How Did Eleanor Roosevelt Influence American Government

While many First Ladies chose not to be interactively involved in politics, Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, engaged fully in the political arena, writing and participating in human rights issues, which highly influenced American government. Roosevelt remained highly active in numerous organizations, and stayed extremely influential to American citizens through her radio programs, television news shows, and books and columns in newspapers. Through her belief and policy of human rights and services, Eleanor Roosevelt affected the writing of the passage of the Universal Declaration of Rights, which now serves as a model for how the United States treats their citizens and foreign countries. Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt created the successful “Fair Employment Practices Commission”, which implemented a group of people to investigate conditions in which Americans were working under, which brought attention to cruelty and racism employed through the work place. During Truman’s two terms Mrs. Roosevelt served as a United Nations delegate hoping to bring an enduring peace to the United States. Eleanor and the committee sought to draft a document defining and declaring international human rights (“First Lady”). So in 1946 she was elected chair of the United Nation’s Human Rights commission, Mrs. Roosevelt held responsibility to define the basic rights of the people around the world, such as free speech, free trial, equal education, and quality of living. Eleanor composed a speech called “On the Adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” on the struggle for human rights evaluating the necessity of a document that would grant opportunity and liberty to America during such a despairing time (Roosevelt). She referred to this document as the “international Magna Carta for all mankind.” Roosevelt’s theory of rights included that all people independent of gender, age, or the color of their skin were born free and equal in dignity and rights. Two years of hard effort into this commission, on December 10, 1948, the Universal Declaration of Rights was approved by the United Nations General Assembly (Freedman 152-153). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an idea standard kept by multiple nations around the world, but does not hold the enforcement of law; Mrs. Roosevelt helped produce two more major documents with the commission, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, both of which converted into international