:
What I plan, gentlemen, and what I shall propose next month, will be a federal, international government, called the United Nations of the World, with a World parliament, President, and Supreme Court, and with a Constitution, simple and classic like our own, that will preserve inviolate the rights of every nation and citizen of that union.
But back to the real world, with the world plunged into its second world war in as many decades the need for a collective security arrangement superior to that of the League of Nations was recognized. On 14 August 1941, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, which stated, among other things:
Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea, or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential.
Although it does not use the term, with this, preliminary work on the formation of what would become the present-day United Nations was begun.
After the United States entered World War II in December 1941, the Allied nations began using the formal appellation of United Nations. The name was suggested by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote of his 31 December 1941 meeting with Roosevelt and the coining of the name:
On my return to the White House all was ready for the signature of the United Nations Pact [....] The title of “United Nations” was substituted by the President for that of “Associated Powers.” I thought this a great improvement. I showed my friend the lines from Byron's Childe Harold:
Here, where the sword United Nations drew,
Our countrymen were warring on that day!
And this is much — and all — which will not pass away.
And on 3 January 1942, Churchill cabled his War Cabinet back in London:
President has chosen the title “United Nations” for all the Powers now working together. This is much better than “Alliance,” which places him in constitutional difficulties, or “Associated Powers,” which is flat.
From August to October 1944, the Big Four powers (the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the Republic of China) convened the Washington Conversations on International Peace and Security Organization, better known as the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, after the Dumbarton Oaks mansion in Washington, DC where it was held. The Big Four, joined by delegates from other Allied nations, hammered out the purpose and structure of the United Nations. The conference’s proposals were finalized on 7 October 1944, and the preamble to the proposals officially named the new organization:
There should be established an international organization under the title of The United Nations, the Charter of which should contain provisions necessary to give effect to the proposals which follow.
From April to June 1945, the United Nations Conference was held in San Francisco, and the United Nations officially came into existence.
To sum up, in the 1930s the phrase united nations began to be used to refer to the League of Nations or to similar proposed or fictional organizations. After the United States entered World War II in December 1941, the Allies took to calling themselves the United Nations, and that name for the victors in that war transferred over to the international organization that we know today.
Sources:
Churchill, Winston. The Grand Alliance. The Second World War, vol. 3 of 6. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950, 682–83, 685. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Goldsmith, John Francis. President Randolph as I Knew Him. Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1935, 184.
Jeffery, W.H. “Another Critic of Smith” (letter). Richmond Times-Dispatch (Virginia), 5 February 1936, 8. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2015, modified September 2019, s.v. United Nations, n.
Roosevelt, Franklin and Winston Churchill. The Atlantic Charter, 14 August 1941.
Rowell, Chester H. “Peace Worth Fighting For.” San Francisco Chronicle, 19 September 1935, 14. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Separate Move for Peace Given as American Way” (26 October 1935). Springfield Republican (Illinois), 27 October 1935, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“The United Nations. Dumbarton Oaks Proposals for a General International Organization.” 7 October 1944. U.S. Department of State Publication 2297, Conference Series 66, Washington, DC, 1945.
“A Wellsian Fantasy.” New York Times Book Review, 22 December 1935, 7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Photo credit: Basil D. Soufi, 2011. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.