Mrs. Roosevelt Speaks
"Mrs. Roosevelt Speaks"
The Summary 29 March 1946
I have just come back from nine weeks in London where I attended the meeting which was attended by delegates of fifty-one countries. These delegates set up the machinery for an organization which we hope will help to preserve the peace of the world. We had thought that if we set up the organization and the members were appointed to the various permanent committees such as the Security Council2 and the Economic and Social Council3 and the judges were elected to the International Court4 and a Secretary General5 with his assistants6 was also elected, that nothing further could be done until this latter gentleman had time to organize a secretariat.
Instead of this, a number of very difficult questions were at once handed to the Security Council7 and while this has been considered by many people a drawback, I think it had good results. It is true that none of these questions were finally decided, but they were discussed and methods by which they could be considered were decided on.8 Some people felt that because some rather heated language was used,9 it would be more difficult to arrive at some kind of solution. I personally feel that it was a very good thing to have the discussion and to let everything come out in the open. My reason for feeling this way is not just that the actual members of governments, who exchanged points of view, let off steam and perhaps felt more kindly toward each other afterwards. I felt in addition, that the peoples of the different nations belonging to UNO learned a great deal by the mere fact that such plain language was exchanged and the peoples were obliged to think about what were the rights and wrongs in certain cases. Iran seemed very far away perhaps to most of the nations in the Assembly, but when people became so heated about it, I think a good many people got out their geographies and looked up where Iran was and perhaps began to wonder why Russia and Great Britain were so interested in preserving their influence in that far away and rather arid country.10
The first thing everyone thinks of in the case of Iran, is that there is oil there and to Great Britain the pipe line which comes out in the Persian Gulf is important, but to Russia the oil is probably of secondary interest. She has all the oil she needs in other areas,11 but the outlet on the Persian Gulf and the control of traffic on the railroad is probably of great importance to Russia. It is an outlet for her goods if she has any to send out, and it is the place where imports can come from the Far East and even from the west coast of the United States. Russia is hungry for consumer goods just as we have been, but with her now it is a real need, for her people probably have a great desire to begin to see some results in better living in view of the long period that they have accepted sacrifices in order to prepare to fight a war.
It is somewhat difficult for us to understand nations with entirely different backgrounds and experiences from our own. Nevertheless, if we have any hope of finding peaceful solutions to problems as they arise, we can only do so by learning to have confidence in each other's intentions and integrity. At the present time there is more suspicion than good will in the world, and yet anyone who spent as I did, even a few days in an area where the last war was actually fought,12 would feel that there is very little choice before us. Either we are going to have peace in the world, or we are going to have complete chaos if we drift into another war. We dropped no atom bombs on Europe and yet we succeeded in destroying the big cities in Germany so thoroughly13 that when I was asked if Germany should rebuild Berlin, I could not help wondering how one could rebuild a complete ruin.
The material ruins, however, are not the most important. It is the deterioration of people. They have suffered so much in many cases, they are numb, and it will take a long while before they can accept responsibility and show initiative in facing the almost insoluable problems which lie all around them.
One might well say in this country—why bother about Europe, we can get along without her. Unfortunately we might get on well for the next couple of years if we filled our national needs. Unless, however, we began to have people buy from us in other countries, and pay for what they buy, we will not have outlets for the great production capacity which we built up during the war, and which we need if our people are to have employment. This means that we, in the United States, must begin to think not only of our domestic situation, but of ourselves as leaders in a world which needs what we can give. We were spared from destruction and therefore have the strength and power to influence the world situation and can only fulfill our destiny, I believe, by doing so.
TMs AERP, FDRL
1. Chester D. Owens to ER, 19 February 1946, AERP; Edens, 44.
2. See Document 89. The UN Security Council comprised five permanent members—the United States, the USSR, Great Britain, France, and China—and six temporary members who served one-or two-year terms. At its first session, the General Assembly elected Brazil, Poland, and Australia to two-year terms and Mexico, Egypt, and the Netherlands to one-year terms ("World News Summarized," NYT, 13 January 1946, 1).
3. The UN General Assembly elected China, France, Chile, Canada, Belgium, and Peru for three-year terms and the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, India, Norway, Cuba, and Czechoslovakia for two-year terms, while the United States, Ukraine, Greece, Lebanon, Colombia, and Yugoslavia were elected for one-year terms (Lie, 28; Boyd, 98).
4. On February 6, the UN General Assembly and the Security Council elected fifteen jurists to the International Court of Justice, one of the principal organs of the international organization. They included Judge Green H. Hackworth, legal advisor to Secretary of State James F. Byrnes (United States); Dr. Hsu Mo (China); Charles de Visscher (Belgium); Prof. Jules Basdevant (France); Jose Gustavo Guerrero (El Salvador); Sir Arnold D. McNair (Great Britain); Prof. Sergei Borisovitch Krylov (USSR); Fabela Alfaro (Mexico); Alejandro Alvarez (Chile); J. Philadelpho de Barros Azevedo (Brazil); Abdel Hamid Badawi Pasha (Egypt); John M. Read (Canada); Milovan Zoricitch (Yugoslavia); Helge Klaestad (Norway); Bohdan Winiarski (Poland) (Sydney Gruson, "15 Judges Elected for World Court," NYT, 7 February 1946, 8).
5. The UN General Assembly elected Norwegian foreign minister Trygve Lie, the organization's first secretary-general on February 1 (Lie, 17).
6. The earliest staff appointments included Adrian Pelt (the Netherlands) as assistant secretary-general in charge of UN conferences, Arkady Sobolev (USSR) as assistant secretary-general for Security Council affairs, David K. Owen (Great Britain) as executive assistant to the secretary-general, and A. H. Feller (United States) as general council to the secretary-general (Sydney Gruson, "Hollander, Russian in UNO Secretariat," NYT, 18 February 1946, 4).
7. Between January 19 and 21, the Security Council received reports on three disputes. Iran complained about the continuing presence of Soviet troops in its territory and Soviet interference in the province of Azerbaijan. See n3 Document 144. In retaliation, the Soviets brought two complaints. Both dealt with the presence of British troops in two separate countries: Greece and Indonesia. On February 4, Syria and Lebanon complained about the presence of British and French troops on their territory in violation of a previous agreement (Chamberlin et al., 12-13; Lie, 30).
8. The Iranian situation ended after the USSR and Great Britain agreed to negotiate directly with one another. After some backstage maneuvering that resulted in a compromise between the two countries (the Soviets agreed to drop their charge that the presence of British troops in Greece constituted a threat to world peace while the British retracted their demand that the Security Council acquit them of the charge), the Greek debate ended with a statement from the Security Council president Norman Makin noting that the views of the Soviet Union and Great Britain and the other members of the Security Council had been heard and that the matter was closed. See n9 below. No resolution was passed on Indonesia. In the case of Syria and Lebanon, France and Great Britain complied with the council's vote to open immediate negotiations for the withdrawal of their troops, which took place shortly thereafter (James B. Reston, "UNO Settles Clash," NYT, 7 February 1946, 1; Lie, 28-34).
9. The exchanges between Soviet Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Vyshinsky and British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin over the situation in Greece were particularly harsh. Vyshinsky described the Greek leadership as "fascist scum" who ruled with British support and said that "such a situation constitutes a grave danger to the maintenance of peace and security." In response, Bevin said, "Have I or my Government … been endangering the peace of the world? If this is true, you ought to tell me to leave this table, because you are established to maintain world peace, and I am branded, at the first meeting, as being the one person in the world disturbing and endangering world peace" (Lie, 31-32).
10. See n3 Document 144. After years of competition against each other for control of Iran, Russia and Great Britain signed a convention in 1907 that gave each country a sphere of influence in the country. Russia's sphere was in the north, while Great Britain dominated the south (NEB; Lie, 29).
11. The Soviet Union's oil fields were located in the Caucasus and Belarus. (Then-undeveloped oil fields also existed in Siberia.) After World War II, the Soviet Union acquired Gallicia with its oil fields at Lvov (MacMillan, 225; OEWH).
12. See Document 94 and Document 95.
13. By the end of the war in Europe, American and British flying forces, operating under the Casablanca Directive code-named Pointblank, had destroyed most major industrial cities in Germany—Schweinfurt, Kassel, Hamburg, Wurzburg, Darmstadt, Heilbronn, Wuppertal, Weser, Cologne, Magdeburg, Dresden, and the capital city of Berlin (Keegan, 415-36).
Rebutting Jim Crow
In its March issue, Ebony featured a photographic essay on Eleanor Roosevelt's collegial relationships with African Americans, praising her as the "best White friend, patron and champion of Negro America," "a woman who practices what she preaches," and "the spiritual pinup girl of Negro Americans." Pages of photographs of ER entertaining the young boys from the Wiltwyck School and the entertainer Josh White and his family surrounded the text. "The party," the editor concluded, "was no stiff-lipped, formal shindig with lots of talk about interracial amity. Instead everyone just went about practicing interracialism by forgetting about color."1
April 12, Allen C. Smith of Kansas City, Missouri, who summered in Tidewater, Virginia, wrote ER to express his disapproval and to ask what she expected "to accomplish for the Negro race by these actions." After stating his thorough "belief that the Negro is entitled to the rights and privileges that a white man is entitled to … and a chance to better and improve his condition," he declared that an African American man "is not a social equal of the white man—and never will be." Furthermore,
the consensus of opinion among the white people in my part of Virginia is that you have done the Negro far more harm than you have done good. In fact, the consensus of opinion everywhere seems to be that instead of helping the condition of the Negro, you and your late husband have set them back. You have caused racial enmity that did not exist before. And the greater the racial enmity is, the greater the Negro is going to suffer.
Smith concluded by arguing the need for African American professionals was "limited" and that "the Negro should be taught that there is no disgrace in the domestic occupations." He then asked ER to "impress upon them that they are entitled to all the rights and privileges of any other citizen, but that there is no occasion or necessity of, that they should even have a desire for social equality with the white man."2