Eleanor Roosevelt

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (October 11, 1884 – November 7, 1962), sometimes called ER', was an American politician who used her celebrity stature as First Lady from 1933 to 1945 to promote her husband (Franklin D. Roosevelt's) New Deal, as well as equal rights for blacks. After Franklin's death in 1945 she built a career as a New Deal Coalition advocate and spokesperson for human rights. She was a suffragist who worked hard to enhance the status of working women, but who opposed the Equal Rights Amendment because she believed it would hurt working women who needed special protection. In the late 1940s, she became a leader in supporting the United Nations, the United Nations Association and Freedom House. She chaired the committee that drafted and approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. President Harry S. Truman called her the First Lady of the World in honor of her extensive human rights promotions. Along with Jane Addams, she was the most prominent American woman of the 20th century. She was a leader of the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party. She dropped her connections with far-left groups after 1945, and in 1947 helped found the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), an anticommunist, independent political lobby dedicated to preserving the legacy of New Deal liberalism. She remains an icon of American liberalism.

Childhood

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born on October 11, 1884, to Anna Hall and Elliott Roosevelt. Her paternal uncle was Theodore Roosevelt who became the 26th President of the United States. Two brothers, Elliot, Jr. (1889-1983) and Hall Roosevelt (1891-1941) were born later. Her mother died when Eleanor was eight, and she and her brothers were sent to live with her maternal grandmother, Mary Ludlow Hall (1843-1919) at her mansion at Tivoli, New York. Just before Eleanor turned ten, her father died of complications of alcoholism. She writes that her father was a drunkard and died in a sanitarium.

She was home-schooled until age 15, save for a brief period at age six in a convent in France. In the fall of 1899, with the encouragement of her paternal aunt Bamie Cowles, the family decided to send Eleanor to Allenswood Academy, a finishing school for young, wealthy American and English women. Under the tutelage of headmistress, Marie Souvestre, Eleanor developed into an independent-thinking, self-confident young woman. Eleanor's first-cousin Corinne Robinson, whose first term at Allenswood overlapped with Eleanor's last said that when she arrived at the school, Eleanor was "everything." During her years as a young woman, Roosevelt claimed her full, 6' height.

Marriage

Roosevelt returned in 1902 and made her debut in New York high society. She became engaged to Franklin D. Roosevelt (a fifth cousin) in 1903; they were married on March 17, 1905 in New York; her uncle President Theodore Roosevelt gave the bride away.

Six children followed in rapid succession, with all but one surviving infancy: Anna Eleanor, James, Franklin (died 1909), Elliott, a second Franklin Delano, and John Aspinwall.

Adulthood

Franklin Roosevelt was elected as a Democrat to the New York State Senate in 1910, but the family remained in New York City. In 1913 the family moved to Washington where Franklin was the powerful and popular Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I.

Very shy at first, Eleanor kept a low profile during World War I. She became more accustomed to the limelight when Franklin was the Democratic nominee for Vice President in 1920 (he lost), and when he ran for governor of New York (he won in 1928 and 1930). After he contracted polio she became much more active, serving as his spokesperson at many meetings around the state. She advocated for women's 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's marriage collapsed in 1918 when she discovered Franklin had a lover. Divorce was impossible, love was absent. The solution was to build up Franklin's career. In 1921 when her husband became ill with poliomyelitis, Eleanor became 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, Eleanor was supportive of his political ambitions. In 1928 Franklin Roosevelt was elected governor of New York, in the face of a landslide by Republican Herbert Hoover. FDR was reelected in his own landslide in 1930.

First Lady

Franklin in November 1932 was elected as the 32nd President of the United States; he was reelected three times, serving until his death, 1933-1945, twelve momentous years of economic depression and World War.

Having seen her aunt, Edith Roosevelt's strict social tension and protocol during Theodore Roosevelt's White House years, Eleanor set out on a different direction. Traditionalists complained when she continued the political activism and writing she had begun before 1933. But she countered that they were an expansion of woman's primary duties as housewife and mother.

Roosevelt maintained a heavy travel schedule over her twelve years in the White House, indeed, heavier than most presidents up to that time. During the war years she increased her travel schedule, visiting factories and mines and especially meeting with the troops at home and overseas. With New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia she cochaired a national committee on civil defense, but it was ineffective.

1940 election button

During Franklin Roosevelt's terms as President, Eleanor was very vocal about her support of the nascent Civil Rights Movement and of African-American rights. Her husband quietly agreed but did not risk alienating the white South until the war began, when he issued powerful civil rights orders, especially FEPC, that ordered an end to discrimination in war industry.

Arthurdale

The New Deal attempt at resettling very poor farmers climaxed at the Arthurdale experiment in West Virginia. Eleanor Roosevelt was in charge of the project from the beginning, seeing it as a way to combat the poverty of the unemployed miners and as a way to forestall the spread of communism. She had no end of troubles with Congress over money and with administrators such as Harold Ickes and Rexford Tugwell. The project was attacked from the Right as a threat to free enterprise and from the Left as a mechanism to decentralize poverty. The population of Arthurdale remained on relief throughout the 1930s until the war, when a defense plant was located there. In 1946 Arthurdale and the other resettlement communities were sold by the government.

Media

She was the first First Lady to hold weekly press conferences. These were given to female reporters only. Roosevelt's activities, her lectures and her radio broadcasts for large sums of money were unusual. She announced that payments for her radio broadcasts would go directly to the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker social service organization. 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. The Pan-American Coffee Bureau paid her $28,000 for a series of weekly broadcasts to American housewives at the start of the war, helping them understand the war issues and the shortages of household goods.

As First Lady she began receiving income of $5,000 a year from an inheritance. 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..." 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." 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 her outside earnings she aggressively promoted many patriotic, civic and charitable causes, and hireda staff to answer literally millions of letters. 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.

Communist attention

All through the first and second terms of the President, Mrs. Roosevelt was industriously cultivated by the Communists and their various front organizations. 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 organizations.

Eleanor Roosevelt is referenced in at least one Venona project decryption regarding Soviet spies who reported to Moscow on her movements. Mrs. Roosevelt had not been assigned a code name yet, but American cryptographers later guessed KAPITANSha, Russian for "the wife of KAPITAN" was used by the Soviet Case Officer. KAPITAN was the code name given to reference Franklin Roosevelt.

Feud with Pegler

The widely-read conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler assailed Eleanor (and FDR) regularly. In public Eleanor ignored him. In private in 1942 she asked the FBI to investigate Pegler suggestion a column he wrote involved “sedition.” Her actions belied her public reputation as a champion of First Amendment rights when it came to leftists. In fact, she wielded her influence as First Lady to push the Bureau on this case. Dissatisfied with the FBI's initial report on the Pegler's column, she prodded J. Edgar Hoover to expand the investigation until it took on a voluminous scope. Recent scholars (including Betty Houchin Winfield, Kenneth O'Reilly, and Richard W. Steele) have exposed Franklin Roosevelt's political use of the FBI and traced how he ordered wartime sedition investigations of anti-New Deal newspaper publishers, such as William Randolph Hearst and the Chicago Tribune's Robert McCormick. In the Pegler's case, there was a willingness to use similar tactics against a prominent conservative columnist. Moreover, it also becomes clear that, despite her reputation as a champion of free speech rights, Eleanor Roosevelt resorted to similar methods against a media opponent.

Postwar politics

United Nations

After World War II, Roosevelt played an instrumental role, along with others, in drafting the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Roosevelt served as the first chairperson of the UN Human Rights Commission. On September 28, 1948, Roosevelt called the Declaration "the international Magna Carta of all mankind" (James 1948). The Declaration was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948. The vote of the General Assembly was unanimous except for eight abstentions. The Declaration was Roosevelt's crowning achievement. Eleanor was nicknamed "first lady of the world", by President Harry Truman after Franklin died because of her outstanding efforts to make the world a better place.

Rejects the far left

She dropped her connections with far-left groups after 1945, and refused to support Henry Wallace, FDR's vice president who was preaching détente and friendship with the Soviet Union. Wallace was building the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), and in 1948 ran for president against Truman. Eleanor supported Truman and the Cold War, and in 1947 she helped found the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), an anticommunist, independent political lobby dedicated to preserving the legacy of New Deal liberalism. In 1953 she was the ADA's honorary chairman. The ADA realized it was impossible to achieve liberal goals within a political alliance with Communists. They placed blame for the Cold War* squarely on the Soviet Union and supported Truman's “get-tough” policy, and endorsed the purge by liberal labor unions of Communist leaders of many union locals. In early 1947 she explained:

"I would like to see all progressive groups work together. But since some of us prefer to have our staffs and policy-making groups completely free of any American Communist infiltration if we can possibly prevent it, while others have not quite as strong a feeling on this subject, it is natural that there should be two set-ups.” She wanted to see the two groups work together, but only if the PCA removed “from its leadership the Communist element."

Until her death in 1962, Roosevelt remained involved heavily in politics. She strongly opposed the Equal Rights Amendment because it would prevent Congress and the states from passing special protective legislation that she thought women workers needed. In 1956 she opposed a strong civil rights plank in the Democratic party platform, fearing it would alienate white southerners.

The Catholic issue

In July 1949, her ambivalent attitude toward American Catholics caused a high visibility fight with Francis Cardinal Spellman, the Catholic Archbishop of New York. In her columns, Eleanor had attacked proposals for federal funding of certain (nonreligious) activities, such as bus transportation for students, at Catholic schools. Spellman pointed out that the Supreme Court had recently upheld such provisions, and accused her of anti-Catholicism. Most Democrats rallied behind Roosevelt, so Spellman came to Eleanor's Hyde Park home to bury the hatchet. However, Eleanor retained her belief that Catholic schools should not receive federal aid. She seems to have paid attention to the anti-Catholic polemics of people like Paul Blanshard. Privately, she said that if Catholics got school aid, "Once that is done they control the schools, or at least a great part of them."

Mrs. Roosevelt was never as popular among Catholics as her husband. While he kept the country neutral in the Spanish Civil War, she openly favored the republican Loyalists (who were anticlerical) against General Francisco Franco's Nationalists (whom many American Catholics favored); after 1945, she opposed normalizing relations with Spain. She told Spellman bluntly that "I cannot however say that in European countries the control by the Roman Catholic Church of great areas of land has always led to happiness for the people of those countries." Catholics resented her quiet support of Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement, and her prewar sponsorship of the American Youth Congress, in which the Communists had been heavily represented, but Catholic youth groups were not represented. In 1960 she actively opposed John F. Kennedy's quest for the presidential nomination in part because, biographer Lash has concluded, "Somewhere deep in her subconscious was an anti-Catholicism which was a part of her Protestant heritage." Her son Elliott Roosevelt suggested that her "reservations about Catholicism" were rooted in her husband's sexual affairs with Lucy Mercer and Missy LeHand, who were both Catholics.

New York and national politics

In 1954, Tammany Hall boss Carmine DeSapio campaigned against Eleanor's son, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., during the New York Attorney General elections, which Franklin (Jr.) lost. Roosevelt held DeSapio responsible for her son's defeat and grew increasingly disgusted with his political conduct through the rest of the 1950s. Eventually, she would join with her old friends Herbert Lehman and Thomas Finletter to form the New York Committee for Democratic Voters, a group dedicated to enhancing the democratic process by opposing DeSapio's reincarnated Tammany. Their efforts were eventually successful, and DeSapio was removed from power in 1961.

Eleanor was a close friend of Adlai Stevenson and supported his candidacies in the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections. When President Truman backed New York Governor W. Averell Harriman, who was a close associate of Carmine DeSapio, for the Democratic presidential nomination, Roosevelt was disappointed but continued to support Stevenson who ultimately won the nomination. She backed Stevenson once again in 1960 primarily to block John F. Kennedy, who nevertheless received the presidential nomination. She represented the last-ditch opposition to Kennedy, primarily because she feared the power of the Irish Catholics in the Democratic Party.

By the 1950s Roosevelt's international role as spokesman for women led her to stop publicly attacking the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). But she never supported it and never thought it was wise. In 1961, President Kennedy's undersecretary of labor, Esther Peterson, who was a former union official and an adamant foe of the ERA, proposed a new "President’s Commission on the Status of Women." Kennedy appointed Roosevelt to chair the commission, with Peterson as director. Roosevelt died just before the commission issued its final report. It was a massive study that restated the decades-old stance that female equality was best achieved by recognition of gender differences and needs, and not by an Equal Rights Amendment.

Roosevelt was responsible for the establishment, in 1964, of the 2,800 acre Roosevelt Campobello International Park on Campobello Island, New Brunswick. This followed a gift of the Roosevelt summer estate to the Canadian and American governments.

Eleanor Roosevelt was outspoken on numerous causes and continued to galvanize the world with her comments and opinions well into her seventies.

Family matters

Relationship with mother-in-law

Eleanor had a sometimes contentious relationship with her domineering mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt. From Eleanor's perspective, she was relatively young, inexperienced and with a mother long dead, lacked support. Despite her forceful and domineering personality, Sara Delano Roosevelt had much to teach her new daughter-in-law on what a young wife should know. Eleanor, while sometimes resenting Sara's domineering nature, nevertheless highly valued her opinion in the early years of her marriage until she developed the experience and confidence a wife gains from the school of marital "hard knocks". Historians continue to study the reasons Eleanor allowed Sara to dominate their lives, especially in the first years of the marriage. Eleanor's income was more than half of that of her husband's when they married in 1905 and could have lived still relatively luxuriously without Sara's financial support.

From Sara's perspective, she was bound and determined to ensure her son's success in all areas of life including his marriage. Sara had doted on her son to the point of spoiling him, and now intended to help him make a success of his marriage with a woman that she evidently viewed as being totally unprepared for her new role as chatelaine of a great family. Sarah would continue to give huge presents to her new grandchildren, but sometimes Eleanor had problems with the influence that came with "mother's largesse."

Franklin's affair

Despite its happy start, the Roosevelts' marriage almost split over Franklin's affair with Eleanor's social secretary Lucy Mercer (later Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd). Eleanor immediately offered a divorce if the affair continued. A divorce would have immediately destroyed Franklin's political career so the marriage was contuinued as a formality. He agreed never to see Lucy again—but Lucy was with him when he died. Eleanor herself had also committed adultery as well, having a lesbian love affair with AP journalist Lorena Hickok.

Controversial personal relationships

In 1928, Eleanor met Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickok, one of the few women White House correspondents. They became close friends by 1932, and remained so for the rest of their lives. Hickok suggested the idea for what would eventually become Roosevelt's column My Day. My Day was a daily newspaper column which started in 1935, in which she talked about interesting things that happened to her each day. After a few years away from Washington, Hickok returned in 1940 and lived in the White House with the first family. Highly personal letters between Hickok and Roosevelt are published in Roger Streitmatter's 1998 book Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok. Eleanor also kept several letters in the Roosevelt Library sealed with the order that they not be unveiled to the public until a decade after her death. The letters in question strongly suggested that her friendship with Lorena Hickok and Eleanor extended to a lesbian affair.

Honors and awards

Roosevelt received 35 honorary degrees during her life, compared to 31 awarded to her husband.

In 1968, she was awarded one of the United Nations Human Rights Prizes. There was an unsuccessful campaign to award her a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize. Roosevelt is Gallup's ninth most admired person in the 20th century.

While very popular as First Lady, sometimes even ranking higher than her husband in public popularity polls, Roosevelt's popularity increased in her post-White House years. ER was ranked #1 for 15 consecutive years as the "World's Most Popular Woman" from 1946 until 1961 and was up to do so again in 1962 the year she died. In 1961, all volumes of her autobiography were compiled into The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt, which is still in print.

Roosevelt was an early member of the Brandeis University Board of Trustees, delivered the University's first commencement speech, and joined the Brandeis faculty as a visiting lecturer in international relations.

Eleanor survived her husband by nearly 20 years. In 1960, at age 76, Roosevelt's health began to fail her. Roosevelt died at her Manhattan apartment. She was buried in the rose garden of her home at Hyde Park, next to her husband.

At her memorial service, Adlai Stevenson asked, "What other single human being has touched and transformed the existence of so many?" Stevenson also said that Roosevelt was someone "who would rather light a candle than curse the darkness."

Eleanor Roosevelt gained respect and admiration for her hard work, intelligence, common sense, optimism, and kind nature, and received many awards for her humanitarian work.

After her death, her son Elliott Roosevelt wrote a series of best-selling fictional murder mysteries wherein she acted as a detective, helping the police solve the crime, while she was First Lady. They feature actual places and celebrities of the time.

Quotes

• "You must do the thing you think you cannot do."
• "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
• "A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity."

See also

• Trude Lash
• American Youth Congress
• Young Communist League
• American Student Union

Bibliography

• Beasley, Maurine H., et al., eds. The Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia (2001) online version
• Beck, Susan Abrams. "Eleanor Roosevelt: The Path to Equality." White House Studies, Vol. 4, 2004 online edition
• Cook, Blanche Wiesen. Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1: 1884-1933 (1992) and Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume 2, The Defining Years, 1933-1938 (2000). the standard scholarly biography. excerpt and text search vol 1; excerpt and text search vol 2
• Lachman, Seymour P. "The Cardinal, the Congressmen, and the First Lady." Journal of Church and State 7 (Winter 1965): 35–66.
• Lash, Joseph. Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship Based on Eleanor Roosevelt's Private Papers (1971). online edition
• Lash, Joseph. Eleanor: The Years Alone (1972) a standard biography; online edition
• Pottker, Jan. Sara and Eleanor: The Story of Sara Delano Roosevelt and Her Daughter-In-Law, Eleanor Roosevelt, St. Martin's Press, 416 pages, ISBN 0-312-30340-8 excerpt and text search
• Goodwin, Doris Kearns. No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, (1995), major study of the wartime partnership; 768 pages, ISBN 0-684-80448-4 excerpt and text search
• Pfeffer, Paula F. "Eleanor Roosevelt and the National and World Women's Parties." Historian Fall 1996: 39-58. in EBSCO* Royal, Mary Mason. "'Maybe You Could Help?' Letters to Eleanor Roosevelt, 1934-1942," Social Education, Vol. 69, 2005 online edition
• Weidt, Maryann N. Stateswoman to the World: a Story about Eleanor Roosevelt. illus. by Lydia M. Anderson. Lerner Publications, 1991. for middle school audience

Primary sources

• Roosevelt, Eleanor. The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Vol. 1: The Human Rights Years, 1945-48. ed. by Allida Black (2007) 1185pp, the first volume of a multivolume scholarly edition
• Roosevelt, Eleanor. On My Own, 1958, autobiography online edition
• Roosevelt, Eleanor. My Day: The Best of Eleanor Roosevelt's Acclaimed Newspaper Columns, 1936-1962, edited by David Emblidge, Marcy Ross, and Blanche Wiesen Cook. (2001) excerpt and text search
• Roosevelt, Eleanor. The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (1961) includes 4 volumes of autobiography excerpt and text search
• Roosevelt, David B. Grandmère: A Personal History of Eleanor Roosevelt, (2002), 256 pages, ISBN 0-446-52734-3
• Schamel, Wynell. "Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters from Children of the Great Depression," Social Education, Vol. 68, 2004 online edition
• Streitmatter, Roger. Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, (1998), 336 pages, ISBN 0-684-84928-3 excerpt and text search

External links

• Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site
• The Eleanor Roosevelt Center at Val-Kill
• The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers
• Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum
• The Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute
• Some of My Best Friends Are Negro: Roosevelt on race.
• Online Biographical Sketch at George Washington University's Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Site
• Text and Audio of Eleanor Roosevelt's Address to the United Nations General Assembly
• [1], Mrs. Roosevelt dies at 78. New York Times Obituary, November 8, 1962.
• Eleanor & Harry The correspondence between Eleanor Roosevelt and President Harry S. Truman
• Biography resources dedicated to Eleanor Roosevelt
• Time 100 Leaders of 20th Century