He played an instrumental role in the creation of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 1919, as well as for his influence in promoting inclusion of a declaration of human rights in the UN Charter.

[2] To underwrite studies overseas, he began writing articles for the Encyclopædia Britannica; soon, he became managing editor of its eleventh edition.

This work provided a good salary, honed his organizational skills, and led to his meeting people like Bertrand Russell and Henry Ford.

[2] He met with the French Minister of Foreign Affairs Aristide Briand in Paris and suggested that a bilateral treaty be negotiated that would outlaw war between the U.S. and France.

[1] In 1939, William Allen White, editor of the Gazette of Emporia, Kansas, along with Eichelberger and Shotwell, established the Non-Partisan Committee for Peace Through Revision of the Neutrality Acts.

The CSOP conducted studies, held popular radio discussion shows and through national and local affiliates became a powerful engine of mass education on behalf of collective security.

[1] In May 1944, he joined a group that published a "Design for the Charter of the General International Organization" to succeed the ruined League of Nations.

The United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China all issued proposals after the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in October 1944 of that year that closely paralleled those of the "Shotwell Commission".

In summarizing his career, Lisa Anderson (then dean of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs) wrote: James T. Shotwell represented the first generation of genuinely cosmopolitan American policy intellectuals.

His obituary in the New York Times observed that he was "among the most respected and dedicated protagonists of internationalism in the United States," a man who saw "the world as a whole."

In many respects, this vision was to remain a minority view in the United States, particularly as the Cold War consumed the second half of the twentieth century, and Shotwell was well aware of the obstacles to its realization.

Reflecting on the impact of what he called "the great communist controversy" on the United Nations, he wrote that "the full and adequate implementation of the revolutionary concept in the Charter may be long delayed."