Utopias Without Borders

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. Today we’re looking at Utopian thinking throughout American history.

ED: That word utopia might conjure up images of wide eyed visionaries venturing into the wilderness on a quest for a perfect society. But now we have the story of a man for whom a better world was never some distant theoretical possibility. As Scott Gurian reports, Garry Davis spent his life trying to convince people that utopia already existed.

BRIAN: Growing up in the 1930s and ’40s, Garry Davis had a lot going for him. He came from a wealthy family, was the son of a famous bandleader, and was a rising Broadway star who once performed as an understudy to actor Danny Kaye. Then came World War II. Flying bombing raids over Brandenburg and losing his older brother Bud to a German torpedo caused him to seriously rethink his role, not just as a participant in the war, but as an American citizen.

GARRY DAVIS: And that’s why I said there is something intrinsically wrong with society, period. And I’m not going to play this game anymore. So, that started me on a whole wave of thinking about how not to play the game without going to a desert island and canceling out.

BRIAN: You concluded that the only way to prevent future wars was for people to remove themselves from the system that creates the us versus them mentality, and instead commit to the idea of world citizenship. So, on May 25, 1948, at the age of 26, Davis traveled to Paris, walked into the US Embassy, and renounced his allegiance to the United States of America.

GARRY DAVIS: It was a kind of a thrill. It was very exciting wondering what’s going to happen now. What’s the French government going to say?

BRIAN: No longer a citizen of any country, Davis was now undocumented, so French officials told him to leave, but since he turned in his American passport, traveling anywhere was kind of difficult. As it happened, right around this time, the newly formed United Nations was holding a meeting in the center of Paris.

The theater where the delegates gathered was temporarily declared international territory, so Davis headed over there with some friends and camped out on the front steps. They seized the chance to call for world citizenship as a path to lasting peace, something the UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations, had failed to uphold.

MALE SPEAKER: An incident that reflects the mood of an impatient world interrupts proceedings at the United Nations assembly.

GARRY DAVIS: All the press was there in the balcony boxes, and we had a huge lights, and we had the balcony box wired up so that it could take our speech.

MALE SPEAKER: I interrupt. I interrupt.

MALE SPEAKER: All the delegates were on the floor. Eleanor Roosevelt, with her headphones. They were wondering where this voice is coming from.

MALE SPEAKER: Mr. Vichinsky looks on as the interrupter, Garry Davis, self-styled first citizen of the world is hustled out.

GARRY DAVIS: –speak to the people. Shall I speak? Will you let me?

I said, I interrupt in the name of the people, not represented here. The nations you represent divide us, separate us, and lead us to the abyss of World War III. What we need is one government for one world, and if you don’t do it, step aside. We’re going to do it ourselves. We had screaming headlines the next day.

BRIAN: Those headlines caught the attention of people around the world. Authors and intellectuals like Richard Wright, Albert Camus, and even Albert Einstein spoke out on Davis’ behalf, and he began receiving letters from supporters interested in joining his movement. So he got to work creating something they could actually join.

[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]

GARRY DAVIS: We set up a registry of world citizens. We hired a hall, and we started issuing a world citizen card. We were IDing a whole new constituency, a world constituency. It was a new language.

BRIAN: Though Garry Davis was now officially a man without a country, he still considered New York his home, so he returned to the US Embassy and convinced authorities to let him migrate back to his native land. After he arrived, he got married, went back to acting, and tried returning to his prewar life. But his heart just wasn’t in it.

GARRY DAVIS: I left the top show in Broadway after three days of rehearsal, and I told the producer, I’m sorry, Horace, I can’t be in this show, because I’ve got to work for world peace.

BRIAN: In 1953, Davis officially created the World Government of World Citizens, which began issuing birth certificates, political asylum cards, and passports in seven languages, including the made up universal language of Esperanto. The movement took inspiration from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a UN document describing the dignity and freedoms to which all individuals are entitled.

Davis read to me a statement he issued at the time. It imagined a better world, where the focus shifted from nations to people, with global institutions preserving the peace.

GARRY DAVIS: In the absence of an international government, our world politically is now a naked anarchy. Two global wars have shown that as long as two or more powerful, sovereign nation states regard their own national laws supreme–

BRIAN: Today the world government has registered more than a million and a half members, and issued about five million legal documents, including passports to political refugees. Last summer Davis sent a world passport the NSA leader Edward Snowden, whose US passport had been revoked.

Though world citizenship still hasn’t caught on as widely as its supporters would like, the group says it has evidence that more than 150 countries have actually accepted its passports on a case by case basis.

Garry Davis’ view of political boundaries was not that they shouldn’t exist, but rather that they don’t exist. He said they’re a fiction we’ve all come to believe in, and by placing himself outside the realm of the nation state, thereby rendered them obsolete. For Davis, the idea of world government was not so far out, Utopian vision, but rather an idea rooted in pragmatism. He said we’re all world citizens, but it’s up to each of us whether we want to recognize that fact.

ED: Garry Davis passed away in July the age of 91. This story was produced by reporter Scott Gurian.