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Eleanor Roosevelt defied stereotype. A complex woman in her
private and private life, Eleanor Roosevelt struggled to adapt
the cherished part of her heritage to an ever changing world.
In the process, she not only redefined her life and changed
American politics, but also presented the world with a new
vision of peace and justice.
Born October 11, 1884 to Elliott
and Anna (Hall) Roosevelt,
the young Eleanor quickly encountered life's volatile nature.
Her mother, distressed by her daughter's plain looks, dubbed
her "Granny" and her adored father, consistently battling
illness and depression, turned to morphine and alcohol for
comfort. Orphaned at the age of ten, she lived a quiet, sad
life with her grandmother Hall
until an aunt recommended that sixteen-year-old Eleanor be
sent to boarding school in London. Under the careful tutelage
of Marie Souvestre,
ER blossomed intellectually and socially. "Mlle. Souvestre
shocked one into thinking, and that on the whole was very
beneficial." For the first time, she was "totally without
fear." Reluctantly, she returned to New York to make her debut
in 1902.
While traveling from New York City to Grandmother Hall's
Tivoli home,
she became reacquainted with Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, her fifth-cousin once removed. Franklin
proposed but, bowing to pressure from his mother, Sara
Delano Roosevelt, agreed to keep the engagement secret.
FDR and ER married two years later, March 17, 1905, where
ER's uncle, President Theodore
Roosevelt, who was in town to lead the Saint Patrick's
Day parade, escorted his niece down the aisle, and dominated
the press coverage of the ceremony.
The couple honeymooned in Europe and returned to make New
York City their home. Within a year, a daughter (Anna)
was born; followed in rapid succession by James
(1907), Franklin (1909, who died soon after birth), Elliott
(1910), Franklin
(1914), and John
(1916). ER taught at the Rivington
Street Settlement House until she became pregnant with
Anna, and then bowed to Sara's wishes that she cease working
in unsanitary neighborhoods. "For ten years" she wrote, "I
was always just getting over having a baby or about to have
one, and so my occupations were considerably restricted during
this period." Moreover, in 1908 Sara Roosevelt gave the couple
a townhouse in New York City, which was not only adjacent
to her own home but which had connecting doors on every floor.
ER, as she began to sign her letters, was miserable, recalling
that she was "simply absorbing the personalities of those
about me and letting their tastes and interests dominate me."
All that started to change in 1911. Dutchess County elected
her husband to the New York state senate. FDR asked her to
leave Hyde Park and to set up a home for the family in Albany.
In Albany, she made new friends, watched her husband shape
government policies, and managed her own household. In 1913,
she followed FDR to Washington where he served as assistant
secretary of the Navy and faithfully made "calling card calls"
on all the cabinet wives. The trauma of World
War I disrupted this social convention and ER spent months
working in the Red Cross canteen at Union Station. Appalled
at the treatment veterans received at Saint Elizabeth's Hospital,
she forced the Interior Department to change its standards.
She was, she later recalled, "becoming independent."
The defeat of the Cox-Roosevelt ticket in 1920 gave ER the
opportunity to focus on her desires and hopes. She soon learned
that working on issues she cared about could be fun, productive,
and helpful to her husband. Thus, before FDR was stricken
with polio in 1921, ER worked to build the Roosevelt network.
After successfully battling her mother-in-law, who wanted
her invalid son to return home to Hyde Park, ER, FDR and close
friend Louis Howe
devised a strategy to boost FDR's morale, preserve his political
viability, and give ER the support she needed to endure the
pressures placed upon her. She soon became a political force
in her own right.
Throughout the 1920s, she helped lead the Women's
City Club, the National
Consumers League, the Women's
Division of the Democratic State Committee (DWC), and
the New York chapters of the League of Women Voters and the
Women's
Trade Union League. Repeatedly she goaded groups to set
realistic goals, prioritize their tasks, and delegate assignments.
ER wrote articles discussing campaign strategies for the Women's
Democratic News. As chair of the Civic League's City
Planning Department, she coordinated its responses on housing
and transportation issues, chaired its legislation committee,
arbitrated disputes over child labor laws, promoted workmen's
compensation and, in a move that made banner headlines across
New York State, strongly urged adoption of an amendment to
the Penal Law legalizing the distribution of birth control
information among married couples. In 1924, she chaired both
the Bok Peace
Prize Committee and the women's delegation to the platform
committee of the Democratic National Convention and served
as Al Smith's liaison
to women voters. A staunch supporter of Robert Wagner's 1926
campaign for the U.S. Senate, ER traveled New York as one
of Wagner's leading speakers and debaters. In 1927, she, with
friends Marion
Dickerman, Nancy
Cook and Caroline
O'Day, formed Val-Kill
Industries to help the underemployed in rural New York
learn new job skills.
ER then took to print to promote her candidates with the
same level of energy she displayed in her speeches. She expanded
her audience, broadened her themes, and carefully tailored
her remarks to readers of the League's Weekly News,
Women's Democratic News, Redbook, Current
History, and North American Review. Her persistent
pragmatism attracted attention within the party and women's
political organizations. Soon the media publicized her clout,
treating her as the "woman [of influence] who speaks her political
mind."
The 1928 election presented a new challenge to both Roosevelts.
Their relationship had begun to move away from a traditional
marriage and more toward a professional collaboration between
peers. Her discovery in 1918 of his affair with Lucy
Mercer destroyed marital intimacy and encouraged her to
look elsewhere for closeness. Anna Roosevelt later recalled
that her mother's discovery of the affair "spurred on" her
activism and that her parents' "different priorities" became
more apparent. As a result, by the time FDR was elected governor,
the couple had developed individual personal and political
support systems.
As the wife of the governor, ER struggled to balance her
commitment to political reform with her husband's political
agenda. Her private loyalty was to the Democratic Women's
Committee whose newsletter she continued to edit covertly.
Although she refrained from delivering "political speeches,"
she continued to travel the remote upstate regions with DWC
organizer Molly Dewson.
When post election polls showed a twenty percent increase
in the upstate Democratic vote, James
Farley credited the victory to ER's "real sense of politics."
Aware of how difficult it was for a politician and his staff
to face unpopular decisions, ER urged the appointment of individuals
who had the nerve to disagree openly with FDR. She lobbied
successfully for Frances
Perkins' appointment as secretary of labor and for Nell
Schwartz to fill the vacancy this appointment left on the
State Industrial Commission.
Perhaps most important, ER began to apply political finesse
to resolve disagreements within FDR's inner circle. She regularly
facilitated conflicts between FDR intimates Louis Howe and
Jim Farley and acted as a political stand-in when FDR could
not or chose not to participate in the discussion. Certainly
there is no clearer indication of ER's prominence within the
Howe-FDR-Farley triangle than its decision to send her to
issue the administration's rebuke of Tammany
Mayor Jimmy Walker's conduct.
The move to the White House presented ER with a more complicated
dilemma. FDR asked that she stop her political activities
and refused her offers to help with his mail, act as his unofficial
ambassador, or serve as administrative assistant. Trapped
by convention, she begrudgingly recognized that "the work
[was his] work and the pattern his pattern" and that she "was
one of those who served his purposes." She turned to Howe
and journalist and confidante Lorena
Hickok for guidance. Hickok suggested that ER capitalize
on the good relations she developed with women journalists
during the 1932 campaign by holding her own press conferences.
Howe, respectful of her political acuity, urged her to continue
to speak out and frequently advocated ER's positions to FDR.
Urging her to reject the confines of the White House, Howe
urged ER to reach out to Americans ravaged by the Great
Depression. The favorable press she received for visiting
the Bonus Army encampment in DC convinced FDR that he erred
in curtailing her activity. By August, ER resumed writing,
began a monthly column for Pictorial Review; by October,
she had traveled 40,000 miles examining social and economic
conditions; and by December, she had responded to the 300,000
letters she received from "forgotten Americans." Her observations
and those of her correspondents only reinforced the impressions
she had formed during the final days of the campaign. She
returned to Washington convinced that relief programs alone
could not counteract the Depression and that basic economic
reforms were essential.
Her constituency expanded, ER began to promote her own version
of the New Deal. Worried that Huey Long supporters felt neglected
by the New Deal, she wanted to make herself available to them.
Also concerned that the Federal Emergency Relief Administration
programs did meet enough of people's needs, she pressured
FERA administrator Harry
Hopkins to hire Hickok to tour different parts of the
nation, observe FERA programs, and report to him on the programs'
effectiveness. Hickok sent copies of these honest, harsh field
reports to ER, daily confirming the many obstacles those seeking
relief encountered.
Determined to make the New Deal as much reform as relief,
ER pressured Harold
Ickes and Hopkins to address those most marginalized by
FDR's policies. She criticized the Economy Act for penalizing
married federally employed women; urged the Civil Works Administration
to hire unemployed women; carefully monitored the construction
of the Arthurdale
subsistence homestead at Morgantown, West Virginia; facilitated
the creation of the National
Youth Administration; and spurred the development of the
Federal
One Programs for writers, artists, and actors. Disappointed
that Social Security did not cover the majority of Americans
and include health coverage, she reinvigorated her call for
a living wage, the right to organize, and safe working conditions.
Like FDR, ER thought fear the greatest threat to democracy.
She paid close attention to democracy's most vocal critics,
especially African Americans and student activists. She coordinated
the infamous 1934 meeting between FDR and NAACP
leader Walter White
to discuss anti-lynching legislation; prodded Henry
Wallace, Aubrey Williams, and Hopkins to resist Jim
Crow relief practices; acted as Mary
McLeod Bethune's White House omsbudsman; and spoke out
strongly against racial violence. Her 1938 defiance of Birmingham
segregation laws at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare
drew national attention to Jim Crow months before her resignation
from the DAR in support of Marian Anderson. From 1936 to 1940,
ER lent the same support to the American
Youth Congress, despite the strong opposition of FDR's
aides, and worked with James Farley, head of the Democratic
National Committee, and Molly Dewson, head of the Women's
Division of the DNC, to discuss the role of women in political
elections.
ER's skillful use of the media helped offset criticism her
activism provoked. In December 1935, she began her daily syndicated
column "My Day" which, by 1940, had a circulation equal to
that of syndicated columnists Walter Lippman and Dorothy
Thompson. She continued to devote four weeks to a nationwide
lecture tour. She expanded her reading audience by launching
a monthly question and answer magazine column; appearing on
radio; writing more than one hundred articles for magazines,
newsletters and policy journals; and releasing the first installment
of her autobiography (This Is My Story) and two small
books on foreign policy (This Troubled World) and
democratic values (The Moral Basis of Democracy).
By the end of the second term, ER was recognized as a political
force in her own right.
World War II
reinforced ER's commitment to social justice and arbitration.
Haunted by the causalities of war and the Holocaust, she carried
a prayer with her to remind her on her responsibilities. "Dear
Lord," it read, "lest I continue in my complacent ways, help
me to remember that somewhere someone died for me today and
help me to remember to ask am I worth dying for."
When FDR died, ER confronted new challenges. Refusing requests
from party leaders to run for office, from labor leaders to
run a political action committee, and from university boards
to run major women's colleges, she told the press "the story
is over." A more inaccurate statement was never uttered. Whether
at Val-Kill,
her apartment in New York City, or traveling the world, ER
brought people together and urged them to work to make their
dreams come true. She continued her column, expanded her speaking
tour, wrote 10 books, joined the NAACP board of directors,
campaigned for Adlai
Stevenson and countless other candidates, and chaired
the first Presidential Commission on the Status of Women.
She helped found Americans
for Democratic Action and the Committee for a Sane Nuclear
Policy. A early vocal critic of both President Truman's
loyalty programs and Senator McCarthy's irresponsible red-baiting
tactics, ER urged Americans to remember that "we are on trial
to show what democracy means." Repeatedly she called the nation
to action, saying "there can be no bystanders on these issues."
Perhaps her greatest legacy was her work as a member of the
American delegation to the United
Nations. As chair of the Human
Rights Commission, she shepherded the passage of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and gave the world a new vision
to combat the horrors of war and prejudice: "All human beings
are born free and equal in dignity and it rights. They are
endowed with reason and conscience and should treat one another
in a spirit of brotherhood."
Eleanor Roosevelt spent the last two years of her life tired
and in pain, but she rarely curtailed her schedule. Battling
aplastic anemia and tuberculosis, she nevertheless continued
to speak out on issues relating to racial justice, world peace,
and women's rights. Outraged by the violence the Freedom Riders
encountered in Mississippi and Alabama and discouraged by
the tepid response of the Kennedy Administration, ER quickly
agreed to a request from CORE in May 1962 to chair a public
hearing charged with investigating law enforcement officials
acts against the young protestors. She returned home to Hyde
Park where she struggled to complete her last book, Tomorrow
is Now, in which she pleaded for racial, political, and
social justice. She died November 7 in a New York City hospital
at the age of seventy-eight.
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