Stettinius, Edward Reilly (1900-1949)

American industrialist and high government official who was the U.S. Secretary of State from December 1944 to June 1945.

Edward Stettinius was born in Chicago on October 22, 1900 to Edward Reilly and Judy (Carrington) Stettinius. His father, Edward R. Stettinius, Sr. (1865-1925) made his fortune in the Chicago wheat pits and later became a successful businessman. In 1915, he was retained by J.P. Morgan to organize a department for munitions purchase by the British and French governments during World War I. Through his efforts, the U.S. arms-making capacity exceeded the combined capacity of Britain and France by war’s end, and Stettinius Sr. won the “tag of father of the military industrial complex.” In 1916, he became a full partner in J.P. Morgan and Co. He was described by his contemporaries as possessing “a meticulous, almost obsessive, attention to detail” and an “almost terrifying sense of responsibility.” ¹ The younger Stettinius grew up in a mansion on the family’s 13-acre estate on Staten Island and graduated from the Pomfret School in 1920. He continued his education at the University of Virginia, but left college in 1924 without a degree, reportedly neglecting his studies in favor of social work. In 1924, he joined the General Motors Company as a stock clerk but ascended the corporate ladder rapidly. By 1926, Stettinius had become assistant to General Motors Vice-President John Lee Pratt, who was a friend of the Stettinius family. That year, he married Virginia Gordon-Wallace, who came from a prominent family in Richmond, Virginia. Intent on improving the lives of GM’s workers, Stettinius developed a program of employee benefits. In 1931, he was named the company’s vice-president in charge of industrial and public relations.

Stettinius’s continued commitment to social work – and particularly his work for unemployment relief projects – brought him in contact with New York’s governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. After Roosevelt was elected president, he invited Stettinius to work on the Industrial Advisory Board in the National Recovery Administration (NRA), but Stettinius’s early government service turned out to be short-lived. In 1934, he moved to U.S. Steel Corporation as chairman of its finance committee, and in 1938 he became its board chairman.

Stettinius’s successful business career and proven abilities as an efficient top manager, along with his strong sense of social responsibility, continued to impress President Roosevelt. In 1940, Roosevelt succeeded in luring Stettinius back to government service to be director of the Priorities Division of the Office of Production Management (OPM). On August 28, 1941, Harry Hopkins asked Stettinius to take over from him the administration of the government’s Lend-Lease program, which was rapidly growing in scale; on September 2, Stettinius became the administrator of Lend-Lease Aid to the Allies. In 1943, he wrote a book, Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory. ²

In 1943, Roosevelt appointed Stettinius under secretary of state. In that capacity, he headed the U.S. delegation to the Dumbarton Oaks Conference with representatives of the other Great Powers in the summer of 1944 – and is credited with succeeding in brokering an agreement on the structure of the future United Nations Organization. In November 1944, the U.S. Senate confirmed Stettinius as the replacement for Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who had to retire due to ill health.

As secretary of state, Stettinius continued the reorganization of the Department of State he had begun as under secretary, tightening its structure, enhancing its manageability, bringing it into closer contact with other government agencies – and improving its relations with the public at large. At the same time, he was occupied with laying the groundwork for the future United Nations Organization. In early 1945, Stettinius accompanied President Roosevelt to the Yalta Conference of the leaders of the Big Three (February 2-8, 1945), to plan the final defeat and occupation of Nazi Germany and discuss the fate of the liberated or defeated countries of Eastern Europe, the future United Nations Organization and other issues. Stettinius is credited in particular with achieving agreement among the Big Three on the provisional rules of procedure for the UN Security Council, which were developed at the Department of State under his supervision.

After the Yalta Conference, Stettinius led the U.S. delegation at the Inter-American Conference on the Problems of War and Peace, which was held in Mexico City on February 21-March 8, 1945, and is commonly known as the Chapultepec Conference. There he lined up Latin American support for the United Nations and facilitated the adoption of The Act of Chapultepec (March 3, 1945), which was a significant milestone in the history of Pan-Americanism.

On his return to Washington, D.C., Stettinius’s major commitment was laying the groundwork for the conference in San Francisco that would officially create the United Nations. He led the U.S. delegation in San Francisco and was present at the United Nations’ official founding on June 26, 1945. But he had to resign his office the following day, after President Harry Truman, President Roosevelt’s successor, made it clear that he wanted to see Justice James F. Byrnes, his former mentor in the U.S. Senate, as his Secretary of State.

Stettinius accepted the position of U.S. representative to the United Nations and led the American delegation to the first United Nations General Assembly, which opened in London on January 10, 1946. Deeply committed to the success of the United Nations (a commitment which was one manifestation of his devotion to the political legacy of President Roosevelt), he nevertheless resigned this post too, in June 1946 – out of frustration with what he saw as President Truman’s failure to use the United Nations as a vehicle to resolve tension between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Stettinius retired to his family farm in Virginia and served for a time as rector of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Within a short time, he became a business partner in a group which foresaw a need for a peacetime ship registry system administered by a private company. In 1948, International Registries, Inc. was established under Stettinius’s leadership with the Registered Agent Office in New York City, to register ships and corporations under the Liberian flag. ³

Troubled by charges of Roosevelt’s “betrayal” of American interests at the Yalta Conference, Stettinius decided to write a detailed and accurate insider’s account of that historic meeting to set the record straight. The resulting book, Roosevelt and the Russians: The Yalta Conference was published after Stettinius died of a heart attack in February 1949. ⁴

Stettinius is remembered in Russia, along with President Roosevelt and his aide, Harry Hopkins, as one of the key figures who ensured American assistance to the Soviet Union in its fight for survival against Nazi attack. After decades of enforced silence regarding the scale of the American Lend-Lease program, the Russian translation of Stettinius’s 1944 book, Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory, was published for the first time in Russia in 2000. ⁵