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Biography
Cordell Hull (1871–1955) was born in 1871, near Byrdstown, Tennessee. He graduated from the Cumberland School of Law and served in the Tennessee legislature before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1906 and then, in 1930, to the U.S. Senate. In 1933 President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Hull as secretary of state. He would be the longest-serving secretary in the nation’s history.
President Roosevelt was actively involved in U.S. foreign policy and typically represented the United States at the major conferences with Allied leaders during World War II. Nevertheless Hull had many notable achievements. Among them was his strong support for President Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy toward Latin America. At the December 1933 meeting of the International Conference of American States in Montevideo, Uruguay, he announced that the U.S. government would henceforth observe a policy of “nonintervention” in the affairs of its neighbors in the Western Hemisphere. Hull believed that free trade promoted international peace and prosperity, and in 1934 he helped secure passage of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA), which gave the president the authority to personally negotiate bilateral tariff reductions. Most notably, Hull also championed the creation of the United Nations, and his staff drafted its charter. For these efforts Hull was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945.