Let's Take Our Country Back

NORTH CAROLINA MAN RESPONSIBLE FOR NORTH CAROLINA BEING DRAWN INTO WORLD GOVERNMENT Robert Lee Humber (1898-1970) — of Greenville, Pitt County, N.C. Born in Greenville, Pitt County, N.C., May 30, 1898. Son of Robert Lee Humber and Lena Clyde (Davis) Humber; married, October 16, 1929, to Lucie Berthier. Democrat. Served in the U.S. Army during World War I; Rhodes scholar; lawyer; alternate delegate to Democratic National Convention from North Carolina, 1956; member of North Carolina state senate 5th District, 1959-64. Baptist. Member, Phi Beta Kappa; Omicron Delta Kappa; Phi Delta Phi; Sigma Phi Epsilon; United World Federalists; American Legion; Rotary; American Bar Association; American Judicature Society; American Academy of Political and Social Science; Farm Bureau; National Trust for Historic Preservation. Died November 10, 1970. Interment at Cherry Hill Cemetery, Greenville, N.C. ************************************************************************ THE NORTH CAROLINA RESOLUTION OF 1941 In November 1791 - after deliberating carefully and getting assurances that the US Constitution would be amended by a Bill of Rights - citizens of the newly independent State of North Carolina ratified it and joined the US federation, some 16 months after citizens of eleven of the thirteen original American states had brought the American Federation into existence by transferring some powers to the new federal government 150 years later, in 1941, thanks to the farsighted Robert Humber, Dean of the University of North Carolina Law School, the state House of Representatives unanimously and the Senate by a 45-5 vote passed the following Joint Resolution for a Declaration of the Federation of the World. Man, the source of all political authority, is a manifold political being. He is a citizen of several communities: the city, the state, the nation and the world. To each of these communities he owes inalienable obligations and from each he receives enduring benefits. Communities may exist for a time without being incorporated, but under stress of adversity, they disintegrate unless legally organized. Slowly but purposefully over the centuries, civilization has united the world...This [international] community has no government, and communitites without a government perish... The ceaseless changes wrought in human society by science, industry and economics, as well as by spiritual, social and intellectual forces which impregnate all cultures, make political and geographical isolation of nations hereafter impossible. The organic life of the human race is at last indissolubly unified and can never be severed, but it must be politically ordained and made subject to law. Only a governmentcapable of discharging all the functions of sovereignty in the executive, legislative and judicial spheres can accomplish such a task. Civilization now requires laws, in the place of treaties, as instruments to regulate commerce between peoples... History has revealed but one principle by which free peoples, inhabiting extensive territories, can unite under one government without imparing their local autonomy. That principle is federation, whose virtue preserves the whole without destroying its parts and strengthens its parts without jeopardizing the whole. Federation vitalizes all nations by endowing them with security and freedom to develop their respective cultures without menace of foreign domination...[Federation] renders unnecessary the further paralyzing expenditure of wealth for belligerent activity, and cancels through the ages the mortgages of war against the fortunes and services of men...It apprehends the entire human race as one family, human beings everywhere as brothers and all nations as component parts of an indivisible community. There is no alternative to the federation of all nations except endless war. No substitute to the Federation of the World can organize the international community on the basis of freedom and permanent peace. According to the Center for Defense Information there were 38 major conflicts ongoing throughout the world at the beginning of the year 2000] North Carolina's "Humber Resolution" was the first of a series of similar resolutions passed by 40 of the American states between 1941 and 1951. (See Joseph Baratta What Happened to One World: A History of the Idea of World Federal Government , Westport, CT: Praeger Press, forthcoming.) For the California Resolution passed by the legislature after a campaign led by Alan Cranston of the United World Federalists of California in 1949, see the Spring 1999 TDWF.