Henry L. Stimson

Henry L. Stimson served as Secretary of State under Herbert Hoover from 1929 to 1933. A New York lawyer associated with Elihu Root, he had been secretary of war under William Howard Taft, a wartime Army officer, a special envoy in Latin America, and governor general of the Philippines. His career combined legal diplomacy with the administration of American military and colonial authority. ¹

Stimson led the American delegation to the 1930 London Naval Conference, which extended efforts to limit competition in naval armaments. He also participated in the Geneva disarmament negotiations of 1932. The worldwide economic crisis and growing international conflict weakened the prospects for these efforts to sustain a stable order. ¹

Japan’s occupation of Manchuria produced the policy associated most closely with his name. In 1932 Stimson declared that the United States would not recognize territorial or treaty changes imposed through aggression. The Stimson Doctrine asserted a legal objection to conquest, but did not reverse Japanese control of Manchuria. After leaving the department, he returned as secretary of war under Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. He helped supervise the atomic bomb program and advised Harry S. Truman during the final months of the war with Japan. That later service gave him a role in decisions very different from the nonrecognition and disarmament diplomacy of his secretaryship. ¹