Bringing Human Rights Home: A History of Human Rights in the United States (review)

The United States government has waltzed its way through and around the issue of human rights in a "three-part dance of ambivalence, rejection, and embrace."¹ That is the thesis of this collection of essays, and it is remarkably consistent, coherent, and convincing. During World War II, the government in Washington championed a holistic vision that promised protection for social and economic rights as well as political and civil rights. But such advocacy, enunciated in the Atlantic Charter (1941), President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" address (1941), and FDR's espousal of an "Economic Bill of Rights" (1944), became a casualty of the early postwar era, when the Soviet Union was keen to castigate the injustices—principally racial—that afflicted American life. Moreover, many Americans, influenced in part by the Cold War, narrowly defined human rights as involving an individual's right to expression, association, and political participation. They were reluctant to tackle issues relating to class for fear of being labeled un-patriotic. In this setting, the US government for decades delayed ratifying international conventions to safeguard social and economic (as well as political) rights. Following the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, a new day seemed to dawn as the United States Senate approved the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, and the International Covenant on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Interestingly, the events of 11 September 2001 and subsequent practices of the administration of George W. Bush with respect to alien deportations, rendition, rough interrogation, and torture served to galvanize human rights activists. One result has been a wider, richer, and more varied movement to protect the dignity of all people. But as the contributors to this volume also suggest, much work remains to be done.

As a historian, I was most interested in the first part of Bringing Human Rights Home, in which Paul Gordon Lauren, Elizabeth Borgwardt, Carol Anderson, and Hope Lewis trace the history of America's encounter with human rights. They illustrate that the US government's engagement with this issue has been a recent phenomenon, centered in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The story they tell is neither one of linear progress nor of sin and redemption but of advocacy followed by avoidance. After World War II, the idealism of the Four Freedoms crashed against hard, political realities. In a nod to Jim Crow, US diplomat John Foster Dulles amended the charter of the United Nations (UN) so as to deny that organization's authority over "matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the State concerned."² Southern Democrats on Capitol Hill were pleased that the UN would have no say—or sway—over their system of racial segregation. In 1953, Dulles, then Secretary of State, went further when he abandoned efforts to seek ratification of the Convention on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in exchange for Senate votes to kill the so-called Bricker Amendment, a measure to restrict the president's ability to secure ratification of treaties. Perhaps the most paradoxical of these policymakers was Eleanor Roosevelt. As a US delegate to the UN under President Harry S. Truman, she helped draft the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. And, yet, when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) asked the UN Commission on Human Rights to investigate the conditions of African Americans, the former First Lady opposed their appeal and briefly resigned from the NAACP's board of directors. Eleanor Roosevelt, like many Americans, also proved uneasy with the redistributive implications of protecting social and political rights; at one point, she denied that countries were obligated "to assure the enjoyment of these rights by direct government action."³ Such a bifurcated perspective, from a purported friend of...