Eleanor (9 page)

Policy was formulated by an interdepartmental committee. But, in effect, Mrs. Roosevelt set the policy. She was a presidential appointee, a woman of world stature; and the State Department was eager to do what she wanted. Hendrick kept her advised on what was going on in the policy-committee meetings, “I tried to be watchful that nothing went into the instructions that she would not go for.”
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Hendrick sat behind her during the meetings of the Commission. He started in by trying to whisper into her good ear
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his suggestions on the best way to handle matters that came up in the Commission, but since that proved unsatisfactory, he took to writing her notes—the speeches in the Commission tended to be lengthy and there was plenty of time to do so. His notes, in addition to suggestions for replies, included advice on how to vote, whom to appoint, resolutions to be submitted:

On the Belgian resolution we have no position, so use your discretion. See no objection to it.

On Philippine resolution, assume you will vote yes.

If there is a sub-committee of three, suggest—Malik, Dukes [Lord Dukeston of Britain], Mora [José A. Mora of Uruguay].
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The Commission set up a drafting committee of three to prepare a text for their next session. Mrs. Roosevelt felt “ill-equipped” compared with such “learned gentlemen” as Dr. Chang, Dr. Malik, and Dr. John Humphrey, the United Nations’ Human Rights director, but perhaps she could help her colleagues put their “high
thoughts” into words that the average person can understand. “I used to tell my husband that, if he could make
me
understand something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country—and perhaps that will be my real value on this drafting commission!”
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The drafting committee met in Mrs. Roosevelt’s Washington Square apartment. While she poured tea, Chang and Malik argued philosophy. The group finally agreed that if a draft was to be prepared by June the responsibility for doing so would have to be taken by the director of the Human Rights Division, Dr. Humphrey. He should first spend a year in China studying Confucianism, Chang grinningly admonished Humphrey, which was his way of reminding the UN official that something more than western rights would have to go into the Declaration.

“I get more and more the sensation of something happening in the world which has a chance to override all obstacles,” Hendrick wrote her after the session, “and more and more that this ‘something’ could never have come into being without you.”
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In June, an enlarged drafting committee went to work on the draft prepared by Humphrey.

They should write a bill, Mrs. Roosevelt told the drafting group, that stood some chance of acceptance by all fifty-five governments. As she said this, some of her colleagues wondered how explicit a statement of the state’s responsibility for full employment the United States was prepared to accept. At the February session Mrs. Roosevelt had not been sure, but in the intervening months she had overcome resistance within the U.S. government and now said the United States was prepared to support not a “guarantee” of full employment, but an undertaking to “promote” it.

The Soviet representative thought this a pretty feeble affirmation of the right to work. “It would be incorrect for him to ask the U.S. representative to undertake to eliminate unemployment in the United States,” he said scornfully. “The economic system in the United States made that impossible. . . .He could, however, ask that something concrete should be done. Instead of making a general statement about the right to work, the relevant article should
list measures to be taken to ensure that right.” “The right to work in the Soviet Union,” Mrs. Roosevelt replied,

means the assignment of workers to do whatever task is given to them by the government without an opportunity for the people to participate in the decision that the government should do this. A society in which everyone works is not necessarily a free society and may indeed be a slave society; on the other hand, a society in which there is widespread economic insecurity can turn freedom into a barren and vapid right for millions of people.
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At her urging, the drafting committee did not spend too much time on the precise wording of the articles. A touchier issue had arisen and was dividing the committee—the binding character of the rights that were to be listed in the Declaration. The small nations in particular wanted something more than a moral manifesto. They wanted states to assume a treaty obligation to grant, protect, and enforce the rights enumerated in the Declaration. Neither the United States nor Russia favored this, but the United States, chiefly as a result of Mrs. Roosevelt’s pressure, deferred to the views of the majority. There would be two documents, the committee decided, one a relatively brief declaration of principles that would provide “a common standard of achievement,” the other a precise convention that would constitute a treaty binding on the states that ratified it and become a part of their own law. It was largely owing to Mrs. Roosevelt, wrote Marjorie Whiteman, that the Commission gave priority to the Declaration. “In her view the world was waiting, as she said, ‘for the Commission on Human Rights to do something’ and that to start by the drafting of a treaty with its technical language and then to await its being brought into force by ratification, would halt progress in the field of human rights.” René Cassin was asked to rework the Humphrey draft with a view to determining which rights should go into a declaration and which into a convention, and by June 25, with Mrs. Roosevelt insistently pressing her colleagues on, the committee had
gone over the text presented to them by Professor Cassin and had authorized the Secretariat to forward the draft to member governments for their comments.
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The moment had arrived when the U.S. government had to define its attitude toward the two documents that were in the process, the Declaration and the Convention. She explained the situation to Sen. Warren R. Austin, the amiable Vermont Yankee who headed the U.S. mission at the United Nations. The United States had wanted to move slowly on the Convention, but a strong majority on the drafting committee demanded that a convention be written at the same time as a declaration and the United States yielded. What Mrs. Roosevelt wanted to know from Senator Austin, who before his appointment to the UN post had been part of the Senate leadership, was whether a convention would be acceptable to the Senate at this time. He could not say, Austin replied.

We should be perfectly willing to enter into a Convention as well as a Declaration, but we must be reasonably certain that the country will back us up. We should not try for too much. It would be most unfortunate if we were to take a lead in forcing a Convention through the General Assembly and then be turned down by the Senate.
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Public opinion in the United States and the mood in Congress were turning hostile toward additional UN commitments. In part, this was a response to the fact that the end of the war, instead of ushering in an era of peace, order, and friendliness, had brought almost chaotic conditions as well as a perilous confrontation with the Soviet Union. In part, it reflected domestic developments—the postwar swing to the right that culminated in McCarthyism and McCarranism. In part, it was a reaction to Soviet behavior in the United Nations. The readiness of the Soviet Union to exploit the platform and high principles of the United Nations in order to abuse the West and to boycott and paralyze the organs of the United Nations when those principles were invoked against Russia’s mundane interests turned congressional sentiment against a
legally binding convention, which, it was said, the Russians would disregard, even as they did their own constitution.

Another factor, perhaps the decisive one, in hardening congressional opposition to the Convention was the rising tension over civil rights inside the United States and the fears of the southern whites that the United Nations might help American Negroes in their struggle against discrimination. Black Americans had already appealed to the United Nations Human Rights division for redress of their grievances against American society. An NAACP petition to this effect was submitted to the United Nations in 1947. It was a carefully researched brief prepared under the direction of Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois with the assistance of distinguished Negro and white attorneys and scholars.

The petition was to be presented to Henri Laugier and Dr. John Humphrey, Walter White notified Mrs. Roosevelt. “Would it be possible for you to be present as demonstration of deep concern of responsible American opinion with the problem which is international as well as national?” She wrote White:

As an individual I should like to be present, but as a member of the delegation I feel that until this subject comes before us in the proper way, in a report of the Human Rights Commission or otherwise, I should not seem to be lining myself up in any particular way on any subject.

It isn’t as though everyone did not know where I stand. It is just a matter of proper procedure.
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On her way to the first General Assembly she had exclaimed on how wonderful it was to feel free and to be able to say just what she wanted. But she had learned after a year’s service with the delegation, that in a way she had less freedom than when Franklin was president:

I am on an entirely different basis. Now I am obliged to carry out the policy of the Government. When my husband was President, although I was the White House hostess, I was,
after all, a private citizen, and for that reason I was freer than I am now. . . .
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The Soviet double standard and the hostility of the southern bloc in the Senate to any international undertaking that might bolster the Negro drive made the State Department warier than ever of the Convention. Hendrick went up to consult Dr. Humphrey, director of the United Nations Human Rights division, on whether in realistic terms a declaration might not be as effective as a convention in the protection of human rights. Although Dr. Humphrey agreed with the United States that the Declaration should be the starting point in the UN approach to human rights, he did not believe, Hendrick advised Mrs. Roosevelt, it would have legally binding force.
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Although the department policy group had prepared a U.S. version of what should go into a convention, there was no agreement, as Mrs. Roosevelt prepared in November, 1947, to leave for Geneva, on whether this document should even be circulated to the other members of the Commission as a working paper and basis for discussion. Robert A. Lovett, the hard-boiled international banker, conservative in outlook, who was undersecretary of state, was a little skeptical of Mrs. Roosevelt and even more so of the Convention. When Hendrick conferred with him just before taking off for the December session of the Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Lovett expressed, as Hendrick informed Mrs. Roosevelt, “a very real objection to the implication which he got from the Declaration that all the rights therein contained were immediately enforceable.” On Lovett’s insistence, Hendrick, subject to Mrs. Roosevelt’s concurrence, agreed to soften the Preamble so that it called upon members to “promote” rather than to “enforce” the rights enumerated in the draft Declaration. That was acceptable to Mrs. Roosevelt provided the United States supported a covenant,
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but she knew that this would mean ultimately overcoming Lovett’s
doubts on the subject. He had expressed those doubts to Hendrick after he had finished on the subject of the Declaration. “We don’t want to have a document which will be happily adhered to by a number of countries which have absolutely no intention of living up to certain of the provisions, and where the violations will be so widespread the UN will be completely powerless to do anything about the matter.”
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She arrived in Geneva, after a plane trip that, because of “freakish” weather, took four days, to find the Russians on the offensive. For the first time, Moscow had assigned someone to the Commission who was an experienced diplomat, a legal scholar, and a debater. He was Alexander E. Bogomolov, Russia’s ambassador in Paris. In the Sub-commission on Minorities and Discrimination, where Jonathan Daniels served as the U.S. expert, the Soviet delegate wanted immediate investigation of the conditions of Negroes in the United States on the basis of the petition of the NAACP. And in the Human Rights Commission itself Bogomolov demanded that priority be given to petition relating to violations of human rights in the non-self-governing trust territories. “Listening to the Russian speakers,” commented a
New York Times
reporter, “one gets the impression that they believe they have found the Achilles heel of the U.S. and Britain.” Although Bogomolov gave the United States “a very hard time,” the
Times
reporter felt that “the Russians seem to have met their match in Mrs. Roosevelt. The proceedings sometimes turn into a long vitriolic attack on the United States when she is not present. These attacks, however, generally degenerate into flurries in the face of her calm and undisturbed but often pointed replies.”
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“Now, of course, I’m a woman and don’t understand all these things,” she would begin a reply and further baffle her Communist opponent with the acknowledgment that there was a good deal in his argument. Then, having smothered her antagonist in these placative preliminaries, Mrs. Roosevelt would quietly state America’s readiness to have Soviet experts examine U.S. practices, if American observers could do the same in the Soviet Union; or she would acknowledge U.S. shortcomings, note U.S. efforts to
do better, and finish her rebuttal by observing mildly that it took maturity in nations as well as individuals to admit mistakes and deficiencies. “Never have I seen naïveté and cunning so gracefully blended,” a State Department advisor commented.
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At the outset of the Commission’s session, she voted for a Soviet resolution to give priority to the Commission’s consideration of the draft Declaration. But only the United States and the USSR favored such an ordering of the agenda. When this became clear the United States bowed to the will of the majority, which felt, she noted, “that the world is expecting a definite commitment which would force the governments to change their laws, if necessary, to conform to an international bill or covenant, and they wished that to be considered first, or at least simultaneously with a Declaration.”
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