“The Conscience of America”: Human Rights, Jewish Politics, and American Foreign Policy at the 1945 United Nations San Francisco Conference James Loef fler In September 1963 John Humphrey, the director of the United Nations () Human Rights Division, wrote a letter to Jacob Blaustein, the former president of the American Jewish Committee (), complimenting him on his organization’s role at the opening United Nations Conference held in San Francisco in 1945: I have been refreshing my memory on the campaign which the various nongovern- mental organizations carried on at San Francisco to strengthen the human rights pro- visions of the Charter and I am more and more impressed, as I read the record, by the decisive role which you and Judge [Joseph] Proskauer played. If we now have a United Nations Commission on Human Rights, it was due in large measure to your personal efforts in April and May 1945. In Humphrey’s recollection, the leaders of the  were singularly responsible for the emer- gence of international human rights. Thanks to their persuasive efforts, the American dip- lomatic team had championed the inclusion of specific human rights provisions in the  Charter adopted in San Francisco in June 1945. Its approval marked the beginning of a new chapter in modern human rights. 1 Humphrey was not alone in assigning special credit to the  for the human rights achievements at the 1945 conference. Many of those present went still further, highlight- ing a single influential speech delivered in front of the U.S. secretary of state by Joseph Proskauer. Late in the day on May 2, hours before the American delegation was scheduled to submit its final amendments to the text of the  Charter, a group of “consultants”— nonvoting advisers to the State Department representing various American nongovernmen- tal organizations (s)—met with Secretary Edward Stettinius Jr. and his staff. There, the elderly Proskauer, an eminent New York lawyer, veteran of Democratic politics, and James Loef fler is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. I would like to acknowledge the invaluable research assistance of Jessica Kirzane as well as the archival staffs of the American Jewish Archives, the Columbia University Archives, the American Jewish Committee Archives, the Ameri- can Jewish Historical Society, the Central Zionist Archives, the Johns Hopkins University Library Manuscript Divi- sion, the National Archives and Records Administration, the University of Virginia Library Small Special Collections, and the  Institute for Jewish Research. For generous comments on various draft versions of this article, I am grateful to Gaston De Los Reyes, William Forbath, William Hitchcock, Melvyn Lef fler, Samuel Moyn, Moria Paz, and the editors and anonymous reviewers of the Journal of American History. I would also like to thank Desiree Guil- lermo of the American Jewish Committee’s Center for Jewish Research for providing illustration assistance. Readers may contact Loef fler at james.loef fler@virginia.edu. 1 John Humphrey to Jacob Blaustein, Sept. 12, 1963, Jacob Blaustein, Letters, 1945–1965, box SC-1066 ( Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio). doi: 10.1093/jahist/jat269 © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. September 2013 The Journal of American History 401