There are few First Ladies more famous than Eleanor Roosevelt. Not only was she First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945 during her husband, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, presidency. But she was also blazing a trail in her own right at the same time, making history while fighting for human rights on all fronts. In doing so, she spoke out many times in favor of peace, and her actions followed suit.
Per Biography Online, Roosevelt was eventually appointed as a delegate to the UN General Assembly and was a major player in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Her causes centered around not just general human rights, but specifically equal rights for women, civil rights for African Americans, and she fought against housing shortages and unemployment. Her husband was president at such a pivotal and chaotic time in the United States, what with the Great Depression going on when he was elected (which FDR helped fight with his New Deal) and World War II starting abroad in 1939. Then, the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, made way for the United States to get involved in WWII, and the rest is history. So to say Eleanor Roosevelt had her hands full with humanitarian causes is an understatement.
During this time and until she died in 1962, she wrote columns and was also frequently on the radio; she appeared on radio shows and even hosted her own programs, per the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project. And that’s where our quote of the day comes from; Roosevelt spoke of peace not just as a concept, but as something tangible we should all fight for.
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Quote of the Day by Eleanor Roosevelt
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“It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.”
Being that Eleanor Roosevelt went on radio shows often, she was frequently on the Voice of America program. As Biography Online reported, on Nov. 11, 1951, Roosevelt delivered a broadcast and said these iconic words about peace. The United States was in the Korean War at the time, the Cold War was fresh and ongoing, and the Second Red Scare was underway on American soil. Not to mention, World War II had just ended not even six years prior.
The full sentiment she said was: “I think that what you want to know—especially you, the women of postwar Europe—is whether you shall be able, tomorrow, to tell your children, that peace is, at long last, a reality. It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.”
This wasn’t her first comment on peace either, nor her last. In a My Day column she wrote that went out on June 26, 1945, at the tail end of WWII, she commended the men working on the San Francisco conference to charter or create the United Nations. She said that their work was meant to “bring forth” something akin to the “kingdom of God on earth,” aka peace.
“There can be no kingdom of God on earth as long as men hate each other, settling their difficulties through wars and bringing sorrow and suffering on other men,” she wrote. “Once you begin a war there is, of course, nothing to do but to fight it to the end; so the effort for peace must be made while the nations are at peace.”
As you can tell, Eleanor Roosevelt was not just a woman of powerful words; she was a woman of action who lived what she preached. According to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, President Truman appointed Roosevelt to the United Nations General Assembly after its creation in late 1945, after her husband died. With her work in the United Nations, which was created to broker international peace and security post-World War II, she actively worked toward that goal. As stated earlier, and as the Bill of Rights Institute reported, she helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted in 1948.
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Eleanor Roosevelt said this quote at a very specific time in history. The United States had gone through a lot of turmoil, along with the rest of the world: the Great Depression, WWII, the ongoing Korean War, the Cold War, etc. It felt like there was no relief from the threat of not just bombs in Europe and wherever our soldiers were abroad, but now a potential nuclear holocaust in America.
With this quote, Roosevelt is urging people to take a deeper look at what peace means to them, urging others to push for it themselves. It wasn’t enough to just talk about peace, saying that you “hope” things become peaceful eventually and that wars will end. But you had to believe in it and work toward that goal. She may have been mostly referring to leaders who held the power to wage and stop wars. American politicians could talk about how much they hated war until they were blue in the face, but until they did the work she was doing, they were all talk and no action.
While this was said decades before the Vietnam War and the subsequent protests against it—not to mention any wars that have happened since or are happening as of now—it’s easy to see how this mindset could inspire anyone who opposes war. You have to make your voice heard and let those in power know that peace is of the utmost importance.
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More Quotes from Eleanor Roosevelt
“If silence seems to give approval, then remaining silent is cowardly.” “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”“When a woman fails, it is much more serious than when a man fails, because the average person attributes that failure not to the individual, but to the fact that she is a woman.” “I believe that democracy is based on the ability to make democracy serve the good of the majority of the people. If it can’t do that, then it should not survive.” “The very weaknesses of human nature are what make it so important that we keep a constantly watchful eye on our government, and that in turn our government watches us with equal care.” “Our obligation to the world is, primarily, an obligation to our own future.”Up Next:
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