World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [NOOK Book]

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Overview

This is the story of Eleanor Roosevelt's proudest achievement, one that both she and generations of historians came to see as her greatest contribution to world history. It marks a crucial turning point in her life, just after the death of FDR, when she had to decide who she would be and what she would do now that she was no longer her husband's wife and the First Lady. It was at this time that the Eleanor Roosevelt who has been enshrined in our memories as one of the greatest women in American history was born.

The story begins at the height of the Second World War, when FDR and Churchill met on a ship in the mid-Atlantic to cement their resolve to combat the barbarism of Nazi Germany. ...

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Overview

This is the story of Eleanor Roosevelt's proudest achievement, one that both she and generations of historians came to see as her greatest contribution to world history. It marks a crucial turning point in her life, just after the death of FDR, when she had to decide who she would be and what she would do now that she was no longer her husband's wife and the First Lady. It was at this time that the Eleanor Roosevelt who has been enshrined in our memories as one of the greatest women in American history was born.

The story begins at the height of the Second World War, when FDR and Churchill met on a ship in the mid-Atlantic to cement their resolve to combat the barbarism of Nazi Germany. Out of that meeting emerged the Atlantic Charter, grounded in Roosevelt's famous four freedoms: The war, he said, was a fight for civilization, a battle to defend mankind's freedom of speech and of expression, freedom to worship God in one's own way, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

One of FDR's most cherished dreams as the war drew to a close was that all of the nations dragged into this conflagration would come together to form an international organization whose purpose would be to ensure that such a war would never happen again. Ravaged by illness and strain, the president would not live to see the birth of his dream. He died a few months before the opening of the United Nations in London, and, to the great chagrin of the American delegation, Eleanor Roosevelt went in his place. She performed so well that she was asked to head one of the UN's most sensitive commissions. Her assignment was to hammer out the world's first international bill of rights, a document that would enshrine Roosevelt's four freedoms and define the rights that every man and woman in every country around the world should enjoy. That document, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was the founding document of the modern rights movement. It transformed the language and texture of international relations, gave legitimacy to anti-colonial movements, inspired a new form of activism, and helped bring down totalitarian regimes. It is the primary inspiration for most rights instruments in the world today.

This is the dramatic and inspiring story of that extraordinary achievement, of the remarkable group of men and women from around the world who participated in it and knew, like the framers of the Declaration of Independence, that they were making history. They worked against the clock in the brief window between the end of the Second World War and the deep freeze of the Cold War. As they struggled to achieve their task, Berlin was blockaded by Soviet troops, Israel declared itself a state and war broke out in the Middle East, China's government was overtaken by Mao's Communist insurgency, and India gained independence.

Mary Ann Glendon is the perfect person to tell this story. An award-winning author and prominent figure in the world of human rights, she led the Vatican delegation to the Beijing Women's Conference. She is a distinguished professor of law at Harvard and has a gift for bringing history to life with passion and immediacy. In addition, she was given exclusive access to unpublished personal diaries and letters of key participants in the creation of the Declaration. A landmark work of narrative history, A World Made New is the first book devoted to this crucial moment in Eleanor Roosevelt's life and in world history.

Editorial Reviews

Merle Rubin
Mary Ann Glendon takes the title of her latest book from the conclusion of Eleanor Roosevelt's nightly prayer: "Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new." There is the irony of the quest for human rights: The worst enemies of human rights are human beings themselves. Yet in the aftermath of World War II, a group of far-sighted people brought forth a document designed, as Glendon puts it, "to improve the odds of reason and conscience against power and interest." On Dec. 10, 1948, without a single dissent, the United Nations General Assembly voted to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Since then, though its principles have often been violated, the declaration has served as an inspiration and a rallying cry for people all over the world. The story of how this document came to be written and adopted is fascinating from a philosophical perspective, involving questions like: What is a human being? What is society? How do we balance civil and political liberties with economic and social welfare? It is equally fascinating from the perspective of diplomacy, showing how a group of individuals, disagreeing among themselves, shepherded the declaration through a minefield of international and interpersonal conflict. The difficulties were daunting. One of the participants, Lebanon's Charles Malik, wrote in his diary: "Intrigue, lobbying, secret arrangements, blocs, etc. It's terrible." A philosophy professor, Malik added: "Power politics and bargaining nauseate me. There is so much unreality and play and sham that I can't swing myself into this atmosphere and act." But that was before he met Eleanor Roosevelt. Indeed, Glendon's book reminds us that it is almost impossible to overestimate the greatness of Eleanor Roosevelt. In her role as US delegate to the UN, we can only marvel at Mrs. Roosevelt's combination of high principles and political adroitness. Her devotion to noble goals was equaled by her people smarts, as she parried attacks on US policies, defused tensions, and built bridges of consensus. The declaration was a group effort, and Glendon shows us what a remarkable group they were. Their numbers included Roosevelt and Malik; as well as P.C. Chang, China's Renaissance man; René Cassin, a key figure in de Gaulle's resistance; Carlos Romulo, a fiery Philippine anti-colonialist; and Hansa Mehta of India, who worked to ensure that the declaration would include the rights of women. Glendon deftly locates these players in the context of an increasingly fraught world. As representatives sought common ground, Arab nations were attacking the new state of Israel, Communists were seizing power in China and Czechoslovakia, and the American-Soviet wartime alliance was falling apart. A central bone of contention for the framers of the declaration was: To what extent, if any, should the provisions be enforceable? Was it simply, as some argued, a waste of time to issue a declaration that made no provision for punishing violations? Or, if the document were drafted as an enforceable covenant with real teeth, would the US and USSR withdraw their support? Glendon, a Harvard law professor and a critic of what she considers a combative approach to enforcing rights, defends the less rigorous approach that was in fact adopted. Only the more gradual effects of moral suasion and education, she believes, can lead to the changes that pave the way for legal enforcement of rights. And in this, she argues, the declaration has proved a qualified success, a beacon, showing people the way to a better future. Glendon mounts a persuasive defense of the declaration's universality. Its framers, as she shows us, consulted a wide range of traditions in defining human rights, creating a structure flexible enough to allow for cultural differences, yet forthright in its enunciation of the fundamentals. Current mantras of cultural relativism, she points out, give cover to authoritarian leaders seeking to silence criticism, while the growing number of Westerners who have ceased to believe in the idea of truth and falsehood may be even more dangerous. "It is one thing," she writes, "to acknowledge that the human mind can glimpse truth only partially, quite another to deny its existence altogether." Glendon's fine book enhances our appreciation of the men and women who sought and found a way to enunciate universals.
Christian Monitor.com
From The Critics
In 1947, in a world recently ripped apart by the Holocaust, a devastating war and mass displacement, the very idea of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights seemed both impossible and supremely necessary. As the specter of the Cold War loomed, a U.N. delegation, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, began writing what would become the world's first standard statement of human rights. Glendon, a professor of law at Harvard University, has written a compelling, at times thrilling account of how Roosevelt and her cohorts argued and cajoled one another through a series of intellectual, political and moral positions, finally hammering out a statement that was acceptable across national, religious and philosophical lines. While Glendon successfully traces the evolution of the document--which was ratified on December 10, 1948, after six drafts and much debate by the U.N. General Assembly--she also presents a richly textured portrait of a woman driven to public service while simultaneously grieving for her late husband. Roosevelt's politics were also at issue: at one point, she resigned from the U.N. over the U.S. government's initial disapproval of the creation of Israel. Glendon concludes with a legal analysis of the declaration and a lengthy discussion of its applicability today, when many non-Western nations (such as China) claim that the concept of "universal" human rights precepts precludes an acceptance of cultural differences. Glendon's work is a welcome addition to the realm of international law and to the growing body of literature on Eleanor Roosevelt's role in modern politics. Agents, Lynn Chu and Glen Hartley, Writer's Representatives. (Mar. 30) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780375506925
  • Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 3/30/2001
  • Sold by: Random House
  • Format: eBook
  • Sales rank: 262,505
  • File size: 759 KB
  • Items ship to U.S, APO/FPO and U.S. Protectorate addresses.

Meet the Author

Mary Ann Glendon is Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University. She led the Vatican delegation to the Beijing Women's Rights conference in 1995, the first woman ever to lead a Vatican delegation, and has been featured on Bill Moyers's World of Ideas. She is the author of Rights Talk; A Nation under Lawyers; Comparative Legal Traditions (a classic textbook on international law); Abortion and Divorce in Western Law, winner of the Scribes Book Award; and The Transformation of Family Law, winner of the Order of the Coif Prize, the legal academy's highest award for scholarship. She lives in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.

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Excerpt

Politics, it has been said, is "the arena where conscience and power meet, and will be meeting until the end of time."

Conscience so often fares poorly in such encounters that we celebrate the occasions when Power gives her more than a tip of the hat. In April 1945, as delegates from fifty lands gathered in San Francisco for the United Nations founding conference, Power was much on display. Battleships leaving the Pacific harbor with men and materiel were a grim reminder that the war with Japan was still raging. The tides of war in Europe, however, had turned in favor of the Allies, and the "Big Three" (Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States) had begun jockeying for the positions they would hold in the new world order. As part of their planning for the postwar era, the Allies invited to the San Francisco conclave all states that had declared war on Germany and Japan by March 1, 1945.

The Allied leaders had agreed in principle on the need for an international organization to prevent future aggression, assure the stability of frontiers, and provide a means for resolving disputes among nations, but the most vigorous supporter of the idea was Franklin Roosevelt. The American president was mindful that the failure of the first such organization, the League of Nations, was due in no small measure to President Woodrow Wilson's inability to convince the Senate to ratify the treaty establishing it. A driving force behind the League's formation after World War I, Wilson had been bitterly disappointed.

To prevent a repetition of that debacle, Roosevelt had begun speaking to the American people about his hopes for anew world organization during the war. "Nations will learn to work together," he insisted, "only by actually working together."

In a radio address on Christmas Eve 1943, he emphasized that the main purpose of such an organization would be to keep the peace. The United States had no interest, he said, in Allied domination over other nations: "The doctrine that the strong shall dominate the weak is the doctrine of our enemies—and we reject it."

Now, with the confidence born of approaching victory, Roosevelt believed the time had come to make up for the mistakes of the last peace. Shortly after his inauguration in January 1945, he told Congress of his hopes to replace the old international system of "exclusive alliances and spheres of influence" with a "universal organization in which all peace-loving nations will finally have a chance to join."

Eleanor Roosevelt had long shared those hopes. When her husband asked her to accompany him to the opening session of the UN founding conference in April, and on a trip to England and the continent in May, she was delighted—not least because his enthusiasm allayed her growing anxiety about his health. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins had objected that a trip to the war zone would be too dangerous, but the president replied that he expected the war to be over by then. He had long looked forward, he told Perkins, to a victory tour with the First Lady at his side: "Eleanor's visit [to England] in wartime was a great success. I mean a success for her and for me so that we understood more about their problems. . . . I told Eleanor to order her clothes and get some fine things so that she will make a really handsome appearance."

With spring flowers in bloom and war's end at last in sight, an exuberant president began to prepare for the San Francisco conference.

The features of the future UN that were of most interest to the Great Powers had been settled already at two much more exclusive meetings. In the summer and fall of 1944, representatives of Britain, China, the United States, and the USSR had met at Dumbarton Oaks to do preparatory work on what would become the UN Charter. One month earlier, at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, the Allies had established the main institutions of the postwar economic order—the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank).

Determined to avoid Wilson's main error, Roosevelt actively courted Republican support for the United Nations. When the time came to choose representatives for San Francisco, he made a point to include prominent GOP leaders: former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen, future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The Soviets went along with the project, but without much enthusiasm. Their chief concern for the immediate postwar period was to protect the frontiers of the motherland from renewed aggression. On the eve of the Normandy invasion, according to former Yugoslav Communist Party official Milovan Djilas, Stalin told Djilas: "Perhaps you think that just because we are the allies of the English we have forgotten who they are and who Churchill is. They find nothing sweeter than to trick their allies. . . . Churchill is the kind who, if you don't watch him, will slip a kopeck out of your pocket. . . . Roosevelt is not like that. He dips in his hand only for bigger coins."

George F. Kennan, a shrewd observer then serving in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, sized up Russia's position this way: "Insofar as Stalin attached importance to the concept of a future international organization, he did so in the expectation that the organization would serve as the instrument for maintenance of a US-UK-Soviet hegemony in international affairs." That arrangement could be satisfactory to the Soviets only if Britain and America accepted the sphere of influence the USSR was establishing in Central and Eastern Europe in the summer of 1944.

Churchill and the British Foreign Office were skeptical of the Soviet Union's value as a partner in promoting future peace and wary of Stalin's expansionist aims. Anthony Eden, Churchill's foreign minister, viewed Soviet policy as "amoral" and the American attitude as "exaggeratedly moral, at least where non-American interests are concerned."

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi
Preface xv
Chapter 1 The Longing for Freedom 3
Chapter 2 Madam Chairman 21
Chapter 3 A Rocky Start 35
Chapter 4 Every Conceivable Right 53
Chapter 5 A Philosophical Investigation 73
Chapter 6 Late Nights in Geneva 79
Chapter 7 In the Eye of the Hurricane 99
Chapter 8 Autumn in Paris 123
Chapter 9 The Nations Have Their Say 143
Chapter 10 The Declaration of Interdependence 173
Chapter 11 The Deep Freeze 193
Chapter 12 Universality Under Siege 221
Epilogue: The Declaration Today 235
Notes 243
Appendices
1. The Secretariat's June 1947 Draft (Humphrey Draft) 271
2. The June 1947 Draft Revised by Cassin (Cassin Draft) 275
3. The June 1947 Draft Revised by the Full Commission 281
4. The Commission's December 1947 Draft (Geneva Draft) 289
5. The Commission's June 1948 Draft (Lake Success Draft) 294
6. The December 1948 Third Committee Draft 300
7. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948 310
Index 315
Photo and Illustration Credits 335
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