excerpts from the book

Eleanor: The Years Alone

by Joseph P. Lasch

W.W. Norton, 1972

Champion of Her Husband's Ideals

p34
They can always keep busy." What she really wanted to do was to make some contribution to what had been Franklin's main wartime objective-the establishment of machinery that would help ensure a lasting peace. As long ago as 1939 she had read Clarence Streit's Union Now and had had the author dine at the White House in order to explain his plan to Franklin

She had kept Franklin informed of the work of Clark Eichelberger's Commission to Study the Organization of Peace. All through the war she had argued for a "United Nations" rather than an Anglo-American approach to peacekeeping. In July, when the UN Charter was before the Senate, she had pleaded for immediate ratification, saying her husband thought it most important to write the Charter and have it accepted while the exigencies of winning the war still kept the Allies together.

p36
The United Nations, regardless of its imperfections, now seemed more important than ever. Mrs. Roosevelt considered it her husband's most significant legacy to the world and wanted his name to be associated with it. She enlisted the help of Truman and Hopkins to get the United Nations to consider the possibility of using Hyde Park as the permanent site of the new organization. She even thought that she, too, might be of help in carrying forward her husband's work.

Truman yielded to no one in his admiration of Mrs. Roosevelt, whom he still addressed as "First Lady," just as he still thought of Roosevelt as "the President." There were two people, Truman had told James Byrnes sometime in November, that he had to have on his political team-Henry Wallace, because of his influence with labor, and Mrs. Roosevelt, because of her influence with the Negro voter. He could "take care of Henry" but wanted Byrnes to find an appointment for Mrs. Roosevelt in the field of foreign affairs. "The following week," Byrnes said, "in recommending a list of delegates for the first meeting of the United Nations Assembly in London, I placed Mrs. Roosevelt's name at the top of the list, expressing the belief that because of her husband's deep interest in the success of the UN she might accept. Truman telephoned to her immediately, while I was still in his office, and she did agree to serve."

p37
"She has convictions and does not hesitate to fight for them, wrote Scripps-Howard columnist Thomas L. Stokes. "The New Deal era was richer for her influence in it. That influence was far greater than appeared publicly." Other women could represent American women, but this was a good appointment because "she, better than perhaps any other person, can represent the little people of this country, indeed of the world."

***

A Magna Charta for Mankind

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[Mrs. Roosevelt] ... had cited the guarantees written into the UN Charter of fundamental human rights. The trampling upon those rights by Nazism and fascism, especially Hitler's persecution of the Jews, was considered by the drafters of the Charter as among the underlying causes of the catastrophe, and a major respect in which the Charter was an advance over the League Covenant was its provision for the establishment of a commission "for the promotion of human rights." It had been the American hope to annex to the Charter a Declaration of Rights, and Durward Sandifer had been assigned to draft such a document. But there was no time before San Francisco to obtain agreement on a Declaration, so its drafting was assigned to the human rights commission as its first order of business.

No delegate in London had more eminently personified the cause of respect for human dignity than Eleanor Roosevelt, and it was not surprising that the Economic and Social Council asked her to serve on the "nuclear" human rights commission whose job it would be to prepare a plan of work and the permanent setup of the Commission.

p61
In January, 1947, the eighteen-nation Human Rights Commission held its first plenary session. Mrs. Roosevelt was the U.S. representative, appointed by President Truman to a four-year term. Again she was chosen chairman by acclamation. The other officers were a vice-chairman, Dr. Peng-Chun Chang, a scholarly Chinese diplomat, and the Commission's rapporteur, Dr. Charles H. Malik of Lebanon, a Christian humanist with an ever-ready reference to Thomas Aquinas.

The initial debate was somewhat philosophical.

p62
The debate had revealed two schools of thought within the Commission. "Our policy was to get a declaration which was a carbon copy of the American Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights," said Hendrick. The Soviet stress was on the need to include all sorts of economic and social rights, "and the less said about freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, etc., the better." The State Department was lukewarm toward the inclusion of the newer rights. Mrs. Roosevelt, however, saw no reason why such rights should not be incorporated into the draft, and she succeeded in pulling the department along with her.

Policy was formulated by an interdepartmental committee. But, in effect, Mrs. Roosevelt set the policy.

p63
The Commission set up a drafting committee of three to prepare a text for their next session. Mrs. Roosevelt felt "ill-equipped" compared with such "learned gentlemen" as Dr. Chang, Dr. Malik, and Dr. John Humphrey, the United Nations' Human Rights director, but perhaps she could help her colleagues put their "high thoughts" into words that the average person can understand. "I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me understand something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country-and perhaps that will be my real value on this drafting commission!"

The drafting committee met in Mrs. Roosevelt's Washington Square apartment. While she poured tea, Chang and Malik argued philosophy. The group finally agreed that if a draft was to be prepared by June the responsibility for doing so would have to be taken by the director of the Human Rights Division, Dr. Humphrey. He should first spend a year in China studying Confucianism, Chang grinningly admonished Humphrey, which was his way of reminding the UN official that something more than Western rights would have to go into the Declaration.

"I get more and more the sensation of something happening in the world which has a chance to override all obstacles," Hendrick wrote her after the session, "and more and more that this 'something' could never have come into being without you."

In June, an enlarged drafting committee went to work on the draft prepared by Humphrey.

They should write a bill, Mrs. Roosevelt told the drafting group, that stood some chance of acceptance by all fifty-five governments. As she said this, some of her colleagues wondered how explicit a statement of the state's responsibility for full employment the United States was prepared to accept. At the February session Mrs. Roosevelt had not been sure, but in the intervening months she had overcome resistance within the U.S. government and now said the United States was prepared to support not a "guarantee" of full employment, but an undertaking to "promote" it.

The Soviet representative thought this a pretty feeble affirmation of the right to work. "It would be incorrect for him to ask the U.S. representative to undertake to eliminate unemployment in the United States," he said scornfully. "The economic system in the United States made that impossible.... He could, however, ask that something concrete should be done. Instead of making a general statement about the right to work, the relevant article should list measures to be taken to ensure that right." "The right to work in the Soviet Union," Mrs. Roosevelt replied,

" means the assignment of workers to do whatever task is given to them by the government without an opportunity for the people to participate in the decision that the government should do this. A society in which everyone works is not necessarily a free society and may indeed be a slave society; on the other hand, a society in which there is widespread economic insecurity can turn freedom into a barren and vapid right for millions of people."

At her urging, the drafting committee did not spend too much time on the precise wording of the articles. A touchier issue had arisen and was dividing the committee-the binding character of the rights that were to be listed in the Declaration. The small nations in particular wanted something more than a moral manifesto. They wanted states to assume a treaty obligation to grant, protect, and enforce the rights enumerated in the Declaration. Neither the United States nor Russia favored this, but the United States, chiefly as a result of Mrs. Roosevelt's pressure, deferred to the views of the majority. There would be two documents, the committee decided, one a relatively brief declaration of principles that would provide "a common standard of achievement," the other a precise convention that would constitute a treaty binding on the states that ratified it and become a part of their own law. It was largely owing to Mrs. Roosevelt, wrote Marjorie Whiteman, that the Commission gave priority to the Declaration. "In her view the world was waiting, as she said, 'for the Commission on Human Rights to do something' and that to start by the drafting of a treaty with its technical language and then to await its being brought into force by ratification, would halt progress in the field of human rights."

p66
Public opinion in the United States and the mood in Congress were turning hostile toward additional UN commitments. In part, this was a response to the fact that the end of the war, instead of ushering in an era of peace, order, and friendliness, had brought almost chaotic conditions as well as a perilous confrontation with the Soviet Union. In part, it reflected domestic developments-the postwar swing to the right that culminated in McCarthyism and McCarranism. In part, it was a reaction to Soviet behavior in the United Nations. The readiness of the Soviet Union to exploit the platform and high principles of the United Nations in order to abuse the West and to boycott and paralyze the organs of the United Nations when those principles were invoked against Russia's mundane interests turned congressional sentiment against a legally binding convention, which, it was said, the Russians would disregard, even as they did their own constitution.

Another factor, perhaps the decisive one, in hardening congressional opposition to the Convention was the rising tension over civil rights inside the United States and the fears of the southern whites that the United Nations might help American Negroes in their struggle against discrimination. Black Americans had already appealed to the United Nations Human Rights division for redress of their grievances against American society. An NAACP petition to this effect was submitted ( to the United Nations in 1947.

p67
The Soviet double standard and the hostility of the southern bloc in the Senate to any international undertaking that might bolster the Negro drive made the State Department warier than ever of the Convention. Hendrick went up to consult Dr. Humphrey, director of the United Nations Human Rights division, on whether in realistic terms a declaration might not be as effective as a convention in the protection of human rights. Although Dr. Humphrey agreed with the United States that the Declaration should be the starting point in the UN approach to human rights, he did not believe, Hendrick advised Mrs. Roosevelt, it would have legally binding force.

p71
A week before Christmas the Declaration was approved by a vote of 13 to 4. Mrs. Roosevelt was not satisfied with the language. It was too professorial, too lawyer-like. "All my advisers are lawyers or I would be lost," she advised a friend, adding, "common sense is valuable now & then I find however!" The Commission approved her resolution asking the drafting committee to prepare a short text, "which will be readily understood by all peoples." On this resolution there was neither abstention nor dissent.

p72
The revised drafts were forwarded to the member governments for their comments before a final session of the Commission on Human Rights, after which she hoped the documents would be ready for consideration by the 1948 General Assembly. The United States no longer had any problem with the Declaration since it would not require congressional approval.

But there was furious debate inside the administration over whether to go ahead with a covenant under which nations would assume a legal obligation to protect the rights enunciated. Officials on the working level in the field of human rights favored a covenant, but would Congress ratify such a treaty? Mrs. Roosevelt came down to Washington after the Geneva meeting to confer with the president and the State Department. Truman's Committee on Civil Rights had just submitted a hard-hitting report that listed ten recommendations to secure minority groups rights in the United States, and southern demagogues, in full cry against those recommendations, were threatening to bolt the Democratic party in 1948.

p77
The 1948 General Assembly met in Paris at the end of September. It was a moment of tense confrontation with the Communists, who were on the offensive throughout western Europe. Soviet Russia's blockade of Berlin was being abetted by Communist-instigated strikes, street demonstrations, and violence inside France and Italy. At the heart of the confrontation, in the view of the West, was the issue of human liberty. The Assembly would have before it the draft Declaration. The president and General Marshall thought Mrs. Roosevelt should give a major speech in Paris.

"I saw both the Secy of State & the Pres. on a flying visit to Washington the other day. They are putting considerable responsibility on me in this session. Dulles has suggested that we point out that all our troubles are rooted in a disregard for the rights & freedoms of the individual & go after the U.S.S.R, not, thank heavens, claiming perfection but saying that under our system we are trying to achieve those rights & succeeding better than most. They want me to make an opening [address] to set this keynote outside the Assembly & I am trying to plan it now. I feel as you do, there cannot be a war but strength & not appeasement will prevent it."

She accepted Rene Cassin's invitation to come to the Sorbonne and talk on "The Struggle for the Rights of Man." She arrived at the Sorbonne accompanied by General and Mrs. Marshall. The amphitheater, which held 2,500, was packed and many hundreds were unable to gain admittance. The French minister of national defense presided, the French foreign minister was in her audience, and the French Broadcasting System broadcast the entire proceedings. The basic obstacle to peace, she said, sounding her central theme, was the different concept of human rights held by the Soviet Union. It

was the battle of the French and American Revolutions all over again. "The issue of human liberty is as decisive now as it was then." Her excellent French and extreme graciousness of manner charmed her audience, as did her ad-libbed departures from her text. Her audience "was particularly delighted when she said she thought she had reached the limits of which human patience is capable when she brought up her family, but that since she had presided over the Commission on Human Rights she had realized that an even greater measure of patience could be exacted from an individual." So the foreign service officer who was assigned to cover the meeting reported to the State Department.

p79
At 3 :00 A.M. on December 10 the Assembly adopted the Declaration and she could write "long job finished." The final vote was 48 countries in favor, none against, 2 absent, and 8 abstentions, mostly of Soviet bloc countries. The Assembly delegates, in recognition of Mrs. Roosevelt's leadership, accorded her the rare personal tribute of a standing ovation.

She glowed when General Marshall told the delegation that the 1948 session would go down in history as the "Human Rights Assembly." "I do not see," commented Charles Malik, who succeeded her as chairman of the Commission, "how without her presence we could have accomplished what we actually did accomplish." Helen Keller, after reading the Declaration in Braille, wrote her, "my soul stood erect, exultant, envisioning a new world where the light of justice for every individual will be unclouded." She was being proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize, Clark Eichelberger of the American Association for the United Nations informed her, but the French felt she and Cassin should share the award. Would she object? He could go ahead, she wrote back, but she did not see why she should be nominated at all. Dulles sent her a copy of a letter he had sent the American Bar Association defending the Declaration and her role in drafting it:

"As regards Mrs. Roosevelt, she has worked loyally and effectively on this matter for two years and, while herself without legal training has had the assistance of competent draftsmen. It is to be borne in mind that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not, at this stage, primarily a legal document. It is, like the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, a major element in the great ideological struggle that is now going on in the world, and in this respect Mrs. Roosevelt has made a distinctive contribution in defense of American ideals."

Some were cynical about the Declaration, stating there was "an inherent absurdity" in an "organization of governments, dedicating itself to protect human rights when, in all ages and climes, it is governments which have been their principal violators." But this was precisely the value of the agreement on the first intergovernmental bill of rights and fundamental freedoms. "Man, the individual human being, has emerged on the international scene which in the past was the jousting ground only of States."

"The first step has been taken," Mrs. Roosevelt replied to Helen Keller. "We shall now go ahead with the work on the Covenants." Progress would be very slow on the Covenants. For a time after Mrs. Roosevelt had left the delegation in 1953, the United States declined to take any part in their drafting. In 1966 two Covenants, one on civil and political rights and the other on economic and social rights, were approved by the Assembly and opened for ratification, but as of this writing fewer than twenty countries have deposited such ratifications and neither of the Covenants has gone into effect.

The Declaration, meanwhile, demonstrated an influence far beyond expectations. It has proved to be "a living document," Dag Hammarskjold observed on the tenth anniversary of its adoption. "It has entered the consciousness of the people of the world," Adlai E. Stevenson wrote in 1961, "has shaped their aspirations, and has influenced the consciences of nations." The European Convention on Human Rights was a spin-off effect of the Declaration, even going beyond it, since it established a commission to hear complaints and a court to adjust them. The Declaration has found its way into many constitutions and is increasingly cited in domestic court decisions. Its provisions often have been invoked in General Assembly resolutions and by Soviet dissenter and black resister. Pope John XXIII, in his encyclical Pacem in Terris, called the Declaration "an act of the highest importance," an "important step on the path towards the juridical-political organization of the world community."

Most international lawyers now think that, whatever the intentions of its authors may have been, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is now binding on states as part of the customary law of nations.

The decision of Mrs. Roosevelt and her advisers to give priority to the Declaration was vindicated. The first United Nations Human Rights prize was awarded to her posthumously.

But more than the prize, she would have enjoyed the knowledge that the Declaration was slowly working its way into the ethical conscience of mankind. For as she wrote in 1958:

"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 he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. 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."

***

Reluctant Cold Warrior

p93
"Of course, I do not believe in having everyone who is a liberal called a communist, or everyone who is conservative called fascist, but I think it is possible to determine whether one is one or the other and it does not take too long to do so."

p93
"The American Communists seem to have succeeded very well in jeopardizing whatever the liberals work for. Therefore, to keep them out of policy-making and staff positions seems to be very essential even at the price of being called red-baiters...

p156
Like her uncle Theodore, Mrs. Roosevelt enjoyed a good scrap. To stand up for the underdog, she knew from three decades of public activity, meant to run the chance of public attack and vilification.

***

Eleanor Roosevelt and the Nobel Peace Prize

p335
Several efforts were made to have the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Mrs. Roosevelt. In 1961 Adlai E. Stevenson, at that time United States representative at the United Nations, nominated her, not only because of the contribution that she had made to the drafting and approval of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but because "in this tragic generation [she] has become a world symbol of the unity of mankind and the hope of peace."'

A year later, when he renewed his request for consideration of Mrs. Roosevelt's nomination, he was seconded by President Kennedy, who wrote the Nobel Committee that she was "a living symbol of world understanding and peace," and that her "untiring efforts" on its behalf had become "a vital part of the historical fabric of this century." An award to this remarkable lady, Kennedy added, "in itself would contribute to understanding and peace in this troubled world." 2

This was nine months before Mrs. Roosevelt's death. Death did not stop the efforts on her behalf. Ralph J. Bunche, himself a recipient of the prize, proposed that it be awarded to her posthumously. "I can think of no one in our times who has so broadly served the objectives of the Nobel Peace Award," he wrote Gunnar Jahn, chairman of the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament which made the award. The prize went to Linus Pauling in 1962 and to the International Red Cross in 1963.

In the summer of 1964 a new effort got under way to obtain the prize for Mrs. Roosevelt posthumously. Lester B. Pearson, prime minister of Canada and a winner of the prize for his work in establishing the first United Nations peace force, wrote Gunnar Jahn urging a posthumous award. "She certainly was an outstanding woman and I believe that the world does owe her a special debt of gratitude for her magnificent work for peace, and for the freedom and human rights on which peace must be based." Nobel officials replied that the statutes of the Nobel Foundation prohibited the submission of the names of deceased persons. But Mrs. Roosevelt's friends thought the committee, if it wished, could interpret the statutes to make the award. Andrew W. Cordier, Dag Hammarskjold's closest collaborator in the United Nations Secretariat, wrote Jahn pointing out that Mrs. Roosevelt had been nominated prior to her death, and in his view, therefore, she "technically qualifies under the rules of your Committee."

At Adlai Stevenson's request, the Norwegian ambassador to the United Nations, Sivert A. Nielsen, inquired whether Mrs. Roosevelt could not be awarded the prize since she had been nominated while alive. "My attention has been drawn to the fact," Ambassador Nielsen added, "that the late Secretary-General [ Dag Hammarskjold] was awarded the prize post-mortem." The director of the Nobel Committee did not find the parallel persuasive. "It is not possible to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Mrs. Roosevelt post-mortem," he informed Nielsen. "The last time she was recommended was in 1962." Nielsen took up the matter with Nils Langhelle, president of the Norwegian Storting and a member of the Nobel Committee. The rules of the Nobel Foundation concerning post-mortem awards, Langhelle replied, were interpreted to mean: "Deceased persons cannot be proposed whereas one who has been proposed and subsequently died can be awarded the prize post mortem for that year."

Mrs. Roosevelt's friends were not to be deterred. Since the 1964 prize had been awarded to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., an organizing committee, consisting of the Dowager Marchioness of Reading, former publisher of the New York Herald-Tribune Mrs. Ogden Reid, and Esther Lape, undertook to secure consideration of Eleanor Roosevelt for the 1965 award. Twenty-eight distinguished citizens from all over the world sent supporting letters.

Former President Truman, with characteristic bluntness, wrote Gunnar Jahn:

I understand that there are regulations in your committee that rule out an award of the Peace Prize to Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt because she has passed away.

The award without the financial prize that goes with it can be made. You should make it. If she didn't earn it, then no one else has.

It's an award for peace in the world. I hope you'll make it.

Clement Attlee, former British prime minister, wrote from the House of Lords with equal brevity and bluntness:

Eleanor Roosevelt did a great work in the world, not only for her fellow citizens of the United States, but for all people, and there is no doubt at all that if posthumous awards are given then the name of Eleanor Roosevelt should be among the recipients, and this nomination has my full support.

"If there is anyone who serves the posthumous award of the Nobel Prize it is she," wrote Jean Monnet, father of the Common Market:

Fundamentally, I think her great contribution was her persistence in carrying into practice her deep belief in liberty and equality. She would not accept that anyone should suffer-because they were women, or children, or foreign, or poor, or stateless refugees. To her, the world was truly one world, and all its inhabitants members of one family.

Letters of support came from United States cabinet members and senators as well as from foreign statesmen. Two former presidents of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Charles Malik of Lebanon and Rene Cassin of France, endorsed the nomination. One letter came from a Harvard professor of international relations in whose class Eleanor Roosevelt had regularly lectured and who later would become better known. "As someone who knows Mrs. Roosevelt for many years," wrote Henry A. Kissinger,

and admired her work all his adult life, I can say that she was no ordinary person, not even an ordinary Nobel laureate. Mrs. Roosevelt was one of the great human beings of our time. She stood for peace and international understanding not only as intellectual propositions but as a way of life. She was a symbol of compassion in a world of increasing righteousness. She brought warmth rather than abstract principles. I am convinced that recognition of her quality would move people all over the world....

"We have no illusions about the flexibility of the Nobel Committee," Esther Lape wrote David Gurewitsch. "Its statements reflect a rigidity extraordinaire. But that the views of these distinguished persons in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, and France will have an impact on the Committee, I cannot doubt."

The 1965 prize was awarded to UNICEF.

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