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 Eleanor
Roosevelt
he First Lady of the World
By Anne
Adams
Our most popular image
of a First Lady is a youthfully attractive
figure who serves as a gracious hostess and
often as an advocate for genteelly
acceptable causes. In fact, many an incoming
First Lady establishes a “cause” that she
will support and then aims her appearances
toward that purpose. Yet while an early
pioneer of this concept not only spoke and
wrote widely for causes important to her,
she was neither young nor extremely
attractive. Indeed, it was not as a
youthfully attractive woman but as a tall
and gangly gray haired figure that Eleanor
Roosevelt accomplished so much.
Another interesting
aspect of Mrs. FDR was the contrast between
what she had been and what she became - how
the driven, socially conscious First Lady
she became had begun as shy, insecure and
completely uninterested in politics.
Moreover, while most First Ladies retire
into obscurity at their husband’s death or
retirement, Mrs. Roosevelt remained in the
public eye and much of her greatest service
took place in her final years.
At her birth in
October, 1884 Anna Eleanor Roosevelt joined
a socially prominent and historically
important family. Her father Elliot was a
younger brother of later President Theodore
Roosevelt and her mother Anna was a
glamorous society beauty. Though Eleanor was
not the ugly child she would later consider
herself, she was plain-featured. “She is
such a funny child,” Anna would tell people,
”So old fashioned that we always call her
‘granny.’” Yet while she felt she had often
disappointed her mother she reveled in her
father’s affection and attention even though
he was often absent on an alcoholic spree or
sobering up in a sanitarium. When her mother
died in 1892 and her father two years later,
Eleanor and her two brothers went to live
with Anna’s mother who exercised strict but
loving discipline over her grandchildren.
However, she would really blossom when at
age 15 she was enrolled at a girls’ school
near London.
The French
schoolmistress took a special interest in
her and encouraged her development with
travel, social and educational
opportunities. When she returned to New York
for her 1902 social debut she was more
confident and mature than before. However,
she still felt insecure as she began the
debutante’s social whirl of teas, dinners,
dances and parties.
Still, there was one
young man who found her attractive and that
was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a distant
cousin attending Harvard. Though they had
met briefly as children and their families
were casually acquainted, they had never
been considered a couple till that autumn of
1903 when Franklin proposed. He told her
that with her help “I might amount to
something someday,” but Eleanor was
hesitant. “Why me?” she asked, “I’m plain. I
have little to bring you.” Yet Franklin
insisted and they prepared to announce their
engagement. However, there was a barrier in
the form of Sara Delano Roosevelt.
Franklin’s mother had
devoted so much of her life to him as her
only child and she did not readily welcome a
rival in the form of her son’s bride. She
insisted they delay announcing their
engagement, but love won out and they were
married on March 17, 1905. Eleanor’s uncle
President Theodore Roosevelt gave her away
and at the wedding attracted more attention
than the bride.
Sara was intent on
continuing to dominate her son and now the
young couple. Their new home was adjacent to
Sara’s, a home that was furnished and
managed by the senior Mrs. Roosevelt. As
Eleanor began the routine of the young
society wife, she was plagued with a gnawing
feeling of futile uselessness. As she put it
later: “I was beginning to be an entirely
dependent person… I was not developing any
individual tasks or initiative.”
In 1910 when Franklin
ran for the New York state senate, Eleanor
received the first of many realizations of
the real world. When she heard Franklin
speak in support of women voting, she was
astonished. She had always assumed men were
“superior creatures.”
Her political awakening
and education continued as she traveled to
Albany to set up a home for her husband when
he was in the legislature. There she enjoyed
the freedom from her mother-in-law to manage
her own home and children. She grew further
as they attended the 1912 Democratic
Convention in Baltimore where Woodrow Wilson
was nominated, and again in 1913 when Wilson
appointed Franklin as assistant secretary of
the Navy. She made the usual social calls
and entertained, but also toured Naval sites
with Franklin and grew to enjoy lively
political discussions with her guests. As
World War I began, Eleanor continued her
service work with knitting for the Red
Cross, visiting Navy hospitals, and working
at canteens for visiting soldiers. She also
spent more time with her children: daughter
Anna and sons James, Elliot, Franklin Jr.
and John. However, her new steps toward
independence were about to meet another
setback.
In 1918 when Franklin
returned from a European trip with
pneumonia, Eleanor assisted with his mail
during his recovery. As she was doing so she
came across letters that indicated Franklin
had been having an affair with Lucy Page
Mercer, her social secretary.
Eleanor offered to give
Franklin a divorce, but when he thought of
the effect on his children and his political
career, he declined. They reconciled and
though Franklin agreed to never see Lucy
again, things had changed between husband
and wife. Though they continued to be
devoted to each other, Eleanor resolved to
become more independent as she distanced
herself from Sara and began to follow her
own projects.
Franklin was nominated
as Vice President in 1920, and while Eleanor
further grew with the campaigning, the
Democratic ticket was defeated and Franklin
returned to New York
Then in 1921 there came
another personal tragedy that affected all
of the Roosevelt family. While vacationing
at Campobello Island, in Canada, off the
northeast coast of Maine, Franklin at age 39
was afflicted with polio and the resulting
paralysis. He would never again walk unaided
and they needed to decide what would be his
future. Sara urged him to retire from public
life to the comfortable life as a country
gentleman, but that was not Franklin’s
choice. With the backing and support of
Eleanor and his political advisors he
resumed his political ambitions.
Then in 1928, FDR
nominated Al Smith at the Democratic
convention and he decided to run himself –
as governor of New York. Smith lost to
Herbert Hoover, but FDR won and while
Eleanor pursued the traditional political
and social duties that came with her
position as the governor’s wife, but assumed
another role. Because of her husband’s lack
of mobility she toured widely, becoming his
“eyes and ears” as she traveled where he
could not and then reported back. It was a
role she would continue in the White House.
In 1930 Franklin was
again elected New York governor, and then in
1932 he became the Democratic presidential
candidate and went on to victory. In her
new position as First Lady, Eleanor carried
out the traditional social duties but also
toured, wrote and spoke widely in support of
the President’s projects as well as her own
interests.
She traveled so much
that the story goes that when she left the
White House one day to visit a Baltimore
prison, the President called her secretary
to find out where she had gone. “She’s in
prison, Mr. President,” was the response.
FDR laughed. “I’m not surprised – but what
for?” A cartoon of the period showed two
coal miners looking up from their work
underground. “Oh, my goodness!” One says to
the other as he looks down the tunnel. “It’s
Mrs. Roosevelt!”
Eleanor was
particularly anxious to promote racial
equality and became a major supporter of
black people as equal participants in both
society and in the President’s programs. Yet
in the segregation-minded America of the
1930s her reforms were not always popular or
possible. However, she did set a personal
example at a 1939 conference in Birmingham,
Alabama where both races took part. Local
law decreed separate sections for the races,
but she made a quiet but dramatic protest
when she placed her chair in the middle
aisle between the two sections.
When the nation entered
World War II in 1941, Eleanor continued to
travel and now occasionally did so out of
the country. She flew to Great Britain in
1942 under the code name Rover (assigned by
FDR, she amusedly assumed) to represent
American interests. She toured military
hospitals, chatting with the men, making
notes so she could later write letters to
their families, and just encouraging them
with her presence and interest, Admiral Wm.
Halsey was amazed at her later visits in the
South Pacific theater. “I marveled at her
hardihood, both physical and mental,” he
recalled. ”She walked for miles and she saw
patients who were grievously and gruesomely
wounded. But I marveled most at their
expressions as she leaned over them. It was
a sight I will never forget.”
When FDR died in April
1945, she immediately wired her four sons in
uniform at various fronts: “Darlings, Father
slept away this afternoon. He did his job to
the end as he would want you to do.” “The
story is over,” she told reporters as she
left the White House, but she was wrong. Her
story of service to her nation and society
would continue.
Soon she was again at
work, lecturing, publishing and doing
committee work for the same causes that had
occupied her in the White House. She
supported racial and civic equality, and
promoted government aid to the poor and the
elderly, and actively supported national
Democratic Party candidates.
Having seen the
disaster of the recent war, she was an early
supporter of the newly formed United
Nations, serving as a delegate under
appointment from President Truman in 1945
till 1953. Then as chairman of the Human
Rights Commission, she had a part in the
drafting of that organization’s statement of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
which was adopted in December, 1948. In
1961 President Kennedy honored her further
with an appointment to the American
delegation to the U.N. as well as to the
National Advisory Committee of the Peace
Corps as well as the chairmanship of the
President's Commission on the Status of
Women
In the early 1960s
despite coping with a debilitating blood
disease she worked until nearly the end. Her
final book, published after her death in
November 1962, carried the words that
perhaps summarized her lifelong struggle to
serve and improve her world: “The future is
literally in our hands to mold as we like.
We cannot wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow is
now.”
~*~
A native of Kansas City, Missouri , Anne
grew up in northwestern Ohio , and holds
degrees in history: a BA from Wilmington
College, Wilmington , Ohio (1967), and a MA
from Central Missouri State University ,
Warrensburg , Missouri (1968).
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