Readers will likely be surprised to learn that I frequently write columns well in advance of their publication. As this is written, President-elect Donald Trump is naming various nominees to the sundry offices and departments of the federal government. President-elect Trump’s nomination of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik to serve as America’s ambassador to the United Nations caused me to consider a column about our first such envoy. Tennessee’s own Cordell Hull, the longest serving Secretary of State in our country’s history, is credited as the “Father of the United Nations” by President Franklin Roosevelt. Unfortunately, neither man could truly enjoy the formation of the UN, as Roosevelt did not live to go to the meeting in San Francisco to see it take its first shape and form. Cordell Hull had retired as Secretary of State and was too ill to make the journey.
It fell to the little man from Missouri, Harry Truman, to select America’s first ambassador to the United Nations. Truman’s choice might have surprised many folks, but while Truman was a highly partisan Democrat, he was also a man of strong personal loyalties who had loved the United States Senate and considered his service in that body as the best time of his life. Truman surprised many when he appointed Senator Harold Burton of Ohio, a former mayor of Cleveland, to the U.S. Supreme Court when Justice Owen Roberts resigned on June 30, 1945. Burton had served on the “Truman Committee” to investigate and root out corruption and overspending in war contracts while they were in the Senate together. Burton was, of all things, a Republican. It is almost impossible to fathom the notion of a president of one party appointing a member of the opposition party to a seat on the Supreme Court today.
The following year, President Truman made yet another bipartisan appointment when he named Warren R. Austin of Vermont, a Republican, as America’s ambassador to the United Nations. Like Harold Burton, Austin had served in the United States Senate with Harry Truman. President Truman admired Austin’s internationalist point of view, even though the Vermont solon had been a critic of FDR’s New Deal. Technically, Austin could not immediately accept the post due to the provision in our Constitution that prohibited congressmen and senators from accepting appointment to an office created during their terms of office. Warren Austin resigned from the U.S. Senate on August 2, 1946, and became a “special representative” of the president and an advisor to Herschel Johnson, who was the first person to occupy the office of America’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Johnson is almost entirely forgotten today, but Herschel Vespasian Johnson, a North Carolinian, had been the United States’ ambassador to Sweden from 1941 through April 1946. Johnson was a career officer in the U.S. Foreign Service and held posts in American offices in Latin America, Europe and finally, the United Nations. Herschel Johnson served as ambassador to the United Nations from June 3, 1946, until January 14, 1947, when Warren Austin took over the office.
It is fair to say Herschel Johnson was a placeholder, as Harry Truman intended for Warren Austin to be the ambassador of the United States to the UN. Still, technically, Herschel V. Johnson was America’s first envoy to the United Nations.
Warren Robinson Austin was a highly seasoned and successful attorney who ran for and was elected to the United States Senate in a March 31, 1931, special election, defeating Senator Frank Partridge, who had been appointed to serve following the death of Frank L. Greene. The following day, Austin took the oath of office as a member of the United States Senate.
Austin had been enormously successful as an attorney, although he had struggled in the beginning. As a young lawyer, Austin ran for state’s attorney in Franklin County to get his name out to the public. Austin won the election in 1904 and won reelection in 1906. In 1908, Austin was elected mayor of St. Albans, Vermont. After completing his term as mayor, Warren Austin concentrated on his burgeoning law practice.
Warren R. Austin had been one of ten children and graduated from the University of Vermont in 1899. Austin studied law in his father’s law office. After being admitted to the Bar, Warren Austin commenced the practice of law with his father. In 1916, Austin departed for China, where he became the legal representative for the American International Corporation, a post he held for a year. In that role, Austin legally represented American businesses that were financing and building railroads in China, as well as developing what became known as the Grand Canal in Shantung Province. Austin returned home to Vermont in 1917 and resumed his law practice with his father. Warren Austin was named as special counsel for the State of Vermont and served in that capacity from 1925 through 1937. Austin enjoyed a lucrative and successful practice until his 1931 election to the United States Senate.
Every lawyer has one particular case that stands out in his/her career, and for Warren R. Austin, that was the matter of the Woodhouse alienation of affection lawsuit. At stake was a million dollars, a terrific sum for the time. Austin won that case, which brought him instant fame in the small state of Vermont. The particulars of the case involved a young lady, Dorritt Van Deusen Woodhouse, who had married into one of Vermont’s wealthiest families. The husband had gone to Reno, Nevada, to obtain a quickie divorce. The question was – – – what or perhaps who – – – had ruined the couple’s marriage?
Dorritt Woodhouse, to the horror of her spouse, filed an alienation of affections lawsuit against her husband’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Lorenzo F. Woodhouse. The wealthy couple hired four very able and even more expensive attorneys to represent them. It took three months to hear all the testimony in the case. Austin was thorough and had been working fervently on the case for two years, gathering evidence from both Paris and Mexico City on behalf of his client. The jury returned a verdict giving Austin’s client a record $465,000 settlement (about $8.7 million today).
Following the death of Senator Greene, Austin entered the Republican primary for the special election. Frank Partridge, a favorite of Vermont’s old-line GOP establishment, had been appointed by the governor immediately following Senator Greene’s death. Senator Partridge, an officer of the Vermont Marble Company, ran to win election in his own right while Austin campaigned as an insurgent. Austin labeled himself a member of the “young guard.” Warren Austin was 53 years old when he began his first statewide campaign. The campaign was hard fought and bitter, especially for a staid state like Vermont. Austin had won a decisive victory, polling 43,457 votes to Senator Partridge’s 35,416 votes.
Once in the Senate, Austin was appointed to the Military Affairs and the Commerce Committee. Eventually, Austin landed on the Foreign Relations Committee, an assignment that was then highly coveted by many senators.
When Senator Austin came up for reelection in 1934, the Roosevelt administration intended to show that even so solidly Republican a state as Vermont could be put into the Democratic column. Vermont Democrats got behind Fred C. Martin, who was well-known in the Green Mountain State. Campaign money flowed freely from Washington, D.C., into Vermont on behalf of Martin’s senatorial campaign. Oddly, those called on to speak on behalf of Fred Martin were southerners like Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky. James A. Farley, who simultaneously was postmaster general in the Roosevelt administration and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, spoke on the radio to boost Martin’s campaign.
Senator Austin ran hard, and at every campaign stop he damned the New Deal and denounced federal “domination.” Austin quoted Revolutionary War patriot Ethan Allen. “I am as determined to preserve the independence of Vermont as Congress is that of the United States,” Austin thundered. “Rather than fail, I will retire with my Green Mountain boys into the caverns of the mountains and wage war on all mankind.”
The Democrats fell short. Senator Austin won 67,146 votes to 63,632 votes for Fred Martin. While the results were close, considering how much money, time and effort had been devoted to the race by the Roosevelt administration, it was a great personal victory for Warren Austin.
Senator Austin traveled during his time in the U.S. Senate, going to the Philippines in 1935, Palestine in 1935, and to Puerto Rico in 1937 to study the judicial system there. Austin was also named an advisor to the American delegation to the Inter-American Conference on the problems of war and peace, which was held in Mexico City in 1945.
Throughout his time in the United States Senate, Warren Austin was a conservative and a critic of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, but he differed from many in Congress inasmuch as he was an internationalist in matters of foreign policy. That was somewhat unusual at the time, as the vast majority of the American people had become quite wary of foreign entanglements following the First World War. Henry Luce’s TIME magazine, perhaps the most persistent internationalist voice in the country, routinely sniffed its disdain of the powerful “isolationist” bloc in Congress, which encompassed influential legislators of both political parties. Some conservatives and liberals were staunch noninterventionists and hellbent on doing everything within their power to keep America out of another foreign war. That became increasingly more difficult with the territorial ambitions of the Empire of Japan in the Far East and the rise of Adolf Hitler, who was demanding more “living room” for Germany.
Stalwart progressives like Republican William Borah of Idaho and progressive Democrat Burton K. Wheeler of Montana were both fervently noninterventionists and routinely labeled as rabid isolationists by the internationalist media of the time. Senator David I. Walsh of Massachusetts, the first Irish Catholic Democrat ever to be elected governor and United States senator from the Bay State, was anti-British and avidly against American involvement in another war. Senator Walsh chaired the Naval Affairs Committee in the Senate. Robert A. Taft, son of President William Howard Taft, and a deeply conservative member of the Senate, was also considered an isolationist, as was the equally conservative Senator C. Wayland Brooks of Illinois. Brooks was derided by some as the “senator from the Tribune,” meaning Colonel Robert McCormick’s profoundly noninterventionist Chicago Tribune, which could rightly be considered the voice of noninterventionism in the American Midwest. Indeed, the McCormick family owned and operated what President Franklin Roosevelt decried as “the three furies of isolationism” in America. Cousins Joseph Medill Patterson and Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson owned and published the New York Daily News and the Washington Herald, respectively. Joe Patterson’s Daily News enjoyed the largest circulation of any newspaper in America.
There was a divide in both political parties, according to geography, as far as internationalism and isolationism were concerned. The South was then totally dominated by the Democratic Party. A few states, like Tennessee and Virginia, had pockets of Republicanism here and there, but statewide elections were very much one-party affairs. Southern members of Congress were almost entirely in favor of President Roosevelt’s foreign policy, as were many Eastern Republicans. Likewise, both Republicans and Democrats representing the Midwest were highly suspicious of foreign involvement and strongly supported the various Neutrality Acts passed by Congress during the decade of the 1930s. So, too, were many Westerners more isolationist than internationally minded. Indeed, one of the most profoundly noninterventionist members of Congress was California’s Senator Hiram Johnson.
Warren Austin also was renowned for his strong sense of ethics and integrity in a town where both were oftentimes in short supply. One Washington reporter once complained Austin was “the only Senator I could never get to tell me, even in the strictest confidence, what happened in an executive committee session.”
While a conservative, Senator Warren Austin was also an Easterner, and his own point of view was not surprisingly in line with his part of the country and the people he represented.
© 2026 Ray Hill
