Herbert Claiborne Pell Jr. (February 16, 1884 – July 17, 1961) was a United States representative from New York, U.S. Minister to Portugal, U.S. Minister to Hungary, and a creator and member of the United Nations War Crimes Commission.
A native of New York City and a member of the prominent and wealthy Lorillard and Claiborne families, Pell was educated at Connecticut's Pomfret School and attended Harvard University, Columbia University, and New York University. Originally active in politics as a Progressive, he later became a Democrat. In 1918, Pell was elected to Congress, and he served from 1919 to 1921. He was an unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1920. Pell continued to remain active in politics, and was chairman of the New York State Democratic Committee from 1921 to 1926 and a delegate to the 1924 Democratic National Convention. He served as vice chairman of the Democratic National Campaign Committee for the 1936 elections.
In 1937, Pell was appointed as Minister to Portugal, where he served from May 27, 1937, until February 11, 1941, when he was appointed Minister to Hungary. In December 1941, Pell received Hungary's declaration of war against the United States, closed the embassy and returned to the United States. He formally resigned in November 1942. From 1942 to 1945, Pell was the United States representative on the United Nations War Crimes Commission. Pell was recognized as an internationalist on foreign policy and a progressive despite coming from the wealthy and conservative class, which tended to be isolationist. He was the leading American seeking to build awareness of the plight of European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s and prevent the Holocaust, and was able to aid in holding the perpetrators responsible as the principal U.S. sponsor of and U.S. representative of the War Crimes Commission.
Pell died in Munich, West Germany on July 17, 1961. His remains were cremated and scattered in the Atlantic Ocean at Beavertail in Jamestown, Rhode Island.
Early life
Pell was born in New York City on February 16, 1884. He was the elder son of two children born to Katherine Lorillard (née Kernochan) Pell (1858–1917) and Herbert Claiborne Pell (1853–1926). His younger brother was Clarence Cecil Pell (1885–1964). He was a great-grandson of U.S. Representative John Francis Hamtramck Claiborne, and great-great-grandnephew of William Charles Cole Claiborne and Nathaniel Herbert Claiborne. Through his mother and maternal grandparents, James Powell Kernochan and Catherine (née Lorillard) Kernochan, the daughter of Pierre Lorillard III, he inherited a share of the Lorillard Tobacco fortune. He was also a direct descendant of Wampage I, a Siwanoy chieftain, as reflected in a Congressional Record entry relating to his son Claiborne Pell.
Pell was educated at the Pomfret School, in Connecticut. He attended Harvard University, Columbia University, and New York University, but did not complete a degree. At Harvard, Pell became friends with one of his classmates, the future president Franklin D. Roosevelt, which was to later on benefit his diplomatic career as Roosevelt distrusted the professional diplomats of the State Department and much preferred to appoint his friends as diplomats. Pell was one of the few people allowed to address Roosevelt as "Frank", a term that normally offended him. Pell first met Roosevelt in 1902 during the fall semester as freshmen at Harvard and he remained in close contact with until January 1945 when Roosevelt abruptly terminated their friendship. Pell was generally known to his friends as "Bertie" and he was rarely referred to as Herbert.
Pell later wrote that there were three types of students at Harvard, namely the "drunks" who were primarily interested in drinking/partying and only studied to avoid being expelled for their low grades; the careerists who studied only for high grades that might help their future careers; and the students such as himself who studied for "learning's sake". He wrote that of the 800 or so new students who entered Harvard in September 1902, "there were not forty that had any idea of doing anything with their lives". Pell was an outspoken student who often fought with his professors and he dropped out of Harvard after only two years out of dissatisfaction with the education he was receiving. Pell enthusiastically embraced the new technology of the automobile with gusto in the early 20th century, and throughout his life was known for his love of cars despite an automobile accident in 1905 that injured him. Between 1908-1912, Pell went on grand tours of Europe via automobile (at the time a novelty), being driven all around Europe by his chauffer/mechanic as Pell considered himself to be a "gentleman" and would never engage such tasks as changing the tires, which were beneath him. As Pell was so rich that he did not need to work for a living, he rented a house in the south of France, which he used as the base for his European travels. Pell's travels throughout Europe gave him a cosmopolitan outlook and he did not share the instinctive contempt for Europe that many Americans felt. A striking handsome man in his youth, Pell stood out as a tall man standing 6'5 with a big booming voice and his fondness for wearing the most expensive clothing possible. Much like Roosevelt, Pell felt a strong sense of noblesse oblige, namely that the idea that men from wealthy families such as the Roosevelts and the Pells had a duty to help the disadvantaged in American society.
Politician
Pell's political career began as a member of the Progressive committee of Orange County, New York (1912 to 1914). He was elected as a Democrat to the Sixty-sixth Congress (March 4, 1919 – March 3, 1921) and was an unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1920 to the Sixty-seventh Congress. As Pell admitted at the time, he had effectively destroyed his political career by voting against bonus payments for First World War veterans as he argued that only veterans who had been wounded deserved a bonus payment and he was against giving bonus payments to healthy men with jobs. Pell argued that as a "gentleman", he could not violate his sense of honor by voting for a bill that he did not believe in even as he admitted in the same speech that his vote was going to end any chance of him being reelected to Congress. In the 1920 election, Pell lost in a landslide to the Republican candidate Ogden L. Mills. He was chairman of the Democratic State committee from 1921 to 1926 and a delegate to the 1924 Democratic National Convention. Pell was appointed chairman of the New York State Democratic Party in 1921 largely due to the influence of his friend Roosevelt, who had arranged in a backroom deal for Pell to have the post.
Regarding Prohibition, Pell was a militant "wet" (i.e anti-Prohibition), which put him at odds with the "dry" (i.e., pro-Prohibition) wing of the Democratic Party. In the 1920s, the Democratic Party was badly divided into a rural, conservative wing that was "dry" and anti-immigration vs. an urban, liberal wing that was "wet" and pro-immigration. Pell was one of the leaders of the urban, liberal faction. Through Pell was a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), he did not share the widespread anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism of the time, and he was quite willing to work with Catholic and Jewish politicians. He fought against the power of the Ku Klux Klan, which was a major force in the Democratic Party at the time and represented the most extreme version of the xenophobic "dry" faction of the Democrats. Pell held the rural population of the United State in contempt, writing that "no intelligent person born on a farm has reached reproductive age without leaving for the city" and owing to the tendency of the intelligent to leave for the city that "the result is the present farming population of the United States stupid, suspicious, illiterate and dishonest". Much of his disdain for the rural population reflected his frequent battles with conservative Democrats from predominately rural states, especially those from the South.
He described the 1924 Democratic National Convention, which pitted the urban and rural wings of the Democrats into a ferocious political battle as "that terrible convention". The 1924 convention brought together "dry" fundamentalist Protestants from the rural areas and small towns of the West and the South who found themselves uneasily rubbing shoulders with "wet" Jewish and Catholic politicians from the big cities of the Northeast and the Midwest. At the 1924 convention, Pell had fought hard for a resolution that condemned the Klan, which failed after 61 ballots. In a letter to editor of the Afro-American newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier, Pell wrote about the Klan that "any group or organization which is attempting to organize for political action along racial or religious lines is fundamentally opposed to the best principles of Americanism...I do not take much stock in extreme theories of race...And I cannot believe that any race today is made up entirely of supermen while none worthy of preservation in any other". At the 1924 convention, Pell had followed Roosevelt and supported nominating the Governor of New York state, Al Smith, who was strongly opposed by the rural fundamentalist Protestant wing of the Democrats who hated Smith for being both a "wet" and a Catholic. The "dry" faction of the Democrats had rallied behind William Gibbs McAdoo, the former Treasury Secretary while the "wets" preferred candidate was Smith. Pell personally disliked Smith and only supported him because Roosevelt did. On 14 August 1924, Pell issued a statement to the press that read: "The Ku Klux Klan violates the fundemental principle of American government by its fight against tolerance and by its interference with and open contempt for the constitutionally organized courts of law". Pell was an occasional lecturer at Columbia University, Harvard University, and other colleges and universities. He also served on the advisory committee of Yenching University, later merged with Peking University.
Owning to his inability to work with Smith, Pell retired from politics in January 1926. After retiring as chairman of the New York Democratic State committee, Pell left for an extended visit to Europe. Like many members of the Lost Generation, Pell disliked the puritanical atmosphere in the 1920s United States-which was best exemplified by Prohibition-and much preferred the more permissive atmosphere of Europe. Pell initially settled in Florence, but he came to dislike the atmosphere of Fascist Italy and soon moved to Paris. He wrote that the Italian people had accepted Fascism out "of a combination of apathy, selfishness and fear". In March 1927, he divorced his first wife in Paris and remarried within two weeks, an action that was considered scandalous as upper class Americans generally did not get divorces in the 1920s. The fact that both he and his ex-wife were remarried shortly after being amiably divorced strongly suggests that both parties had fallen in love with other people. Pell then settled in Vienna while making frequent trips to Germany and France. In 1928, when Roosevelt was elected governor of New York state, which Pell welcomed and inspired him to return to the United States. In a letter to Roosevelt dated 1 January 1929, Pell wrote: "Of course, I am more of a radical than you, but the national election of 1924 showed very definitely that the business community was not interested in honest government and the election of 1928 convinced me that the great finance organizations of the country were ready to strain every nerve and stoop to any depth...Every time we have tried conciliating these people we have failed or have been corrupted".
The Wall Street stock clash of 1929 and the Great Depression led Pell to advocate far-reaching reforms as he argued the capitalism needed to be reformed to save it from itself. He saw his duty to be a "good steward" who would maintain the family fortune to pass on to his son, which required the continuance of the capitalist system, which he believed to be impossible with millions of American left unemployed by the Great Depression. Pell was widely denounced within his social milieu as a "traitor to his class", a "rebel" and a "radical". From 1929 onwards, Pell had been urging Roosevelt to run for president in the 1932 election as he argued that the United States needed a "sanely radical" president who would carry reforms to end the Great Depression. Pell was overjoyed when Roosevelt won the 1932 election, and supported his New Deal reforms that he launched in 1933. Pell's reputation as a "radical" ensured that Roosevelt was unwilling to offer him any position besides for being U.S. minister to Bulgaria, which Pell rejected. On 17 April 1934, Pell was at the White House for a ceremony to mark the end of the American occupation of Haiti attended by Roosevelt and President Sténio Vincent. Much to Pell's surprise, Roosevelt invited him to join him in his conversations with Vincent. As both Pell and Roosevelt were fluent in French, both spoke to Vincent in that language about their hopes for Haiti now that its independence was being restored after being occupied by the United States since 1915. In 1936 he was vice chairman of the Democratic National Campaign Committee. daughter of Nelson Pendleton Bigelow. Before their divorce in March 1927, they were the parents of:
- Claiborne de Borda Pell (1918–2009), a U.S. Senator from Rhode Island who served for 36 years from 1961 until 1997.
In June 1927, Matilda married Hugo W. Koehler (1886–1941), a commander in the United States Navy who served as a naval and State Department special agent in Russia during its civil war in 1920. Two weeks later in Paris, Pell married Olive Bigelow Pell (1886–1980), the portraitist. Olive Bigelow was the daughter of Poultney Bigelow (1855–1954) and granddaughter of John Bigelow (1817–1911), the U.S. Ambassador to France under Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. His funeral was held at Trinity Church in Newport, Rhode Island where there is a memorial plaque in his honor. His ashes were committed to the ocean off Beavertail in Jamestown, Rhode Island.
Honors and commemorations
The Herbert Pell Cup in yachting is named for Pell.
References
Notes
Sources
- Herbert Claiborne Pell, "Preparing for the Next War", American Mercury, v. 23, no.92 (August 1931) 455–463.
- Baker, Leonard. Brahmin in Revolt; A Biography of Herbert C. Pell. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972.
- Blayney, Michael S. Diplomat and Humanist: The Diplomatic Career of Herbert Claiborne Pell. Ph.D. dissertation, Washington State University, 1973.
- Cox, Graham B. Seeking Justice for the Holocaust: Herbert C. Pell, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Limits of International Law. University of Oklahoma Press, 2019.
- http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=134584