Beyond the Nation: Pushing the Boundaries of U.S. History from a Transatlantic Perspective

Ferdinando Fasce, Maurizio Vaudagna, Raffaella Baritono

• Publisher: Otto
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9788895285429
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents the results of a research project conducted by Italian Americanist historians from the Universities of Genoa, Bologna, and Eastern Piedmont, in cooperation with other European scholars specializing in U.S. history. The relationship between the national and the transnational in the history of the U.S. during the 20th century has been the central focus of the project. Recent efforts among scholars based both inside and outside the U.S. to "deprovincialize" and internationalize American history by charting the vast set of historical factors located beyond the nation-state level provide the scholarly context of this text. Indeed, the essays collected here examine crucial moments and issues of national U.S. history and identity in the 20th century by extending their scope to an international and transnational arena. They also touch upon a vast array of subjects related to American history including women's studies, migration, race, popular culture, the welfare state, and intellectual history.

“We Must Have Eagle Eyes:” Eleanor Roosevelt, the United Nations and the World Trips of the 1950s[1]

Raffaella Baritono

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This paper is part of a broader general analysis of the activism and political thought of Eleanor Roosevelt from the 1920s through the Cold War period. The hypothesis at the basis of this research centers on Roosevelt’s unique blend of domestic politics and international engagement, which helps us understand the different ways American liberalism both reflected and reinterpreted the political changes taking place during the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, Roosevelt sought to trace something of a third way between the cosmopolitanism characterizing certain assumptions of liberalism during the progressive 1920s (which had found expression in political culture and women’s pacifism) and the Cold War liberalism of the 1940s and 1950s; in other words, a way that combined the ideals of a participatory democracy respectful of individual and human rights with the reality of a political framework marked by the bipolar confrontation. This was a difficult balance to achieve. In this author’s view Eleanor Roosevelt’s ambivalent positions, often dictated by a unique pragmatism, represent a brand of American liberalism that, even at its most progressive, never managed to escape the trap of exceptionalism and bipolar antagonism.

Any research on the work of Eleanor Roosevelt would likely be partial. Indeed, a lifetime would not suffice for a careful consideration of all the sources. From the start of her public career in 1921 to her death in 1962, Roosevelt wrote 27 books, more than 8,000 newspaper articles, and 850 essays. She received an average of 45,000 letters a year, with peaks of as high as 300,000 when she was First Lady. Even after 1945, the number of letters she received continued to be in the thousands. From 1945 to 1948 she gave 30 interviews or speeches on the radio, and was a guest on 326 radio broadcasts between 1948 and 1961. Between 1959 and the autumn of 1962 Boston’s educational television station aired her monthly program “Prospects of Mankind,” a roundtable talk show with politicians, artists, activists, and intellectuals. ER’s papers are to be found in more than 600 collections held in 263 archive centers throughout the United States and in nine foreign countries. Half of these papers are in the 4,842 boxes of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library.[2]

This paper will briefly outline the basic elements of Eleanor Roosevelt’s internationalism and how her commitment to this cause justified her appointment to the American delegation to the United Nations in 1945. We will then consider the overseas tours Roosevelt took as a political figure in the 1950s with particular reference to her 1952 journey to the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, highlighting the most significant elements for the present analysis.

On December 21, 1945 Harry Truman informed Eleanor Roosevelt of her appointment as a member of the American delegation to the first session of the United Nations, to be held in London in early January of the following year. Heading up the delegation was former Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius. According to the letter, the former First Lady, like the other U.S. representatives, was assigned the solemn responsibility of showing her government’s strong support for the new institution and its great task of preserving international peace and creating conditions of mutual trust to promote economic and social wellbeing among the world’s peoples.[3]

Roosevelt hesitated to accept the appointment for she thought she lacked the diplomatic qualities needed to carry out the task entrusted to her by Truman.[4] Yet Truman’s appointment had been motivated by her commitment to peace and to building an international system grounded in the principles of democracy and freedom; a commitment dating back to the early 1920s that had grown mostly within pacifist associations and other groups continuing to pursue Wilsonian ideals. The former First Lady even made a reference to Wilsonianism in one of her first speeches as a member of the American delegation: “Woodrow Wilson, who believed so whole-heartedly that an association of nations could be successfully formed and could keep the peace of the world, is being vindicated today since we are meeting again to carry on his idea.”[5]

It had in fact been the political education Roosevelt had received during World War I and especially in the 1920s that had placed her in the ranks of the progressives, especially progressive women—most of whom were linked to social work and devoted to uniting the ideals of justice and social reform with those of peace and disarmament; in short, those for whom the struggle was for “peace, bread and freedom,” to paraphrase the title of a famous pamphlet by Jane Addams.[6] As fellow social worker Lillian Wald had explained,

We on Henry Street have become internationalists, not through the written word or through abstract theses, but because we have found that the problems of one set of people are essentially the problems of all. We have found that the things which make men alike are finer than the things which make them different, and that the vision which long since proclaimed the interdependence and the kinship of mankind was farsighted and true.[7]

However, it was Roosevelt’s encounter with Carrie Chapman Catt in April 1921, at a meeting promoting a women’s crusade for peace, that would prove crucial for her involvement in women’s groups active in social feminism like the League for Women Voters, the Women’s Trade Union League, the New York Women’s Club, and the Women’s Committee of the New York Democratic Party.

At the time, the internationalist engagement for peace primarily involved a commitment to promoting the United States’ membership in the Permanent Court of International Justice (the World Court). Thanks to the efforts of Esther Lape in 1923, Eleanor Roosevelt joined the committee to award a prize (offered by Edward Bok, editor of Ladies’ Home Journal) for the best peace-policy proposal. The committee considered thousands of proposals, everything from the most outlandish to those drafted by noted jurists and internationalist scholars. In a 1925 speech for the campaign in favor of the World Court, Roosevelt stressed the importance of women’s commitment to peace:

We still remember vividly the horrors of 1914-18 (…) now is the time to act. (…) we all know that the next war will be a war in which people not armies will suffer, and our boasted hard-earned civilization will do us no good. Cannot the women rise to this great opportunity?[8]

In the wake of the Bok Prize, Roosevelt helped collect signatures for a referendum calling for the United States to cooperate with the technical agencies of the League of Nations and join the World Court. In 1924 she represented the Federation of Women’s Clubs as a speaker for the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War. Roosevelt’s engagement in this cause lasted until 1935 when as First Lady she arranged a White House event to honor Jane Addams (in an effort to influence a Senate vote on these matters)—until, that is, no hope remained that the U.S. would join the World Court.

From 1933 on, Roosevelt’s commitment to peace was reinforced by the news arriving from Europe, mostly provided by women belonging to international and pacifist associations. That summer Roosevelt and her friend Elinor Morgenthau went to visit Lillian Wald who was convalescing after an operation. Wald informed them that she had organized a meeting with Jane Addams and Alice Hamilton, the latter of whom had just returned from Germany where she had stayed with the German Jewish suffragist Clara Landsberg.[9] There emerged from her account the gravity of what was happening: all the activists they knew were either in exile or in danger. Struck by the report, Roosevelt arranged for Hamilton to meet the president at the White House a few weeks later. It is worthwhile to highlight this action since Eleanor was notably silent in public during this period. As many have observed, she had openly expressed herself on many issues, including economic reform, the World Court, and the U.S. role in the Spanish Civil War, even going so far as to diverge from the opinions of the administration on the subject of the Nazi regime. However, from 1933 to 1939 she chose the path of what could only be called a deafening silence.[10] We will leave aside the possible reasons for this, but it is worth noting that her public silence was accompanied by actions to promote the admission of Jewish refugees. She also made strong efforts to pressure and counterbalance State Department officials who held decidedly anti-Semitic positions and resisted more flexible interpretations of immigration rules.[11]

The year 1938, which is marked by the impact of Kristallnacht on American public opinion, represents a turning point in Eleanor Roosevelt’s internationalism. She had already been calling herself a “realistic pacifist”[12] since 1934, i.e. a pacifist aware of the dangers posed by fascist expansionism and, therefore, of the need for a strong democratic response. In fact, unlike activists like Catt, her attitude had always been marked by a political realism that, for example, prevented her from being totally in favor of disarmament policies in the context of Nazi-Fascist totalitarianism. Instead, she had come to agree with journalist and feminist Dorothy Thompson’s “The Dilemma of a Pacifist” published in 1937: “I find that, by and large, [Thompson] has reached the same conclusion I have […] It was ‘dangerous’ to let ‘the rest of the world stew in its own juice.’”[13] Thus, in January 1938 she published a short essay called This Troubled World. Written six months earlie...