Foreign Affairs, April 1st, 1948 Each Sunday this summer, we’re sharing an essay from the archives that provides a rare first-person account of history as it unfolded. This week, we’ve chosen a 1948 essay by Eleanor Roosevelt on the hard work of uniting the world behind a shared commitment to human rights. In 1945, when the United Nations was founded, the world was reeling from the devastation of World War II. There was strong public support for a new international institution that could help prevent countries from starting wars and foster global cooperation on the problems plaguing the world. Its name originated with Eleanor Roosevelt’s husband, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who used the term in 1942 to describe the 26 nations fighting the Axis Powers. FDR died in April 1945, and did not live to see the signing of the UN Charter in San Francisco in June of that year. Several days after her husband’s death, Eleanor Roosevelt told reporters, “The story is over.” But that was hardly the case. In December 1945, President Harry Truman asked if she would join the first U.S. delegation to the United Nations. At first, Roosevelt declined—but eventually she accepted, becoming the first woman to represent the United States at the UN. Her work there began as the international community struggled to make sense of the horrors of the Holocaust and the existential threat of the atomic bomb. She became a central player in the global human rights movement, chairing the UN commission tasked with drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In this 1948 essay, she describes the difficult, and often tedious, bureaucratic work of uniting the world behind a shared commitment to human security and dignity. The commission was made up of representatives from all over the world, with the aim of including diverse political and cultural points of view. “We mapped out our work very carefully,” she wrote, and “feeling ran high.” But the commission remained united by a common aspiration: “Many of us thought that lack of standards for human rights the world over was one of the greatest causes of friction among the nations, and that recognition of human rights might become one of the cornerstones on which peace could eventually be based.” The end result of this work—the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—was a milestone in global human rights, freedom, and equality. Adopted shortly after Roosevelt’s essay was published, it marked the first time that the world agreed on the rights and freedoms deserving of universal protection. It remains the most sweeping human rights statement ever to be endorsed on a global scale.
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