Early in September 1943, United States Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, a Republican from Grand Rapids, chaired a meeting of fellow GOP luminaries at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. Governor Thomas Dewey of New York and Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio were among the major players who attended. The goal? Develop a foreign policy position for the party’s 1944 platform. But the result was even greater. This meeting would lay the foundation for Republican congressional support of the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Two nationally renowned West Michigan historians, Hank Meijer and Richard Norton Smith, will explore the seventy-fifth anniversary of this critical moment in the history of United States foreign policy.

Learn more about the award-winning National History Day project on Senator Arthur Vandenberg, developed by Kyle Korte and Claire Parish of Forest Hills Eastern High School, by viewing their website.

(Image courtesy of the Boston Public Library, via Digital Commonwealth: bit.ly/2uuMmeg.)