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 dele
gation, 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. . . . S
uch 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.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3 Page 69
