Speech on Behalf of Roosevelt College

24 May 1947 [Chicago]

Ladies and Gentlemen of Roosevelt College: I have been enormously interested tonight in all the things that I have heard about Roosevelt College. And in many ways I think one of the things that I have been hoping for is being worked out here.

You know, to me the most important thing in the world today is that we here in this country should consciously work for the perfection of our own democracy, and should understand that it has to come by the improvement of each individual and the individual community. It cannot come from the top down; it has to come from the bottom up.⁵

And the reason that I feel this so keenly is that I have had to work with the representatives of 55 nations, and it is very embarrassing, sometimes, when they come to you and say—because they do read—they come to this country and they read our papers—and they travel around and they meet us—and they come to you and say, "Is this a process of democracy?" You find it a little hard sometimes to just explain what this process is that they have come across.

I have come to feel that when the whole world is looking to a nation because it is the strongest nation in the world, because it is the greatest democracy, then there is a tremendous responsibility on the people of that nation. They—I think most of them—have been living in great comfort, with the Constitution which they like very much but which they didn't feel it incumbent upon them to re-read too often, particularly the Bill of Rights part of it.

And so it was quite possible to go along and say, "O yes—some day we really will live up to all the things that we say we believe in." But when you become the leading nation in the world, you have no longer the comfortable situation of feeling that you can indulge yourself in dreams, about what you really are; you have to come face to face with the facts of how you truly function.

That has brought me to feel that what has to happen here in our country is that we as individuals have to become very conscious of what we mean by democracy; and that democracy must be something you live day by day, and that enters into everything you do. You can't just put it aside and bring it out every now and then when it is convenient; it is something you live by.

That leads you to feel that it has to be strong in every community. If it isn't strong in every community, then the nation will never really be the kind of nation where the people really make the policies; where the people really know that they are represented by their representatives.

And so, to find education going on in a group of young people, which is aimed at making them conscious of their responsibilities in a democracy, is a very heartening thing, because we cannot escape leadership. I think we would like to very much, but we were spared in this war, and merely because of that, leadership must come from us. We must prove that what we believe in really is worth believing in.

Someone said to me the other day that there was no reason at all why we should prove that democracy was better than communism, let us say, since that is the other great force in the world today. Why should we prove anything at all? Why not leave it all to them to prove?

Well, the answer is that at present proof has to be brought about by enthusiasm. Now, there is plenty of enthusiasm in communism; and unless we have as much vitality and as much crusading spirit, we do run a certain danger.

It isn't enough to be against something. You have to be for something with more real feeling, that you have something that is really worth-while for the world as a whole. I do not mean that you have to make everybody else think as you do and live as you do. I simply mean that each of us who believes that democracy really has the essence of something which can give more to the people than anything else—we who believe that—have to show that it is true. We have to make of our nation the kind of a nation that truly can say, "We live up to the things we believe in. We have a unified nation."

It is going to take us a long while to do it, but everything worth-while takes a long while. And it seems to me that if we realize that it is something each of us works at, and that it is something that affects us, of course—it affects how we live; what we do—but it also affects what is going on in the world as a whole.

I am rather glad that attacks come to Roosevelt College from both the right and the left, because that is a pretty sure sign that you are going pretty well down the middle of the road. And you couldn't possibly be a liberal educational force and not be subject to attacks from both sides.⁶

And I am glad that you don't take it too seriously. I am glad that you persist in the processes of democracy, because those processes take time to work out. But they are the processes which really show the difference between our theories and collectivist theories.

I always remember a conversation I heard between a person of considerable importance in his own country and one of our own democratic leaders. There was considerable trouble in this country, and it was causing the government a good deal of worry and anxiety. And I heard the democrat say, "Well, what would you do in your country if you had this situation? And you had certain leaders?"

And the answer was, "O, we deal with that very easily. We would take the leaders and do this (sign of cutting the throat)."

That is a very simple answer, and at times it is much more tempting than going through the process of democracy.

But I think for us the real progress that can be made is if our youth can understand what we are trying to do in this country, and what we hope for in the future. I think if this College can send out people who are trained to a sense of responsibility, personal responsibility, for what happens in their community, in their environment, then I think this College will have done a tremendous work for democracy at home and for a solution to the great world problems that we have to lead in solving today.

Those problems are very difficult problems. Just in the mere small things that happen when you meet with the representatives of 55 nations you come to see how difficult just understanding backgrounds and differences of customs and habits may be.

I will tell you one funny story on myself, which perhaps is not a very good example, but still will show how little we do know about little things, and how easily little things can make for misunderstandings.

When I was elected chairman of our Commission on Human Rights, I thought it was a very bad choice because I know no parliamentary law! So I thought, "What am I going to do? I had better get up and tell them now before I get started and I make terrible mistakes."

So I got up and said I would have to call on the men on the Commission who knew a great deal of parliamentary law to help me out. I said, "I only know two things. One is that when a motion is offered, you have to have a seconder to the motion before you can discuss it." And I saw my Belgian colleague, who is just wonderful at parliamentary law, look at me smilingly.

He said, "Madam, under United Nations' rule, you do not have to have a seconder." So, Rule No. 1 was useless.

I said, "I only know one other rule, and that is that when there is a motion and there are amendments to it, your poor chairman has to try to decide what is the amendment furthest away from the original motion so as to get that voted on first." And I noticed my USSR colleague look at me and shrug his shoulders and look down, and he didn't say anything. I didn't know what it was all about, but I went on.

Several days later we had a little difficulty with our British colleague because he didn't seem to understand a point of view very well, so they suggested that I invite him to lunch, with his advisors. So I invited him to lunch, and we settled the point of view on the question at issue; and then one of his young advisers said, "I spent several years in Russia, Mrs. Roosevelt. I speak Russian. You didn't know it, but you cleared up a point the other day."

I said, "I cleared up a point? What did I clear up? I noticed that my Russian colleague looked sort of queerly at me, but I didn't know I had cleared anything up."

This young man said, "Well, you know in Russia they vote on the motion; they don't vote on the amendment furthest away; and nobody has ever really convinced them here that they weren't being hurt, this wasn't being something that was done to keep them from getting a vote on their motions. And when you just out of a clear blue sky explained that it was a rule, the USSR delegate looked at you, and I'm sure he went and told everybody else, 'Well, Mrs. Roosevelt said it was a rule so it probably is; it probably isn't a game against us.'"

Well, that is a little thing. And I have never known whether it was really true, although I think my young Britisher knew what he was talking about. But it seemed an illustration of how little differences can exist which we know nothing about and how much there is for us to know in so many ways about each other.

And believe me—the amount that needs to be known about us by other nations is considerable, because we take it for granted that all our good intentions are completely understood by everybody else, and that nobody would possibly suspect that we weren't functioning with good will towards the world as a whole. We couldn't have a bad intention of any kind. But you know, everybody doesn't just take that for granted.

And so I think that it really is very important today that we realize that the rest of the world is watching us—watching every community—watching individuals—trying to find out what this is that we call democracy—what it really does in daily living for people. And is it so much better than what they have? And can it do so much more? And do the people have so much more actual strength? And actual ability to control in their hands? And do they use it? And have they the capacity to use it wisely? All those things we are proving day by day; and we must not forget it.

And I think that Roosevelt College is probably doing more towards making a large group of young people understand their responsibility and go out into our country and perhaps through the contacts with many other countries really be able to interpret democracy, to live it, and through that to give us a chance at peace.

Without peace we are never going to succeed in having the benefits that we believe come with democracy. And yet, without democracy, I doubt if we will ever have peace. The two things have to come together. We have to work for them together. And I hope that every student that goes out from Roosevelt College will realize that our objectives today are to achieve understanding and cooperation; that we cannot expect to live in a world which does not have misunderstandings and does not have conflict; but that in the end we hope to achieve a peaceful world; and in that world we hope that people will have greater democracy and that individuals will have greater liberty and justice and freedom for all.

TSptr RUA, ICRC

1. Information on the venue of ER's speech received by e-mail from Michael Gabriel, archivist, Center for New Deal Studies, Roosevelt University, 18 November 2005.

2. John F. Sembower, "College for All Races," NYT, 16 November 1947, SM28-29; "Education Notes—Roosevelt—Growing," NYT, 17 March 1946, E9; and "Chicago's Roosevelt College Grows," NYT, 6 April 1947, E9; "Chicago's 'Equality Lab' Thrives," WP, 30 March 1947, B3.

3. "Education Notes—Roosevelt—One World," NYT, 21 April 1946, 83; "Chicago's Roosevelt College Grows," NYT, 6 April 1947, E9.

4. Quoted in "Chicago's Roosevelt College Grows," NYT, 6 April 1947, E9. For more on President Sparling and on the admission policies, curriculum, and governance of Roosevelt College, see Document 59 and its header.

5. For ER on making democracy real, see also Document 99 and Document 151.

6. Because of its integrated faculty and student body, ties to the labor movement, and the progressive views of many of its faculty, Roosevelt University became an easy target for critics who chose to label it a hotbed of Communism (Gross, 40-42).

On the Violence in Palestine

Angered by the British refusal to accept the recommendation of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry to permit 100,000 European Jews to emigrate to Palestine, Jewish underground military units unleashed a wave of attacks on British authorities in Palestine. On July 22, 1946, the Irgun Z'vai Le'umi bombed the headquarters of the British military at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing more than ninety people; in December, four British soldiers were kidnapped and flogged by the Irgun; and on March 1, 1947, a British officers club in Jerusalem was blown up, and attacks throughout Palestine killed 18 and wounded 25 Englishmen. The British responded with strong measures to control the uprising, imposing a house curfew on populations of the all-Jewish areas of Tel Aviv, Petach Tikvah, and Ramat Gan, and declared martial law for the Jewish quarter of Meash'arim.¹

Although ER placed much of the blame for the deteriorating situation in Palestine on the "totalitarian" tactics adopted by the British, she indicated in the following letter to Marshall that the failure of the United States to adopt a clear, firm policy within the UN only exacerbated the problem.