Herbert Pell

Herbert Pell

Herbert Claiborne Pell Jr. (born February 16, 1884 in New York City , †  July 17, 1961 in Munich ) was an American diplomat and politician of the Progressive Party and the Democratic Party , which, among other things, the state of New York in the US House of Representatives .

Life

Pell came from a politically influential family. His great-grandfather, John Francis Hamtramck Claiborne, was a Congressman for the state of Mississippi . He was also the great-great-nephew of William CC Claiborne , a governor of Mississippi and Louisiana, and the United States Senator for Louisiana, and the great-great-nephew of Nathaniel Claiborne , who was a congressman for Virginia . His own son Claiborne Pell was, after all, the US Democratic Senator for Rhode Island for 36 years .

Herbert Pell studied after attending the Pomfret School in Connecticut at Harvard University and Columbia University . He began his political career first in the Progressive Party and was in this between 1912 and 1914 a member of the party committee in Orange County of New York State. He then moved to the Democratic Party and was elected to the US House of Representatives for it, where he represented the 17th congressional electoral district of New York from March 4, 1919 to March 3, 1921 . After he suffered an election defeat in 1920 and had to leave Congress , he was from July 1921 to January 1926 chairman of the Democratic Party Committee in New York State and 1924 delegate to the Democratic National Convention .

After that, Pell was occasionally a lecturer at Columbia University, Harvard University and other higher education institutions, and in 1936 Vice Chairman of the Democratic National Campaign Committee , which organized the successful re-election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1936 US presidential election .

He was then first on May 27, 1937 Ambassador of the United States in Portugal , before he was then on February 11, 1941 as the successor to John Flournoy Montgomery Ambassador to Hungary . He held this post until his resignation on November 30, 1942 after Hungary declared war and diplomatic relations were frozen . Pell later served as the US representative in the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) between August 1943 and January 1945 .

Background literature

• Leonard Baker: Brahmin in Revolt; A Biography of Herbert C. Pell . Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972
• Michael Steward Blayney: Diplomat and Humanist: The Diplomatic Career of Herbert Claiborne Pell . Ph.D. Dissertation , Washington State University, 1973
• Michael Steward Blayney: Democracy's Aristocrat: The Life of Herbert C. Pell . University Press of America. 1986

Web links

• Herbert Pell in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)
• Herbert Pell in the nndb (English)