Foreword
Early in 1946, with the horrors of two world wars uppermost in their minds, a group of dedicated men and women, representing 18 nations, gathered under the auspices of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to craft a vision so powerful that it could combat the nightmare of fifty million deaths inflicted on the world. Their chairman was Eleanor Roosevelt (ER), former First Lady, social justice activist, nationally syndicated journalist, and one of the twentieth century’s most renowned human rights leaders. As they set to work, none of the drafters, ER included, imagined that the document they would produce would become the centerpiece of the modern human rights movement and affect the lives of millions of people around the world. However, they knew from the outset that they had no alternative. If they failed to create a shared vision, or if they failed to secure international support for the document they produced, the world might quickly be on the path to World War III. “You can measure the extent of physical damage done to cities, you can restore water supplies, gas and electricity, and you can rebuild the buildings needed to establish a military government,” Eleanor argued. But the real challenge was “how to gauge what has happened to human beings—that is incalculable.”
This educational resource tells the story of the growth and development of both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and Eleanor Roosevelt. ER’s determination to conceal her influence, others’ determination to overstate their influence, and historians’ narrow focus kept many details of both stories obscure. This educational resource provides students with a fuller picture of the UDHR and of the woman who played such a pivotal role in its creation.
Eleanor Roosevelt, who as a young child survived the enduring sadness of both her parents’ deaths, the loss of a younger brother, and the absence of the courage and confidence that love provides, knew how fear could cripple one’s soul. In fact, her greatest fear was that she would succumb to fear when called upon to combat an egregious crisis. As a ten-year-old orphan shipped off to live with a stern, strict grandmother, ER recognized that she had to find strength she did not know she had in order to make her own way in the world. With the support of a remarkable teacher, a devoted aunt, and her own immense reservoir of courage, ER grew from a fearful child to a bold social activist to a precedent-shattering First Lady to political pundit to diplomat to the world’s most prominent voice for human rights. Her journey was neither easy nor safe. Her actions generated as much fierce ridicule as they did praise and respect. Yet she persevered, determined to develop effective working relationships with the various constituencies essential to making the UDHR “real.” “Staying aloof,” she wrote,” is not a solution. It is a cowardly evasion.”
Part I of this resource, and the documents that accompany it, detail ER’s growth and development as a person and as an activist. During the 1920s and 1930s, ER worked on issues related to women, labor, housing, education, and race. She honed her political skills and built networks among like-minded individuals. She also became adept at mediating political disputes between her husband and his top aides, a skill that would stand her in good stead once she reached the United Nations. After the American voters elected FDR president in 1932, ER worried that her husband’s victory would force her to curtail her work on the issues she thought were critical to surviving the Great Depression and expanding democracy. Together, with the wise counsel of Louis Howe, the Roosevelts developed a partnership unique in American political history. Within eight months of FDR’s inauguration, ER would travel 40,000 miles promoting the New Deal and collecting political and policy advice for the New Deal’s architects. She also resurrected her journalism career with her monthly magazine column Mrs. Roosevelt’s Page. After her fourth column, she had received and answered 350,000 letters. Her conversation with the American people had begun. It continued throughout her extensive travels, with her regular White House press conferences, and beginning in January 1936, in a nationally syndicated daily column My Day.
She also redefined her position as First Lady to advocate consistently for unpopular causes, such as racial equality and humane treatment of refugees. The most famous example of her White House civil rights activism occurred in 1939, when she used My Day to announce her resignation from the Daughters of the American Revolution after that group denied African American contralto Marian Anderson the use of its hall. ER then not only helped organize Anderson’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial but also, in championing her performance, equated the discrimination Anderson encountered to the Aryan policies Hitler imposed on Fascist Germany.
Eleanor Roosevelt brought the same passion and commitment to the cause of refugees. As the clouds of war gathered over Europe, and the plight of those fleeing from the Nazis grew more desperate, she worked closely with such groups as the Emergency Rescue Committee and the United States Committee for the Care of European Children. She also spoke out against the United States’ restrictive immigration policies and worked to increase the number of visas available to refugees. “When will our consciences grow so tender,” she asked, “that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?”
Part II focuses on Eleanor Roosevelt’s activities during World War II and the early postwar period. After addressing the nation on the evening of the December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor attack (hers was the first official voice Americans heard), she traveled the nation opposing the “politics of fear,” arguing that victory did not require “hate,” and insisting that racial divisions weakened the war effort. She lent her public support and private counsel to those who opposed the internment of Japanese Americans. She also championed the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Commission and urged the racial integration of the armed forces.
A 1943 visit to Allied troops in the Pacific convinced her that the only way to redeem the courage and sacrifice she saw there was to create a better world. To that end, she followed the development of the United Nations closely. Indeed, as FDR lay dying in Warm Springs in 1945, ER was meeting with a State Department official in preparation for the San Francisco conference that would ratify the UN Charter.
FDR’s death opened a new chapter in ER’s life. Though uncertain about what she could achieve through her “own momentum,” she by then possessed all the skills and attributes of a seasoned political operative. She also had an impressive international reputation as an advocate for the discounted, disparaged, and ignored.
Things changed when President Harry S. Truman suddenly appointed ER to the first American delegation to the United Nations. Although ER initially had doubts about her qualifications, and concerns about the Senate confirmation process, she embraced the nomination. Her fellow United States delegates, all male and all senior political leaders and cabinet secretaries, did not. They resented her appointment and, in retaliation, assigned her to the Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee, an appointment they considered “safe” and inconsequential. Ironically, that committee ended up being the most contentious, since it dealt with the repatriation of European refugees. The sight of these people, many of them Holocaust survivors whom she saw during a 1946 visit to displaced persons camps, filled ER with horror and anger. “There is a feeling of desperation and sorrow . . . which seems beyond expression,” she wrote in My Day. When Andrei Vyshinsky, the chief Soviet delegate to the United Nations, argued that all such persons were “quislings” and “traitors” and should be returned to their countries of origin, Eleanor Roosevelt rose to rebut him. Calmly and deliberately, she told him that it would be “foreign” to the United States’ concept of democracy “to force repatriation on any human being.” ER prevailed. The UN rejected Vyshinsky’s proposal.
Eleanor Roosevelt brought the same blend of courage, political savvy, and common sense to the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As chairman first of the nuclear committee to set up the commission, and then as the commission’s first chairman, she faced a daunting assignment—the drafting of an international bill or declaration of human rights. Proposals, models, and ideas had poured in from all over the world. Her colleagues were an equally varied group who brought their own ideas and cultural norms to the debate. Keeping everyone at the table and focused on the work required more than just tact and diplomacy. It required a firm hand and a willingness to listen to and moderate between competing points of view.
As she listened, ER deepened her understanding of what constituted human rights. She had long insisted that education, housing, and access to employment were basic human rights that society had both a moral and political obligation to provide. Now she recognized anew the importance of food and physical safety as fundamental to human dignity and well-being. As her own awareness grew, she persuaded the State Department to move toward a more international understanding of human rights (i.e., to accept that social and economic rights were as important to many parts of the world as political and civil rights were to the United States) even as she continued to advance her country's position on the topic.
Part III illuminates the debates and struggles over the development of the UDHR and details ER’s role in the process. Besides serving as chairman of the commission, she also chaired the subcommittee charged with drafting the document. There she insisted that the Declaration be a document “which will be readily understood by all people.” Once the drafting process was completed, she took a leading role in “selling” it—first to the United Nations itself and then to the world. Her 1948 Sorbonne speech, given at a time of heightened international tensions, underscored the United Nations’ commitment to human freedom and helped create a climate in which the General Assembly could approve the Declaration.
It is my belief, and I am sure it is also yours, that the struggle for democracy and freedom is a critical struggle, for their preservation is essential to the great objective of the United Nations to maintain international peace and security.
Among free men the end cannot justify the means. We know the patterns of totalitarianism—the single political party, the control of schools, press, radio, the arts, the sciences, and the church, to support autocratic authority; these are the age-old patterns against which men have struggled for three thousand years. These are the signs of reaction, retreat, and retrogression.
The United Nations must hold fast to the heritage of freedom won by the struggle of its peoples; it must help us to pass it on to generations to come.
The development of the ideal of freedom and its translation into the everyday life of the people in great areas of the earth, is the product of the efforts of many peoples. It is the fruit of a long tradition of vigorous thinking and courageous action. No one race and no one people can claim to have done all the work to achieve greater dignity for human beings, and greater freedom to develop human personality. In each generation and in each country there must be a continuation of the struggle, and new steps forward must be taken since this is preeminently a field in which to stand still is to retreat.”2
Part IV, and the documents that it contains, looks at the legacy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and provides more information about other members of the Human Rights Commission. The contributions of Charles Malik of Lebanon, René Cassin of France, and Hansa Mehta of India, to name three, underscore the international character of the Universal Declaration. This section also asks students to connect the Declaration to contemporary human rights problems.
Eleanor in talks with Soviet Communist Party head Nikita Khrushchev on September 28, 1957, in Yalta, Ukraine. Eleanor strove to build productive relationships with Soviet leaders, even during the Cold War era.
© Bettmann/Corbis
Although Eleanor Roosevelt considered the adoption of the UDHR her finest achievement, she continued to risk her income, reputation, and health to implement its principles.
At home, she opposed Senator Joe McCarthy’s attack on American civil liberties. She thought race was “the litmus test for democracy” and supported legal challenges to segregation and extralegal protests, boycotts, and demonstrations. When management and many political leaders remained determined to curtail the labor movement, she adamantly defended a worker’s right to join a union (she joined the Newspaper Guild) and held union leaders accountable for the policies and tactics they adopted. As the nation’s most visible post-war Democrat, she challenged her party to be true to its principles, and not to succumb to what she called the “politics of fear.” She so insisted that women be part of the presidential leadership team that John Kennedy responded to her pressure by creating the first Presidential Commission on the Status of Women and asking her to chair it.
ER carried these same values with her as she traveled the world. Refusing to succumb to easy political characterization of world leaders, she strove to build productive relationships with Josif Broz (Yugoslavia’s “Tito”), Jawaharlal Nehru (India), and Nikita Khrushchev (Russia). As an unpaid ambassador for the American Association for the United Nations, she visited dozens of nations, urging their support for the UN and their incorporation of the UDHR’s basic principles. And she used her My Day column to give credence to those nations emerging from colonial dominance, and to lobby for an American diplomacy, as grounded in development and aid as it was in military deterrence.
In short, ER devoted the rest of her life to the creation of a culture of human dignity at home and abroad. She believed that no one’s rights were safe unless everyone’s rights were respected. She argued repeatedly that “human rights began in small places close to home,” that these rights were political and civil rights as well as economic, social, and cultural rights, and that their implementation required “concerted citizen action.” She insisted that the world, the United States in particular, was “on trial” to show what human rights mean.
She, like her fellow commissioners, knew that this would not be easy. But she refused to succumb to cynicism. As she told anyone within earshot, she knew the pitfalls and obstacles lethargic leaders around the world used to rationalize their timid commitment to the Declaration. Declaring that “we make our own history,” she argued that we have a choice. “If we want a free and peaceful world, if we want” to create a world where everyone can “grow to greater dignity as a human being, WE CAN DO IT.”
1 Clinton Timothy Curle, Humanité: John Humphrey’s Alternative Account of Human Rights (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 40.
2 Eleanor Roosevelt, “The Struggle for Human Rights Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris (September 28, 1948),” in Allida M. Black, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Volume 1: The Human Rights Years, 1945–1948 (New York: Thomson Gales, 2007).