The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt

      

NEW YORK, Wednesday— I think the time has come for us as a nation, perhaps for various nations, throughout the world to decide what really offers us the best chance for peace in the future. Mr. Churchill's speech in Missouri indicates his belief as a private individual that the future peace of the world can best be guaranteed by a military alliance between Great Britain and the United States. He believes that the people of both our countries want peace, but for some reason he is not equally sure apparently that this is the case where the peoples of other nations are concerned. I think he pays the English speaking people of the world a very high compliment. I hope that we could be trusted to have no selfish desires, not to think of our own interests first and therefore never to take advantage of our strength at the expense of other peoples. We must, however, it seems to me face the fact that were such an alliance formed other nations in the world would certainly feel that they must form independent alliances too. What is sauce for the goose must also be sauce for the gander.

The situation does not seem to me to differ very greatly from the old balance of power politics that have been going on in Europe for hundreds of years. The only difference would be that now we would be a part of the political world picture. We have not always seen eye to eye with the foreign policy of our English speaking cousins. We certainly have done a good deal of critical talking about the balance of power game as it has gone on in Europe. Almost invariably it led sooner or later to wars and more wars. The alternative to this old political game was what Woodrow Wilson dreamed of in the League of Nations. Then my husband and many other great statesmen planned the United Nations Organization as a result of this last war. Instead of running an armament race against each other and building up trade cartels and political alliances, we the nations of the world should join together each contributing a certain amount of military strength to be used only against an aggressor. We would use the forum of the United Nations to discuss our difficulties and our grievances using our diplomatic machinery to adjust such things as we could among ourselves, but bringing questions that individual governments disagreed on before the bar of the United Nations as a whole. Difficult machinery to work out, but it aims at the nations of the world living under law, using an international court of justice and only resorting to force to curb an aggressor. I do not wonder that the elderly statesmen think this a new and revolutionary move in the international situation. I will grant that there are two possibilities here, the old way and the new way. We have seen the results of the old way, however, in war and destruction and we may still see starvation and pestilence stalk the earth as a result of the old way. Might it be wise to try the new way?


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, March 7, 1946

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
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Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007

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Digital edition published 2008, 2017 by
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Available under licence from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

Published with permission from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

MEP edition publlished on June 30, 2008.

TEI-P5 edition published on April 28, 2017.

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Transcription created from a photocopy of a draft version of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. Transcribed from a My Day column draft dated March 6, 1946, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY
TMsd, 6 March 1946, AERP, FDRL