Frank Billings Kellogg

Frank Billings Kellog 1912

Frank Billings Kellogg (born  December 22, 1856 in Potsdam , St. Lawrence County , New York , †  December 21, 1937 , Saint Paul , Minnesota ) was an American politician , lawyer and diplomat . As a negotiating partner in the Briand-Kellogg Pact , a mutual renunciation of war between states , he received the Nobel Peace Prize for 1929, which was not awarded until 1930.

Life

Early years and education

Frank Billings Kellogg grew up in Minnesota and enjoyed a rather superficial education in a country school. While studying law in Rochester, Minnesota , he worked as a farm hand and / or janitor. At the age of 21 he passed his exams in 1877 and was admitted to the bar. He practiced in Saint Paul as a lawyer for several industrial companies and banks. He became known through a procedure commissioned by US President Theodore Roosevelt , in which the government demanded the unbundling of the Standard Oil Trust on the basis of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and was also right through a federal court decision on May 5, 1911. In 1912 he became president of the American Bar Association for two years and supported Roosevelt in the presidential election .

Political career

In 1916, Frank Kellogg was elected to the United States Senate for the Republican Party as representative of Minnesota and remained there for an electoral term until 1923. There he expressed his concerns about the plan to form a League of Nations . Although he did not reject it, he had massive concerns about the form of implementation. He supported President Woodrow Wilson's declaration of war against the German Reich in 1917 .

From 1923 Kellogg worked as a diplomat in South America and as a US ambassador to Great Britain . In 1924 he supported the implementation of the Dawes Plan and reached an agreement on the controversial Ruhr area issue between Germany and France , which culminated in the Ruhr occupation . In 1925 Kellogg became Secretary of State of the United States in the cabinet of Calvin Coolidge and remained so until 1929. In this position he tried to defuse relations with Mexico ; towards China he maintained a form of non-interference policy. However, the government of the Kuomintang party was confirmed by the conclusion of a customs agreement on customs autonomy.

The Briand-Kellogg Pact

Frank Billings Kellogg, 1930

In 1927, French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand Frank Billings Kellogg proposed an American-French treaty outlawing war as a means of international politics. This Briand-Kellogg Pact was signed and accepted in a modified form on August 27, 1928 by 15 states. In this context, Kellogg called for increasing international armament. By signing the treaty, the states undertook to renounce war as a political means and were encouraged to seek peaceful solutions in the event of conflicts. By 1929, 63 states had joined the pact and the foundations for international law were created, which were later incorporated into the statutes when the United Nations was founded. The practical enforceability of the treaty proved to be unsuitable, however, as neither the occupation of Manchuria by Japan in 1931 , the occupation of Ethiopia by Italy in 1935 and finally the Second World War could be prevented. In the pact there was neither a definition of a war of aggression nor sanctions against states that broke the pact.

From 1930 to 1935 Kellogg was a member of the Permanent International Court of Justice in The Hague . He died in Saint Paul in 1937 at the age of 80.

Since 1931 he was an elected member of the American Philosophical Society .

literature

• Robert H. Ferrel: Walter Q. Gresham. In: Edward S. Mihalkanin (Ed.): American Statesmen: Secretaries of State from John Jay to Colin Powell . Greenwood Publishing 2004, ISBN 978-0-313-30828-4 , pp. 293-298.
• Bernhard Kupfer: Lexicon of Nobel Prize Winners. Patmos Verlag Düsseldorf 2001.

Web links

Commons : Frank B. Kellogg  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1929 award ceremony for Frank Billings Kellog
• Newspaper article about Frank Billings Kellogg in the press kit 20th Century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Frank Billings Kellogg in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)
• Frank B. Kellogg in the Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ LInfo.org: The Sherman Antitrust Act , accessed May 30, 2014
2. ↑ See Project Syndicate: A Roosevelt Moment for America's Megabanks? , Simon Johnson , July 14, 2010
3. ^ Member History: Frank B. Kellogg. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 20, 2018 .