Why Eleanor Roosevelt Still Matters

When I was a kid, Eleanor Roosevelt was a figure of fun. She had big buck teeth and that goofy falsetto voice. Growing up in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, I wasn’t given books about Eleanor Roosevelt or told to follow in her footsteps to greatness (though my parents were Democrats). She died in 1962, beloved but still easily satirized, the kind of celebrity Jon Stewart would have had a field day with. Even back when her husband was president, people had joked about his nightly prayer, “Dear God, please make Eleanor tired.”

Today, Eleanor Roosevelt is viewed as a figure of near-saintliness and great prescience. My daughter dressed as Eleanor Roosevelt one year for Halloween. She’s a weird kid, I’ll admit, but it still indicates a trend. Pick up a copy of “Olivia Saves the Circus” (or borrow one from nearly any 5-year-old girl) and note that the piggy heroine has a huge poster of Mrs. Roosevelt on her bedroom wall. The author, Ian Falconer, admits that he used the image in part for absurdist effect, but also because Eleanor Roosevelt “is a great role model.”

The sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will be celebrated today, and no doubt Eleanor Roosevelt will be celebrated along with it. And indeed, the role she played in producing the declaration explains, more than any other achievement, the latterly rise in her reputation. For the two and a half years that she chaired the United Nations committee to draft the declaration, and for many years thereafter, human rights was a spindly, if noble, idea. Thirty-five million people had just been slaughtered in World War Two, and the wife of the now-dead American president was working with some leading intellectuals from the global wreckage to draw up a document saying such things shouldn’t happen. Hmmm.

Most of the people who supported the idea from inside the U.S. government did so only because they thought a declaration might be a good club to whack the Soviets with.There were no Amnesty Internationals or Human Rights Watches. There were no Assistant Secretaries of State for Human Rights, or university majors in human rights, or international conferences devoted to human rights. The term “human rights” didn’t appear much in the newspaper or on the radio. The field of human rights, quite crowded today, was hardly peopled.

When Human Rights Watch was founded thirty years later, its first achievement was to help publicize the names of Soviet dissidents who were white, mostly male, and not just educated but among the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century. It was a fairly narrow, if impressive, slice of the global population. Today the universe of people laying claim to the human rights idea has grown to encompass women, children, gay people, refugees, prisoners, people living with HIV/AIDS, people living with disabilities. The beauty of the Universal Declaration is that it has grown along with them. Like the US constitution, it’s a document that is flexible enough, and basic enough, to remain relevant while the world around it gets way more complicated. Eleanor Roosevelt and the drafters did a good job.

Mrs. Roosevelt did a lot for human rights, and human rights returned the favor. The embrace of any Big Idea entails lonely work at the beginning, of course (it makes a better story for Hollywood that way, too), but if the Big Idea catches on, it sends a lot of luster back through time to its earliest proponents. Nietzsche wrote that “truth has the fewest defenders not when it is dangerous to speak the truth but when it is boring.” People used to think Eleanor Roosevelt was kind of boring. Not anymore.