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Harris Wofford (left) as a young aide to John F. Kennedy
“Count no man happy until he dies,” declared Sophocles 24 long centuries ago, in the immortal final line of Oedipus Rex. The sages of ancient Greece understood that the purpose, the meaning, the verdict on a life couldn’t be rendered until after it had run its course -- and perhaps not until decades or centuries later.
The obituaries in The New York Times and The Washington Post for Harris Wofford Jr., who died on January 21 at 92, focused mostly on his work as an aide to candidate and President John F. Kennedy, and then later as a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. But it may turn out, in the very long run, that his greatest legacy was what Harris told me was “his first love in the world of ideas,” and the first great cause of his life.
Because in 1942, during the darkest days of the Second World War, teenage Harris Wofford founded a nationwide youth movement which proclaimed that after the end of that war the human race could abolish war, by creating a “United States of the World.”
The 1940s Student Movement for a World Republic
I met Harris seven years ago, in January 2012. He was speaking at a small, under-the-radar Ethiopian history event in Washington D.C. (He had served in the early 1960s as the first director of Peace Corps programs in Africa.)
I approached him afterwards, told him I knew a bit about his even more remote personal history, and asked him, well, if he still believed any of that stuff. “It’s totally still how I think about the direction of history,” he replied. “And you’re the first one to ask me anything about it in maybe 25 years.”
So he invited me to come by for a visit sometime in his Foggy Bottom apartment. Soon I did. And I invited myself back many times thereafter, pretty much every two or three months for the next seven years, to interrogate him about the almost completely forgotten movement in the 1940s to bring about One World.
One night early in 1941, Harris told me, as WWII raged prior to America’s entry, he was sitting in the bathtub in his family’s home in Scarsdale, New York, simultaneously trying to complete his Latin homework and listen to Mr. District Attorney on the radio. The crime drama reached its denouement, and the radio station switched to talking heads at the Waldorf-Astoria. “Had the contraption been within reach,” he said, “I would have quickly turned the dial.”
But the captive audience of one instead was forced to listen to a panel, including New York Tribune columnist Dorothy Thompson, Nobel laureate author Thomas Mann, and future congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, all proselytizing for something they called “A World Federal Union of Free Men.”
“Democracies must do what our 13 states did long ago,” said Luce, “unite to face a common peril, form the nucleus of a world government ... and expand around the world until it becomes the United States of all mankind.” Harris later wrote that “prophets and visionary statesmen had proclaimed the idea of a Federal World Republic for centuries. ... But for me the idea was born that night.”
Harris recounted this origin tale in his 1946 book It’s Up to Us: Federal World Government In Our Time -- written at age 19 while he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps, published by Harcourt Brace, and edited by the legendary publisher Robert Giroux. It was well told again in Gilbert Jonas’s 2001 iUniverse book One Shining Moment: A Short History of the American Student World Federalist Movement 1942-1953.
A year later Pearl Harbor had brought America into the war, and that moved 15-year-old Harris to act. One evening early in 1942 he and classmate Mary Ellen Purdy set out on their bicycles, rode around Scarsdale, knocked on doors, missed their suppers -- but enlisted themselves and eight other classmates as the inaugural chapter of the “Student Federalists.”
“Those of us who would later come under Wofford’s charismatic spell,” wrote Jonas, “know full well how difficult it must have been for his peers to resist.”
Harris Wofford’s Scarsdale home became the outfit’s bustling headquarters. A perpetual teenage conclave in the living room, backyard, and kitchen was mostly tolerated by his equanimous parents. His grandmother endured misadventures like a couple of stumbling boys bursting into her bedroom while she was half dressed, because “we thought this was the supply closet.” Nevertheless, magnanimously, she began to contribute $5 per month.
And the Student Federalists began to spread far beyond the boundaries of Scarsdale. Funds were raised. Speaking tours were organized. Literature was printed. Essay contests were launched. A “Model World Constitutional Convention” was undertaken just a few weeks before D-Day. TIME magazine published a flattering article on the organization’s founder on November 20, 1944.
During one cycle the National Debate Tournament topic for all American high schools was: “RESOLVED: That a federal world government should be established.” The chancellor of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, assembled a group of eminent scholars and designated them “the Committee to Frame a World Constitution.” (Harris, by then a UofC undergraduate, served as advisor and chief bottle washer for the Committee.)
It must be admitted that the Student Federalists were hardly a model of diversity. Most of the members were white, well-off, and privileged. Harris made a point of telling me this the very first time I visited him at his home.
But that same fundamental flaw was not evident when it came to gender. The Jonas book is full of photographs of young women right in the thick of things, obviously not relegated to clerical duties. The Wellesley College Student Federalist chapter alone boasted 200 members. Indeed, one of the organization’s earliest leaders was a champion high school debater from Minnesota named Clare Lindgren, who went on both to serve as third president of the Student Federalists and to marry Harris Wofford in 1948.
By 1947, the Student Federalists had enlisted several thousand members -- many of them battle-tempered WWII veterans -- opened ten regional offices, and established chapters on 367 high school and college campuses around the country. In February of that year, they combined with a half dozen similarly thriving world government advocacy organizations to form the “United World Federalists” (UWF).
One of the leading brokers of the merger, by all accounts, was 21-year-old Harris Wofford. That organization has remained in continuous existence ever since -- small, obscure, struggling, but endeavoring to keep the flame alive -- and is known today as Citizens for Global Solutions (CGS).
A Brilliant Young Man’s Thinking on a World Republic
Two years after his 1946 book, Harris wrote a sequel monograph called Road to the World Republic. The foreword was written by Stringfellow Barr, longtime president of St. John’s College in Annapolis (and founder, with Wofford’s own greatest mentor Scott Buchanan, of the Great Books Program there) -- who had resigned from St. John’s to become president of a new “Foundation for World Government.”
In these two works, Harris Wofford demonstrated that he possessed more than just the personal magnetism that Gil Jonas described, but a deep and probing intellect as well.
With the new United Nations only a few months old, Harris illuminated both its impotence and undemocratic character. “We should work to develop the General Assembly into a world law-making body by delegating it real powers,” he recommended. “Assembly delegates should be elected directly by the people of the respective nations.”
He emphasized the bedrock idea that world government would not eliminate local institutions or identities. “By becoming a world citizen we maintain citizenship in our city, province, and nation, and gain a higher and more precious title. ... This means a world government that is federal, with power in all fields truly international in scope but with lower levels each continuing in the fields it can govern best ... Only such a federal union can protect the diversity in the world and still secure the needed unity.”
Yet at the same time it might enact and enforce standards within states as well. How? “A World Bill of Rights ... should include freedom of religion, thought, speech, press, assembly, elections, and fair trials. The world government must assure these rights to all its citizens everywhere, with no prejudice to race, nationality, class, or sex.”
That first sentence is quite similar to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which came into force in 1948 -- though of course without any global mechanism to enforce it. When I pointed out to Harris that his second sentence would be greeted today as politically preposterous, he immediately agreed. But the alternative, he insisted, was to resign ourselves forever to the dismal fate of women in so much of the world, and of gay people in so many homophobic nations, and of political dissidents in authoritarian countries.
He recognized that what he proposed would mean epochal historical transformation. “World federal government would be the greatest political step ever taken by man. The idea of moving from the national to the world level of citizenship is the most revolutionary proposal in history. ... A whole new world would open to man once he moved from his present confining nationalism into this great, truly global civilization.”
And he called unapologetically for philanthropists to step up. “Carnegies and Nobels are needed. There must be some men and women who will leave their millions to this cause instead of to private schools, libraries, or homes for stray cats. A share in building world federation would be the greatest memorial anyone could seek.”
During our many conversations in his apartment, I found that a couple of ancient episodes moved Harris Wofford still. In It’s Up to Us, he related that one classmate would shout “Union Never” whenever passing a Student Federalist in the hallways of Scarsdale High. This, Harris told me, is what he yearned to reawaken. An active debate about whether something like a world union might actually be a desirable destination, or whether instead it’s something that would on balance do more harm than good for the human condition. He very much lamented that the topic, in both the high school hallways and the digital public squares of today, has become conspicuous only by its absence from the debates of the 21st century.
Another was the tale he told in Road to the World Republic of Duncan Cameron, an 18-year-old boy who refused induction into the British Army, “preferring prison rather than violence in support of national interests.” But young Cameron was no pacifist. He declared his “determination never again to serve in the army of a nation-state,” but simultaneously announced “his readiness to serve in a World Police Force to enforce world law.” British authorities put him on trial for treason. Harris called it instead “loyalty to the world community.”
The Road to the World Republic
“The living owe it to those who no longer can speak,” said the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, “to tell their story for them.” That seems especially true when a Harris Wofford dies at a time when so many demagogues, both here and abroad, seek to divide our one humanity by race, class, gender, religion, and nation.
Every time we got together, I could tell that it meant a great deal to Harris that one person, during the twilight of his life, knew something about and asked him about and cared about his opening act on the stage of history. And he demonstrated his enduring commitment to the dream of a politically unified human race. We coauthored two articles about it for The Huffington Post and the Public Interest Report from the Federation of American Scientists. These pieces were decidedly not ghostwritten by me. We worked on them together for weeks, and at age 88 he haggled with me over every word.
We also made three joint speaking appearances together about it -- at the Brearley School in Manhattan (which had maintained a thriving Student Federalist chapter seven decades earlier), at the Woman’s National Democratic Club in Washington, DC, and before the University of Chicago Alumni Club. And just about a year ago, he re-engaged with the organization he did so much to create, Citizens for Global Solutions, joining its newly reconstituting Advisory Council after I showed him the organization’s newly reconceptualized mission statement, committing to “a democratic federation of nations with the power to enact enforceable world law to abolish war, protect universal human rights, and restore and sustain our global environment.”
Nineteen-year-old Harris Wofford dedicated It’s Up To Us “To Jim, Tom, Bruce, Dwight, and all the sons of a fighting earth, who died so that democracy might live and mankind have a chance to move forward in our time to the United States of the World.” Classmates at Scarsdale High all, dispatched by their country to war but never returned. Dwight and Jim were killed in Germany, Bruce on Iwo Jima, and Tom on the USS Indianapolis -- likely drowned or devoured alive by sharks in one of the most horrifying episodes of a horrible war -- after delivering to Tinian Island the atomic bomb that would be detonated a week later over Hiroshima.
These young men all died in their early 20s, while their classmate Harris Wofford lived until his early 90s. And he died with the hope in his heart that the daughters and sons of our still fighting earth, today, might once again ignite a new youth movement for global citizenship and planetary patriotism and human unity. Might once again mount a campaign to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. Might produce a few more Duncan Camerons. And might generate an irresistible historical current, so that their own daughters and sons might someday be born into a united world.
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“Count no man happy until he dies,” declared Sophocles 24 long centuries ago, in the immortal final line of Oedipus Rex. The sages of ancient Greece understood that the purpose, the meaning, the verdict on a life couldn’t be rendered until after it had run its course -- and perhaps not until decades or centuries later.
The obituaries in The New York Times and The Washington Post for Harris Wofford Jr., who died on January 21 at 92, focused mostly on his work as an aide to candidate and President John F. Kennedy, and then later as a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. But it may turn out, in the very long run, that his greatest legacy was what Harris told me was “his first love in the world of ideas,” and the first great cause of his life.
Because in 1942, during the darkest days of the Second World War, teenage Harris Wofford founded a nationwide youth movement which proclaimed that after the end of that war the human race could abolish war, by creating a “United States of the World.”
The 1940s Student Movement for a World Republic
I met Harris seven years ago, in January 2012. He was speaking at a small, under-the-radar Ethiopian history event in Washington D.C. (He had served in the early 1960s as the first director of Peace Corps programs in Africa.)
I approached him afterwards, told him I knew a bit about his even more remote personal history, and asked him, well, if he still believed any of that stuff. “It’s totally still how I think about the direction of history,” he replied. “And you’re the first one to ask me anything about it in maybe 25 years.”
So he invited me to come by for a visit sometime in his Foggy Bottom apartment. Soon I did. And I invited myself back many times thereafter, pretty much every two or three months for the next seven years, to interrogate him about the almost completely forgotten movement in the 1940s to bring about One World.
One night early in 1941, Harris told me, as WWII raged prior to America’s entry, he was sitting in the bathtub in his family’s home in Scarsdale, New York, simultaneously trying to complete his Latin homework and listen to Mr. District Attorney on the radio. The crime drama reached its denouement, and the radio station switched to talking heads at the Waldorf-Astoria. “Had the contraption been within reach,” he said, “I would have quickly turned the dial.”
But the captive audience of one instead was forced to listen to a panel, including New York Tribune columnist Dorothy Thompson, Nobel laureate author Thomas Mann, and future congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, all proselytizing for something they called “A World Federal Union of Free Men.”
“Democracies must do what our 13 states did long ago,” said Luce, “unite to face a common peril, form the nucleus of a world government ... and expand around the world until it becomes the United States of all mankind.” Harris later wrote that “prophets and visionary statesmen had proclaimed the idea of a Federal World Republic for centuries. ... But for me the idea was born that night.”
Harris recounted this origin tale in his 1946 book It’s Up to Us: Federal World Government In Our Time -- written at age 19 while he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps, published by Harcourt Brace, and edited by the legendary publisher Robert Giroux. It was well told again in Gilbert Jonas’s 2001 iUniverse book One Shining Moment: A Short History of the American Student World Federalist Movement 1942-1953.
A year later Pearl Harbor had brought America into the war, and that moved 15-year-old Harris to act. One evening early in 1942 he and classmate Mary Ellen Purdy set out on their bicycles, rode around Scarsdale, knocked on doors, missed their suppers -- but enlisted themselves and eight other classmates as the inaugural chapter of the “Student Federalists.”
“Those of us who would later come under Wofford’s charismatic spell,” wrote Jonas, “know full well how difficult it must have been for his peers to resist.”
Harris Wofford’s Scarsdale home became the outfit’s bustling headquarters. A perpetual teenage conclave in the living room, backyard, and kitchen was mostly tolerated by his equanimous parents. His grandmother endured misadventures like a couple of stumbling boys bursting into her bedroom while she was half dressed, because “we thought this was the supply closet.” Nevertheless, magnanimously, she began to contribute $5 per month.
And the Student Federalists began to spread far beyond the boundaries of Scarsdale. Funds were raised. Speaking tours were organized. Literature was printed. Essay contests were launched. A “Model World Constitutional Convention” was undertaken just a few weeks before D-Day. TIME magazine published a flattering article on the organization’s founder on November 20, 1944.
During one cycle the National Debate Tournament topic for all American high schools was: “RESOLVED: That a federal world government should be established.” The chancellor of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, assembled a group of eminent scholars and designated them “the Committee to Frame a World Constitution.” (Harris, by then a UofC undergraduate, served as advisor and chief bottle washer for the Committee.)
It must be admitted that the Student Federalists were hardly a model of diversity. Most of the members were white, well-off, and privileged. Harris made a point of telling me this the very first time I visited him at his home.
But that same fundamental flaw was not evident when it came to gender. The Jonas book is full of photographs of young women right in the thick of things, obviously not relegated to clerical duties. The Wellesley College Student Federalist chapter alone boasted 200 members. Indeed, one of the organization’s earliest leaders was a champion high school debater from Minnesota named Clare Lindgren, who went on both to serve as third president of the Student Federalists and to marry Harris Wofford in 1948.
By 1947, the Student Federalists had enlisted several thousand members -- many of them battle-tempered WWII veterans -- opened ten regional offices, and established chapters on 367 high school and college campuses around the country. In February of that year, they combined with a half dozen similarly thriving world government advocacy organizations to form the “United World Federalists” (UWF).
One of the leading brokers of the merger, by all accounts, was 21-year-old Harris Wofford. That organization has remained in continuous existence ever since -- small, obscure, struggling, but endeavoring to keep the flame alive -- and is known today as Citizens for Global Solutions (CGS).
A Brilliant Young Man’s Thinking on a World Republic
Two years after his 1946 book, Harris wrote a sequel monograph called Road to the World Republic. The foreword was written by Stringfellow Barr, longtime president of St. John’s College in Annapolis (and founder, with Wofford’s own greatest mentor Scott Buchanan, of the Great Books Program there) -- who had resigned from St. John’s to become president of a new “Foundation for World Government.”
In these two works, Harris Wofford demonstrated that he possessed more than just the personal magnetism that Gil Jonas described, but a deep and probing intellect as well.
With the new United Nations only a few months old, Harris illuminated both its impotence and undemocratic character. “We should work to develop the General Assembly into a world law-making body by delegating it real powers,” he recommended. “Assembly delegates should be elected directly by the people of the respective nations.”
He emphasized the bedrock idea that world government would not eliminate local institutions or identities. “By becoming a world citizen we maintain citizenship in our city, province, and nation, and gain a higher and more precious title. ... This means a world government that is federal, with power in all fields truly international in scope but with lower levels each continuing in the fields it can govern best ... Only such a federal union can protect the diversity in the world and still secure the needed unity.”
Yet at the same time it might enact and enforce standards within states as well. How? “A World Bill of Rights ... should include freedom of religion, thought, speech, press, assembly, elections, and fair trials. The world government must assure these rights to all its citizens everywhere, with no prejudice to race, nationality, class, or sex.”
That first sentence is quite similar to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which came into force in 1948 -- though of course without any global mechanism to enforce it. When I pointed out to Harris that his second sentence would be greeted today as politically preposterous, he immediately agreed. But the alternative, he insisted, was to resign ourselves forever to the dismal fate of women in so much of the world, and of gay people in so many homophobic nations, and of political dissidents in authoritarian countries.
He recognized that what he proposed would mean epochal historical transformation. “World federal government would be the greatest political step ever taken by man. The idea of moving from the national to the world level of citizenship is the most revolutionary proposal in history. ... A whole new world would open to man once he moved from his present confining nationalism into this great, truly global civilization.”
And he called unapologetically for philanthropists to step up. “Carnegies and Nobels are needed. There must be some men and women who will leave their millions to this cause instead of to private schools, libraries, or homes for stray cats. A share in building world federation would be the greatest memorial anyone could seek.”
During our many conversations in his apartment, I found that a couple of ancient episodes moved Harris Wofford still. In It’s Up to Us, he related that one classmate would shout “Union Never” whenever passing a Student Federalist in the hallways of Scarsdale High. This, Harris told me, is what he yearned to reawaken. An active debate about whether something like a world union might actually be a desirable destination, or whether instead it’s something that would on balance do more harm than good for the human condition. He very much lamented that the topic, in both the high school hallways and the digital public squares of today, has become conspicuous only by its absence from the debates of the 21st century.
Another was the tale he told in Road to the World Republic of Duncan Cameron, an 18-year-old boy who refused induction into the British Army, “preferring prison rather than violence in support of national interests.” But young Cameron was no pacifist. He declared his “determination never again to serve in the army of a nation-state,” but simultaneously announced “his readiness to serve in a World Police Force to enforce world law.” British authorities put him on trial for treason. Harris called it instead “loyalty to the world community.”
The Road to the World Republic
“The living owe it to those who no longer can speak,” said the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, “to tell their story for them.” That seems especially true when a Harris Wofford dies at a time when so many demagogues, both here and abroad, seek to divide our one humanity by race, class, gender, religion, and nation.
Every time we got together, I could tell that it meant a great deal to Harris that one person, during the twilight of his life, knew something about and asked him about and cared about his opening act on the stage of history. And he demonstrated his enduring commitment to the dream of a politically unified human race. We coauthored two articles about it for The Huffington Post and the Public Interest Report from the Federation of American Scientists. These pieces were decidedly not ghostwritten by me. We worked on them together for weeks, and at age 88 he haggled with me over every word.
We also made three joint speaking appearances together about it -- at the Brearley School in Manhattan (which had maintained a thriving Student Federalist chapter seven decades earlier), at the Woman’s National Democratic Club in Washington, DC, and before the University of Chicago Alumni Club. And just about a year ago, he re-engaged with the organization he did so much to create, Citizens for Global Solutions, joining its newly reconstituting Advisory Council after I showed him the organization’s newly reconceptualized mission statement, committing to “a democratic federation of nations with the power to enact enforceable world law to abolish war, protect universal human rights, and restore and sustain our global environment.”
Nineteen-year-old Harris Wofford dedicated It’s Up To Us “To Jim, Tom, Bruce, Dwight, and all the sons of a fighting earth, who died so that democracy might live and mankind have a chance to move forward in our time to the United States of the World.” Classmates at Scarsdale High all, dispatched by their country to war but never returned. Dwight and Jim were killed in Germany, Bruce on Iwo Jima, and Tom on the USS Indianapolis -- likely drowned or devoured alive by sharks in one of the most horrifying episodes of a horrible war -- after delivering to Tinian Island the atomic bomb that would be detonated a week later over Hiroshima.
These young men all died in their early 20s, while their classmate Harris Wofford lived until his early 90s. And he died with the hope in his heart that the daughters and sons of our still fighting earth, today, might once again ignite a new youth movement for global citizenship and planetary patriotism and human unity. Might once again mount a campaign to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. Might produce a few more Duncan Camerons. And might generate an irresistible historical current, so that their own daughters and sons might someday be born into a united world.
“Count no man happy until he dies,” declared Sophocles 24 long centuries ago, in the immortal final line of Oedipus Rex. The sages of ancient Greece understood that the purpose, the meaning, the verdict on a life couldn’t be rendered until after it had run its course -- and perhaps not until decades or centuries later.
The obituaries in The New York Times and The Washington Post for Harris Wofford Jr., who died on January 21 at 92, focused mostly on his work as an aide to candidate and President John F. Kennedy, and then later as a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. But it may turn out, in the very long run, that his greatest legacy was what Harris told me was “his first love in the world of ideas,” and the first great cause of his life.
Because in 1942, during the darkest days of the Second World War, teenage Harris Wofford founded a nationwide youth movement which proclaimed that after the end of that war the human race could abolish war, by creating a “United States of the World.”
The 1940s Student Movement for a World Republic
I met Harris seven years ago, in January 2012. He was speaking at a small, under-the-radar Ethiopian history event in Washington D.C. (He had served in the early 1960s as the first director of Peace Corps programs in Africa.)
I approached him afterwards, told him I knew a bit about his even more remote personal history, and asked him, well, if he still believed any of that stuff. “It’s totally still how I think about the direction of history,” he replied. “And you’re the first one to ask me anything about it in maybe 25 years.”
So he invited me to come by for a visit sometime in his Foggy Bottom apartment. Soon I did. And I invited myself back many times thereafter, pretty much every two or three months for the next seven years, to interrogate him about the almost completely forgotten movement in the 1940s to bring about One World.
One night early in 1941, Harris told me, as WWII raged prior to America’s entry, he was sitting in the bathtub in his family’s home in Scarsdale, New York, simultaneously trying to complete his Latin homework and listen to Mr. District Attorney on the radio. The crime drama reached its denouement, and the radio station switched to talking heads at the Waldorf-Astoria. “Had the contraption been within reach,” he said, “I would have quickly turned the dial.”
But the captive audience of one instead was forced to listen to a panel, including New York Tribune columnist Dorothy Thompson, Nobel laureate author Thomas Mann, and future congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, all proselytizing for something they called “A World Federal Union of Free Men.”
“Democracies must do what our 13 states did long ago,” said Luce, “unite to face a common peril, form the nucleus of a world government ... and expand around the world until it becomes the United States of all mankind.” Harris later wrote that “prophets and visionary statesmen had proclaimed the idea of a Federal World Republic for centuries. ... But for me the idea was born that night.”
Harris recounted this origin tale in his 1946 book It’s Up to Us: Federal World Government In Our Time -- written at age 19 while he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps, published by Harcourt Brace, and edited by the legendary publisher Robert Giroux. It was well told again in Gilbert Jonas’s 2001 iUniverse book One Shining Moment: A Short History of the American Student World Federalist Movement 1942-1953.
A year later Pearl Harbor had brought America into the war, and that moved 15-year-old Harris to act. One evening early in 1942 he and classmate Mary Ellen Purdy set out on their bicycles, rode around Scarsdale, knocked on doors, missed their suppers -- but enlisted themselves and eight other classmates as the inaugural chapter of the “Student Federalists.”
“Those of us who would later come under Wofford’s charismatic spell,” wrote Jonas, “know full well how difficult it must have been for his peers to resist.”
Harris Wofford’s Scarsdale home became the outfit’s bustling headquarters. A perpetual teenage conclave in the living room, backyard, and kitchen was mostly tolerated by his equanimous parents. His grandmother endured misadventures like a couple of stumbling boys bursting into her bedroom while she was half dressed, because “we thought this was the supply closet.” Nevertheless, magnanimously, she began to contribute $5 per month.
And the Student Federalists began to spread far beyond the boundaries of Scarsdale. Funds were raised. Speaking tours were organized. Literature was printed. Essay contests were launched. A “Model World Constitutional Convention” was undertaken just a few weeks before D-Day. TIME magazine published a flattering article on the organization’s founder on November 20, 1944.
During one cycle the National Debate Tournament topic for all American high schools was: “RESOLVED: That a federal world government should be established.” The chancellor of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, assembled a group of eminent scholars and designated them “the Committee to Frame a World Constitution.” (Harris, by then a UofC undergraduate, served as advisor and chief bottle washer for the Committee.)
It must be admitted that the Student Federalists were hardly a model of diversity. Most of the members were white, well-off, and privileged. Harris made a point of telling me this the very first time I visited him at his home.
But that same fundamental flaw was not evident when it came to gender. The Jonas book is full of photographs of young women right in the thick of things, obviously not relegated to clerical duties. The Wellesley College Student Federalist chapter alone boasted 200 members. Indeed, one of the organization’s earliest leaders was a champion high school debater from Minnesota named Clare Lindgren, who went on both to serve as third president of the Student Federalists and to marry Harris Wofford in 1948.
By 1947, the Student Federalists had enlisted several thousand members -- many of them battle-tempered WWII veterans -- opened ten regional offices, and established chapters on 367 high school and college campuses around the country. In February of that year, they combined with a half dozen similarly thriving world government advocacy organizations to form the “United World Federalists” (UWF).
One of the leading brokers of the merger, by all accounts, was 21-year-old Harris Wofford. That organization has remained in continuous existence ever since -- small, obscure, struggling, but endeavoring to keep the flame alive -- and is known today as Citizens for Global Solutions (CGS).
A Brilliant Young Man’s Thinking on a World Republic
Two years after his 1946 book, Harris wrote a sequel monograph called Road to the World Republic. The foreword was written by Stringfellow Barr, longtime president of St. John’s College in Annapolis (and founder, with Wofford’s own greatest mentor Scott Buchanan, of the Great Books Program there) -- who had resigned from St. John’s to become president of a new “Foundation for World Government.”
In these two works, Harris Wofford demonstrated that he possessed more than just the personal magnetism that Gil Jonas described, but a deep and probing intellect as well.
With the new United Nations only a few months old, Harris illuminated both its impotence and undemocratic character. “We should work to develop the General Assembly into a world law-making body by delegating it real powers,” he recommended. “Assembly delegates should be elected directly by the people of the respective nations.”
He emphasized the bedrock idea that world government would not eliminate local institutions or identities. “By becoming a world citizen we maintain citizenship in our city, province, and nation, and gain a higher and more precious title. ... This means a world government that is federal, with power in all fields truly international in scope but with lower levels each continuing in the fields it can govern best ... Only such a federal union can protect the diversity in the world and still secure the needed unity.”
Yet at the same time it might enact and enforce standards within states as well. How? “A World Bill of Rights ... should include freedom of religion, thought, speech, press, assembly, elections, and fair trials. The world government must assure these rights to all its citizens everywhere, with no prejudice to race, nationality, class, or sex.”
That first sentence is quite similar to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which came into force in 1948 -- though of course without any global mechanism to enforce it. When I pointed out to Harris that his second sentence would be greeted today as politically preposterous, he immediately agreed. But the alternative, he insisted, was to resign ourselves forever to the dismal fate of women in so much of the world, and of gay people in so many homophobic nations, and of political dissidents in authoritarian countries.
He recognized that what he proposed would mean epochal historical transformation. “World federal government would be the greatest political step ever taken by man. The idea of moving from the national to the world level of citizenship is the most revolutionary proposal in history. ... A whole new world would open to man once he moved from his present confining nationalism into this great, truly global civilization.”
And he called unapologetically for philanthropists to step up. “Carnegies and Nobels are needed. There must be some men and women who will leave their millions to this cause instead of to private schools, libraries, or homes for stray cats. A share in building world federation would be the greatest memorial anyone could seek.”
During our many conversations in his apartment, I found that a couple of ancient episodes moved Harris Wofford still. In It’s Up to Us, he related that one classmate would shout “Union Never” whenever passing a Student Federalist in the hallways of Scarsdale High. This, Harris told me, is what he yearned to reawaken. An active debate about whether something like a world union might actually be a desirable destination, or whether instead it’s something that would on balance do more harm than good for the human condition. He very much lamented that the topic, in both the high school hallways and the digital public squares of today, has become conspicuous only by its absence from the debates of the 21st century.
Another was the tale he told in Road to the World Republic of Duncan Cameron, an 18-year-old boy who refused induction into the British Army, “preferring prison rather than violence in support of national interests.” But young Cameron was no pacifist. He declared his “determination never again to serve in the army of a nation-state,” but simultaneously announced “his readiness to serve in a World Police Force to enforce world law.” British authorities put him on trial for treason. Harris called it instead “loyalty to the world community.”
The Road to the World Republic
“The living owe it to those who no longer can speak,” said the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, “to tell their story for them.” That seems especially true when a Harris Wofford dies at a time when so many demagogues, both here and abroad, seek to divide our one humanity by race, class, gender, religion, and nation.
Every time we got together, I could tell that it meant a great deal to Harris that one person, during the twilight of his life, knew something about and asked him about and cared about his opening act on the stage of history. And he demonstrated his enduring commitment to the dream of a politically unified human race. We coauthored two articles about it for The Huffington Post and the Public Interest Report from the Federation of American Scientists. These pieces were decidedly not ghostwritten by me. We worked on them together for weeks, and at age 88 he haggled with me over every word.
We also made three joint speaking appearances together about it -- at the Brearley School in Manhattan (which had maintained a thriving Student Federalist chapter seven decades earlier), at the Woman’s National Democratic Club in Washington, DC, and before the University of Chicago Alumni Club. And just about a year ago, he re-engaged with the organization he did so much to create, Citizens for Global Solutions, joining its newly reconstituting Advisory Council after I showed him the organization’s newly reconceptualized mission statement, committing to “a democratic federation of nations with the power to enact enforceable world law to abolish war, protect universal human rights, and restore and sustain our global environment.”
Nineteen-year-old Harris Wofford dedicated It’s Up To Us “To Jim, Tom, Bruce, Dwight, and all the sons of a fighting earth, who died so that democracy might live and mankind have a chance to move forward in our time to the United States of the World.” Classmates at Scarsdale High all, dispatched by their country to war but never returned. Dwight and Jim were killed in Germany, Bruce on Iwo Jima, and Tom on the USS Indianapolis -- likely drowned or devoured alive by sharks in one of the most horrifying episodes of a horrible war -- after delivering to Tinian Island the atomic bomb that would be detonated a week later over Hiroshima.
These young men all died in their early 20s, while their classmate Harris Wofford lived until his early 90s. And he died with the hope in his heart that the daughters and sons of our still fighting earth, today, might once again ignite a new youth movement for global citizenship and planetary patriotism and human unity. Might once again mount a campaign to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. Might produce a few more Duncan Camerons. And might generate an irresistible historical current, so that their own daughters and sons might someday be born into a united world.
Democratic lawmakers are vowing to investigate the Trump administration's pressure campaign that may have led to ABC deciding to indefinitely suspend late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) announced on Thursday that he filed a motion to subpoena Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr one day after he publicly warned ABC of negative consequences if the network kept Kimmel on the air.
"Enough of Congress sleepwalking while [President Donald] Trump and [Vice President JD] Vance shred the First Amendment and Constitution," Khanna declared. "It is time for Congress to stand up for Article I."
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, also said on Thursday that he was opening an investigation into the potential financial aspects of Carr's pressure campaign on ABC, including the involvement of Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which is the network's largest affiliate and is currently involved in merger talks that will need FCC approval.
"The Oversight Committee is launching an investigation into ABC, Sinclair, and the FCC," he said. "We will not be intimidated and we will defend the First Amendment."
Progressive politicians weren't the only ones launching an investigation into the Kimmel controversy, as legal organization Democracy Forward announced that it's filed a a Freedom of Information Act request for records after January 20, 2025 related to any FCC efforts “to use the agency’s licensing and enforcement powers to police and limit speech and influence what the public can watch and hear.”
Democratic lawmakers on Thursday vowed to fight back against US President Donald Trump's efforts to attack and dismantle liberal and progressive organizations.
Led by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), the Democrats introduced the No Political Enemies Act aimed at protecting organizations' free speech rights from retaliation from the federal government.
During his speech touting the new legislation, Murphy recounted recent actions by Trump and his administration, including the president's threats to "arrest members of the Soros family simply for funding groups that oppose his agenda," as well as Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr's pressure campaign to get ABC to fire late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel.
Murphy then said that the No Political Enemies Act was necessary because "Donald Trump is right now instructing his Department of Justice to go on the hunt for his political enemies" for challenging him.
"Trump is making it 100% clear that he is going to ramp up his efforts to use the power of the federal government to punish his critics," he said. "This is legislation that makes sure that the law is on the side of free speech and the right to dissent."
The proposed law would give political organizations and individuals new tools to combat political harassment from the federal government, and would allow them to both recover attorney fees and more easily file lawsuits against federal officials who abuse their authority for political purposes.
Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), who also expressed support for the legislation, put the stakes facing Americans in stark terms.
"We are in the biggest free speech crisis this country has faced since the McCarthy era," he said. "The murder of Charlie Kirk was a horrific crime, and it's clear that Trump wants to hijack that horrific crime to silence anyone who disagrees with the president about any issue."
Casar, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, also took a shot at major corporations who have been caving to the president's demands in recent months.
"As we saw last night, far too many billionaires and corporate-owned media companies are bending the knee: Disney and ABC, Paramount and CBS, the Washington Post editorial board, Facebook," he said. "Let's be clear, the ultrawealthy men who own these companies are making a choice. David Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bob Iger—these men are enriching themselves, auctioning off the United State's First Amendment to a wannabe dictator and tyrant."
Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) pointed out that the FCC's pressure campaign on ABC to fire Kimmel is particularly nefarious given that Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which is the network's largest affiliate, is currently involved in merger talks that will need FCC approval.
"All of this ties back to money and people enriching themselves, and bending the knee to Donald Trump to make it happen," he said.
The Democrats' proposed legislation comes after Trump announced late Wednesday night that he planned to designate “antifa,” a movement of autonomous individuals and loosely affiliated groups who oppose fascism, as a “major terrorist organization."
It also comes comes days after Trump adviser Stephen Miller began pushing a plan to "dismantle" the organized left using the power of the federal government.
During a recent appearance on Fox News, Miller described the entire left as a "domestic terrorism movement in this country," and vowed "to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence."
President Donald Trump's Department of Education has announced that it will partner with right-wing think tanks and organizations to develop a new curriculum for “patriotic education” in American classrooms.
Earlier this week, the Trump administration redirected $137 million initially meant for programs aimed at minority students toward what it described as "American history and civics education."
Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced Wednesday that the money will be directed toward discretionary grants aimed at K-12 schools that adopt a new curriculum being drawn up by the 250 Civics Education Coalition—a consortium of more than 40 right-wing groups that launched on same day. The goal, McMahon said, was to advance education that "emphasizes a unifying and uplifting portrayal of the nation's founding ideals" in advance of the nation's 250th anniversary in 2026.
It is not Trump's first crack at instilling the nation's youth with a "patriotic education." In the waning days of his first term in office, Trump unveiled the 1776 Report, which, education columnist Jennifer Berkshire recently noted in The Baffler, "was widely panned by actual historians for its worshipful treatment of the Founding Fathers, its downplaying of slavery, and its portrayal of a century-old 'administrative state' controlled by leftist radicals."
While little has been publicized yet about what McMahon's new endeavor will look like, it is known who will be crafting it. The initiative is being led by the America First Policy Institute, a MAGA-aligned think tank that has been responsible for staffing Trump's second administration and has received over $1 million from his political action committee, the Save America PAC. Until 2023, McMahon herself served on the board of AFPI.
In 2022, the group presented a piece of model legislation for a "Civics Course Act" to be introduced in states. It included requirements for students to spend ample time studying the nation's founding documents and figures while banning the teaching of what it called the "defamatory history of America’s founding," which suggests that slavery or inequality are in any way inherent to the nation's institutions.
It also banned the concepts of "systemic racism" and "gender fluidity" and forbade teachers from giving students course credit for engaging with "social or public policy advocacy."
Also included in the coalition is Hillsdale College, a private Christian liberal arts school in Michigan that has proposed its own K-12 curriculum, which Vanity Fair notes "has been criticized for revisionist history, including whitewashed accounts of US slavery and depictions of Jamestown as a failed communist colony."
Another participant is PragerU, the overtly partisan and often factually loose YouTube channel that has been tasked with creating children's educational content in nearly a dozen red states.
The group has produced content venerating figures notorious for practicing slavery, like colonist Christopher Columbus and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Its videos have argued, among other things, that climate change is a myth, that European fascism was a "far-left" ideology, and that Israel has "the world's most moral army."
The pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA will also be involved in crafting the curriculum. Its longtime leader, Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated in Utah last week, went on a crusade last year to, in his words, "tell the truth" about Martin Luther King Jr., whom he described as "an awful person," while claiming his signature achievement, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was a "huge mistake."
An offshoot of Kirk's group, Turning Point Education, said Kirk's assassination has increased its resolve to promote a "God-centered, virtuous education" in US public schools.
The 250 Civics Education Coalition has not yet published a curriculum. But according to the Department of Education, it will be rolling out "a robust programming agenda" over the next 12 months.
During Trump's second term, he has undertaken an effort to purge federal museums and national parks of what one executive order called "improper ideology," which has resulted in the erasure of exhibits and monuments to Black and Native American history. Last month, he lamented that the Smithsonian Museum focuses too much on "how bad slavery was" and ordered a review of the museum's content.
Federal websites, meanwhile, have systematically eliminated many pages that acknowledged the accomplishments of nonwhite historical figures or important events in women's and LGBTQ+ history.
Critics in the education world view Trump's effort to use grants to induce them to adopt his preferred curriculum as an illegal effort to propagandize children.
"The law is clear," said education historian Diane Ravitch in a blog post. "Federal officials are prohibited from seeking to influence or direct curriculum in any way."
Since 1970, the federal government has been barred by law from "any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum" of public schools.
"Civic education is and must be non-partisan," said Ted McConnell, the executive director of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools. "While the funding is long sought, this is the wrong approach and smacks of authoritarianism."