ER began her emotional journey into widowhood with deep insights and surprising candor in You Learn by Living, published in 1960. “Like countless other women, I had to face the future alone after the death of my husband, making the adjustment to being by myself, to planning without someone else as the center of my world. . . . But I discovered that by keeping as busy as possible I could manage increasingly to keep my loneliness at bay.” That was in fact how ER had lived her entire adult life. After 12 April 1945, however, she felt independent, relieved from political restraints.
ER returned to writing her daily column within a week of FDR’s passing. In her 17 April memorial for her husband, she called for a people’s movement to create a United Nations dedicated to a future of peace and human rights: Today grief “pervades the world, [and] personal sorrow seems to be lost in the general sadness of humanity. . . . There is only one way in which those of us who live can repay the dead who have given their utmost for the cause of liberty and justice.” FDR’s goal had been to build an organization “to prevent future wars,” and that was now ER’s quest.
After she completed her White House chores and packed belongings that filled twenty trunks, ER held a farewell tea for the sixty women of her press corps. She confided to them that her present work plans were limited to writing her columns; she would not accept public office, and she rejected Congresswoman Mary Norton’s (D-NJ) intention to name her special delegate to the San Francisco Conference to establish the UN organization. Although ER had considered FDR’s decision to convene the first UN meeting before war’s end “a stroke of genius” and actively lobbied for women representatives, she mysteriously held back: “Nothing would induce me to run for public office or to accept an appointment to any office at the present time.” Subsequently, she told her allies and most insistent promoters that she “would rather be chloroformed” than accept any political nomination. She was pleased, however, to continue her writing career—as a magazine journalist and daily columnist. “Because I was the wife of the President, certain restrictions were imposed upon me. Now I am on my own, and I hope to write as a newspaper woman.” That spring she wrote Trude Lash, “I’m glad you like my columns; they are more fun to do now that I am freer.”
Although ER refused to attend the UN conference of 25 April–26 June for “reasons of protocol,” she was entirely committed to its success in creating the UN Charter. It was, after all, an extension of her intense efforts on behalf of U.S. involvement in the World Court and League of Nations after World War I and the fulfillment of her appeals to FDR to go beyond Churchill’s limited vision of Anglo-American leadership and build a real international alliance for world peace.*
ER never took any credit for her husband’s decision regarding the UN and repeatedly explained that she worked only to promote his vision, fulfill his legacy. That was her theme both in public and in her intimate correspondence. In her last White House letter to Hick, she wrote, “The Trumans have been to lunch & nearly all that I can do is done. The upstairs looks desolate & I will be glad to leave tomorrow. . . . Franklin’s death ended [an era] in history & now in its wake for lots of us who lived in his shadow . . . we have to start again under our own momentum & wonder what we can achieve.”
To lift ER’s self-imposed veil of modesty, however, is to reveal a different reality. Eleanor Roosevelt promoted her unique vision of decency in world affairs from a variety of public positions—as lobbyist, critic, and insider. She did not become the “First Lady of the World” solely as a result of her role as the most public, active, and popular of all U.S. first ladies. Rather, her diplomatic interests and skills, and her involvement in U.S. international affairs, began during World War I and continued until her death. She was a key, if often unrecognized, figure in activist international circles.
ER imagined a world without war, and understood that peace would remain a chimera so long as entire nations and subject peoples were denied access to economic security: food, clothing, education, work, health, comfort. She understood power, sought power, and influenced policy from positions of power. She was a practical idealist who understood the complexities of colonial privilege and revolution and the vagaries of competition and compromise. She was committed to the precepts of America as codified in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Bill of Rights. But she also believed that no individual, community, or nation could be truly free so long as others were fettered.
On 30 April 1945, she wrote in support of Congresswoman Norton’s efforts for a Fair Employment Practices Committee bill, to end race and gender discrimination in every workplace. This bill, ER wrote, would benefit the entire nation:
If we do not see that equal opportunity, equal justice and equal treatment are [granted] to every citizen, the very basis on which this country can hope to survive with liberty and justice for all will be wiped away.
Are we learning nothing from the horrible pictures of the concentration camps which have been appearing in our papers day after day? Are our memories so short that we do not recall how in Germany this unparalleled barbarism started by discrimination directed against Jewish people? It has ended in brutality and cruelty meted out to all people, even to our own boys who have been taken prisoner. This bestiality could not exist if the Germans had not allowed themselves to believe in a master race. . . .
There is nothing, given certain kinds of leadership, which could prevent our falling prey to this same kind of insanity, much as it shocks us now. The idea of superiority of one race over another must not continue within our own country, nor must it grow up in our dealings with the rest of the world.
As we survey “the war-torn world,” ER concluded, our struggle is “to find a way [to live] peacefully and cooperatively . . . internationally and within our own borders.” We must boldly create a new system of equality, fairness, and dignity “through our government and as individuals. . . . Where the theory of a master race is accepted, there is danger to all progress in civilization.” Her April 1945 call to create a new world defined by respect and equal opportunity for all became the core of her postwar efforts, which began on 8 May, V-E Day.
ER’s important correspondence with President Harry Truman also began on 8 May, when she wrote to congratulate him on his V-E Day broadcast: “I listened to your Proclamation this morning and I was deeply moved. I am so happy that this day has come and the war in Europe is over.” But, as she wrote in her column, there was nothing as yet to celebrate, since so many continued to die in the Pacific war. “Some of my own sons with millions of others are still in danger.”
On 10 May the president wrote a ten-page letter that began with a note of appreciation—“the whole family was touched by your thoughtfulness”—and explained the international situation:
I noticed in your good column today you expressed some surprise at the Russian attitude on the close of the European War. I think that I should explain the situation to you. On Wednesday, April 25, our Minister to Sweden sent a message to me saying that Himmler wanted to surrender to General Eisenhower all their troops facing the western front and that the Germans would continue to fight the Russians. . . . The matter was discussed with our staff and the offer was very promptly refused. . . . Negotiations went on for two more days—we always insisting on complete, unconditional surrender on all fronts. . . . Germans delayed and delayed, trying all the time to quit only on the western front. . . . Our commanding general [Eisenhower] finally told them that he would turn loose all we had and drive them into the Russians. They finally signed at Rheims the terms of unconditional surrender effective at 12:01 midnight of May 8-9. . . .
I have been trying very carefully to keep all my engagements with the Russians because they are touchy and suspicious of us. The difficulties with Churchill are very nearly as exasperating as they are with the Russians. But patience I think must be our watchword if we are to have world peace. To have it we must have the wholehearted support of Russia, Great Britain and the United States.
ER agreed and told him she hoped FDR’s commitment to the Grand Alliance might prevail: “Your experience with Mr. Churchill is not at all surprising. He is suspicious of the Russians and they know it. If you will remember, he said some pretty rough things about them years ago and they do not forget. Of course, we will have to be patient, and any lasting peace will have to have the Three Great Powers behind it.” She suggested that Truman “get on a personal basis” with Churchill: “If you talk to him about books and let him quote to you from his marvelous memory everything on earth from Barbara Fritche to the Nonsense Rhymes and Greek tragedy, you will find him easier to deal with on political subjects. He is a gentleman to whom the personal element means a great deal.” She also had practical advice about how he might approach the Russians during the Potsdam Conference, 17 July–2 August 1945.
Truman was grateful for her suggestions and courted her support. She did not criticize his most controversial decision to use the new atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, but subsequently wrote: “The day the atomic bomb was dropped we came into a new world—a world in which we had to learn to live in friendship with our neighbors of every race and creed and color, or face the fact that we might be wiped off the face of the earth. . . . Either we do have friendly relations, or we do away with civilization.” ER’s 12 October column was forevermore part of the movement for global disarmament.
On 20 November 1945 she wrote a long letter of opinion to Truman on a variety of troubling issues. “We have an obligation first of all, to solve our own problems at home,’’ she urged, since U.S. failures had an impact on the rest of the world. She hoped that all postwar planning would be fair to labor and business interests alike and would take into account the United States’ growing responsibilities in the world.
The issues were complex, and ER wanted people she trusted, notably Bernard Baruch, to be involved in investigations and analyses. She did not approve of Truman’s initial lending policies: “If we lend only to Great Britain, we enter into an economic alliance against other nations, and our hope for the future lies in joint cooperation.” With 400,000 Jewish survivors of death camps and hiding places now stranded in displaced-persons camps and unwanted everywhere, ER specifically opposed the formation of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry into Palestine:
I am very much distressed that Great Britain has made us take a share in another investigation of the few Jews remaining in Europe. If they are not to be allowed to enter Palestine, then certainly they could have been apportioned among the different United Nations and we would not have to continue to have on our consciences, the death of at least fifty of these poor creatures daily.
The question between Palestine and the Arabs, of course, has always been complicated by the oil deposits, and I suppose it always will. . . .
Lastly, I am deeply troubled about China. Unless we can stop the civil war there by moral pressure and not by the use of military force, and insist that Generalissimo Chiang give wider representation to all Chinese groups . . . I am very much afraid that continued war there may lead us to general war again.
Being a strong nation and having the greatest physical, mental and spiritual strength today, gives us a tremendous responsibility. We cannot use our strength to coerce, but if we are big enough, I think we can lead.
Their robust correspondence forged an alliance. Truman said he trusted her judgment and relied on her advice. He was so pleased by some of her columns he had them entered in the Congressional Record. Nevertheless she was amazed when Truman called her Washington Square apartment to appoint her to the U.S. delegation for the first session of the United Nations General Assembly in London.
Initially, she hesitated and demurred, saying she knew nothing about international affairs or parliamentary procedure. Her friends and family reminded her of all her previous contributions, and although she still felt “very inadequate,” she accepted Truman’s offer. Only Senator Theodore Bilbo (D-MS) voted against her confirmation.
She would lend considerable dash to the bipartisan and rather conservative first UN team. Former secretary of state Edward Stettinius was designated principal representative to the Security Council. The other members were Senator Tom Connally (D-TX), chair of the Foreign Relations Committee; Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI); and Secretary of State James Byrnes, whom she had distrusted and disliked for many years. In addition there were five alternates: John Foster Dulles, a Wall Street lawyer and veteran Republican diplomat who had been at Versailles with Wilson and served as an adviser to the drafting conference for the UN Charter at San Francisco in April 1945; Representative Sol Bloom (D-NY), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; Representative Charles Eaton (R-NJ); former postmaster general Frank Walker; and former senator John Townsend, now chair of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee.
By appointing ER to the U.S. delegation to the UN, President Truman gave her the chance to fight for her vision of the future from an official position of leadership for over six years. She considered her appointment a great victory for women and a great opportunity. She would lobby and cajole, compromise and go to battle. She would be an earnest diplomat who frequently succeeded. When she lost, she would return fighting. Convinced that pessimism was politically incorrect, she would never give up.
ER sailed on the Queen Elizabeth on 30 December 1945.
• • •
Before she left for London, ER requested that the friends and allies she had depended upon for information and advice for decades send her suggestions. As she sailed across the ocean, she studied their reports.
Carrie Chapman Catt wrote that as far as she was concerned, women wanted peace: “War must be abolished. During the last two thousand years nearly every war has developed new and more destructive weapons. . . . The cost of the war just closed, for the first time, will be counted in trillions. Since wars have thus increased their wickedness and destruction . . . no nation which calls itself civilized should consider [this] question . . . debatable.”
Walter White, Mary McCleod Bethune, and Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois sent her the “desires of American Negroes,” which included the abolition of the entire colonial system, citing it as one of the chief causes of war, poverty, and disease; a world campaign of education for the uneducated colonial and other peoples; a world campaign to utilize all the resources of science, government, and philanthropy to abolish poverty for all people in our time; freedom for the native people of South Africa; democracy for China; withdrawal of recognition of Franco’s Spain.
Esther Lape sent ER a list of very practical concerns. “The important thing about the UNO will be who makes the agenda. . . . An international debating society is some good; but not much. It won’t avert wars.
Many international questions require domestic legislation. For example: How could we be a parry to international agreements regarding refugees so long as we keep our immigration quota system . . . which is really an incorporation of racial discrimination. How could we be a party to international agreements designed to make the raw materials of the earth more equitably available (and this is one of the promises of the Atlantic Charter) unless we are prepared to transfer to an international economic and scientific and allocating body the resources we now hold under strong national possessive control.
Lape was convinced that national legislation would be forthcoming if and when international agreements required it, especially laws concerning “raw materials, trade routes and policies, citizenship, immigration (which can no longer be a purely national question).” Moreover, economic issues were key, and the problem was less “what authority is to handle the atomic bomb” than how we “handle the economic questions that produce the wars of which the atomic bomb is a final form. . . . I hope all of your magnificent courage will be expended in this direction.”
Much alone aboard the Queen Elizabeth, she was surprised during one afternoon walk to be stopped by Senator Vandenberg, who “said in his rather deep voice, ‘we would like to know if you would serve on Committee 3,’” the social, humanitarian, and cultural committee. ER wondered why that decision was made without her but assumed that the men, who clearly resented her presence, had decided it was an appropriate place for a woman, and not especially important. But on the voyage out she remembered that she enjoyed a good fight, and that she was prepared to compete.
Once they were all in London, her competitive instincts would serve her well regarding the men of her delegation. Unused to a woman participating in decision making on important international issues, her colleagues met without her and awarded the tougher tasks to themselves. John Foster Dulles, for one, sat on the Trusteeship Committee, which negotiated the future of League of Nations–mandated territories and the controversial new U.S. trust territories in the Pacific—the Caroline and Marshall islands, which the United States had taken over as military bases and subsequently used as atomic test sites.
ER was puzzled by Dulles’s apparent unconcern regarding South Africa’s refusal to discuss conditions in its territories. She protested his calm and pointed out that the Union of South Africa clearly “believed a government had the right to discriminate in any way against any part of its population.” She thought the United States should support changes to “improve the colonies,” whether South African or British. Indeed, she noted, conditions in “places where the UK had been for a hundred years” were dreadful, and she “could not help wondering what the UK had been doing there for a hundred years.” ER sought a full discussion, but Dulles disagreed.
In London at meetings of the U.S. delegation, her convictions frequently got nowhere. Her male colleagues regarded her as an interloper and treated her with crude misogyny. They tried to use the old boys’ ploy of listening politely to the lone woman in the room, then moving on—never addressing her words, however apt or significant. Even in the official publication of State Department papers, Foreign Relations of the United States, references to ER bear a tone of lofty condescension within otherwise colorless reports. Her voice is reported to have been shrill; she was called strident and schoolmarmish.
But she was insistent and would not be ignored. She banged the table and repeated her words, patiently and frequently, until they were acknowledged. Undoubtedly it drove her colleagues, especially John Foster Dulles, wild. And when the delegation failed to listen, she could take her perceptions to the public. The world’s press was more interested in her views than in theirs. Day after day her words were quoted in newspaper articles, while she expressed her views directly in her daily column, her own radio program and those of others, and the Voice of America. She was a political pro, agile at the political game as well as the game of nations.
ER was happy to hear the news that Norway’s Trygve Lie was elected secretary general. He was a compromise candidate whom the United States and the USSR could agree upon. But she was critical of her fellow delegates as self-involved, legalistic, and wordy beyond belief. They strutted and preened, generally careless about the sensibilities of other countries—she was frankly surprised at how undiplomatic some diplomats could be. They seemed to her without serious convictions and in many ways thoughtless: “I like the Vandenbergs more than I do the Connallys but I don’t like any of them much.” She was somewhat appalled at Senator Connally’s initial response to England during the drive to London: He “kept repeating: ‘Where is all this destruction I’ve heard so much about, things look all right to me.’ I started to point out bombed spots but soon found he just wasn’t interested.”
ER appraised her colleagues most explicitly in a letter to Elinor Morgenthau: Senator Arthur Vandenberg “is smart & hard to get along with and does not say what he feels. Byrnes is much too small for the job & . . . can never give any inspiration. . . . Tom Connally is nicer than I thought but he has no real sensitivity. . . . J. Foster Dulles I like not at all.”
ER was more impressed with the State Department staff—Alger Hiss, Dr. Ralph Bunche, Adlai Stevenson, Ben Cohen, and Durward Sandifer. They had influence and a sense of responsibility, and she regularly spoke with them at length: “I said many things which I hope go back to the Secretary and the President.” But she was critical of James Byrnes, whom she had disliked for years.*
She reported in her London Diary, “The papers should not be pessimistic, progress is being made here. Vandenberg and Dulles are largely responsible for pessimism, I think. These representatives of ours do not build friendships for us. . . . They have no confidence so they are rude and arrogant and create suspicion. Honesty with friendliness [is needed,] but they haven’t the technique.” By contrast, ER had faith in the importance of personal diplomacy. Face-to-face contacts mattered:
At the Assembly sessions, our delegation is seated next to the Russians. On the first day I was delighted to find that next to me was V. V. Kuznetsov, president of the All Union Council of Trade Unions of the USSR. He greeted me in a most friendly fashion, and I remembered that he had come to my apartment in NY one afternoon to interpret for a group of Russian women, part of a workers’ delegation. . . . It’s funny how a little opportunity like this of seeing someone in your own home, even for a little while, makes you feel much more friendly.
ER worked long and exhausting days, as she wrote on 31 January:
Yesterday was the usual pattern. 9:30 delegates meeting; at office, 10:30 committee meeting. Ate and dictated column, saw a doctor on national health organization, went to BBC and did two recordings, one for Infantile [Paralysis] and one for American Broadcasting program. Had tea for a Swedish woman and a Jewish refugee; went to Port of London Authority tea and Turkish Embassy. Frieda Miller dined with me and I had all the women delegates here in my room.
She was pleased that eighteen women, including the Soviet delegate, accepted this first of her many invitations.
Other days were packed with social events about which ER wrote very little. Her London diary for 23 January, for example, included these tantalizing details: “The afternoon session was cancelled,” so she saw many people, including her young friend Louise Morley and the suffragist and peace activist Lady Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence (“nice old lady”), who arrived with her houseguest, the U.S. feminist Betty Gram Swing (“very high powered”). They arrived to try “to persuade me” to support the establishment of the Commission on the Status of Women at the UN. Although “non-committal,” ER promised to “look into it.”*
That evening ER dined at the home of Vera Brittain and her husband, George Catlin: “A pleasant dinner, usual three courses and a very cold house. Lots of people in afterwards.” One can only wonder about ER’s conversation with Brittain, the most severe critic of mass bombings and atomic weapons, whose pacifist-feminist-socialist books and articles had generated vigorous opposition. ER considered her first international assignment a remarkable learning experience. “It is a liberal education in background and personalities” to meet people with vast differences in vision and goals.
Constrained by State Department protocol and advice, ER was far less free than she had hoped to be. Nevertheless, she had much to contribute since her committee was concerned with all issues relating to human rights, fundamental freedoms, social progress, and world development. It was the committee that witnessed the first substantial confrontation between the United States and the USSR relating to refugees. Thirteen million displaced persons remained in temporary German domiciles and camps after V-E Day—“Ukrainians, Belorussians, Poles, Czechoslovaks, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and others . . . because they did not want to return to live under Communist rule. . . . There also were the pitiful Jewish survivors of the German death camps,” unwanted everywhere, with no haven in sight.
ER’s opponent on the issue was the formidable Andrei Vishinsky, Stalin’s chief prosecutor in the Moscow purge trials. The Russians accused Western propagandists of fomenting fear and hatred of the Soviet Union in the DP camps, discouraging Central European refugees from returning to their homelands now under Soviet rule. The Russians claimed that those who refused to return were quislings, traitors, and fascists.
ER, outraged by that accusation, called for universal recognition of the right of political asylum and freedom of movement. In a momentous speech to the General Assembly, she asked if the Soviets would really prefer to see “political refugees forcibly repatriated to Franco’s Spain?” Eager to achieve the support of “our South American colleagues,” she spoke about the great liberator Simón Bolívar “and his stand for the freedom of the people of Latin America.” It worked, and the General Assembly voted for the right of refugees to choose their destinations. The victory was, however, a hollow one: no Western European country, nor Canada or the United States, welcomed the refugees, and Britain prohibited additional Jews from going to Palestine. The fight at the UN continued for years, while the refugees languished in camps.
ER’s capacity to debate and best the Soviets pleased her State Department advisers and impressed even her Republican colleagues. At one in the morning, after exhausting meetings, she encountered Vandenberg and Dulles on the steps of the Claridge’s Hotel. They told her frankly that they had been appalled by her appointment and had done “all we could to keep you off the United States delegation.” They wanted now to acknowledge that they “found [her] good to work with. And we will be happy to do so again.” ER noted in her diary, “So—against odds, the women move forward, but I’m rather old to be carrying on this fight!”
Despite her debates with Vishinsky, she made every effort to remain cordial with him and with the increasingly combative Soviet delegation. ER had met Ambassador Andrei Gromyko in Washington. Now during these meetings she “had the pleasure of sitting next to him at lunch. All these little contacts do develop better understanding,” she concluded.
Personal diplomacy and institutional processes were needed to secure the future peace. She was gratified that fifteen “well distributed” judges were elected to the International Court of Justice, representing the United States, the UK, Russia, France, China, Belgium, Norway, Yugoslavia, Poland, Egypt, Canada, Mexico, Chile, and El Salvador. Since her post–World War I efforts to secure U.S. adherence to the World Court had failed, she was particularly pleased with the willingness of these nations to deal seriously with the hardest political questions. She hoped that spirit of cooperation could be maintained.
As the UN’s first session came to an end, ER was optimistic. The greatest accomplishment, she wrote, was that “at the end we still are a group of 58 nations working together.” The United States had not been in the League of Nations, but it was in the UN, and from the beginning Republicans and Democrats actively participated. She was also pleased that the UN decided to locate its permanent headquarters in the United States. As international host, the American public, ER believed, would be more responsive to it and actively support this “last and best hope for our civilization.”
• • •
After the first session ended, ER toured the devastated European continent. She wrote in My Day that she dreaded the journey, knowing that the tragic sights would “fill our souls.” In Germany, she visited two camps for displaced persons. At Zeilsheim, a camp for Jewish DPs, she answered their greetings “from an aching heart” and wondered, “When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?” One man told her that his entire family had been “made into soap.” She met a boy of ten who looked six, who “had wandered into camp one day with his brother, so he was the head of his family” and “the camp singer.”
He sang for me—a song of his people—a song of freedom. Your heart cried out that there was no freedom—and where was hope, without which human beings cannot live? There is a feeling of desperation and sorrow in this camp which seems beyond expression. An old woman knelt on the ground grasping my knees. I lifted her up, but could not speak. What could one say in the end of a life which had brought her such complete despair?
“Israel,” she murmured, over and over. “Israel! Israel!”
As I looked at her weather beaten face . . . I knew for the first time what that small land meant to so many.
From Zeilsheim, ER went to Wiesbaden and visited a camp of “Poles and Balts,” refugees from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. “These are refugees who, because of political differences with their present governments, cannot see their way to return to their own countries, and yet they fought against the Nazis, and many of them spent long years in concentration or forced labor camps.”
The political complexities of these refugees as well as the Jewish refugees haunted the early years of the UN. For years the debate went on as the people continued to weaken and die, or subsisted in wretched or underfunded UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration camps. What, ER asked in 1946, was the “ultimate answer”? The General Assembly created a Special Committee on Refugees and Displaced Persons to meet in April 1946 to study the problem. ER predicted it “will tear at their hearts” and recommended all due speed. But it was a dreary and protracted process, complicated by disagreements over Palestine, political distrust, pervasive bigotry—and the demands of the intensified Cold War.
When ER returned to the United States, she was invited to serve on a commission to create “the structure and functions of the permanent Commission on Human Rights,” to convene at Hunter College in the Bronx [subsequently Lehman College] on 29 April 1946. She accepted but was perplexed by the fearful climate Truman seemed to endorse when he accompanied Winston Churchill on 5 March to Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. There the former prime minister declared: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the [European] continent.” Churchill’s bellicose speech was a call to arms and an appeal for an Anglo-American military alliance. ER was relieved to learn that Truman had not known what Churchill intended to say and believed he was to speak constructively “about the sinews of peace.”
Armed with that information, ER felt free to disagree with Churchill in My Day:
Instead of running an armament race against each other and building up trade cartels and political alliances, we the nations of the world should join together . . . [to] use the forum of the United Nations to discuss our difficulties and our grievances. . . . I do not wonder that the elderly statesmen think this a new and revolutionary move in the international situation. I will grant that there are two possibilities here, the old way and the new way. We have seen the results of the old way, however, in war and destruction and we may still see starvation and pestilence stalk the earth as a result of the old way. Might it be wise to try the new way?
ER spoke against Churchill’s speech several times and was cheered by a note from her friend Arthur Murray, Lord Elibank, who was closely allied to Lady Stella Reading and John Winant. He wanted her to know that British “men of all parties” considered Churchill’s “utterance one of great unwisdom, and a source of embarrassment.” Just as the UN embarked on its difficult journey, there “plunges like a bull in a china shop, Winston Churchill.”
• • •
Unanimously elected chair of the committee that founded the Human Rights Commission, ER was part of an extraordinary team that agreed their first project would be to write an International Bill of Human Rights. The other members of the committee were John P. Humphrey, Canadian international lawyer; Peng-chun (P. C.) Chang, a Chinese scholar, playwright, musician, and leading diplomat; and Lebanon’s learned Dr. Charles Habbib Malik. This leadership group was subsequently joined by France’s René Cassin, who had spent the war years in London as Charles de Gaulle’s legal adviser. He had lost his sister and more than twenty-five other relatives in Nazi concentration camps. By 1947 Cassin and ER supported a Jewish homeland, while Malik emerged as a leader of the Arab League. Their ability to work together, to negotiate across all their differences, made possible the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
They, along with India’s Hansa Mehta, laid the unfinished ethical agenda of our time before the world. And Mehta, president of the All India Women’s Conference and a leader of the independence movement—and the only other woman on the commission—significantly transformed the document by her insistence that the words “all men” would in much of the world be taken to exclude women. Hansa Mehta influenced ER in many ways. The commission adopted her inclusive formula, “all human beings,” during its June 1948 session, and women’s equality was forevermore affirmed in UN literature.
ER’s imaginative and steadfast personal diplomacy helped ensure the passage of the UDHR by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948. Consisting of a preamble and thirty articles, the declaration was to serve “as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations,” a yardstick by which to measure decency and human dignity. Since 1948 it has continued to be the most significant of all UN declarations on behalf of fundamental political freedoms as well as economic and social rights:
–All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. . . .
–Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth . . . without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. . . .
–No one shall be held in slavery or servitude.
–No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. . . .
–All are equal before the law. . . .
–No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile. . . .
–No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon honor and reputation. . . .
–Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. . . .
–Everyone has the right to leave any country, and to return. . . .
–The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of the government, involving free and secret ballots based on equal and universal suffrage.
In its first twenty-two articles the UDHR detailed political and civil rights: freedom of assembly, opinion, and expression and “the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”; the right to religion and to change religion; the right to marriage and divorce, and the right to be secure and protected within the family unit.
Articles 23 to 30 detailed the economic and social rights and obligations of the human community to ensure the free and full development of personality:
–Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, . . . and to protection against unemployment.
–Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work. . . .
–Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions.
–Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including periodic holiday with pay.
–Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being including food, clothing, housing, medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age. . . .
–Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
–Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages . . . and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
ER believed that the kind of New Deal agencies created within the United States to limit and prevent so many of the personal tragedies engendered by the Great Depression might be applied to the entire postwar world. She championed the various agencies the UN created or strengthened, notably the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the International Labor Organization (ILO). The work of each of these agencies supported the UDHR. But ER never underestimated the political differences and disagreements that limited its scope and endangered its future.
The UDHR was a compromise. At first ER was instructed to limit the principles to civil and political rights. This she refused to do. And the woman who always advised her friends, “If you have to compromise—compromise up,” succeeded in persuading her delegation, as well as Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall, of the importance of including the Soviet-originated demands for economic and social rights. ER understood the need for an all-embracing document: “You cannot talk civil rights to people who are hungry.” Moreover, in 1941 FDR’s Four Freedoms had promised freedom from want as well as freedom from fear. ER believed in the connectedness of the economic, civil, political, and social aspects of human rights. When she offered to resign rather than forgo economic and social rights, President Truman told her to follow her conscience.
After eighty-five meetings, at three a.m. on 10 December 1948, the UN General Assembly finally approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Forty-eight voted in favor; Honduras and Yemen were absent; and eight abstained: the six Soviet bloc nations (Byelorussia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Ukraine, the USSR, and Yugoslavia), Saudi Arabia, and South Africa. ER was relieved that the Soviets did not vote against it, a testimony to her remarkable personal diplomacy. She was also impressed that when each article was polled separately, twenty-three of thirty achieved unanimous approval. The General Assembly gave her an unprecedented standing ovation, and she left the Great Hall profoundly moved by the warmth and solidarity displayed that night. From that day to this, the declaration stands as a beacon, to stir our imaginations and prod us on. ER considered it a “first step” and went to work to negotiate enabling covenants.
ER initially hoped that the UDHR would quickly be followed by binding covenants—treaties “for the implementation of human rights,” to be ratified by the Senate and rendered law. In the United States, the Senate would have to approve it. But hopes for ratification were soon shattered, domestically and worldwide, by the intensification of Cold War realities, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO in April 1949, Russia’s successful atomic explosion during that summer, and Mao Tse-tung’s victorious announcement of the People’s Republic of China in October. At home, McCarthyism and Truman’s “Loyalty Oath” program (which ER deplored) contributed to opposition to the covenant. The president of the American Bar Association led a right-wing assault against the UN and the UDHR as a Communist threat to globalize the New Deal. Still negotiating and compromising, on 27 March 1950 ER called for a limited political and civil rights covenant, one that the Senate might actually ratify. In 1951 she accepted Hansa Mehta’s suggestion that there be two covenants, one for political and civil rights, the other for economic and social rights.
In 1947 Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois protested to the UN against U.S. racism. But “An Appeal to the World: A Statement of Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent” was derailed by President Truman’s own actions on behalf of civil rights. Alongside ER, Truman was the first president to address the NAACP. On 27 June, their appearance at the closing meeting of the NAACP convention at the Lincoln Memorial before ten thousand people was historic. The United States had “reached a turning point in the long history of its efforts to guarantee freedom and equality to all Americans,” he announced. “And when I say all Americans, I mean all Americans.” All discrimination “because of ancestry, or religion, or race, or color” must be removed. “We can no longer afford the luxury of a leisurely attack upon prejudice and discrimination. . . . Our national government must show the way.” ER spoke about the “blot of lynching.” The racial tragedies faced by veterans and families of color, she said, destroyed the meaning of democracy as we sought to impress the world with promises of human rights.
In October 1947, Truman’s civil rights vision, “To Secure These Rights,” boldly promised real change. The president proposed the creation of a permanent civil rights commission to ensure voting rights, end segregation in the military, and ensure a federal anti-lynching law finally to end state-sanctioned violence. ER and Truman seemed allied in 1947 and 1948.
For the 1948 presidential election, when Truman ran for reelection as the Democratic candidate, several states broke away from the party to form a segregationist split-off known as the Dixiecrats, running South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond as their candidate. ER hoped the Dixiecrat leaders of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina would remain adrift. It was time, she wrote, for the Democratic Party to renounce racism and become a truly liberal party. Subsequently, she would deplore Truman’s hypocritical preference for a unified Democratic Party—which reestablished the status quo as the Dixiecrats returned to their positions of congressional committee leadership, and Truman ended his pledge in “To Secure These Rights.”
Then, in December 1951, civil rights attorney William Patterson, executive of the Civil Rights Congress, and singer Paul Robeson introduced to the UN a petition called “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People.” ER rejected it as the work of Communists and part of the Soviet assault that hurt the United States at the UN “in so many little ways.” Blindsided by her Cold War priorities, she dismissed the charge of genocide as “perfect nonsense” yet insisted the future required an end to white supremacy: an end to segregation, discrimination, poverty, and violence. Limited by her own virulent anti-Communism, she would continue to challenge Soviet propaganda—and also to struggle for racial justice.
One of her colleagues on the Human Rights Commission, Dr. John Humphrey, wrote in his journal that ER’s “role will embarrass her biographer.” No longer the champion of democratic participation, she actually obstructed progress toward a strong human rights covenant. Humphrey believed that ER had become a State Department functionary and “one of the most reactionary forces” at the UN. But Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon considers Humphrey’s judgment “harsh and naive. Eleanor Roosevelt was a practical politician as well as a visionary statesperson.” She juggled as she had learned so well to do; she fought for what was possible and considered what the Senate might ratify. It was limited, and ER acknowledged that hers were only tentative first steps in rapidly shifting sands. In the spring of 1951 she turned the chairmanship of the Human Rights Commission over to Lebanon’s Charles Malik but continued to struggle for human rights covenants.
Progress was slow, and then Eisenhower’s 1952 victory all but ended U.S. support for human rights and UN leadership on the issue. Eisenhower accepted ER’s resignation with cold alacrity. In April 1953 Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told the Senate that the State Department no longer cared to pursue either the civil and political covenant or the economic and social covenant. The department was also uninterested in the Genocide Convention and intended to take no part in the effort to secure a UN treaty on the rights of women. ER’s State Department adviser, Durward Sandifer, told ER that the United States’ human rights position at the UN was now limited to issuing “reports and studies on the status of such human rights issues as slavery; and the creation of an advisory service which would fund seminars and fellowships on human rights.” ER replied: “You will excuse me if I think these [efforts] are really comic.”
After ER’s official tour of duty at the UN ended, she walked across First Avenue and offered her time and energy to Clark Eichelberger’s American Association of the United Nations. From 1953 to 1962 she traveled across the United States and around the world with her message of peace and human rights. She went door to door, town by town, insisting that the fight for a global standard of human rights, the inclusion of morality and decency in the international arena, must be on the agenda. ER understood that to win a war for human rights would take as much energy and vision, as much money and dedication, as it took to win any other kind of war.
On 27 March 1958, she celebrated the tenth anniversary of the UDHR with a UN speech that inspired and propelled the global human rights movement:
Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual persons; the neighborhood . . . ; the school or college . . . ; the factory, farm or office. . . . Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.
Personally, ER was nourished and fortified by her extended family of allies and beloveds. She cherished time with her grandchildren and supported her children through their multiple divorces. The intimate circle of friends she relied on changed over the years. She was bereft when her longtime great friend, secretary, traveling companion, and primary editor Tommy Thompson died suddenly on 12 April 1953. While Esther Lape, Lorena Hickok, Earl Miller, and Bernard Baruch remained her steadies, her time was more completely devoted to Dr. David Gurewitsch. After Joe and Trude Lash left Hyde Park to live in Martha’s Vineyard, ER’s primary affections turned to David and Edna Gurewitsch, with whom she bought an Upper East Side town house. An ISS associate of Trude, who introduced them, David became ER’s intimate friend and traveling companion to many countries including India, Pakistan, Israel, and the Soviet Union. They were generally accompanied by hard-working congenial assistant, Maureen Corr, who had replaced Tommy.
Politically, race remained in the forefront of ER’s efforts as she worked for a future defined by human rights. Her young friends Pauli Murray and Harry Belafonte fortified these efforts. ER predicted that the United States would lose to Communism unless it ended racial injustice: “Our great struggle today is to prove to the world that democracy has more to offer than communism”—but it could not do that as long as bigotry, segregation, and unemployment remained. The United States could not have it both ways: world leadership and domestic sloth.
She challenged the public to organize, to show what it could do: “We have to develop courage and a staunchness that perhaps we have never had.” Civil rights was no longer a “domestic question.” It was, she believed, “the question which may decide whether democracy or communism wins out in the world.” “We cannot be complacent about unemployment . . . , about injustices.” We have to be able to talk with each other and disagree, to “learn from each other, and contemplate new ideas.” There were new friendships to be forged, intensified struggles under way. Throughout the 1950s ER campaigned for integrated housing, integrated schools, voting rights, and the end of discrimination and bigotry.
ER defended her friends in public and in print. Already outraged by the extremism of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) and the “Gestapo tactics” used by his Senate committee and HUAC’s (House Un-American Activities Committee) crusade against subversives, she was further appalled when her dear friend, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, was accused of “association” with allegedly Communist organizations. ER told her My Day readers that a New Jersey school had disinvited Bethune—a most heroic “leader among the American colored citizens and loved and admired by all . . . who know her.” Mary Mcleod Bethune was “the kindest, gentlest person I have ever met. . . . If it were not so sad to have respected and beloved American citizens insulted and slighted, it would be funny.” The Red Scare threatened American traditions of freedom and civil liberties. She hoped a bold movement for justice and fairness would arise to “save us” from McCarthyite demands for “complete conformity which kills originality and truth.”
When Paul Robeson was attacked by rioters during a concert in Peekskill, she defended him. She deplored his Communist sympathies, but she deplored violent repression that threatened democracy even more. In an extraordinary column she asserted that Robeson had the right to perform unmolested—even though he turned his concerts into forums for Communist propaganda. Moreover, ER thought it important to understand why such a talented star would praise the USSR and choose to reside there for several years. “He wanted to find something he did not find here. He was a brilliant law student,” who graduated from Columbia Law School, “but there was no equality of opportunity for educated men of his race.” He became a singer, “a gain for art—but perhaps there was some bitterness in his heart.” He took his family to the USSR so that his son would not suffer as he did. “Others might feel the same way. In the USSR he was recognized as an educated man, as an artist and as an equal. We disapprove of his speeches, but we must also understand him and above all . . . we must [work] to preserve the liberties that are inherent in true democracy.” Since the USSR “does not permit real democratic freedom,” she subsequently chided Robeson for his failure to see that everyone had a better chance of achieving equality “in the US than anywhere else in the world.”
By 1954 all white integrationists were accused of being Communists. ER remained allied with such southern race radicals as Jim Dombrowski and Myles Horton of Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, Aubrey Williams, Virginia Durr, Anne Braden, and other activists of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), the successor to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, founded in 1947. ER agreed to serve on SCEF’s board, spoke often on its behalf, raised funds, and worked closely with Aubrey Williams, president of SCEF, and Dombrowski, its director, on projects “dedicated to the fight against racial segregation and discrimination in all fields of social endeavor.”
In 1952 SCEF issued a stunning pamphlet, The Untouchables, that protested the death-dealing situation that people of color faced all across the country when they were in need of emergency medical attention. Illustrated by Ben Shahn, with text by New Orleans journalist Alfred Maund—who edited The Southern Patriot, SCEF’s monthly magazine—The Untouchables was part of SCEF’s campaign to end hospital segregation and medical neglect, which ER supported financially and through several public events. In her 17 October column, she asked her white readers to imagine what might happen to them in Asia or the Middle East if such “segregation were practiced against us . . . because we would be in the minority, since two-thirds of the world’s people are colored.” ER concluded on a note of hope, since SCEF had inspired a citizens’ movement to replace “Jim Crow medical care” with comprehensive health services for all, under way in many states including New York and Kentucky.
Our leadership of “the free world,” she wrote in 1956, depended on our realization that “the white race is a minority race.” Around the world “colored people have been exploited by white people and they are suspicious of us.” Every time we “deny to any of our citizens equal rights it is proof . . . that freedom is no more real in the United States than it is in the Soviet Union. . . . We must face the facts,” and make significant changes. As white supremacists organized to resist the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, and as Dixiecrats returned to positions of congressional dominance, ER had no illusions, but she did have specific suggestions: “In the North . . . before integrating our schools we must get rid of segregated housing, and that is not easy. We can do it but it will take determined” and persistent citizen action. “In the South the first problem is the right to vote. Until we have that we cannot do anything. This is a Federal right and the Federal government can do something.” Republican rule and partisan compromise had suspended all promises, and ER hoped that a victory for Adlai Stevenson would change that. But above all she called for an activist movement—to give people hope, to work to end disease and poverty, and thereby to maintain “our prestige in the world.”
In 1958 ER attended Harry Belafonte’s concert in Brussels that, as he said, “inaugurated the American pavilion of the World’s Fair.” She wrote a stunning review and visited Harry, his wife, Julie, and their baby David at their hotel. She held little David “as she discussed world affairs,” whereupon he wet her lap. ER just laughed and said, “Well, little man! Thank you for your opinion!” Their friendship flourished, and the Belafontes made many visits to Val-Kill and dined with ER in New York City. In addition to Harry Belafonte’s civil rights work, he increased his support for the Wiltwyck School for troubled black and white youth—which ER and their mutual friend Dr. Viola Bernard, a New York social worker and integration leader, supported. Belafonte was outraged by his inability to rent an apartment in New York City. He filed a complaint against the city and called a press conference. ER wrote on 20 October 1958,
I am sure that every New Yorker was shocked . . . to read that Harry Belafonte and his charming wife and baby were finding it practically impossible to get an apartment. . . . I have long been saying that in the North we have only one step to take to meet the Supreme Court order of nonsegregation in schools, and that is nonsegregation in housing. . . . We are a mixture of races in New York City, and every neighborhood should in normal course become a mixed neighborhood.
Personally, ER said, she would enjoy nothing more than having the Belafontes as her neighbors, and she hoped they found “a home shortly where they and their enchanting little boy can grow up without feeling the evils of the segregation pattern. Discrimination does something intangible and harmful to the souls of both white and colored people.”
The next day ER invited the Belafontes to move in with her. Although delighted, they refused, since they and several friends had decided to purchase a building at 300 West End Avenue, one that had refused to rent to him, and create an integrated cooperative. As their friendship grew, ER introduced Harry to many of the new African leaders she worked with through the UN Association, including Achar Maroff, the UN ambassador from Guinea; the son of Habib Bourgiba, Tunisia’s first president; and Tom Mboya of Kenya. She also offered him profound advice: occasional demonstrations were not enough to achieve civil rights for blacks in the United States—it would require a nationally organized, vigorous, and persistent movement. As FDR had told A. Philip Randolph, “Go out and make me do it.” Harry Belafonte believed that ER had become a “socialist” and that government needed to do more to confront “race . . . the greatest barrier to that more equitable vision” that promised “social benefits and job opportunities” for all.
Belafonte was correct about ER. She was a revolutionary who believed everybody should have equal opportunity, excellent education, and the comforts of life in a community that cared. She had devoted her life’s work to the achievement of security for all. During the 1930s she had insisted that everyone must have enough means to enjoy the benefits of “graciousness and freedom.” The New Deal promised an end to poverty and the pattern of “building a civilization on human suffering.” Achieving this goal required imposing higher taxes and limitations upon the irresponsible, greedy actual “restrictions on their freedom to make fortunes.” When in 1960 the sit-ins for integration began, ER urged college students everywhere to “go South for freedom.” She lived to see a new day dawn, and see her work for universal human rights become a worldwide movement.
In January 1961, John F. Kennedy named her chair of the President’s Committee on the Status of Women and reappointed her to the U.S. delegation to the UN. There she worked closely with her friend Adlai Stevenson—now UN ambassador—to renegotiate human rights covenants. She was gratified by the changed UN environment. Among the representatives of the many new nations, freed from colonial domination, the idea of human rights had spirited support. She was proud to be part of the global “social revolution” for civil rights and human rights that was under way.*
On 5 November 1961 ER endorsed the American Friends Service Committee’s declaration of conscience to protest “the present drift toward war.” She affirmed her conviction that “freedom and democracy could not survive nuclear war” and called for a popular movement to demand disarmament.
Long before most of America’s leadership appreciated the changing needs of this planet, ER did. In September 1962, she wrote a column that anticipated the primary challenge of our time:
It has always seemed to me that we never present our case to the smaller nations in either a persuasive or interesting way. I think most people will acknowledge . . . that we have given far more military aid to these nations than economic aid. It is not very pleasant to palm off this military equipment on people who really are not looking for it. The fiction is that they are being given military aid so that they will be better able to cope with any Communist attack. But all the nations where we do this know quite well that it is pure fiction. . . .
In view of this, why don’t we offer them something they really want? For one thing, most of them would like food. Many of them, as they watch the development of the bigger nations, want to establish the beginnings of industry. But they know that wider training of their people is essential . . . and hence a primary need is aid to their education system..
Until her death on 7 November 1962, ER was committed to a liberal vision and to hope. In Tomorrow Is Now, her last book, published three months after her death, she looked to the future with genuine optimism. With “proper education . . . a strong sense of responsibility for our own actions, with a clear awareness that our future is linked with the welfare of the world as a whole, we may justly anticipate that the life of the next generation will be richer, more peaceful, more rewarding than any we have ever known.” For the future the United States needed to resurrect with conviction and daring the good American word liberal, “which derives from the word free. . . . We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us.”
Eleanor Roosevelt’s international journey reflects the full range of the complex tides of the twentieth century. Committed to improving the quality of life, she made the noblest values seem globally achievable. She believed in the power of ideas to transform society. In Tomorrow Is Now, she wrote that social change required that ideas be faced with imagination, integrity, and courage. That was how she lived her life and pursued the most controversial and complex issues of state, none of which have become any less controversial. Ultimately, she embodied her own creed: “The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.”
Adlai Stevenson, in his eulogies for ER both at the UN General Assembly on 9 November, and at New York’s Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on 17 November, most eloquently defined that legacy:
Her life was crowded, restless, and fearless. Perhaps she pitied most not those whom she aided in the struggle, but the more fortunate who were preoccupied with themselves and cursed with the self-deceptions of private success. She walked in the slums and the ghettos of the world, not on a tour of inspection . . . but as one who could not feel complacent while others were hungry, and who could not find contentment while others were in distress. This was not sacrifice; this, for Eleanor Roosevelt, was the only meaningful way of life. . . .
Like so many others, I have lost more than a beloved friend. I have lost an inspiration. She would rather light a candle than curse the darkness, and her glow has warmed the world.
More than half a century later, ER’s glow continues to warm the world with the hope that human rights will be observed in every home and village—and increasingly be accepted as women’s rights and children’s rights. The world movement to achieve the conception of human rights that ER advanced is under way. Someday poverty will be replaced by dignity and respect, and we will unite to save our small blue endangered water planet—which we all do happen to share.