The United Nations and Its Agencies

The United Nations emerged directly from the failure of its interwar predecessor, the League of Nations, founded in 1920 under the Covenant appended to the Treaty of Versailles and fatally weakened by the absence of the United States, which never ratified membership after the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and by its inability to stop Japanese aggression in Manchuria (1931), Italian aggression in Ethiopia (1935), or German expansion under Hitler. Franklin D. Roosevelt coined the term "United Nations" in the Declaration by United Nations, signed on January 1, 1942, by 26 Allied states pledging to continue fighting the Axis powers. The organization's founding charter was drafted at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference (Washington, D.C., August–October 1944) and finalized at the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco, where delegates from 50 states signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945; Poland, unable to attend, added its signature later as the 51st founding member. The Charter entered into force on October 24, 1945, after ratification by the five prospective permanent Security Council members and a majority of other signatories — a date now marked annually as United Nations Day.