Dawson's Atlantic Charter : penicillin for ALL

The most ringing and the most important word in the famous Atlantic Charter (the avowed war aims under which the Allies fought WWII and the document both the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were based upon) is surprisingly small .

That word is "all"  - a modest , homey stand-in for the big word Universal that is more normally found in such documents.

It is used a total of thirteen times in the very short (a few hundred words) Charter cum press release that was released in mid August 1941, after FDR and Churchill had both returned safely home from their secret first meeting onboard two ships in Atlantic Canada.

Both that little word "all" caught the ear and the imagination of humanitarian and internationally minded people all around the world during WWII.

Too bad that the Atlantic Charter was to be more honoured in the breach than in practise during that war.

But for a few transplanted Atlantic Canadians, the Atlantic Charter seemed to have particularly caught their imagination and inspired their lives.

Atlantic Charter inspires - not unexpectedly - Atlantic Canadians

I am thinking of people like John Humphrey , Lauchlin Currie and Martin Henry Dawson.

Humphrey obviously drew deep from the well of the Atlantic Charter when he prepared the first draft of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights which declared that all human beings share the same fundamental rights.

It may well have led Currie (then one of FDR's six original White House executive assistants) to more discuss freely important matters of state with fellow employees of the US government.

Employees who he might have suspected of sharing such information with all of America's allies , such as the Free French and the Russians.

In any case, Currie was heavily involved in the distribution of abundant American penicillin (mostly from John L Smith 's Pfizer plant)  to all the Allies and friendly Neutrals via the Lend Lease program he administrated through the Foreign Economic Administration (the FEA).

In Dawson's case , he had long sought to put the ethos of the Charter into actual practise by suggesting that the wartime distribution of penicillin could be a small but concrete and do-able example of the Charter at work in the real world.

He felt wartime penicillin could be -- and should be -- produced in such quantities that it could be provided to all who would die without it.

In his own hospital practise he had successfully saved the lives of many patients when his own government and his own profession said their invariably fatal illness was not a wartime military priority and that they should be left to die.

His rebel stance on behalf of 'doing the right thing' inspired a number of people (Floyd Odlum, Dante Colitti, Mae and John L Smith and Rudy Schulinger) who had either been his patients or had worked with him.

Together , this small band would all help make the mass production and mass distribution of wartime penicillin a reality - and also help make it about the only Good News story that ever did come out of WWII's Bad New war ....