David Hunter Miller

Background

David Hunter Miller was born on January 2, 1875, in New York City. He was the son of Walter Thomas Miller, president of Walter T. Miller and Company and a founder and treasurer of the New York Cotton Exchange, and of Christiana Wylie.

Education

Miller was educated at public and private schools in New York City. After service as a second lieutenant in the Ninth New York Volunteer Infantry in the summer and fall of 1898, Miller became a partner in the family firm. In 1904, Miller turned to the study and practice of law. In 1910 and 1911, respectively, he received LL. B. and LL. M. degrees from the New York Law School; and in 1915, with Gordon Auchincloss as his partner, he established a law firm in New York.

Career

When the nation entered World War I, Auchincloss, the son-in-law of Colonel E. M. House, became assistant counselor to the State Department, and Miller participated in departmental affairs. On June 17, 1917, Secretary Robert Lansing named him special assistant with a monthly salary of $1. His duties primarily involved drafting legal documents for Colonel House. In July 1918, Miller and House presented Wilson with suggestions for a postwar international organization, and thereafter Miller was intimately involved in composing the Covenant of the League of Nations. As technical adviser to the American delegation in Paris, he was the chief United States negotiator on details of the League of Nations' constitution. Miller and Sir Cecil Hurst drafted a covenant that served as the basis for deliberations of the Commission on the League, and it was they who revised the document into the form that was finally approved on April 28, 1919. From the beginning Miller agreed with Wilson that the Covenant should be part of the treaty of peace. He advocated a clause recognizing the Monroe Doctrine that was eventually added under pressure from the U. S. Senate. He helped defeat British attempts to tie provisions for revision of the treaty to the guarantee of mutual security, but he failed to persuade Wilson that that guarantee should be a negative, rather than a positive, obligation. Nonetheless, Miller endorsed the positive guarantee as embodied in the Covenant's controversial Article X "The bogey of inconsistency, " he later wrote, "is nothing to me. " Miller participated in discussions in Paris on various other issues, including an international labor convention a project he hoped would help prevent socialrevolutions such as the one in Russia.

One of the staunchest opponents of normalizing relations with the Bolsheviks, Miller had a hand in planning the Hoover-Nansen mission that was to distribute humanitarian relief in the Soviet Union while undermining the Soviet regime. William C. Bullitt referred to Miller as "the blackest reactionary" in the delegation, blaming him personally for Wilson's ultimate refusal to recognize the Bolshevik government. With House, Miller supported Italy's demands for territory on the Adriatic coast, although he acknowledged that the secret treaty of London of 1915, by which Italy had been promised such territory as inducement to join the Allies against Austria-Hungary, had been invalidated by the Fourteen Points. The issue contributed to House's alienation from Wilson, which deepened when the colonel, again with Miller's support, urged the president to accept the Lodge reservations in order to secure Senate approval of the Treaty of Versailles. Miller returned to Washington in June 1919, and resigned from the State Department in October. Thereafter, he was one of the most vocal American supporters of the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles. In a newspaper debate, he challenged John Maynard Keynes's conclusions on the economic consequences of the peace. In 1921, he acted as legal adviserto the Weimar government in its unsuccessful claim to all of Upper Silesia following a treaty-mandated plebescite. Two years later he condemned the French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr Valley as a violation of the terms of the peace settlement. In 1922, Miller's law firm merged with another whose senior partner was Alton B. Parker, the Democratic candidate for president in 1904. Miller's political activities intensified at about this time. He led the effort in New York to win the 1924 Democratic presidential nomination for William G. McAdoo, and after that failed, he divided his time between partisan and international causes. Coauthor of the American plan that became the Geneva Protocol of 1925, he constantly maintained that the United States could not be disinterested in Europe and that the League of Nations, even without American help, was the best guardian of peace. In 1929, Miller became editor of treaties in the State Department, a post he accepted at considerable financial sacrifice. The next year he represented Washington at the Nationality Conference in The Hague, and in 1931, he assumed additional duties as historical adviser to the State Department, a post he held until 1938. Miller retired from public life in 1944, having edited eight published volumes of treaties. He died in Washington, D. C.

Achievements

• Miller was an original member of Inquiry, the group of experts who were to formulate the American peace program. He was treasurer of the panel and one of its specialists in international law, although he lacked experience or training in that field. He contributed to a memorandum on war aims on which the territorial provisions of President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points address of January 1918 were based.

Works

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  • Opinion on the Question of Upper Silesia: Written at the Request of the Government of Germany (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Opinion on the Question of Upper Silesia: Wr...)

  • Secret Statutes of the United States: A Memorandum (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Secret Statutes of the United States: A Memo...)

  • The New Administration: An Address Delivered Before the Women's Democratic Association of Minnesota, May 5, 1921 (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The New Administration: An Address Delivered...)

  • George Washington, an address delivered before the Legislature of New Jersey;

    (This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)

  • International Relations of Labor; Lectures Delivered Before the Summer School of Theology of Harvard University, June, 1920

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • The Peace Pact Of Paris

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • The Drafting of the Covenant (2 Volume Set) (English, French, German and Italian Edition)

Connections

On April 25, 1900, Miller married Sarah Whipple Simmons; they had no children.

Father:

Walter Thomas Miller

Mother:

Christiana Wylie

Wife:

Sarah Whipple Simmons

References

• Letters from the Paris Peace Conference.
• James T. Shotwell and the rise of internationalism in America
• Anglo-American Relations At The Paris Peace Conference Of 1919
• Italy At The Paris Peace Conference