The Atlantic Charter: A Creed for Today
The following speech was delivered by Peter H. Russell on August 14, 2017, at Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto, Canada, on the occasion of the unveiling of a new plaque commemorating Churchill’s role in the Atlantic Charter.
Ladies and Gentleman, Members of the Churchill Societies, Citizens of Toronto – and of the World
– for it is an event of world importance that we recognize by gathering here today.
Seventy-six years ago today, on August 14, 1941, the two great leaders of the free world – Winston Spencer Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt – released to the world the document they had written together in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland.
On the weekend of August 9, 10 and 11, Churchill and Roosevelt had held a summit meeting with their top military advisers on a flotilla of warships anchored just off Ship Harbour on the east side of Placentia Bay.
That meeting took place in total secrecy. For Roosevelt, President of a neutral nation deeply, divided about the War (bear in mind that this was 4 months before Pearl Harbor), secrecy was necessary for political reasons.
For both leaders, secrecy was also essential for security reasons. To get to Newfoundland they had to travel through the U-Boat infested waters of the North Atlantic, not to mention coming within range of Nazi aircraft. Roosevelt came up the New England coast on the Cruiser Augusta, the capital ship of the US Navy on the east coast, with her sister ship the Tuscasora. Churchill on the Prince of Wales, the Royal Navy’s capital ship, came all the way from Scappa Flow at the top of Scotland. The Prince of Wales outpaced her destroyer escorts and was on her own as she passed by Greenland, until two Canadian destroyers, the Assiniboine and the Restigouche, picked her up and escorted her to Newfoundland.
When we think of the extraordinary risks these leaders, sailors, and soldiers took and how much freedom in this world depended on an effective alliance of the two great democracies, we can appreciate why Roosevelt framed these lines of Longfellow as his parting gift to Churchill on an earlier occasion:
Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
At Placentia Bay, as the American and British commanders met on ships of the flotilla to plan the military alliance that would be so essential for defeating the Axis powers, Churchill and Roosevelt worked for three days on the Augusta, writing the Atlantic Charter. Churchill had hoped that the meeting would bring America immediately into the war. But for political reasons that was a non-starter for Roosevelt.
What Roosevelt needed, was a statement of why a war against the Axis powers was worth waging. He knew that in his day mobilizing men and women to fight a great war required a great cause – something that was badly lacking in the first Great War.
Churchill and Roosevelt, great wordsmiths that they were, aimed to define in clear and compelling language the kind of world they and the nations allied with them would be committed to building if victory over the enemies of freedom could be won.
And that is exactly what they gave us in the Atlantic Charter. Its eight propositions (and you can read them right here on this plaque) set out fundamental conditions for humanity’s well-being:
The first three have to do with freedom – political freedom- the freedom of all peoples to govern themselves and the duty of states to respect other countries’ territory
The next two, with economics – the need to respect the benefits of free and fair trade, to have high labour standards and improved living conditions for all people
The final three are about international security – a world open to the movement and communications of all humankind, and sustainable world peace with institutions to ensure our collective security
On the 1st of January, 1942, representatives of 26 nations meeting in London, England, adopted the Charter as their “United Nations Declaration” of allied war aims. This was, indeed, the first step towards the founding of the United Nations
Let those eight propositions – those few hundred words – that led to the founding of the United Nations seven decades ago serve today as our guide
Churchill referred to the Atlantic Charter as a star. When dark forces of authoritarianism and protectionism are gathering strength in the world we need the Charter, as we haven’t for many years, to be the star that illuminates principles that we wish to see flourish in the world, and for which we must summon the courage of Churchill and Roosevelt to stand up for so that humanity with all its fears and all its hopes for future years will go forward and not retreat into a dark abyss.