FORMER CHILD STAR SHINES FOR EARTH

 

Shirley Temple Black, U.S. delegate to the U.N., 1969.

Fifty years ago this month, a former child star known the world over, her once-golden curls grown dark and tamed into a business-like bun, stepped onto an international stage to address the problem of human pressure on the environment.

Speaking as the U.S. delegate to the first-ever United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Shirley Temple Black urged her listeners in the final plenary session to unite with empathy and humility to restore the world for future generations. “We are trustees of the earth they will inherit.”

“[Humanity],” she continued, “with the wonderful and terrible powers that science has put in [our] hands, stands in greater need than ever before of an ethic to guide [our] steps,” she said. “The environmental warnings we see around us are warnings not only to our engineering skills, but to our spirits.”

The road to Black’s triumphant performance on that diplomatic stage in 1972 was a bumpy one, despite, or perhaps in part because of, her worldwide fame as a child actor beginning at age three in the 1930s. As she herself put it in an excerpt from an unpublished memoir given to the Smithsonian by her heirs, “The name, Shirley Temple, still opens doors for me. But Shirley Temple Black still has to perform, or the doors will close.”

President Richard Nixon had named her the U.S. delegate to the U.N. in the fall of 1969, just as the organization was gearing up for the big international conference on the environment in Stockholm to take place in 1972. Black threw herself into the planning wholeheartedly, recognizing the importance of the issues. But she quickly found herself sidelined by chauvinist attitudes at all levels—by higher ups at the U.N. who “neglected” to send her crucial data on time and, worse, by members of her own team.

At one planning meeting, Christian Herter, director of the State Department’s Office of Environmental Affairs, whose role was vice chair of the U.S. delegation in Stockholm, made his feelings clear. According to Black’s memoir, “He had ignored me after the introductions, but finally turned and said with a patronizing smile, ‘And now, Madam Deputy, will you kindly take our requests for coffee? You can bring it from the machine down the hall.’”

You younger folks may be shocked, but this was typical for the time, no matter how far a woman had risen in the ranks. Yet Black handled the insult—like all the others—with grace. As she wrote, “Macho attitudes usually fall victim to hard work, timely humor, and an absence of resentment.” Remember, this was 50 years ago. We ladies weren’t allowed to punch our aggressors in the nose.

Black’s approach—and her overwhelming charm—worked. At the conference, she worked the crowd of 1200 attendees from 113 of the U.N’s 132 countries deftly, making particular allies among developing countries. She was skilled at managing press conferences, using her acting skills to maintain calm, even when confronted with difficult questions about the U.S. and Vietnam, and she argued for compromise “midway between passion and timidity,” as she put it, despite the heated rhetoric of the Chinese delegation, which blamed U.S. industry for much of the world’s pollution.

In the end, the Stockholm conference was a success, establishing the first parameters for global environmental cooperation which steered all international diplomacy around the issue leading up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janerio. That in turn ultimately led to the Paris Agreement, the global treaty on climate change adopted by most countries in 2015. The Stockholm conference also had more concrete results, in establishing the United Nations Environmental Program and proposing an immediate ten-year moratorium on commercial whaling (a moratorium that has since been extended).

Shirley Temple Black was one of few women delegates to that first environmental conference. Now notable women like Patricia Espinosa of Mexico and Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica have made their mark on the international environmental scene. At the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow last year, one third of all party representatives were women. Not yet representative of the world’s population, but better than it was in 1972, when Shirley Temple Black overcame all odds to perform on a new and much bigger stage.

Cheers, Donna

Information for this post provided by: “Shirley Temple Black's Remarkable Second Act as a Diplomat,” by Claudia Kalb, Smithsonian Magazine, June, 2022. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/shirley-temple-black-second-act-diplomat-180980038/