This Troubled World

Eleanor Roosevelt’s stirring call for peace in the face of rising fascism.

We will have to want peace, want it enough to pay for it, pay for it in our own behavior and in material ways.

In 1938, with fascist regimes gaining strength and global tensions on the rise, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt published a visionary plan for achieving world peace. This Troubled World offers a clear-eyed assessment of the political climate in the aftermath of World War I and a set of pragmatic proposals for avoiding global violence.

Anticipating the United Nations by nearly a decade, Roosevelt calls for a new world court to replace the failed League of Nations. She speaks of the need to define aggressor nations and to establish a system of trade embargoes to punish wrongdoing. She also advocates for an international peacekeeping force to intervene where economic weapons are insufficient.

Along with these proposals—which were in direct opposition to the policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration—Mrs. Roosevelt concludes that world peace cannot be achieved with political machinery alone; it requires a popular commitment to tolerance and brotherly love.

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