Growing Toward Peace.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s Copy
Roosevelt, Eleanor and Regina Tor. Growing Toward Peace. Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan Private Ltd., (1960) [published August 1962, released February 1963].
8vo.; illustrated; illustrated wrappers. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
The scarce first Indian edition; 5000 copies; first published in New York in 1960 by Random House. Eleanor Roosevelt’s copy, with the transmittal slip loosely inserted stating the author, title, publication date, local publisher, and number of copies printed. Provenance: Eleanor Roosevelt; by descent to her son; acquired by Glenn Horowitz Bookseller from Irene Roosevelt Aitken, John’s widow.
This UN-sponsored publication is addressed and dedicated to the world’s youth: “for you, the young people of the world, because how you think, what you believe is what you are … is what the world will be.” Illustrated throughout with black and white photographs, and color drawings, the text explains the world body as the culmination of a persistent human impulse to overcome the waste and destruction of war: “Since the time of Ikhnaton, who was Pharoah of Egypt about 1375 B.C., there has been a chain of plans and practical attempts for peace which lead all the way from 1375 B.C. to our own day and the United Nations.” Alfred G. Katzin, the Acting Head of the Office of Public Information of the United Nations, contributes an idealistic preface:
Adventure, history and human interest are all to be found in the following pages for they trace the gallant struggle waged by a family over many years to win security and a fuller life.
This family is yours and mine—the family of mankind. And we are all heirs to the heritage of hope and experience passed on to us by earlier generations who strove to build a better world.
We are part now of the greatest effort yet to achieve that aim through the organization of our world family in the United Nations.
If the younger readers for whom this book is primarily intended learn from its reading that in the United Nations they have a cause worthy of the zeal and idealism that are the special attributes of youth, then the next stage in this continuing human story will truly record a new and vital growth toward peace.
Tor and Roosevelt celebrate the role of the UN as both an instrument for preserving peace, and as an agency for improving the health, education and productivity of people around the world. “Although the UN officially came into being at San Francisco in 1945,” they write, it “is actually a highly complex international organization which has been built upon a foundation that has been long in the making, a foundation constructed of the long-ancient hopes, and dreams, the slowly accumulated human group knowledge, and the ever-developing conscious reasoning of thousands of ages of man.” Written at the height of the Cold War and decolonization movement, the book expresses the vaunting—almost utopian—hopes of activists like Mrs. Roosevelt, who passionately believed in the power of the UN to achieve some form of world government and thereby avert the outbreak of a third world war. The conclusion merits quoting:
Many thousands of years ago man was drawing bisons and mammoths on the walls of his narrow, hark, and close-ceilinged cave in the hope that this, his painting of food, would automatically produce the real food he and his family needed in order to survive.
Today, man is building deep within the complex structure of the United Nations the realistic means with which he knows he can make the kind of world he and his family must have in order to survive.
There can be peace in the world, but world peace can come now only through the United Nations.
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