Conclusion

Abstract

The principal aim of this book is to offer a comprehensive description of the motives, the goals, the means, and the effects of Mrs. Roosevelt’s anti-nuclear activism. This book argues that Eleanor Roosevelt’s direct involvement in the so-called struggle against the bomb was not just a naïve pastime (See Lawrence S. Wittner, The Struggle Against the Bomb, Volume One, One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement Through 1953 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993)). It epitomized instead a very specific view of the international affairs and the Cold War relations, as well as an enduring yearning for world peace and social justice.

Either by arguing in favor of the US participation in the World Court in the interwar years, by sponsoring relief programs for miners’ communities in the 1930s, or by publicly defending the necessity of nuclear disarmament in the late 1950s, throughout her life, Eleanor Roosevelt kept hammering a drive to a more equal, just, and therefore, peaceful society into American consciousness. Her innermost belief was that human beings needed, first and foremost, to be safe. For this reason, she saw racism, inequality, and frequent attacks to individual freedom as the threatening marks of the cold war at home.