Eleanor Roosevelt: “The Struggle for Human Rights”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In the fall of 1948 Roosevelt journeyed to Paris to attend the UN General Assembly's third session and to introduce for discussion and final approval the text of an “International Declaration of Human Rights” written by the UN's Human Rights Commission, which she chaired. At the time, the growing estrangement of the United States from the Soviet Union had already emerged as the defining feature of international politics in the postwar world and the most serious threat to the long-term maintenance of international peace and security. This state of affairs extended especially to the United Nations, established three years earlier to promote peaceful relations among its signatories though now a central battleground in the tense standoff between its two most powerful member states. Having already witnessed many American priorities falter in this fractious diplomatic environment, Roosevelt undertook a full-blown political campaign to build support for the declaration's passage, the broad rationale for which she unveiled in a major policy address at the Sorbonne (the common name at the time for the University of Paris and various of its successor institutions) on September 28, 1948.

Rather than evade or paper over the ideological conflict at the heart of Soviet-American tensions, Roosevelt used her speech to position the declaration as a challenge to the totalitarian state model favored by the Soviet Union and a successor to the signature documents and events of democratic transformation in North America and western Europe. “I have chosen to discuss it here in France, at the Sorbonne, because here in this soil the roots of human freedom have long ago struck deep and here they have been richly nourished,” she tells the assembly. “We are fighting this battle again today as it was fought at the time of the French Revolution and at the time of the American Revolution.” In this context she makes reference to the Declaration of the Rights of Man (which also included the words “and Citizen” as part of the full title). This was a 1789 document promulgated by the National Assembly of France during the French Revolution. Roosevelt goes on to describe the process by which the Declaration of Human Rights was created, noting that the work of the UN's Human Rights Commission was incomplete; while the commission had completed the declaration per se, it had not yet finished the binding treaty that would accompany the declaration and that, presumably, the UN's member nations would sign.

The advent of World War II coupled with the postwar reckoning of its greatest atrocity, the Holocaust, had given new urgency to the need to renew these values and update them for an international community twice plunged into global war in the previous thirty years. At the heart of this renewal lay the principle that universal human rights protect “the full development of individual personality” whenever and wherever it exists, without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion and within parameters that acknowledge the basic human rights of “freedom of speech and a free press; freedom of religion and worship; freedom of assembly and the right of petition; the right of men to be secure in their homes and free from unreasonable search and seizure and from arbitrary arrest and punishment.” Of utmost concern to Roosevelt was the integrity of these principles in the face of totalitarian attempts to undermine them by changing their definition. “We must not be deluded by the efforts of the forces of reaction to prostitute the great words of our free tradition and thereby to confuse the struggle,” she declares. “Democracy, freedom, human rights have come to have a definite meaning to the people of the world which we must not allow any nation to so change that they are made synonymous with suppression and dictatorship.”

Roosevelt notes that only four member states of the Human Rights Commission abstained from voting to approve the document. These states were the Soviet Union, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Yugoslavia, all Communist. The Soviet Union, she hastens to point out, had not met this standard in its own affairs; yet, uncharacteristically for an American diplomat at the time, she concedes later that the United States had not done so either. She uses the issue of race relations to illustrate her point. “We recognize that we have some problems of discrimination.… Through normal democratic processes we are coming to understand our needs and how we can attain full equality for all our people. Free discussion on the subject is permitted.”

By contrast, Roosevelt takes note of the Soviet government's claim that “it has reached a point where all races within her borders are officially considered equal … and they insist they have no discrimination where minorities are concerned.” But she reminds her audience of “other aspects of the development of freedom,” such as the ability to speak one's mind freely, “which are essential before the mere absence of discrimination is worth much, and these are lacking in the Soviet Union.” She goes on to point out fundamental differences in the meaning of the very word freedom and how those differences translate into differences in the meaning of such expressions as “freedom of the press.” In the Soviet Union, she notes, “freedom of the press” means that the state provides the machinery and salaries that allow newspapers to be published; in the West, such freedom pertains to the unfettered ability to question and criticize the government.

By establishing a standard that the world's population might look to as the rightful guarantees of civil society, Roosevelt hoped to foreclose any possibility that their meaning could change at the behest of despotism or the will of future dictators, as they had in Nazi Germany when Hitler rose to power. In closing, she tells her audience:

The propaganda we have witnessed in the recent past, like that we perceive in these days, seeks to impugn, to undermine, and to destroy the liberty and independence of peoples. Such propaganda poses to all peoples the issue whether to doubt their heritage of rights and therefore to compromise the principles by which they live, or try to accept the challenge, redouble their vigilance, and stand steadfast in the struggle to maintain and enlarge human freedoms.

Animated by the desire to make her own contribution in this regard, Roosevelt continued to campaign on behalf of the Declaration of Human Rights through the fall of 1948. On December 10, at midnight, she saw her efforts rewarded with its final adoption by the UN General Assembly. She considered the declaration's adoption her life's greatest accomplishment.