India and the Awakening East by Eleanor Roosevelt - 1953

New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1953. First edition, later printing. Hardcover. This is a later printing of Eleanor Roosevelt’s account of her 1952 journey through the Middle East and Far East, including Lebanon, Pakistan, Syria, Trans-Jordan, Israel, and India.

This copy is good plus in a good plus dust jacket. The dust jacket differs from that of the first printing only in flap fold content; the jacket faces and spine are identical. The volume differs in the binding, which is quarter dark green cloth over pale green paper-covered boards rather than the black and brick red of the first edition. The contents appear identical save for the absence of “FIRST EDITION” on the title page verso.

The binding is square, tight, and clean with a faint tide line across the bottom inch of the binding. The contents are clean with no spotting or previous owner names. The dust jacket is unclipped, retaining the original “$3.00” front flap price, with wear to the joints, flap folds, and extremities, staining to the upper rear face, shallow loss to the spine ends, and spine toning. The jacket is protected beneath a clear, removable, archival cover.

Newly independent, India was trying to establish a functional democracy and had just held its first general elections between October 1951 and February 1952. Fractiously engaged with Pakistan and a notional geopolitical counterweight to communist China, India was of increasing importance to the West. The political landscape and considerations do not sound appreciably different nearly three quarters of a century later. Likewise enduring is the first-person perspective of someone as astute, engaged, seasoned, and engaging as ER, particularly as a witness to India’s nascence.

While the trip was unofficial, such was Eleanor’s stature and temperament that she could never be an unaffecting observer. President Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, wrote President Truman to say of ER’s tour that it "served the public interest exceedingly well," and that "she appears to have done much to increase understanding of United States foreign policy objectives".

Called “First Lady of the World” by President Truman for her humanitarian work, Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) was the first US Representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, a prolific writer (including dozens of books, hundreds of articles and editorials, and a daily newspaper column from 1936-1962), and the longest-serving first lady of the United States.

When her husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was running for president in the fall of 1932 as the likely election winner, Eleanor had already independently made for herself a name in Democratic politics as a spokesperson for the newly enfranchised woman voter, labor advocate in the midst of the Great Depression, a vocal promoter of civil rights, and the head of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee since 1928. She feared her impending role as First Lady, a heretofore purely social and apolitical role, would necessitate a quieting of her convictions and force her to step down from her political positions; she even told friends that she would divorce FDR should he win rather than lose her independence.

After FDR’s unprecedented victory securing 42 of 48 states, Eleanor made the decision to transform her new position rather than yield to it. She did so, and in so doing “…she became a fearless international champion of progressive causes and perhaps the most influential American woman of the twentieth century.” (ANB).

Eleanor’s famous partnership with Franklin D. Roosevelt ended with FDR’s death, in April 1945 at the start of his fourth presidential term. Of that partnership, Eleanor wrote in This I Remember: “He might have been happier with a wife who had been completely uncritical… Nonetheless, I think that I sometimes acted as a spur, even though the spurring was not always wanted…” She could as easily be speaking of her relationship with the world, which she loved as earnestly as she goaded, undaunted by its challenges and disappointments.