Eleanor Roosevelt was a prime mover for the establishment of the UN, with a hope that it would correct all of the problems that were inherent in the League of Nations. She was one of my Mother’s heroes, and was considered more intelligent than her husband. She was tireless in her efforts during and before the war to make things better for the average citizen.
Politically, the Republicans had to attack her, but it never really worked for them.
]]>Mrs. Roosevelt was, without question, fundamentally opposed to war, notwithstanding all her actual work on behalf of our troops. At several points in the autobiography she remarks on the human cost and the waste of resources of every sort. She was able to write this only because she was writing quite some years after W.W.II was over; even so, she received many accusations from the press and media (and of course American political opponents) of being a Commie, which was particularly ironic considering her service at the UN: chair of Human Rights Commission and eventually chair of the US delegation. In both roles, goodness knows she faced down enough endlessly propagandizing Soviet officials. But apparently having any association with the UN, then as now, brings out the nut-jobs throwing sharp objects. In over half a century, nothing seems to have changed, except the demise of the Soviet Union…
My father, who is of course my all-time favorite American veteran (gunnery officer on a troop landing ship on D-Day, among other occasions; carried shrapnel in his arm to prove it), used to recite a surely apocryphal “quote” falsely attributed to FDR by his opponents:
I hate war.
My wife Eleanor hates war.
And I hate [insert obvious conclusion here]!
Of those three statements, I’d be willing to believe the first; there is incontrovertible evidence in print for the second… and damned little evidence for the third, especially as Eleanor was tutored by the most adept Democratic advisers of her era into surely the most effective political spouse in history. No wonder the RWNJs of the age made up sh!t about her!
]]>