This essay in intellectual and legal history reintegrates war-related developments in international law and institutions with broader themes in American political history. Planning for postwar international institutions growing out of the Atlantic Charter's war aims reinvigorated the role of rights discourse in domestic political debates, which had been suppressed by racial considerations in American politics since virtually the end of Reconstruction.

This paper analyzes how wartime legal and rhetorical initiatives were not really based on new ideas, but rather on a new receptivity to old ideas, looking to transnational influences and nineteenth-century antecedents including abolitionism, feminism, and the arbitrationist branch of the peace movement.

Specifically, the paper argues that what galvanized new perceptions of the U.S. role in the world was a sense of "cultural traction"--a new congruence with deeper aspects of American society and culture, based on the mass experiences of the Great Depression and its New Deal response. This new congruence was in turn consolidated by the cosmopolitan sensibilities fostered by widespread wartime service and wartime mobility. In addition, extensive travel within the U.S. for training at multiple military bases, particularly in the South, also shaped trainees' perceptions around racial issues and contributed to a revived debate about the role of civil rights in postwar America.

This paper is an excerpt from my dissertation in progress, "An Intellectual History of the Atlantic Charter: Law, Ideas, and Conceptual Change in American Diplomacy, 1941-1946." It is based on oral histories from the Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War 11; War, State, and Office of War Information archives; the Hamilton Fish Armstrong Papers at Princeton University; as well as newspapers and popular magazines.