23 October 2008
Eleanor Roosevelt: A Profile
Eleanor Roosevelt transcended her privileged upbringing to serve as a tireless advocate for the economically disadvantaged in the United States. After the death of her husband, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, she served as chairwoman of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.
Eleanor Roosevelt had many roles in her lifetime, but she considered her time on the U.N. Commission on Human Rights her most important work.
A native New Yorker, Roosevelt was born in 1884 into a prominent family that valued community service. Both her parents died before she was 10, and she was raised by relatives.
Finding society life stifling, she taught “calisthenics and fancy dancing” in a Manhattan settlement house in New York City. The settlement house was a new form of social reform where those who served the poor in urban areas would live among them and work with them directly. She married her distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a rising political star, in 1905. They had six children together.
Resuming her volunteer work after the outbreak of World War I, Eleanor Roosevelt visited wounded soldiers and worked in a Red Cross canteen. “The feeling that I was useful was perhaps the greatest joy I experienced,” she later said.
In 1920, Franklin was stricken with polio, an affliction that would relegate him to a wheelchair and, it seemed for a time, end his political career. Eleanor was torn between pursuing her love of volunteering and helping her husband maintain his political viability. She spoke and worked for the Women’s Trade Union League and the National Consumers’ League. Working in the legislative affairs office of the League of Women Voters, she read the Congressional Record regularly. But she also nursed her husband back to health. Franklin Roosevelt resumed his political career, winning, in 1928, the governorship of New York, then the nation’s most populous and politically important state. Then, in 1932 — at the height of the Great Depression — Franklin Roosevelt was elected to the presidency of the United States.
The Constitution of the United States does not establish any role for the nation’s “first lady.” Many presidential wives had served a ceremonial function only. But Eleanor Roosevelt swiftly carved out for herself a role as trusted policy adviser. She was an advocate for rights of women, the poor, and minority groups. She became Franklin’s eyes and ears, traveling the country and reporting back her findings, especially regarding racial discrimination in the South. Often, she would aggressively lobby the president to change policy based on what she had seen. As presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin writes about Eleanor, “Citing statistics to back up her story, she would interrupt her husband at any time, barging into his cocktail hour when he wanted only to relax, cross-examining him at dinner, handing him memos to read late at night.” And it worked. Franklin Roosevelt signed a series of executive orders barring racial discrimination in the administration of government economic relief projects.
During World War II, Eleanor Roosevelt visited England and the South Pacific to boost the morale of U.S. servicemen and to maintain strong ties with the Allies. With her husband’s death in April 1945, she moved out of the White House but continued her activism. Later in 1945, the new president, Harry S. Truman, calling Eleanor the “First Lady of the World,” appointed her to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations.
Roosevelt served as the chairwoman of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which was charged with submitting proposals, recommendations and reports regarding declarations on civil liberties, the status of women, freedom of information, the prevention of discrimination and the protection of minorities. First and foremost on the commission agenda, however, was formulating an international bill of rights.
Securing one would be no easy feat. Mixing philosophical debates with the political process was dangerous in an international setting — everyone wanted to respect the neutrality of the document while articulating his or her vision for human rights. But Roosevelt was characteristically unfazed. “We make our own history,” she said. “It is more intelligent to hope than not to hope, to try rather than not to try. Nothing is achieved by the person who says it can’t be done.”
People around the world began flooding the commission, and especially Roosevelt, with letters detailing human rights abuses and asking for help. It made the commission’s charge all the more pressing. Roosevelt kept the group on a tight schedule, sometimes working late into the night. The delegates understood that she worked hard, and expected the same of others.
In December 1947, the Commission on Human Rights put the finishing touches on its draft of a declaration on human rights. But getting the draft through the United Nations Third Committee (which handled social, humanitarian and cultural affairs) was difficult. “We worked for two months, often until late at night, debating every single word of that draft Declaration over and over again before Committee 3 would approve its transmission to the General Assembly,” Roosevelt wrote in her memoirs.
In December 1948, with just one week to go until the U.N. General Assembly ended its annual session, the delegates still vehemently debated and amended the draft. Finally, on December 9, Eleanor Roosevelt addressed the General Assembly, saying that “we stand here today at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind.” And with just four minutes left before midnight on December 10, General Assembly President Herb Evatt of Australia called for a vote. Forty-eight nations voted affirmatively, none against, and eight abstained (two countries were not present and neither voted nor abstained). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been adopted. Eleanor Roosevelt received a standing ovation from the General Assembly.
Eleanor Roosevelt left the United Nations in 1951, but she continued writing and giving lectures and remained active in Democratic Party politics until her death in 1962.
-- Meghan Loftus
