The origin story of the U.N. General Assembly, forged in the ashes of WWII
In post-Blitz London, organizers threw together the first U.N. General Assembly with rationed food, a shoestring budget and big ambitions for a peaceful future.
The task was as ambitious as they come: Design a global, democratic body to save the world forevermore from the scourge of warfare.
The problem: Unlike for the 80th session of the U.N. General Assembly, which meets this week at the organization’s sprawling New York City headquarters, the diplomats responsible for organizing its first session had little money, no staff and no office.
The year was 1945, the location was war-torn London, and the feat expected of the scrappy organizing committee — hosting delegates from 51 nations to rebuild from the ashes of World War II — was mammoth.
So, armed with a shoestring budget and a can-do attitude, they divvied up the tasks.
“I’ll handle the high diplomacy; you take on the rest. Find an office and a secretary and get this thing started” were the instructions of British diplomat Gladwyn Jebb, head of the organizing committee, according to an interview with his deputy, David Owen, decades later.
Spearheaded originally by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the U.N. was established by charter in San Francisco that June, following an agreement hammered out months earlier at the Black Sea resort of Yalta with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin on the future of Europe after the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Alongside a powerful Security Council through which the war’s victors could exercise influence, it established the General Assembly — a more democratic organ that would serve as the U.N.’s chief policymaking tool, in which each member state has an equal vote.
But before the high diplomacy, Jebb and Owen needed to tackle the logistics.
In Britain’s bombed-out wartime capital, they scrambled to find enough beds for delegates and adequate restaurants to feed them amid food rationing. For nearly two weeks, Owen said, the organizers depended on a 30-pound loan provided by himself (equivalent to about $1,500 today).
After sourcing a secretary from Britain’s War Office and a typewriter from the Foreign Office, the organizers set up shop in the London headquarters of the Church of England — which would later host the first meeting of the Security Council.
“Together in a taxi we headed for Church House in Westminster, drove through the courtyard and knocked on the door,” Owen later recalled. “The old custodian peered at us across a barricade of sandbags used as protection against bombing and demanded to know who we were. ‘We are the United Nations,’ I remember answering. And that was the beginning.”
Around them, the capital was reeling from the 12,000 metric tons of bombs dropped by German forces on London, killing nearly 30,000 civilians and devastating swaths of the urban landscape.
As a location for the first General Assembly, the organizers settled on the Methodist Central Hall, the denomination’s headquarters. According to an interview with Dan Shaw, the hall’s spokesman, the choice of a religious sanctuary was rooted in the symbolism of prayer and hope, desperately needed after the horrors of war.
But there was another factor, he added: “No bombs hit us. There were a few firebombs, including one that famously landed on Westminster Abbey across the road, but we were spared,” Shaw said in a phone interview. So sturdy was the hall that nearby Londoners had sheltered in its basement throughout the Blitz.
To make space, the committee evicted the Methodist congregants and refitted the building with translation booths, carpets and 40-foot tables to seat the delegates. A new chandelier was suspended to provide light for photojournalists, and the church organ was concealed behind a cloth that would double as the backdrop for the U.N. emblem. Delegates were fed in YMCA canteens and offered tours of bombed-out areas by the Women’s Voluntary Service.
On Jan. 10, 1946, hundreds of delegates dressed in black and brown crammed onto the floor for the assembly’s opening day, as the “wives, aides, newsmen” peered overhead from the public galleries, The Washington Post reported in a dispatch.
(Eagle-eyed observers of ceremony footage will notice that the emblem was oriented differently than the present-day U.N. logo, which includes a world map seen from above the North Pole, centered on the prime meridian. According to the U.N., the emblem on display in 1946 was “misplaced,” with North America in the middle. It’s not entirely clear whether this was intentional. Another early prototype of the U.N. logo, designed in 1945 by an architect at the CIA’s predecessor, the OSS, oriented the United States at its center.)
The assembly listened intently to British Prime Minister Clement Attlee outline what he considered to be the delegates’ most urgent tasks: to limit the use of atomic energy to peaceful purposes and organize the Security Council.
The session lasted over a month. Its first resolution established the U.N. Atomic Energy Commission — kick-starting decades of nuclear nonproliferation efforts that continue, with limited success, to this day. They also elected the temporary members of the first Security Council, whose five permanent members, including the United States, would wield a powerful veto on issues of war and peace, a moment described by The Post’s reporter at the scene as “an event of limitless significance.”
At this latest session, delegates from 193 nations will debate topics including nuclear nonproliferation and the question of Palestinian statehood as Israel’s war in Gaza rages. Critics often point out that the assembly is ultimately powerless to enforce any of its decisions, while the Security Council is crippled into inaction by the veto power of its permanent members: China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States. Defenders insist that the U.N. model of global cooperation remains the world’s best hope at averting catastrophe.
And that was the theme running through many of the speeches in 1946, symbolically reinforced by London’s bombed-out surroundings. One by one, representatives from around the world stressed their belief in the need for nations to find a way to settle disagreements through deliberation instead of combat.
“We won the war by fighting together. We must now preserve the peace by working together,” U.S. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes told the delegates.
Seated alongside the Russian delegation in the audience in 1946 was former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who said Byrnes received lengthy applause. “I think it was because he pledged the full, wholehearted cooperation of the United States in the work which we are gathered here to do,” she wrote in a newspaper column. Washington’s refusal after World War I to support the United Nations’ failed predecessor, the League of Nations, had hampered it considerably.
Eleanor Roosevelt delivered a rousing speech of her own in support of women’s rights and described feeling her late husband’s spirit in the air. She also complained about the length of the speeches. “French is not a language in which it is easy to speak briefly,” she observed wryly. Nor did she have kind words for London’s “yellow fog” or the rationed diet, which consisted in large part of potatoes, carrots and cabbage: “The drabness and dullness of it, I think, is getting harder and harder to bear.”
Jebb and Owen failed in providing food up to Roosevelt’s expectations. But on their loftier goal, she struck a more open-minded tone: “A forum is provided here, but whether men long accustomed to leave much unsaid can now realize that the success of this undertaking depends on complete understanding and frankness, is something that remains to be seen.”