Eleanor Roosevelt
From Conservapedia
Eleanor Roosevelt (b. 1884) was the wife of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
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Childhood
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born on October 11, 1884, to Anna Hall and Elliott Roosevelt. Her Uncle (her father's brother) was Theodore Roosevelt who became the 26th President of the United States. She writes that her father was a drunkard and died in a sanitarium. [1]
Eleanor was only 8 years old when her mother died, and sadly, her father passed away 2 years later, leaving Eleanor and her siblings to be raised by their maternal Grandmother. Until she was 15 years old she had no schooling save for a brief period when she was about six in a convent in France.
Marriage
She became engaged to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1903, who was distantly related (5th cousin). They were married two years later, in 1905. The Roosevelts had 6 children, and lived in her home state of New York.
Adulthood
Eleanor's husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to the New York State Senate in 1910 and the Roosevelts moved to Washington D.C. Eleanor was devoted to her husband and supportive of his career. In 1921 when her husband became ill with poliomyelitis, Eleanor tenderly cared for him, his helpmate through his serious health problems. The polio left Franklin Roosevelt without the use of his legs, confined to a wheelchair for the most part. However, he did not allow this disability to end his political career, and his wife, Eleanor was supportive of his political ambitions.
First Lady
In 1928 Franklin Roosevelt became Governor of New York, and in November 1932 was elected as the 32nd President of the United States. He would serve four terms in office, 1933-1945, through years of economic depression and World War II. Eleanor took an active role as First Lady, often travelling with her husband, visiting the troops overseas, and was outspoken, holding press conferences, and speaking on the radio about current issues.
Mrs. Roosevelt frequently invited the press and radio reporters and commentators to Hyde Park and the White House for picnics and swimming with the President. The media were courter with positions in the New Deal for the members of their families at a time when jobs were hard to come by.
Mrs. Roosevelt's activities, her lectures and her radio broadcasts for large sums of money were unusual. Shortly after becoming First Lady she began appearing on radio selling toiletries, mattresses, candy and other products. She was getting from $1000 to $4000 per appearance. An advertising agency that employed the son of Harry Hopkins, an old Roosevelt family friend, New Deal agency head and intimate Presidential adviser, offered Mrs. Roosevelt $1000 a week to sponsor ads on behalf of the Pan-American Coffee Bureau. Mrs. Roosevelt accepted the offer.
As First Lady she began receiving income of $5,000 a year from the government in 1936. Privately she "earned twenty times as much from her rounds on the lecture circuit and from her...columns, My Day, which appeared in some sixty newspapers..." According to the 1987 book Eleanor Roosevelt and the Media by Maurine Beasley: "For a woman of her day, Eleanor Roosevelt earned an astonishing amount of money while she was first lady; $75,000 as an advance on her autobiography, for an example, and an estimated $156,000 from her radio broadcasts in 1940 alone." [2] It is estimated that she has received during the 15 years she was in the White House at least three million dollars.
To counter criticism of Mrs. Roosevlet's outside earnings while First Lady she cultivated an image as patriotic with an interest in social causes and helping the underprivileged. She advocated for womens issues and joined the League of Women Voters and the Women's Trade Union League, and worked for the New York State Democratic Committee, in the women's Division. Eleanor took a strong stance for civil rights and was outspoken in her beliefs for equal treatment of all races. She resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution due to her disagreement with the group's pro-segregation views. She devoted much of her time working with groups on labor issues and establishing a minimum wage.
All through the first and second terms of the President, Mrs. Roosevelt was industriously cultivated by the Communists and their various front organizations. [3] Mrs. Roosevelt served as Honorary Chairwoman for the American Committee for Yugoslav Relief which later was placed on the Attorney General's list of subversive oganizations.
In May of 1944, the wife of CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder, Raissa Browder, who had entered the United States illegally, was permitted to become a citizen upon the urgent request of the First Lady to the State Department and Immigration Service officials. [4]
Eleanor Roosevelt is referenced in at least one Venona project decryption; the First Lady's good friend Trude Lash was recruited into doing work for the espionage service of the Soviet Union. It appears Mrs. Roosevelt had not been assigned a code name yet, but the cryptographers theorizes KAPITANSha, Russian for "the wife of KAPITAN" was possibly being proposed by the Soviet Case Officer. KAPITAN was the code name given to reference Franklin Roosevlet. [5]
Later Life
After her husband died (April 12, 1945) she became very active as a spokesperson for the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. President John F. Kennedy appointed her a member of the National Advisory Committee of the Peace Corps and chairman of the President's Commission on the Status of Women.
She gained respect and admiration for her hard work, intelligence, common sense, optimism, and kind nature, and received many awards for her humanitarian work. Eleanor died in New York City in 1962. She was buried in the rose garden of her home at Hyde Park, next to her beloved husband.
See also
References
- ↑ The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80476-X
- ↑ Democracy Now Forum, Internet Archive. Retrieved July 27,2007.
- ↑ Scott Shane and Tom Bowman, U.S. Agency Declassifies Soviet Spy Messages, The Moscow Times, 14 October 1995.
- ↑ US Senate, 81st Congress, 1st Session, Committee on the Judicary, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturealization, September 14, 1949, Part II, (GPO), p. 785.
- ↑ Venona 786-787 New York KGB to Moscow 26 May 1943 (pg.1) (pg. 2). "Processing" of President Roosevelt's wife.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/ http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/ http://www.udhr.org/history/Biographies/ http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/erbio.html http://www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/eleanor4.html
