Eleanor (33 page)

“Do you think you could use me in your Association as an educational volunteer?” she asked. Eichelberger, who had been fighting the collective security battle for thirty years, was rendered speechless by the windfall her offer represented and, even more, by the modesty with which she presented it. “I practically fell on the floor,” he recalled. A firm believer in organization, she told Eichelberger that she wanted to devote herself to building chapters around the country and spreading the message of the United Nations, and when not traveling, she would spend two days a week at the AAUN’s headquarters.

In January she moved into the small, austerely furnished cubicle that she insisted would suffice. “She walked into it as if it were the
Gold Room at the White House,” reported A. M. Rosenthal of the
New York Times
, “and after a moment it did seem quite grand.”
¹

Although Mrs. Roosevelt expressed herself forcefully on the broad issues of policy that came up at AAUN staff and board meetings, her stress was on organization and grass-roots education, finding the right person to serve as state chairman, the establishment of chapters, the raising of the budget. “Everyone here is very keenly aware of the wonderful contributions you have made,” Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., Eisenhower’s representative at the United Nations, wrote her, “and are making!” he added in his own hand. By November she was barnstorming the nation for the AAUN as systematically as she had New York State for the women’s division of the Democratic State Committee in the 1920s.

I am not having any holiday but am working as hard as I know how on the organizing of the American Association for the United Nations and have just come back from a trip covering the whole western part of our country. It was unbelievably strenuous but successful and as I have always told you I thrive on work.
²

A few months after Dulles assumed command of the country’s foreign relations it became clear to her she could never have served as Eisenhower’s representative on the Commission on Human Rights. Sandifer informed her that the new administration had decided “not to continue to support the completion of the Human Rights Covenants.” She was not surprised. She had already heard that Dulles was prepared to back away from all human rights treaties if that was the price of defeating the Bricker amendment. She disagreed with the order to retreat. Although she knew that there was not “the slightest chance” to draft the Economic and Social Rights Covenant in a way that might make it acceptable to the Senate,

I did hope it might continue under discussion for a number of years and eventually become more palatable, but the one
on Civil and Political Rights I still feel we ought to be able to ratify. My real feeling for this, of course, is that just as the Supreme Court decision which said that educational facilities must be equal for all citizens has made it possible for a fight to be made which is gradually removing segregation in higher education in the South, so having a Convention on Civil and Political Rights would not mean that every nation would live up to those rights immediately, but it would be invaluable as a legal background for those people wishing to make the fight to promote human rights and freedom in this area. The United States is going backwards and taking the same stand that Great Britain has taken. . . .I am very glad I was not asked to stay on the Human Rights Commission. I could not possibly have accepted the Department’s stand and I am very sorry for Mrs. [Oswald] Lord. Anything emptier than to go to Geneva with these positions, I can not imagine. I would certainly feel it was a terrible waste of time.
³

In April, Dulles informed the Senate that the United States would no longer press for adoption of the two covenants on human rights or ask for ratification of the completed genocide convention or go ahead with the treaty on the rights of women. His stand permitted the Soviet Union, which did not wish to sign a human rights covenant, to get off the hook, an indignant Doris Fleeson wrote. It undermined the world-leadership position in the field of the promotion of human rights that Mrs. Roosevelt had gained for her country. He had abandoned this high ground, Miss Fleeson went on, although the Democratic leadership in the Senate was confident it had the votes to defeat the Bricker amendment.

“Good luck to you in Switzerland!” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote her successor:

I can’t say I envy you your time in Geneva. . . .It will be hard for you to get along with the other representatives and to do any worthwhile work, I am sure.
⁴

Sandifer sent her the three resolutions the United States introduced at Geneva. One called for an annual report by member governments on what they were doing about human rights. The second proposed a series of studies on a world-wide basis of specific aspects of human rights such as slavery. The third would set up a United Nations Advisory Service for the countries that requested it and fund fellowships in human rights. “You will excuse me if I think these three resolutions are really comic,” she wrote the hapless Sandifer. The national commissions on human rights were what the Russians had wanted all along and she considered them window dressing. “You know that in this country this year, the Commission set up for that purpose is not being given any appropriation by Congress, so it does not look as though we would do so well on that subject.” Nor did she feel that anything useful would come out of the studies or the advisory services. “Dear Irene,” she wrote Sandifer’s wife, “I have just written a rather nasty note on the work of the Human Rights Commission to Sandy, so I am glad to have a chance to write you both a personal note.”
⁵

She had told Dr. Eichelberger when she began her work with the AAUN that in June and July she would take a round-the-world trip, beginning with a six-week visit to Japan. The latter had originated in the spring of 1952 when the U.S. Committee on Intellectual Interchange with Japan submitted a list of Americans to the Japanese committee and asked it to indicate its preference. “Mrs. Roosevelt,” the word came back. “Your presence in Japan at this time when Japanese womenkind are in the midst of a veritable social revolution would be of inestimable value to them,” wrote Harry J. Carman, dean of Columbia University, which acted as host in the United States for the program. The State Department told her to go ahead. But after the Eisenhower victory she decided it might be better to send a Republican woman who would be able to interpret the Republican point of view. Carman, however, considered her a national not a party figure and begged her to inquire of the incoming secretary of state whether he objected to her going. Dulles’s reply was very guarded. He felt insecure about
his own status with Eisenhower, and the McCarthy wing of the party viewed him suspiciously. Mrs. Roosevelt represented danger. He wrote her a lawyerlike letter. Since she was going as a private person, at the request of a private U.S. foundation, in response to the desire of a nonofficial Japanese committee, he saw no reason why the incoming administration should “recast” the project, “unless it carries some implications affecting national policy which I do not see now.” He left himself an out. If the situation should change by the time she was ready to leave, “I suppose we might both feel differently.”

She sent this on to Carman saying she still thought it was wiser not to go, but if he decided otherwise, she was prepared to abide by his judgment. Carman renewed the invitation. The Japanese would be disappointed, since they had asked especially for her. Finally she agreed, and he happily put her in touch with Miss Fusae Ichikawa, “who through the years has been the spearhead of the women’s rights movement in Japan and who is now here for three months on the Interchange Program.”
⁶

So, late in May, together with her newest daughter-in-law, Elliott’s wife Minnewa, who wanted to get to know her extraordinary mother-in-law, and Maureen Corr, she flew to Japan with the message of democracy and women’s liberation.

After being briefed by her Japanese hosts and some Americans long resident in the Orient and by her old friend Father George B. Ford, who had preceded her on the exchange program, she went to her first meeting at the Ministry of Labor, which brought together the handful of women in government to discuss women’s status. A minor incident occurred as she left the ministry. A group of Communist women, headed by an American woman married to a Japanese, with the implausible name of Mrs. Anna Rosenberg Fujikawa, shouted at her, “Go home Yankee! We know war and don’t want it.” “I stopped long enough to say we didn’t either, then got in the car & drove away.” But the Japanese press exaggerated the story. It was “not true” that the Communists had dragged her from her car, she reassured David Gray. “They just called out
to me but did not touch me.” Her friends at home continued to be anxious. Finally she laid down the law to John Golden, who importuned “Dearest First,” as he addressed her, to take greater precautions for her safety:

It is quite unnecessary to ask the Consul, Ambassador or anyone else to get the Japanese government to watch over me. Nobody has made a gesture that was anything but kind since the Communist ladies made themselves unpopular.

My main trouble is having petitions handed to me. I have to tell everyone there is nothing I can do but that I will send their letters to the Ambassador, which I suppose is not very satisfactory.
⁷

By the time she sent this letter she had addressed innumerable audiences of women, of students, had toured textile factories, visited farm areas, dined with Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida and other Japanese notables, and that very day was in Hiroshima, the Japanese encounter that she had most dreaded. In fact, the committee initially had excluded it from her itinerary, wishing to spare her spiritual anguish, and instead had urged a day’s cruise down the Inland Sea from Osaka to Beppu, but Mrs. Roosevelt asked to go to Hiroshima and to meet with some of the victims.

Hiroshima was a moving experience. . . .I walked on eggs while there. I know we were justified in dropping the bomb but you can’t help feeling sorry when you see suffering.

The papers here are somewhat unreliable. They color stories and sometimes make them up when they can. I did not weep in Hiroshima, as some of them said I did, at the sight of some girls who suffered bad burns, but the little Japanese girl with me was in tears. It is always hard to tell people that it is the causes of war which bring about such things as Hiroshima, and that we must try to eliminate these causes because if there is another Pearl Harbor, there will be undoubtedly another Hiroshima. Somehow I have tried to get this point across.
⁸

At least one Japanese observer appreciated the “calm but uncompromising manner” in which Mrs. Roosevelt answered questions in the A-bombed city. Tatsuo Morito, the president of Hiroshima University, felt she brought into the discussion of these sensitive problems a healthy sense of “concrete and harsh reality.” “I felt nowhere any personal antagonism, not even in Hiroshima,” she reported to Dean Carman at the end of her trip, not even, she might have added, from those who had been leaders in Japan before Pearl Harbor. A touching note in longhand had come to her from Adm. Kichisaburo Nomura. He was the Japanese ambassador in Washington at the time of Pearl Harbor, although he had been superseded by special envoy Saburo Kurusu. “I never spoke to the President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull any lie or played to them any double play,” he wrote Mrs. Roosevelt. “My conscience does not allow such dirty acts. I did not know, of course, Pearl Harbor attack, in advance. . . .I wish earnestly to make crystal-clear to the soul of the late President Roosevelt and Mr. Cordell Hull my true mind, just before the outbreak of the war.” “Dear Admiral Nomura,” she hastened to reply,

I know my husband always felt you had been honest with him. I remember his saying so. There were others he was not quite so sure about but I never heard him express a doubt about you and I have always had the friendliest of feelings toward you, and I hope we will have an opportunity to discuss how best we can improve relationships between our two countries.
⁹

She had felt a lack of candor at her first meeting with Prime Minister Yoshida, but subsequently they did talk freely at a luncheon on a Sunday when few others were present. She was not happy with what she learned:

To my astonishment the Prime Minister said that of course Japan was going to rearm, though he would not say so openly for political reasons. There is a contradiction in this whole political situation here because the reactionaries are actually in
power but they accepted and uphold the very liberal constitution which we forced upon them. They really do not believe in most of the measures which are actually accepted but the people do believe in them and they do not dare repudiate them, though I think they will try to whittle them away. . . .Mr. Yoshida was a charming host, easy and talkative, but I do not think he is a progressive in our sense of the word.
¹⁰

She was chiefly concerned with the status of women: the Mac-Arthur constitution was western and modern in its conception, but the underlying Japanese thought patterns and family structure were still almost feudal.

It is always amusing to me that only a few of the men bring their wives to these parties and when the wives do come, they are usually very silent and they gather together afterwards and stay quite apart from the men. But the women who are working in different fields have appeared at nearly all the entertainments for me and I think it gives them a little lift to feel that the gentlemen are being so attentive to a woman.

In Kyoto at a formal tea ceremony in a “very grand house,” for the first time “I really had to sit on a cushion on the floor and I am not very good at it, I am sorry to say. I wish I had preserved the Japanese women’s ability to flop down on their knees and sit on their heels and on their knees for an endless length of time.”
¹¹

The women, except for the Japanese mother-in-law, served the men, too deferentially for Mrs. Roosevelt’s taste. She discovered that the Japanese mother-in-law was the key to the subjugation of the women, more perhaps than the men. The mother-in-law tyrannized the women in the household, especially her daughters-in-law. She ran everyone except her husband and her oldest son. All the family’s earnings went into the mother-in-law’s leather pouch and it was she who doled out the money, even to married sons and their wives. The daughter-in-law was practically a slave taking her bath last, arising early, preparing the food, and serving
everyone else “before she kneels a step below her husband and his mother to eat her own meal.”