The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
JANUARY 15, 1953
NEW YORK, Wednesday—Day after day it is becoming more evident that a well-organized and well-financed campaign against the United Nations is coming to light. It is tied now and then with hatred of the New Deal and my husband and it sometimes appears to be an offshoot of isolationism. But whatever its roots, the results are bad.
One day this week the president of the League of Women Voters, Mrs. John Lee, came to see me. She had just finished a tour of the country and was gratified by the rapid growth of memberships in the League. On the other hand, she was seriously disturbed by the evidence she had found of work being done against the U.N., and brought examples to see the kind of thing that people there dare to print.
In this connection I can recall the religious material that came out of some of the Southern states at the time Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York ran for President. Today this same religious prejudice, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, is levelled at the U.N.
One of the publications Mrs. Lee showed me printed a picture of Secretary Acheson and Justice Frankfuther walking together and the editorial matter with it revealed a conversation that was supposed to have been overheard between the two men. Anyone who knows these gentlemen would immediately recognize that such a conversation could never have taken place. And when they proceeded to say that this was the day the old Jewish plot to control the world was going to be carried out, I recognized some of the signs of the old pro-Fascist and pro-Nazi literature that I have read before.
Some of the old people are carrying on in the same name of anti-communism and pro-Americanism the same campaign they waged in favor of fascism. The sad thing is that though they fight communism they play into the hands of the Communists. The Communists want to create suspicion and disunity among the people of the United States, and much of this anti-U.N. literature is designed to do exactly what the Communists want, but under a cloak of saving us from communism and fostering patriotism and religion in this country.
I have taken the trouble to analyze one pamphlet—sent me from Texas and financed, I am told, by a Mr. Hunt—and I am showing Mr. Hunt some of the untruths and pointing out some of the wrong impressions that this pamphlet creates.
The people of our country will have to know the good things that the U.N. has accomplished or they will be taken in by all this fear-mongering that is being done by organizations made up of individuals who have been identified for many years with types of thinking that are now discredited.
Unless the truth, however, gets out to people, how are they going to know that this nonsense that is handed to them is not based on facts?
It seems to me that every reputable newspaper, magazine, radio and TV outlet has a great obligation not to minimize the faults but to tell the truth about what the U.N. has done and how it has benefitted our country and the world. Unless our vast media for spreading information accepts this responsibility, the people of the country may well wake up to find that they have made decisions on false information. That will be a sad day for all of us.
E.R.
(WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1953, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC. REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART PROHIBITED.)
About this document
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, January 15, 1953
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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The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project
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