"Suspicion as Peace Bar Feared by Mrs. Roosevelt"

Newark Evening News 2 October 1945

Anxiety that suspicions and lack of mutual confidence will hamper peace was expressed last night by Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt before 1,000 in the auditorium of South Side High School at a postwar freedom rally sponsored by the American Federation of Negro College Students.⁴

"I look with great anxiety on the meetings of our representatives which don't settle questions," Mrs. Roosevelt said. "We must have confidence in one another and must avoid a situation where everybody approaches everybody else with suspicions. I am very much afraid that's what's happening in the seats of the mighty."

The former first lady said that individuals must have the integrity and determination "to do what's right. We can't be represented unless we have within us the thing we want represented," she said. "It's what you do personally that counts."

Attired in deep mourning, Mrs. Roosevelt discussed the atomic bomb, saying scientists who had worked on its development in this country told her we "delude ourselves by thinking we hold a secret we could keep." She described the discovery of the release of atomic power as a "race with other scientists which we won but perhaps by a very narrow margin. Its principles," she said, "are known wherever in the world men think and the secret will not long remain."

The real problem, she declared, is not who holds the secret "even if we trust ourselves so completely as to believe we wouldn't use it except in a righteous cause." Pointing out that atomic bomb scientists declare it possible for a small aggressor nation to destroy the rest of the world with it overnight, Mrs. Roosevelt stated it evolved into a question of "who decided to use it first."

"If we really want peace," she said, "it has to begin in every human heart. There has to be a strong desire for it in the hearts of men, women and young people."⁵

She questioned whether so-called strikes among metropolitan high school students originates in the schools and said she believes they begin outside, through the influence of the students' elders, possibly in the home.⁶

The problem of settling these differences cannot be put off from one generation to another, she declared, "but in view of atomic power this generation has got to face its problems and solve questions. If we want peace we've got to do the job and do it now, not leave it to the boys who come home or the boys and girls in school. They will carry on, but we have to do the beginning.

"Each of us has to make sure that freedom really exists, that in our hearts we have the spirit that really wants freedom not just for ourselves but for the other fellow too. We must want the kind of freedom in which people discipline themselves sufficiently so that every one has rights."

"The four freedoms really hang together," she asserted. "We can't have freedom from fear without freedom from want and equality of opportunity; that is, getting a job you are able to do, in government, in meeting other people who make up your community and feeling that together you can achieve freedom and peace. If we don't achieve it in this country where we have a miniature league of nations," she said, "how in the world do you think we are going to achieve it in the world as a whole?"

Pnews, DLC

1. Alexander Feinberg, "Student 'Strikes' Flare into Riots in Harlem Schools," NYT, 29 September 1945, 1.

2. "Athletic Coaches Scored by Mayor," NYT, 1 October 1945, 11.

3. MD, 3 October 1945.

4. ER's My Day of October 3, 1945, also described the assembly at which Newark Mayor Vincent Murphy and Dr. Tobias spoke.

5. ER elaborated on this point a week earlier, as the Council of Foreign Ministers first convened in London to draft the peace treaty agreements for Europe. She then told her readers:

I have been somewhat disturbed lately to read statements in the public press by members of Congress and military officers which seem to assume that the atomic bomb is a secret that can be kept by this nation, if we so desire. The scientists who worked on the discovery, and who should know more about it than anyone else, insist that it is no secret. No scientific discovery can long remain secret when the fundamental principles involved are so widely known; and in this particular case, the fundamental principles of atomic energy and its release were widely known even before the particular developments for this project were undertaken. The technical and engineering details will soon be discovered by other scientists in other lands.

It seems to me that this discovery has made imperative an educational undertaking in every country in the world. Every man, every woman—everywhere—must grow up knowing that since this discovery of how to use atomic energy for destruction, annihilation faces them unless they learn to live in a peaceful world and to allow the policing of the world to be done by an international security agency.

The sovereignty which each nation will have to renounce is not too high a price to pay for the continuation of our civilization. Almost every country in the world has the needed raw materials for the manufacture of these bombs, and the little countries can do it as well as the big ones. All that is needed, to destroy, is to act first. Are we going to live in constant dread of all our neighbors? Except for the completely happy-go-lucky person, able to wipe out all thought of the future, no one could go to bed at night with any sense of security. Once a weapon is discovered, it will always be used by those who are in desperate straits.

The day we found the secret of the atomic bomb, we closed one phase of civilization and entered upon another (MD, 25 September 1945).

See n1 Document 35.

6. The following day she made similar points in My Day:

I think Mayor La Guardia was right to be horrified when he heard of the rumored high school riots here, and of the actual ones in Chicago and in Gary, Indiana. It seems to me, however, that while on the surface we can blame certain organizations and leaders who may [have] been impressing on these young minds the differences among people rather than their likenesses, we elders cannot escape from the main responsibility. Parents at home must know when their children are rioting, or developing the ideas which lead to riots. If they do not know, it shows a lack of family communication and mutual interest which is sad indeed (MD, 3 October 1945).

Rebutting Walter Winchell

October 9, ER traveled to New Haven, Connecticut, as Time magazine later reported, to break "her silence on what she thinks" of Truman's policies. Her comments on the president's "thinking about the atomic bomb"¹ and her insinuation that James Byrnes "used inept tactics at the Council of Foreign Ministers" meeting² not only were reprinted in the New Haven press, but also published in Time under the banner "Mrs. Roosevelt Speaks Out." Radio coverage was more pronounced after Walter Winchell told his audience that ER "had sharply attacked Secretary of State Byrnes."³ When "several people" told ER about his October 14 broadcast, she wrote Winchell, enclosing a copy of the New Haven Evening Register coverage of her speech, to say that she "had no intention of criticizing Secretary Byrnes" and that she was "sorry that someone gave you incorrect information."⁴