Cordell Hull

Cordell Hull was an American statesman who served as United States Secretary of State from 1933 to 1944, the longest tenure in that office, and was awarded the 1945 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in establishing the United Nations. He was born on October 2, 1871, in a log cabin in Olympus, Pickett County, Tennessee, the third of five sons of William Paschal Hull, a farmer and lumberman, and Mary Elizabeth Riley. He grew up in the Cumberland Mountains of north-central Tennessee.

He attended local schools and the National Normal University in Lebanon, Ohio, then earned a law degree from Cumberland University in 1891. Admitted to the Tennessee bar at twenty, he served in the state legislature from 1893 to 1897, fought as a captain in the Spanish-American War, and sat as a circuit-court judge before winning election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1906.

In Congress he wrote the income-tax laws of 1913 and 1916 and the federal estate-tax law of 1916, and after a single term in the U.S. Senate from 1931 was named Secretary of State by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in March 1933.

He championed reciprocal trade agreements, the Good Neighbor policy toward Latin America, and resistance to Axis aggression. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he led American diplomacy through the Second World War and helped draft the United Nations Charter, for which Roosevelt called him "the Father of the United Nations." Ill health forced his resignation in November 1944. He died on July 23, 1955, in Bethesda, Maryland, aged 83.

The name Cordell is an English masculine given name from an Old French occupational surname meaning "maker of cord or rope," worn by him through a life that knit nations together.