Speaking as the representative of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt stated that the ILO text was 'both complete and adequate'. Despite her own personal commitment to social welfare, Roosevelt represented a country in which the consensus that underpinned the New Deal was giving way in the face of the anti-communism of the nascent Cold War. … In a memo of March 1948, Roosevelt was informed that Lovett 'felt that if these were expressed they could far better be expressed in terms of 'better standards' rather than a right to a "decent living"'.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 190