Admired and beloved, scorned and reviled, influential, controversial, and timeless, Eleanor Roosevelt changed history. As first lady in wartime, she insisted on civil rights, liberty, democracy, and economic security for all. While President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was obligated to southern Democrats for support against mostly isolationist Republicans, and therefore needed to juggle, he allowed his wife a measure of independence regarding domestic issues. As educator, journalist, and prescient activist/public citizen, ER had a profound and enduring impact. She was a democratic socialist, or social democrat, who believed all change required a vigorous, informed, popular movement. She and her allies introduced the debates that offered hope for the future then and that still do today, as struggles for peace and freedom, democracy and justice, dignity and human rights continue worldwide.
She crossed class and race divides, built bridges and forged remarkable friendships. The playwright, journalist, and Republican congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce noted that ER was among the world’s “best loved women” for many reasons, but above all: “No woman has ever so comforted the distressed—or distressed the comfortable.” The African-American poet, activist, teacher, and priest Dr. Pauli Murray, called a “Firebrand” by ER, was inspired by their friendship and described how ER modeled what women could do. ER, she wrote, was not only “the First Lady of the World . . . she was also the Mother of the Women’s Revolution.”
Everywhere she went, ER offered hope. Her interest and concern empowered impoverished communities and healed the wounded. Tell me, she asked, what do you want, what do you need? She traveled to war zones as cannons blazed and bombs fell, visited hospitals in every state and factories and mines both at home and abroad. She identified with, and worked especially for, people in want, in need, in trouble.
In the miseries of those in pain or in need, she saw the sufferings of her own parents and sought to alleviate them. Forever hurt by her mother’s disregard, ER remained devoted to an illusory, alcoholic father. Her mother died at twenty-nine, when Eleanor was eight; her father died two years later at thirty-four. During these solemn years she lived with her grandmother and her difficult uncles and aunts. ER remained forever haunted by the ravages of alcoholism, a family disease.
At fifteen, she was released from her gloomy lonely childhood when she embarked on a three-year journey of study and travel under the tutelage of Marie Souvestre, brilliant headmistress of the Allenswood Academy in England. Souvestre recognized her many talents, and she experienced “attention and admiration” for the first time: “Attention and admiration were the things throughout all my childhood that I most wanted, because I was made to feel so conscious of the fact that nothing about me would attract attention or would bring me admiration!”
Her mother called her “Granny” when she was six and told her that since she was so “plain,” she had best develop “manners.” ER was haunted by those words of shame. But at Allenswood she learned self-worth, and it changed her life. French-speaking upon arrival, she was an ardent student and was encouraged to be creative, independent, and bold. She was a popular leader among her classmates and Marie Souvestre’s special favorite, and her confidence grew and her eager spirit flourished. She excelled at music and became proficient at playing the piano and violin. She quickly demonstrated her gift for languages by mastering German and Italian. She danced and played games and enjoyed sports and competition. To the end of her life, she credited her years at Allenswood with her sense of social responsibility and political activism, highlighted by the cultured cosmopolitan teachings of Marie Souvestre: “Whatever I have become since had its seed in those three years of contact with a liberal mind and a strong personality.”
Educators open doors, reveal paths to creativity, and inspire their students to reach for the best in themselves. After a lifetime of creativity and achievement, ER affirmed that “the happiest day of my life was the day I made the first field hockey team at Allenswood School.” Marie Souvestre had recognized ER’s profound gifts, encouraged her talents, and forever emboldened her quest for independence, competition, and a life of endless learning, passionate intensity, and surprising romance.
ER’s deepest affiliations were with people, those she met across the country and around the world. Her great friend Lady Stella Reading, who became director of the Women’s Voluntary Service in wartime London, observed most clearly that “Eleanor Roosevelt cares first and always for people.” They are her “interest . . . her hobby . . . her preoccupation . . . her every thought is for human beings. . . . I believe that the basis of all her strength is in her profound interest in them and her readiness to share with them the agony of experience and the fulfillment of destiny.”
She responded to public acclaim with self-deprecating humility. In 1939 more than a thousand activists and educators she admired honored her at New York’s Hotel Astor as an “apostle of good-will” whose wisdom helped “resolve the maladjustments in the social order.” Journalist Dorothy Thompson said “few people received universal admiration, and virtually nobody universal affection. . . . I doubt if any woman in the whole world is so beloved.” ER was grateful but bewildered. After all, she responded, she did nothing extraordinary, just what came to hand. Anyone would have done what she had done, she claimed, “given the opportunity.” Her modesty was an abiding quality. Indeed, her humility seemed to grow in proportion to the attention she received.
ER’s profound love of people, and for the world, was fortified by cherished friendships. While she accepted Marie Souvestre’s mantra “Never be bored, and you will never be boring,” she was easily bored and often impatient. Although loyal to those she loved, she was always open to promising new relationships. Over time, her life filled with several unusual romances.
ER returned to New York at eighteen, to “come out” into society—and in 1905, at twenty, she married her distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Their marriage, forged by love, was maintained by shared visions and political goals. To appreciate ER’s public life and many contributions, it is necessary to reconsider her formative years, which enabled her to conquer the loneliness she experienced during her childhood and the early years of her marriage. In 1918, stunned by evidence of her husband’s betrayal with her friend and social secretary Lucy Mercer, ER confronted depression, rejected suicide, and determined to live fully, with ardor and purpose. Her marriage became a generous partnership—mutually supportive, respectful, and affectionate.
Although ER never wrote the truth about her heart and erased Lucy Mercer and her husband’s subsequent infidelities from the public record, we know that over the decades she escorted all her friends to a sheltered green holly grove to view the statue in Rock Creek Cemetery she called Grief. Commissioned by Henry Adams, that sanctuary of mourning and resistance had been created by the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to honor Adams’s late wife Marian Hooper Adams, known as Clover. A pioneering woman photographer, linguist, and learned “bluestocking,” Clover was a gracious and popular hostess whose translations and research were important to Henry Adams’s early histories. He never credited her work, and forbade the sale of her acclaimed portraits when they were to be published. When she learned of Henry’s affair with her friend Elizabeth Cameron in 1885, she committed suicide by drinking photographic (prussic) acid.
For hours on end, alone and in despair, ER sat upon the stone benches, designed by Stanford White, to face that hooded robed figure and consider the lives of women. She felt connected to generations of Washington wives who had so much to contribute but who were so routinely ignored, belittled, and humiliated. In the quiet of that holly grove, ER moved beyond pain and suicide. She was thirty-five, and her five children ranged in age from three to thirteen. She did not want them to suffer the cold embrace of her own mother’s legacy and was determined to move beyond her frozen gloom. Her mentors offered examples of courage, understanding, and strength. There were alternative roads to hope, love, and forgiveness. She would forgive, but she would never forget. On her desk ER kept a copy of the poem Cecil Spring-Rice had written about the bronze statue she visited repeatedly over the years. It was among her bedside papers at her death:
O steadfast, deep, inexorable eyes
Set look inscrutable, nor smile nor frown!
O tranquil eyes that look so calmly down
Upon a world of passion and of lies!
Restored by her contemplations of grief, ER forged with FDR one of history’s most powerful and enduring partnerships. She understood his needs, forgave his transgressions, buried her jealousies, and embarked on her own independent career. She left the role of dutiful, submissive wife at the altar of Grief in Rock Creek Cemetery. She became an activist, journalist, radio commentator, and teacher, a woman with power who enjoyed manipulating power. FDR encouraged her independence and when he silenced her did so for reasons of state. Unfortunately, as World War II progressed, many reasons of state emerged—generally regarding issues of race and rescue about which ER cared profoundly, a primary theme of this volume.
Inspired by Marie Souvestre, ER became a great teacher and prolific writer, dedicated to continual learning and adventure. Indeed she identified herself as an adventurer. In 1960, she wrote:
Learning and living. But they are really the same thing, aren’t they? There is no experience from which you can’t learn something. . . . And the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
You can do that only if you have curiosity, an unquenchable spirit of adventure. The experience can have meaning only if you understand it . . . if you have arrived at some knowledge of yourself, a knowledge based on a deliberately and usually painfully acquired self-discipline which teaches you to cast out fear and frees you for the fullest experience of the adventure of life.
My own life has been crowded with activity and, best of all, with people. I have seen them wrest victory from defeat; I have seen them conquer fear and come out strong and free. . . .
I honor the human race. When it faces life head-on, it can almost remake itself. . . . In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.
ER’s life as an adventurer was enhanced by her partnership with FDR, and strengthened by her intimate circle of friends, who during the 1920s helped forge her public career and remained her primary and most trusted support network. Esther Lape, a scholar, activist, and director of the American Foundation who fought for the World Court, and her life partner, the international lawyer Elizabeth Read, were ER’s mentors and life-long confidantes. She trusted them, and her traveling companion and secretary Malvina “Tommy” Thompson, above all. Tommy, born in the Bronx, a stenographer with a grand sense of humor, became ER’s personal secretary in 1928. Dedicated to ER, she was brilliant, critical, perceptive, and fun to be with.
During the 1920s ER was intimate with Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman. They worked together to build women’s influence in the Democratic Party and created Val-Kill, where they lived. Cook ran the Val-Kill furniture factory and with Caroline O’Day purchased the Todhunter School for Girls, where Dickerman was headmistress and ER was associate principal and most popular teacher. ER was delighted by this friendship until it shattered bitterly in 1938. Tensions and jealousies had intensified as ER’s circle widened. Cook and Dickerman despised Earl Miller, the state trooper whom FDR assigned to protect his “Lady” in 1929 and who became ER’s great companion; and they could not stand the journalist Lorena Hickok, called “Hick,” who was ER’s primary companion after the 1932 election. Hick considered Cook and Dickerman “self-absorbed snobs” and for years refused to visit ER at Val-Kill. In 1938 Nancy Cook verbally assaulted ER with her fantasy that she and Dickerman had “created” ER and were responsible for her public achievements. Although her precise words are unknown, they wrecked the friendship. ER was devastated. The partnership that had sustained Val-Kill, which had once been filled with so much joy and creative energy, was now marked by an icy, emotionally empty divide. It was over. ER moved into what had been the furniture factory, remodeled so that Tommy and her beloved Henry Osthagen also had an apartment there. The school was sold; ER settled money on Cook and Dickerman and expected them to move, which they refused to do until 1947. For many years, toxic tensions at Val-Kill were all that remained of their once creative friendship.
Disillusioned by her former friends, ER plunged into gloom. Frantic with worry, Tommy telephoned Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read to report that ER was depressed, had taken to her bed, refused to see anybody, and simply turned “her face to the wall.” She slowly recovered as her steadies rallied around her. She returned to her work, grateful for her growing circle of friends, and moved on. Cook and Dickerman were invited to major events and family gatherings, but they remained beyond ER’s emotional scope. Always correct and courteous, but forevermore cold and uninterested, every event for them was agony. Tommy wrote to ER’s daughter, Anna, with relief that her mother’s life “is so completely changed she does not need to depend on them for any companionship.”
While she must have been aware of the jealousies that swirled around every aspect of her life and the rivalries that marked her many friendships, ER never overtly acknowledged them. There were tensions between Hick and Joe Lash; between Trude Pratt Lash and Elinor Morgenthau; and between Joe Lash and ER’s last great friend, the physician Dr. David Gurewitsch. Unpleasant upsets erupted among her children, and eventually Tommy disparaged almost everybody. In correspondence with her only confidantes, Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, Tommy was often privately critical. Once, when publicly critical, she wrote Trude with remorse about her irate words: certainly ER “has every right to invite anyone she wishes. I am a mean disagreeable old woman and can’t seem to do anything to improve myself.”
Happily, the live-in steadies of ER’s court—Tommy, Earl Miller, and Hick, her core emotional team in New York and the White House—trusted one another and seemed harmonious whenever they were together. Although their roles were different, and their contributions to ER’s heart and hearth varied, they each put ER’s needs first and promoted her interests. Always the squire, Earl sought to protect his Lady from “chiselers and users.” He personally vetted each new friend, every newcomer to ER’s table.
Orphaned and homeless at twelve, a wild child of many gifts, Earl Miller had wandered about, a self-creation: boxer, gymnast, and circus acrobat. He played the piano and sang, much as her father had. The most attentive and generous companion of her middle years, he delighted ER. With him she was carefree and frolicsome. Physically, Earl reenergized ER, coached her tennis game, taught her to shoot rifles and pistols, and gave her a chestnut mare named Dot, who became her favorite horse, the one she rode every morning for many years.
He introduced her to his show business friends, especially the innovative dancer Mayris Chaney, called Tiny, who quickly entered ER’s circle of intimates. In 1943, when ER moved into her Greenwich Village apartment on Washington Square, she refused John Golden’s offer of a piano, noting that she preferred to have Earl’s, “for purely sentimental reasons.”
There is no doubt that he brought restorative elements—music and athletics—to ER’s life, enhancing her joy in her leisure hours. But the scope of their relationship remains an ongoing mystery because their correspondence has disappeared—we have no diaries, memoirs, or letters for detail and nuance. There are rumors that a vast correspondence was purchased and then destroyed. In 1971 Joe Lash wrote that there were many ER letters to Earl “full of warmth and affection,” but he wrote in 1982 that they “have disappeared.”
The only other reference to this correspondence is in the 1947 divorce proceedings between Earl and his third wife, Simone Miller. After a packet of “endearing” letters was introduced and sealed by the court, Simone was awarded a considerable but undisclosed settlement and custody of their two children, Earl Jr., six, and Anna Eleanor, three. ER was godmother to both children but remained unnamed in the rather sensational divorce. On 13 January 1947 the New York Daily News columnist Ed Sullivan noted, “Navy Commander’s wife will rock the country if she names the co-respondent in her divorce action!!!”
Whatever the boundaries of their relationship, it was lifelong—and the subject of controversy and jealousy among ER’s closest friends.
As for Hick, early in their relationship, she and ER explored their feelings about romantic love and unbridled jealousy. “You are right,” ER once wrote her. “There are only two ways to beat jealousy. One is not to love enough so as not to care if someone gives you less than you thought they might, the other is to love so much that you are happy in their happiness and have no more room for thoughts of yourself, but that is only possible to the old!”
By 1945, those words defined ER’s feelings about FDR. She even forgave her mean-spirited cousin Laura (Polly) Delano for telling her about Lucy Mercer’s many visits with FDR. ER’s subsequent friendship with Polly, as revealed in William Turner Levy’s celebration of ER, is rather a puzzle. Indeed, the contours and depths of many of ER’s friendships remain incompletely known. She and Broadway producer John Golden met for lunch every week when ER was in New York. The financier Bernard Baruch was also one of her intimates and startled ER when he suggested they marry. She wrote Esther Lape, “Have you heard? Bernie has proposed marriage! Isn’t that controlling!” History awaits a biography of Esther Lape, who devoted her life to movements for world peace and universal health care.
Joseph Lash, whom she met when he was an activist in the American Youth Congress (AYC), also became a dear friend. He brought a keen intellect, vision, and passion to his relationship with ER, and their friendship deepened when he married Trude Pratt, whose many contributions to the first lady’s activism during the war years remained long unacknowledged.* ER’s deep interest in Trude and Joe Lash’s romance was in part about love across barriers and divides and the ways they bridged religious and national differences. Their relationship enhanced ER’s life, in many ways shaped her wartime efforts, and inspired her hopes for the future. During and after the war, ER and Trude worked together on projects for civil rights and human rights, and opposed discrimination in housing and segregation in the city’s schools. Their friendship endured many changes and was framed by daily morning phone conversations, wherever both of them happened to be.
ER’s quest for peace and justice expanded during the war years, 1939–1945, as she struggled to influence domestic and international policies, not merely as first lady but also as lobbyist, journalist, public critic, and activist power broker. Joseph Lash noted, during the 1984 centennial celebrations of her birth, that ER was “infinite”—and the impact of her work incalculable. “She went to great lengths to deny and conceal her influence,” Lash said, partly to avoid charges of “petticoat rule” from political enemies and thereby protect her husband. While she was pleased when FDR adopted her words and ideas, she was aware that he never publicly acknowledged “her role in his life.” She understood he needed her presence among the American people and abroad, where she became his goodwill ambassador for the United States and was beloved by so many.
However unacknowledged, history’s most active and controversial first lady appreciated their partnership and was grateful for every opportunity actually to influence policy from a position of power. Although many have observed the tensions between them, which grew during the war, others observed their mutual reliance. ER’s friend Justine Wise Polier emphasized the intensity of all they shared, their different observations, and fully explored disagreements. Polier was sometimes present at the White House dinners, or when FDR phoned his wife, and she observed their discussions during urgent crises. While they “both grew individually . . . in very different ways,” they grew together “throughout their marriage.” To the end, they confided in and trusted each other, even as they increasingly traveled separately.
ER was frequently hurt by FDR but remained loyal to his vision and respected his political acumen. They disagreed profoundly about strategies to end racial violence and segregation and also about efforts to rescue Europe’s endangered refugees. Whenever she was silenced, she deferred to his judgment about what was politically needed and feasible. She was his conscience, and she knew it.
Chester Bowles, director of the Office of Price Administration during the war and subsequently a member of Congress from Connecticut and ambassador to India, was close to ER, whom he credited for his political career. Bowles agreed with Polier about the increasingly tense Roosevelt partnership but concluded that ER retained an enduring influence. ER told Bowles that when FDR traveled, she generally spoke to him on the telephone each morning: “I have learned by experience to recognize the point at which the President’s patience is about to give out and he will begin to scold me. At that moment I hurriedly say Franklin, my car is waiting, I must be on my way, I shall call you again tomorrow.”
Bowles believed the views and ideas of FDR’s “remarkable wife” were found throughout his policies and speeches. ER, he wrote, “deserved a major share of credit for all that he succeeded in doing. She helped bring to the surface his compassion, his concern for people and for human dignity. . . . She brought the American people to him and encouraged him to give himself to the people.”
ER was a proud card-carrying member of the Newspaper Guild. She brought union members, both rank-and-file and officers, into the White House to dine and to meet the president, and she encouraged them to use their meetings to lobby, agitate, and make their causes known. After one White House weekend, a notable unionist was interviewed. She recounted that she had awakened in the middle of the night, stunned by her surroundings: “Imagine me Feigele Shapiro, sleeping in Lincoln’s bed.”
ER’s ties to her labor colleagues remained strong during the years on the scholarship committee of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL). Rose Schneiderman of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) was “like a sister,” according to the historian Brigid O’Farrell; ILGWU head David Dubinsky was a good friend, and United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther was “like a beloved son.”
ER believed union rights, civil rights, and human rights would help create a peaceful world defined by economic security, housing, health, and freedom for all humanity. She lived in service to these ideals. But today, seventy years after the end of World War II, as we embark on a new era of intensified racism and conflict, ER’s vision remains embattled. To reconsider her efforts, to review what she considered at stake in our fight for liberty, dignity, and security, is to reignite hope and recall notable successes. Throughout the 1940s she helped young interned Japanese-Americans leave their camps to attend schools, colleges, and universities, and she worked for their right, women and men, to enlist in the military. On Easter Sunday 1943, after visits to the Gila River and other Japanese internment camps, she changed public opinion by her columns.
Throughout the war, ER agitated for black recruits and nurses in all services and for an end to the most discriminatory segregation practices—at public events, in officers’ clubs and dining halls, and on public transportation. Her enthusiasm for the skills of the Tuskegee pilot Charles Alfred Anderson, with whom she flew, resulted in the successful training and deployment of more than 990 Tuskegee Airmen. Throughout the war she monitored the activities of the heroic black fighter pilots, who were finally sent into combat in April 1943 after she protested their prolonged idleness.*
ER also lobbied for the full participation of black and white women in the military. In 1944, when James Forrestal replaced Frank Knox as secretary of the navy, black women were finally accepted into the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). Two were selected for officer’s training—ER’s student activist friend Harriet Ida Pickens, daughter of NAACP officer William Pickens, and Hunter College graduate and social worker Frances Wills Thorpe.*
Thurgood Marshall, who became director of the NAACP’s legal defense fund in 1938 and shepherded the most significant integration cases through the courts during the 1940s and 1950s, called ER “Lady Big Heart.” Appointed by Lyndon Baines Johnson to the Supreme Court, Justice Marshall credited ER for the hope that sustained race activists throughout the decades. He told his biographer, the diplomat-journalist Carl Rowan, that “Eleanor Roosevelt did a lot; but her husband didn’t do a damn thing.” She became “a great force for justice” and was “one dream maker” who empowered Marshall and gave “the NAACP a reach that exceeded the mean clutches of all the racists” who dominated U.S. politics and so limited FDR’s efforts.
In 1957 Rowan sought to learn why Justice Marshall considered ER “one of the greatest of dream makers.” When he called her for an interview, she replied, “What a coincidence. I am this moment reading your new book, Go South to Sorrow,” and she invited him to her New York apartment. The interview turned into a prolonged visit at Hyde Park, during which she told Rowan the story of her childhood and of the legacy of her many struggles. “All my life I have fought fear—physical fear, and the fear of not being loved,” she remarked candidly. Her privileged childhood offered prestige and money, but affluence did not “shield her from the agony of watching her fathers and uncles drink themselves to death.” Unloved, dressed in ill-fitting “hand-me-down” clothes that her aunts had discarded, young ER had known she was “different from the other girls” and confided to Rowan: “I never lost a feeling of kinship for anyone who is suffering.” For ER, there were no inferior children; there were only new pathways to love, education, and respect.
During his two-week visit, Rowan became mightily impressed with ER. They spent many long evenings after dinner alone on the porch “listening to frogs croak from the lily pads of Val-Kill Creek,” as ER shared private and political confidences “openly and honestly.” She said she never had real differences with FDR “on racial and social reforms, but there was conflict over timing. She always wanted to move faster than Franklin did.” He insisted that “a democracy moves slowly,” and he required the political support of Congress. He juggled but encouraged ER to say and do what she believed necessary.*
After FDR’s death, when she represented the United States at the United Nations, she too juggled. Opposed by Dixiecrats and McCarthyites, limited by State Department restraints and Cold War tensions inflamed by aggressive Soviet propaganda, she seemed to follow FDR’s political strategy precisely—and moved differently than she might have were she not in the government. Profoundly anti-Soviet, but condemned as a Communist by U.S. politicians, ER compromised. But her brilliant diplomacy resulted in the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948. From that day to this, the declaration remains the single most important document of worldwide hope for peace and justice.
Subsequently, ER’s activities for civil rights intensified. During her final meetings with northern student activists in 1961 and 1962, she encouraged boycotts and sit-ins, as well as demonstrations for integration. She advised, “Go South for Freedom.”*
While ER’s legacy regarding civil rights and human rights remains “infinite,” this volume focuses on the infinitely controversial war years, 1939–45. To learn about her efforts, especially regarding race discrimination and the failure to rescue refugees in flight from Nazi horror, is only to intensify the controversies. ER’s struggles regarding race and rescue enable us to understand history’s slow, still ongoing movement toward international justice and human rights.
Debates over FDR’s “indifference” to the Jewish slaughter will surely continue. Those who argue that FDR did “everything possible” are contradicted by ER’s assertion that nobody did all they could have. In 1946 she visited displaced persons camps in Germany, and when she returned to the United States, she addressed the women’s division of the United Jewish Appeal: “We let our consciences realize too late the need of standing up against something that we knew was wrong. We have therefore had to avenge it—but we did nothing to prevent it. I hope that in the future, we . . . remember that there can be no compromise . . . with the things we know are wrong.”
In 2003, Arthur Schlesinger suggested that he and I meet for dinner to discuss, as he put it, “our differences” regarding FDR, which had been aired mostly at the Graduate Center for several years. After a cordial evening, during which we agreed about all contemporary issues, our final exchange was illuminating. I said, “I know what ER proposed and FDR rejected. How can you argue that FDR did everything ‘possible’ to rescue and save the perishing?” Schlesinger answered by pointing to the politics of FDR’s position: U.S. anti-Semitism. Look at the numbers, he said. Thirty percent of the U.S. population was German-American; the Democratic Party was Irish, Italian, and southern. There was no congressional support to save the Jews, no movement to save them, and intense division among Jewish leaders—many of whom remained silent throughout. Silence. Denial. Complicity.
Our understanding of the U.S.-British failure is complicated by ER’s silence regarding Eleanor Rathbone’s parliamentary efforts to “rescue the perishing”—despite the fact that ER’s friend Lady Stella Reading was a member of Rathbone’s committee. The full story remains to be told.
Subsequently, ER became an optimistic Zionist. She visited Israel three times, accompanied by David Gurewitsch, Ruth Gruber, and Trude Pratt Lash. She was concerned about Jewish refugees languishing in displaced persons camps mostly in Germany, as well as about Palestinian refugees newly removed from their homes who languished in camps mostly in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, under conditions ER pronounced entirely unacceptable. She saw why violence had escalated as it did in the 1948 war but tended to absolve Israel for the Nakba, the flight or removal of 800,000 Palestinian refugees. “The truth is the Arab authorities are to a large extent responsible for this wholesale flight. Mass evacuation was apparently a part of their strategy,” to be followed by a quick victory of the Arab armies and restoration of all property. ER concluded that responsibility “must be shared” by all parties, including the British, and that to avoid endless war throughout the region, all parties must pursue peace—repatriation or resettlement—through UN negotiations.
Because in war there are no final victories, and every war sows the seeds for the next, ER’s vision for a permanent just peace is urgently needed now. She brought to the United Nations two convictions: that humanity was connected now as never before, and that liberal democracy was essential to humanity’s survival. As FDR said in 1940, “We will have a liberal democracy, or we will return to the Dark Ages.” In 1943, she concluded the time had come for “world thinking” to ensure a postwar economy of creativity, education, abundance, and full employment. It was a theme that she had expressed vigorously since 1934 and now brought to the world stage for global impact.
To deny any part of a population the opportunities for more enjoyment in life, for higher aspirations is a menace to the nation as a whole. There has been too much concentrating wealth, and even if it means that some of us have got to learn to be a little more unselfish about sharing what we have . . . , we must realize that it will profit us all in the long run. . . . I think the day of selfishness is over; the day of really working together has come . . . all of us, regardless of race or creed or color. We must wipe out any feeling . . . of intolerance, of belief that any one group can go ahead alone. We all go ahead together, or we go down together.
Today, as poverty, inequality, and neoslavery return across the United States, as women and children are condemned to bondage and refugees are in flight worldwide, ER’s words are urgently needed. Her prescience can serve to embolden U.S. politicians finally to discuss and ratify the Economic and Social Rights Covenant of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the inspiration of her life can be a guide for healing and restorative movements worldwide.