Her Prospects of Mankind

In the final three years of her life, former U.S. First Lady, diplomat and pro-active pacifist, Eleanor Roosevelt, hosted her own television series entitled: Prospects of Mankind on (foreign) politics that appeared monthly from 1959 until her death in 1962. Television was rising in popularity in the early 1960’s, and in an article of 1959 Eleanor Roosevelt had written about the special opportunities of this medium, for which scholars concluded she apparently understood the medium as much as she understood other media. Prior to the show, Eleanor Roosevelt broadcasted her voice via the radio and was famous for her near-to-daily column My Day. Throughout her life, Eleanor Roosevelt had built an international network of friends, political experts and world leaders, whom she did not hesitate to invite for the topics of discussion in Prospects of Mankind. This unique combination of journalistic and public skills, (inter)national fame and influential relations on screen, was a conscious choice of producer Henry Morgenthau III. Prospects of Mankind covered a wide variety of topics, but in order to be able to say something about how Eleanor Roosevelt used the medium television, choosing a topic she strongly believed in and wholeheartedly promoted would most likely give insights in her approach. Therefore, the relatively little researched views of Eleanor Roosevelt with regard to the United Nations was selected, in the knowledge that she noted this to be ‘her most important work’. Therefore, this thesis questioned: How did Eleanor Roosevelt present her views on the United Nations in her television series Prospects of Mankind and from what can this be explained? For the first part of this thesis, the leading audio-visual primary source (the Prospects of Mankind series) and PoM correspondence on the production process were analyzed. In the second part, the analysis of just one episode, nr. 16 which Eleanor Roosevelt entitled: ‘Congo: Challenge to the United Nations,’ was more extensively analyzed in the form of a case study. The same set of questions was applied to the analysis of this episode, but in contrast to the analyses of part I, extended with a contextual background of the Congo Crisis from 1960-1961, and the production process of this particular episode hosted in April 1961. Important for the narrative of this story, the time of production was in the middle of the cold war between U.S. and the USSR. In 1960, U.S. containment politics were applied in more and more countries, including the newly independent Congo. While the Congo was struggling for internal unity, both the U.S. and the USSR supported factions within the country trying to increase their own influence in the region, with the aim to spread their ideologies. The Congolese Premier Kasavubu and Prime Minister Lumumba took the initiative to call upon the United Nations. In pursuit of international cooperation and world peace, the UN intervened. With the combination of the DVD Collection and the transcripts and general correspondence on the show, this thesis had the opportunity to reconstruct how Eleanor Roosevelt’s views on the United Nations were presented throughout PoM, Through the analysis of a leading audio-visual primary source, the way(s) Eleanor Roosevelt presented her views in Prospects of Mankind have come to light.