LETTER AND MSS on War: Autograph letter signed to "George," n.d., with 1 p. manuscript.
Unpublished Roosevelt Manuscript and Letter
Roosevelt, Eleanor. Autograph Manuscript Signed; n.d., n.p.; ca. 1942.
1 pp.; one leaf of Roosevelt’s Washington Square West stationery; creased; with remnants of a paperclip in the upper left hand corner. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
Together with:
Autograph letter signed, “Eleanor Roosevelt,” to George (Marvin); n.d.; ca. 1942.
Roosevelt’s note forwarding this short manuscript to her close friend, George Marvin, reads in full: “Dear George, I’m sorry I didn’t get this done until this evening. So I’m mailing it – I’m going back to Washington on the midnight – Sincerely/Eleanor Roosevelt/It was fun last night!”
According to her biographer, Blanche Cook, “George” was George Marvin, FDR’s teacher at Groton and a close friend of the Roosevelts. Cook explains that Marvin also served as a sort of pedagogic mentor to Roosevelt, and he encouraged her to send him pieces she was working on. Cook dates this particular manuscript and accompanying letter to 1942 or 1943; Roosevelt had moved into the Washington Square address in 1941, and infers from the text that at the time of writing that the first A-bomb drop, in 1945, had not yet occurred.
Roosevelt’s manuscript merits quoting in full:
It seems as though nothing good could come out of the war. Inherent in that notion lies the greatest good we can hope for. If enough people feel as I do they will be willing to better themselves to find ways to prevent another war. We know that the advance of science may make it possible to destroy all life upon the planet if we make new discoveries that may be made for destruction. If therefore we believe that man has a destiny, if we have the intelligence to develop it, we will feel that a determination to prevent future wars is the greatest good that can come to man. That if this was, we may learn that a such passive will to peace for [ourselves] can never [ ] peace for us – we may learn that only by giving people a vision of something to strive for can we hope to Part of that was that in more passive will to peace for all – the way [ ] that only by giving people a vision of something to strive for can we hope to obtain their cooperation in peace. Eleanor Roosevelt.
In 1943, Roosevelt founded the UN Association of the United Nations, to advance support for the formation of the United Nations in the United States. This was a humanitarian organization devoted to educational programs and grassroots movements; in 1945, she was appointed by Harry Truman to be a delegate to the UN General Assembly, a post she held until 1952. The UN’s – and by extension, the UNA-USA – desire for peace between nations is certainly illustrated in Roosevelt’s manuscript, though it is unclear if it was related to her founding of the UNA-USA.
Phone conversation with Blanche Cook; February 6, 2008.
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