Sumner Welles

Welles soon became a specialist in Latin American affairs. He served in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1919 and became fluent in Spanish.[11] In 1921, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes appointed him to head the Division of Latin American Affairs.[11]

In March 1922, Welles briefly resigned from the State Department.[11] He was unsympathetic to the view held by American diplomacy that military might was meant to protect the overseas interests of American business.[12] Hughes brought him back the next year as a special commissioner to the Dominican Republic. His particular assignment was to oversee the withdrawal of American forces and to negotiate protection for overseas investors in the Dominican Republic's debt.[11] Welles remained in that post for three years and his work was accomplished after his departure in a 1924 treaty.[11]

In 1924, President Coolidge sent Welles to act as mediator between disputing parties in Honduras. The country had lacked a legitimate government since the election of 1923 failed to produce a majority for any candidate and the legislature had failed to exercise its power to appoint a new president. Negotiations managed by Welles from April 23 to 28 produced an interim government under General Vicente Tosta, who promised to appoint a cabinet representing all factions and to schedule a presidential election as soon as possible in which he would not be a candidate. Negotiations ended with the signing of an agreement aboard the USS Milwaukee in the port of Amapala.[11][13][14][15]

Miss Mathilde Townsend, John Singer Sargent, 1907

Coolidge, however, disapproved of Welles' 1925 marriage to Mathilde Scott Townsend, who had only recently divorced the President's friend, Senator Peter Gerry of Rhode Island. He promptly ended Welles' diplomatic career.[16][12]

Welles then retired to his estate at Oxon Hill, Maryland.[11] He devoted himself to writing and his two-volume history of the Dominican Republic, Naboth's Vineyard: The Dominican Republic, 1844–1924 appeared in 1928.[17] Time described the work as "a ponderous, lifeless, two-volume work which was technically a history of Santo Domingo, actually a careful indictment of U.S. foreign policy in the Hemisphere".[9] James Reston summarized its thesis: "we should keep in our own back yard and stop claiming rights for ourselves that we denied to other sovereign States".[12]

He served as an unofficial adviser to Dominican President Horacio Vásquez.[11]

During the presidential election of 1932, Welles provided foreign policy expertise to the Roosevelt campaign.[11] He was a major contributor to the campaign as well.[9]

Welles, holding hat at left, greeting Cuba's Fulgencio Batista at Union Station, Washington, D.C.
November 10, 1938

In April 1933, FDR appointed Welles Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs,[11] but when a revolution in Cuba against President Gerardo Machado left its government divided and uncertain, he became instead the President's special envoy to Cuba. He arrived in Havana in May 1933.[11] His mission was to negotiate a settlement so that the U.S. could avoid intervening as U.S. law, namely the Platt Amendment of 1901, required.[11]

His instructions were to mediate "in any form most suitable" an end to the Cuban situation. Welles promised Machado a new commercial treaty to relieve economic distress if Machado reached a political settlement with his opponents, Colonel Dr. Cosme de la Torriente, from the Nationalist Union; Joaquín Martínez Sáenz, for ABC; Nicasio Silveira, for the Revolutionary Radical Cellular Organization; and Dr. Manuel Dorta-Duque, representing the delegation of the University of Havana.[18] Machado believed the U.S. would help him survive politically. Welles promised the opponents of Machado's government a change of government and participation in the subsequent administration, if they joined the mediation process and supported an orderly transfer of power. One crucial step was persuading Machado to issue an amnesty for political prisoners so that the opposition leaders could appear in public.[11] Machado soon lost faith in Welles and denounced American interference as a colonialist adventure. Welles' mediation process conferred political legitimacy on sectors of the opposition that participated and allowed the U.S. to assess their viability as long-term political allies. Unable to influence Machado, Welles met with Rafael Guas Inclan, president of the Chamber of Representatives, at the home of newspaper publisher Alfredo Hornedo, and requested that he initiate impeachment proceedings against the president. When Guas harshly refuted him,[19] Welles then negotiated an end to his presidency, with support from General Alberto Herrera, Colonels Julio Sanguily, Rafael del Castillo and Erasmo Delgado after threatening U.S. intervention under the Platt Amendment and the restructuring of the Cuban army high command.[20]

In 1937, FDR promoted Welles to Under Secretary, and the Senate promptly confirmed the appointment. Indicative of ongoing rivalries within the State Department, Robert Walton Moore, an ally of Secretary of State Hull was appointed the department's Counselor at the same time, a position equal in rank to that of Under Secretary.[21]

1939 hand signed issued passport by under Secretary of State Sumner Welles

In the week following Kristallnacht, in November 1938, the British government offered to give the major part of its quota of 65,000 British citizens eligible for emigration to the United States to Jews fleeing Hitler. Under-Secretary Welles opposed this idea, as he later recounted:[22]

I reminded the Ambassador that the President stated there was no intention on the part of his government to increase the quota for German nationals. I added that it was my strong impression that the responsible leaders among American Jews would be the first to urge that no change in the present quota for German Jews be made...The influential Sam Rosenman, one of the "responsible" Jewish leaders sent Roosevelt a memorandum telling him that an "increase of quotas is wholly inadvisable. It will merely produce a 'Jewish problem' in the countries increasing the quota."

Welles headed the American delegation to the 21-nation Pan American conference that met in Panama in September 1939. He said the conference had been planned in earlier hemispheric meetings in Buenos Aires and Lima and he emphasized the need for consultation on economic issues to "cushion the shock of the dislocation of inter-American commerce arising from the war" in Europe.[23]

In February and March 1940 Welles visited Italy, Germany, France (he visited President Albert Lebrun on March 7) and England to discuss peacemaking proposals. Hitler feared that the purpose of his visits was to drive a wedge between Germany and Italy.[24]

On July 23, 1940, following the principles of the Stimson Doctrine, Welles issued a statement that became known as the Welles Declaration. In the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, Germany agreed to allow the Soviet Union to annex the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Welles condemned those actions and refused to recognize the legitimacy of Soviet rule in those countries. More than 50 countries later followed the U.S. in this position.

The Declaration was a source of contention during the subsequent alliance between the U.S., Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, but Welles persistently defended it.[25] In a discussion with the media he asserted that the USSR had maneuvered to give "an odor of legality to acts of aggression for purposes of the record".[26][27]

In a 1942 memorandum describing his conversations with British Ambassador Lord Halifax, Welles stated that he would have preferred to characterize the plebiscites supporting the annexations as "faked".[28] In April 1942 he wrote that the annexation was "not only indefensible from every moral standpoint, but likewise extraordinarily stupid". He believed any concession on the Baltic issue would set a precedent that would lead to additional border struggles in eastern Poland and elsewhere.[29]

Cordell Hull
Secretary of State, 1933–1944

A New York Times profile described Welles in 1941: "Tall and erect, never without his cane,... he has enough dignity to be Viceroy of India and... enough influence in this critical era to make his ideas, principles, and dreams count."[12]

He appeared on the cover of Time on August 11, 1941,[30] and in that issue Time assessed Welles' role within Hull's Department of State:[9]

Sumner Welles is one of the very few career men ever to become Under Secretary of State, and as matters now stand may eventually become Secretary....Grave, saintly Mr. Hull, never an expert at paper-shuffling, has long left the actual administration of the Department to his chief aide, Sumner Welles. And Cordell Hull may choose not to retire. But even if Welles never becomes Secretary, he will still hold his present power: through Presidential choice, his own ability, background and natural stamina, he is the chief administrative officer of U.S. foreign policy.

Roosevelt was always close to Welles and made him the central figure in the State Department, much to the chagrin of secretary Cordell Hull, who could not be removed because he had a powerful political base.[31]

The clash became more public in mid-1943, when Time reported "a flare-up of long-smoldering hates and jealousies in the State Department".[32] After Welles was forced out of office, journalists noted that two men who shared "aims and goals" were at odds because of a "clash of temperament and ambitions".[33]

Welles was a closeted bisexual.[34] In September 1940, Welles accompanied Roosevelt to the funeral of former Speaker of the House William B. Bankhead in Huntsville, Alabama. While returning to Washington by train, Welles solicited sex from two male African-American Pullman car porters.[35] Cordell Hull dispatched his confidant, former Ambassador William Bullitt, to provide details of the incident to Republican Senator Owen Brewster of Maine. Brewster, in turn, gave the information to journalist Arthur Krock, a Roosevelt critic; and to Senators Styles Bridges and Burton K. Wheeler. When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would not release the file on Welles, Brewster threatened to initiate a senatorial investigation into the incident. (In 1995, Deke DeLoach told C-SPAN's Brian Lamb on Booknotes that file cabinets behind J. Edgar Hoover's secretary Helen Gandy contained two-and-a-half drawers of files, including information about "an undersecretary of state who had committed a homosexual act."[36]) Roosevelt was embittered by the attack on his friend, believing they were ruining a good man, but he was obliged to accept Welles's resignation in 1943. Roosevelt particularly blamed Bullitt.

In August 1943, reports that Welles had resigned as Under-Secretary of State circulated for more than a week. The press reported it as fact on August 24, despite the lack of an official announcement. Writing in The New York Times, Arthur Krock said that opinion in Washington saw Welles's departure as an attempt to end factionalism in the State Department: "The long-existing struggle disorganized the department, bred Hull and Welles factions among its officials, confused those having business with the department and finally produced pressure on the President to eliminate the causes." Despite the "personal fondness" of the President and his wife for Welles, he continued, the President sided with Hull because supporting a subordinate would promote revolts in other government agencies, Hull was politically connected and popular with Congress, and the Senate, he was told, would not support Welles for Secretary of State or any other office. Krock added a cryptic explanation: "Other incidents arising made the disagreements between the two men even more personal. It was those which aroused the Senate to opposition to Mr. Welles that was reported to the President."[37]

While Welles vacationed in Bar Harbor, Maine,[38] "where he held to diplomatically correct silence",[39] speculation continued for another month without official word from the White House or the State Department. Observers continued to focus on the Hull-Welles relationship and believed that Hull forced the President to choose between them to end "departmental cleavage".[40] Others read the situation politically and blamed FDR's "appeasement of Southern Democrats".[39] Without confirming his resignation or speaking on the record, Welles indicated he would accept any new assignment the President proposed.[40] Finally, on September 26, 1943, the President announced the resignation of Welles and the appointment of Edward R. Stettinius as the new Under-Secretary of State. He accepted Welles' resignation with regret and explained that Welles was prompted to leave government service because of "his wife's poor health". Welles' letter of resignation was not made public as was customary and one report concluded, "The facts of this situation remained obscure tonight."[41] Time summarized the reaction of the press: "Its endorsement of Sumner Welles was surprisingly widespread, its condemnation of Franklin Roosevelt and Cordell Hull surprisingly severe."[39] It also described the resignation's impact: "In dropping Sumner Welles [Hull] had dropped the chief architect of the US's Good Neighbor Policy in South America, an opponent of those who would do business with Fascists on the basis of expediency, a known and respected advocate of U.S. cooperation in international affairs. The U.S. still awaits a clarification of its foreign policy and the forced resignation of Sumner Welles made an already murky issue even more obscure."[39]

The biography written by his son Benjamin Welles concludes:

Sumner Welles made four major contributions to the Roosevelt era. He conceived and carried out the Good Neighbor policy, arguably the all-time, high-water mark in U.S.--Latin American relations. With Roosevelt, Churchill and Alexander Cadogan, he wrote the Atlantic Charter, the cornerstone of the United Nations. In mid--World War II, at FDR's direction, he drafted the original UN Charter. And during and after the war, he threw his support behind a national homeland for the Jews: Israel. The Good Neighbor policy and the Atlantic Charter are largely memories. The United Nations and Israel endure.[68]

Winston Churchill, who made the phrase "No comment" famous, cited Welles as his source for the cryptic response.[69]

Welles' papers are held by the National Archives at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York.[70]

The street adjacent to the current Embassy of the United States in Riga, Latvia was named after Sumner Welles (as Samnera Velsa iela) in 2012.[71]

• Kapcia, A., "The Siege of the Hotel Nacional, Cuba, 1933: A Reassessment" in Journal of Latin American Studies v. 34 (2002), 283–309
• Lazo, Mario, Dagger in the Heart: American Policy Failures in Cuba (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968)
• Phillips, R. Hart, Cuban Side Show, 2nd ed. (Havana: Cuban Press, 1935)
• Phillips, R. Hart, Cuba, Island of Paradox (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959)
• Thomas, Hugh, Cuba or The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1971)

• primary documents based on O'Sullivan's book, 2007