Clark Mell Eichelberger was a 20th-century American peace activist who championed first the League of Nations and then its successor the United Nations.
Background
Eichelberger was born in 1896 in Freeport, Illinois. His parents were Joseph Elmer Eichelberger and Olive Clark. They descended from pre-Revolutionary Swiss and English settlers. He interrupted and never resumed studies at Northwestern University.
Career
In World War I, Eichelberger interrupted his studies to serve in France. In 1922, he became a lecturer for the Radcliffe Chautauqua System. In 1928, Eichelberger became director of the Midwest office of the League of Nations Association. He served as a consultant to the League of Nations Secretariat. By 1934, he was national director of the League of Nations Association. In 1945, the association's name changed to the American Association of the United Nations, and Eichelberger served as its executive director until 1964, when he became vice president of the United Nations Association of the USA through 1968. In 1945, Eichelberger served as consultant to the United States delegation to the San Francisco Conference and was a member of the committee which created the first draft of the charter of the United Nations. Alger Hiss served as Acting Secretary during that meeting.) In 1939, he co-founded and directed the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace. In 1964, he became its chairman. In 1968, he became executive director. Eichelberger was a prolific writer and used such occasions to advocated for the United Nations as a means of achieving world peace. In 1939, he wrote:
The road to peace for the United States and for the rest of the nations is to be found in a highly developed society of nations. Some future generation may live in a world in which national sovereignty counts for much less than it does today. In it there will be new forms of group loyalty and patriotism.
In 1944, in a review on book about the United Nations, he commented:
The world has so shrunk that the distance from (Washington to any other place in the world is less in time than the distance from Washington to New York in the early history of our country. In this kind of a world there is not room for several sets of moralities and rules of international conduct. Above and beyond any natural groupings must be universal law, and a common morality, and a universal organization.
Eichelberger wrote many books on the United Nations.
Peaceful change, the alternative to war; a survey prepared for the National Peace Conference Campaign for World Economic Cooperation with William T. Stone
