The 40s: The Story of a Decade

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Whether an American spokesman at an official international gathering has been thoroughly briefed or not depends pretty much on his inclinations and durability. Not far from the portals of all major conference chambers there are obscure State Department career experts on one aspect of foreign policy or another to whom briefing comes as easily as breathing. They stand ready to provide our delegates with up-to-the-minute, authoritative counsel, and they, or even more shadowy aides, prepare thoughtful essays setting forth the official United States position on all foreseeable points of contention. These documents are called “position papers.” As a rule, they come to the delegates bound in folders and are then called “position books.” The delegates are not, of course, supposed merely to parrot the sentiments expressed in these treatises. Our representatives on United Nations committees and commissions are counted upon to use their own knowledge, intelligence, initiative, instinct, skill, and viewpoints in reconciling the United States position to that of other nations—without, however, straying in any important respect from Department policy—in order to arrive, if possible, at a multilaterally satisfactory solution of the issue under discussion. The delegates, who are expected to read the position books, along with many supplementary texts, between the conclusion of one long-drawn-out meeting and the beginning of the next, informally call this literature “homework.” Its unsung authors know that much of it is not read or, at best, is hastily skimmed, so they were flabbergasted, in London, when Mrs. Roosevelt accepted her homework gratefully and did all of it, an unorthodox practice to which she has heroically adhered ever since. She showed further signs of eccentricity in London by remarking that her hotel accommodations seemed unnecessarily elegant, by making an effort to attend every session she was supposed to attend, and by being on time. So unflagging was her devotion to duty that when the King and Queen of England invited her to a private luncheon one day, she replied, to the astonishment of several State Department protocol men, that she would be delighted to come but that she’d have to leave early, to make a subcommittee meeting.

  Our delegates to each session of the General Assembly are picked by the President, and their assignments lapse upon adjournment. Mrs. Roosevelt is the only American who has been an official representative at every regular Assembly session. Her appointment to the Human Rights Commission, in April, 1946, was a separate one, for the duration (four years) of the United States’ current term of service in that group. She was immediately elected chairman by its other members. The commission has been engaged principally in framing an International Bill of Rights. Some United Nations officials do not consider this as urgent a piece of business as, say, the control of atomic energy, but Mrs. Roosevelt feels that it is time the United Nations stated clearly and ringingly what rights it thinks its member nations should guarantee the individuals residing in them. Our State Department, and Mrs. Roosevelt, originally had in mind simply a brief declaration of fundamental rights, possibly to be followed later on by one or more covenants setting forth basic civil rights, along the lines of the American Bill of Rights. The Soviet Union was agreeable, but whenever anybody brought up the subject of the exact contents, the U.S.S.R. delegate and his cohorts insisted on putting all the emphasis on economic rights—like the right to work, the right to be housed, the right to free medical care, and so on. The majority of the other nations represented on the commission were not satisfied with the idea of beginning merely with a declaration. They wanted a formal covenant to be drawn up at the same time, and they won their point at Geneva. “We often make the mistake of thinking, when we go into an international meeting,” Mrs. Roosevelt said afterward, “that our views will naturally please everyone else. Besides, you really couldn’t blame the small nations for feeling the way they did. Many of the things that happened to some of them during the war might not have happened if there had been existing and binding international agreement on what human rights could not be violated.” The project is still in draft form—a declaration, a covenant, and a section dealing with proposals for implementing the covenant. The Commission is now revising these at Lake Success, on the basis of recommendations by the United Nations’ fifty-eight member states. By the end of this month Mrs. Roosevelt hopes to have a final draft ready for the Economic and Social Council, which, if it endorses this version, will pass it along to the General Assembly for consideration at its next regular session, in September. If the Assembly approves the bill, the covenant will be submitted to the member nations for ratification, and if ratified (locally, if it were regarded as a treaty, the United States Senate would have to approve it by a two-thirds vote), it will become binding—if, that is, it can be enforced.

  Mrs. Roosevelt approached her work on the Human Rights Commission with the skittish self-deprecation that has characterized her sorties into other fields. “The writing of a preliminary draft of the bill of rights,” she confessed in her column, “may not seem so terrifying to my colleagues in the drafting group…all of whom are learned gentlemen. But to me it seems a task for which I am ill-equipped. However, I may be able to help them put into words the high thoughts which they can gather from past history and from the actuality of the contemporary situation, so that the average human being can understand and strive for the objectives set forth. 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 to the drafting commission!” Mrs. Roosevelt has since admitted that she is surer of herself than that, and while it would be impossible to credit any one person with sole responsibility for a statute so often rephrased as the bill already has been, in United Nations circles it is generally conceded to be her baby.

  Mrs. Roosevelt has run her commission as firmly and efficiently as she has run her private life. Two and a half years ago, she was an indifferent parliamentarian, and it still seems to bother her a bit when she has to cut off a speaker in mid-flourish, but nowadays she can chairman a meeting as expertly as if she had been born with an “Out of order” on her lips. When the Geneva meeting was convened, last December, some of the delegates muttered gloomily that, because of the inevitable tendency of such conferences to drag on, they wouldn’t get home for Christmas. Mrs. Roosevelt had sixteen grandchildren (she now has one more), and she likes to spend Christmas with her family. On December 3rd, she announced from the chair that she expected the delegates to attend to all the items on their agenda in the next two weeks. The commission wound up its business at eleven-thirty on the night of December 17th. Later, Mrs. Roosevelt was asked by the envious chairman of another commission how she had managed this minor miracle. “There was nothing to it,” she replied. “I simply made them work from the beginning exactly as people at conferences usually do at the very end.” As the delegates were bidding each other farewell, the Soviet representative complained good-humoredly to her that Madam Chairman had driven everybody too hard, and that while she didn’t appear terribly tired, his wife, who had served him as secretary and interpreter, was exhausted. Mrs. Roosevelt was not feeling good-humored about her colleague—who, she thought, had been needlessly severe toward the delegates of several small nations who had disagreed with him at the meeting—and in saying goodbye to the Russian she emphatically indicated her devotion to the human right of freedom of expression by murmuring that she was sorry to hear about his wife but glad that he had learned that even in the decadent democracies some people knew how to work.

  As a rule, Mrs. Roosevelt sternly forbids herself the luxury of any overt show of exasperation. Her patience is formidable, but once or twice she has, if not quite lost it, at least mislaid it momentarily. Last fall, she delivered a sharp impromptu lecture to the General Assembly’s Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee, which had just been treated to a statement on war-mongering and slander by a Yugoslav humanitarian. “The longer I listen to this committee and I hear what happens in other committees,” Mrs. Roosevelt said, “the more I think the time has come for some very strai
ght thinking among us all. The ultimate objective that we have is to create better understanding among us, and I well acknowledge that this is going to be difficult. And I will give you the reasons why. I have never yet heard a representative of any of the U.S.S.R. group acknowledge that in any way their government can be wrong. They may say it at home—I do not know—and they may think it is wrong to do it outside. They are very young, and the young rarely do acknowledge anything which they may have done that may not be quite right. With maturity we grow much more humble, and we know that we have to acknowledge very often that things are not quite perfect. [At this point, two listening officials of the State Department, which traditionally takes an unkindly view of acknowledging American imperfections, looked at each other and gulped.] Because we acknowledge it does not mean that we love our country any less, that we do not basically believe in the rightness of the things that exist in our country. What it does mean is that we know that human nature is not perfect and that we hope that all of us can contribute to something better.” She concluded with, “Now, I don’t expect the millennium immediately, but I do expect and hope and pray that we are going to see a gradual increase in good will rather than a continual backwards and forwards of telling us what dogs we are and how bad we are. I see no use in that at all. I am weary of it all, and all I can say to my colleagues is that I hope we can work with good will.”

  · · ·

  Mrs. Roosevelt is pessimistic about the prospect of effecting an immediate East-West rapprochement through United Nations councils or by any other method, but her relations with her colleagues from Eastern Europe have been, on the whole, extremely cordial. “A lot of diplomats play that part of the game correctly,” one State Department man has observed, “but in Mrs. R’s case it’s obvious that she does so not only because it’s the proper thing to do but because she has a real sincerity of feeling.” Mrs. Roosevelt’s relations with domestic Communists have of late been less friendly. She is a leading example of an American who has become disillusioned with our Communist Party, not because of the editorial page of the Journal-American but through association with its members. She does not try to hide the fact that in past years she often supported organizations in which Communists were prominent, and, before her first appointment to the United Nations, Miss Thompson cheerfully compiled, for the benefit of any federal character investigators who might drop around, a list of all the groups, among the hundreds with which her employer had been involved, that Miss Thompson thought the government might deem subversive. Mrs. Roosevelt cut herself adrift from the extreme Left three years ago. Shortly before that, she had allowed a youth organization to hold a meeting at the White House. She knew that some of the members present were Communists and she told her guests that she knew it. She added that, in order to let everyone there know who stood where, she would appreciate it if the Communists in the room would rise and identify themselves. Nobody got up. Mrs. Roosevelt regards deception as an unforgivable sin. Not long thereafter, in “My Day,” she said that the members of the Communist Party of the United States “taught the philosophy of the lie” and added that “I happen to believe that anyone has a right to be a Communist, to advocate his beliefs peacefully and accept the consequences. A Communist here will be—quite rightly, it seems to me—under certain disadvantages. He will not be put into positions of leadership. I do not believe that he should be prevented from holding his views and earning a livelihood. But because I have experienced the deception of the American Communists, I will not trust them.” Since then, Mrs. Roosevelt has been wary about permitting her name to be used by any organization. As a result of her experiences, she is perhaps better equipped than most Americans to understand the nature of Communist negotiating tactics. After one particularly harrowing meeting of a United Nations committee, another American, who had never been mixed up with a Communist front in his life, came up to her and, mopping his brow, said, “Well, at least we had that argument out today.” “We’ll have it again tomorrow,” she replied placidly, and so they did.

  Mrs. Roosevelt does not think that this country’s chances of ultimately attaining peaceful relations with Russia are hopeless. She has become convinced, after many months of reflection on the world situation, that the surest way of attaining them is through economics, and that the two powers might get along better if we were to offer to send an economic mission to the U.S.S.R.—chiefly, to begin with, to help it develop its vast natural resources, some of which the United States, now pressed for many raw materials, could make profitable use of. “I’ve learned that the Politburo admires toughness,” Mrs. Roosevelt said not long ago, “and therefore I would have put on the mission, along with others, the very toughest, best group of industrialists we could get—people like Ernest Weir and Tom Girdler and Alfred Sloan—because theirs has been the kind of success that the Russians appreciate. These men could say to the Russians, ‘Now, look, we didn’t come over here only for your good; we came to get something mutually advantageous.’ If we were to do that, and it convinced the Russians that we were willing to co-operate with them and didn’t want to monopolize all the economic processes—as I think it might—then maybe we could start moving in a sensible direction.” She has not sounded out the Messrs. Weir, Girdler, and Sloan, but she has presented the idea to a number of our highest government officials, who are presumably mulling it over.

  Some of Mrs. Roosevelt’s fellow-citizens think that the best mission this country could send to Russia would be Mrs. Roosevelt herself. She recently returned from a trip to Europe, which she made principally to attend the unveiling of the statue of her husband that the British put up in London. Her itinerary included brief excursions to Belgium, where she spoke to an assembly of women’s clubs; to Switzerland, where she called on a sick friend; and to Holland. She was invited to the Netherlands by Princess Juliana, an old acquaintance, and in her note of acceptance she said that she would be glad to run over to pay her respects to Queen Wilhelmina and the children. The Princess wrote back that she appreciated Mrs. Roosevelt’s interest in the family but that the main reason for the invitation was the belief that the morale of the Dutch people would be immeasurably buoyed up if Mrs. Roosevelt were to appear in person among them. Since the end of the war, nearly all the nations of Europe, including some within the Soviet orbit, have repeatedly asked Mrs. Roosevelt, either formally or informally, to pay them visits, in many cases indicating to her that they regard her as an incomparable morale builder.

  Busy as Mrs. Roosevelt was in Switzerland, she did take time out to meet with some Swiss national officials in Berne and some canton officials in Geneva and talk over a few of their problems with them. In Geneva one night, at her instigation, she had a three-hour conversation with the local men in charge of commerce, welfare, agriculture, and labor. She asked them a great many questions and took careful notes on their answers. The Swiss were delighted and flattered by her interest, and told her so. “You know,” she said later to a friend, “for the first time I realized that I can really create good will abroad for the United States.” Her admirers believe that even in Russia she could create good will. When her son Elliott saw Stalin in Moscow, a year and a half ago, the Premier’s first words of greeting indicated that in at least one respect he is not as different from the heads of Western European governments as is commonly thought. “When is your mother coming?” he asked.

  FROM

  Lillian Ross

  MARCH 26, 1949 (ON SIDNEY FRANKLIN)

  The best bullfighters in the world have come, traditionally, from Spain or Mexico. The old Spanish province of Andalusia has contributed more bulls and more bullfighters to the bull ring than all the rest of Spain. Manolete, probably history’s top-ranking matador, who, at the age of thirty, was fatally gored in the summer of 1947, was an Andalusian. Carlos Arruza, who retired last year, at twenty-eight, with a two-million-dollar fortune and the reputation of fighting closer to the bull than any other matador had ever done, was born in Mexico, of Spanish-born parents. B
elmonte, an Andalusian, and Joselito, a Spanish gypsy, were the leading figures in what is known in bullfight countries as the Golden Age of Bullfighting, which ended with Belmonte’s retirement to breed bulls, in 1921, a year after Joselito’s death in the arena. The only Mexican who ranked close to Belmonte and Joselito in their time was Rodolfo Gaona, an Indian, who, in 1925, retired a millionaire with large real-estate interests in Mexico City. Some years ago a Chinese bullfighter named Wong, who wore a natural pigtail, turned up in Mexico as El Torero Chino, and a Peruvian lady bullfighter, Conchita Cintrón, is active today. Only one citizen of the United States has ever been recognized as a full-fledged matador. He is Sidney Franklin, who was born and raised in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn.

  Franklin, who is now forty-five, estimates that he has killed two thousand bulls so far. Last winter, in Mexico, he killed thirteen. He is planning to go to Spain this summer to kill as many bulls as he can get contracts to fight, although he is much older than the usual bullfighter is at his peak. “Age has nothing to do with art,” he says. “It’s all a matter of what’s in your mind.” He hopes someday to introduce bullfighting to this country, and, if he succeeds, expects it to become more popular than baseball. Ernest Hemingway, who became an authority on bullfighting, as well as on Franklin, while preparing to write Death in the Afternoon, maintains that to take to bullfighting a country must have an interest in the breeding of fighting bulls and an interest in death, both of which Hemingway feels are lacking in the United States. “Death, shmeath, so long as I keep healthy,” Franklin says. When aficionados, or bullfight fans, charge that Americans born north of the border are incapable of the passion necessary for bullfighting, Franklin replies passionately that coldness in the presence of danger is the loftiest aspect of his art. “If you’ve got guts, you can do anything,” he says. “Anglo-Saxons can become the greatest bullfighters, the greatest ballet dancers, the greatest anything.” When, in 1929, Franklin made his Spanish début, in Seville, the aficionados were impressed by the coldness of his art. “Franklin is neither an improviser nor an accident nor a joker,” wrote the bullfight critic for La Unión, a Seville newspaper. “He is a born bullfighter, with plenty of ambition, which he has had since birth, and for the bulls he has an ultimate quality—serene valor. Coldness, borrowed from the English, if you please.… He parries and holds back with a serene magnificence that grandly masks the danger, and he doesn’t lose his head before the fierce onslaughts of the enemy.” “Franklin fought as though born in Spain; the others fought as though born in Chicago,” another critic observed a year later, in comparing Franklin’s manner of dispatching two bulls with the work of the Spanish matadors who appeared on the same bill in a Madrid bull ring. One day early in his career, Franklin killed the two bulls that had been allotted to him, then, taking the place of two other matadors, who had been gored, killed four more. This set off such an emotional chain reaction in the ring that another bullfighter dropped dead of excitement. Today, many aficionados, both Spanish and Mexican, disparage Franklin’s artistry. “Manolete made you feel inside like crying, but Franklin does not engrave anything on your soul,” a Spanish aficionado of thirty years’ standing complained not long ago. “Franklin has no class,” another Spaniard has said. “He is to a matador of Spanish blood what a Mexican baseball player is to Ba-bee Ruth.” “I am A Number One,” Franklin says. “I am the best in the business, bar none.”