By LORNA CHEROT LITTLEWAY
THE COLUMBIA COUNTY Libraries Association marked Women’s History Month with a webinar about First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of President Franklin Roosevelt, Monday, March 9. The online session called “A Tireless Advocate For Change” was led by Jeff Urbin, educator at the FDR Presidential Library and Museum, in Hyde Park.
In his opening remarks Urbin described Eleanor as an “inspiring person, a champion of social justice and human rights, and for doing the right thing.” Urbin told Eleanor’s story as “five turning points.” Born in New York City, on October 11, 1884, she was named Anna Eleanor after her mother, Anna Hall, “a descendant of the Livingston clan.” Eleanor first met Franklin when she was two years old and he was four at a Roosevelt Family reunion.
Eleanor’s early childhood was not a happy one. Her father Eliot Roosevelt was an alcoholic and her mother, a “beautiful socialite,” was disappointed that Eleanor was not an attractive baby. She thought Eleanor looked like a “little old lady” and at age four nicknamed the child “granny.” Urbin showed a picture of Eleanor as a toddler with her father and opined, “[She] does not look like a granny to me! She’s a perfectly cute little kid.”
Eleanor was largely ignored or neglected by her parents. Urbin relayed the story of a Daddy-Daughter Day outing in the city, which fizzled when her father left Eleanor on the front steps of a Manhattan hotel, where he drank until drunk. After 90 minutes passed Eleanor asked the doorman about her father and was informed that he had been escorted out the back door and put into a taxi and sent home.
By age 11 Eleanor’s parents had died; her mother from diphtheria and her father from complications due to alcoholism. Eleanor was sent to Tivoli in northern Dutchess County to live with her grandmother and her two sons. Grandma Hall was very strict and impatient with Eleanor. As an example Urbin said that Hall would become “enraged if Eleanor set the dining table incorrectly, and would yell at her then turn a cold shoulder to her for several days.”
Eleanor also had to contend with her uncles – both alcoholics. They would shoot rifles from the attic windows at her while she groomed her pony to frighten them.
At age 15 Eleanor was sent abroad to London to study at the Allenswood School for girls, where Madam Silvestri was the head mistress. Urbin called this move the first turning point. Silvestri saw in Eleanor a “smart, compassionate, kind and inquisitive person. She saw in Eleanor the qualities the world would see.”
Silvestri had a huge influence on Eleanor, whom she encouraged to travel and keep a diary. She allowed Eleanor to venture about London unescorted. During her three years at Allenswood, Eleanor learned “self-awareness, self-value, self-confidence and self worth.” Said Urbin, “[She] realized, ‘I am a young woman who has interests and ideas to offer the world.’” She and Silvestri remained life-long friends and Eleanor kept a framed picture of her mentor on her desk.
When Eleanor returned to NYC she tended to immigrant women as a social worker at a tenement house. According to Urbin, when Eleanor and Franklin met again as young adults “sparks flew. Their partnership was based on a deep, deep mutual love. They were a perfect pair, two halves of the same whole.” He added, “Franklin was outgoing bringing her up a bit and Eleanor was bookish bringing him down a bit.”
They were wed on St. Patrick’s Day in 1905. March 17 was chosen because it was the only day when “Uncle Teddy,” President Theodore Roosevelt, was available to escort Eleanor down the aisle. (He would be in NYC to lead the Irish parade.) Urbin remarked that Eleanor played a bit part in her own wedding, upstaged by the president, on whom everyone focused.
The newlyweds honeymooned for three months abroad. For the next 10 years, 1906-16, Eleanor was either pregnant or recovering from a pregnancy. She bore six children; five lived to adulthood. (Franklin, Jr. passed after one year.) Urbin said, “Eleanor was a timid mother.” Franklin’s mother, Sara, assumed the lion’s share of raising their children.
During World War I Franklin was appointed assistant secretary of the Navy. The couple moved from Hyde Park to Washington, DC, where his principal duties were to visit US naval bases and schmooze with DC “muckety mucks.” Eleanor did not like the partying. In addition to being shy she abhorred alcohol and was exhausted by her children.
Eleanor suggested her husband substitute her personal secretary Lucy Mercer to attend DC parties with him. The two began an affair. Urbin called “cheating on Eleanor” the second turning point. Eleanor learned of the dalliance when she discovered love letters Mercer had written to Franklin. Eleanor admitted, “The bottom fell out of her world.” Urbin added the two became “pistons working in the same engine.”
Eleanor offered Franklin a divorce, which he declined. His advisor Louis Howe warned Franklin that his political career would be over and his mother, who controlled the Roosevelt Family fortune, threatened to disinherit him. (Sara Roosevelt died in 1941 and Franklin four years later.)
Said Urbin, “So they stayed married and their partnership prevailed. But now Eleanor had leverage. She was free of emotional support from Franklin.” If Franklin complained about her Urbin said Eleanor’s retort would be, “You wouldn’t have a marriage or political career without me. So back off!”
Turning point number three occurred in 1921 when Franklin contracted polio. He and Eleanor returned to Hyde Park, where Franklin spent the next seven years learning how to walk again. To keep his name in the local and national political discourse, Eleanor was dispatched across New York and the nation. She developed political skills as well as a network among the tens of thousands of people she met.
Eleanor made speeches and wrote articles on Franklin’s behalf. And it worked. In 1928 Franklin was elected governor of New York and used that position as a steppingstone to the presidency, which he won in 1932. Eleanor was not pleased with the pressure and “fishbowl” life the victory would bring.
Turning point number four happened when Eleanor vowed to remake the First Ladyship “in her own image.” Eleanor was the first to hold her own press conferences with only women journalists. This was a boon to women journalists. A publication would need to have at least one woman on staff if it wanted an interview with the First Lady.
Said Urbin, “Eleanor makes a ceremonial job into a real job. FDR was an activist president and Eleanor was his feedback loop.” She traveled 144,000 miles as Franklin’s “eyes, ears and legs.” As an example Urbin cited, “Franklin wanted her to verify that soup kitchens were serving gumbo, as claimed, and not oatmeal because the government was paying for gumbo.”
Eleanor wrote a “My Day” column, which now would be considered the first blog, from 1935-62. She also wrote magazine articles for Ladies Home Journal and Collier’s. Eleanor boosted military morale during WWII by visiting English soldiers twice. She logged 30,000 miles, in the South Pacific visiting 60,000 American troops and “losing 30 pounds” in the process.
Eleanor Roosevelt took several Civil Rights stands. She resigned her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) when the group barred the opera singer Marian Anderson – a personal friend — from singing at Constitution Hall because of her race. “Music has no color reasoned Eleanor.” Anderson performed an open-air concert at the Lincoln Memorial, which 75,000 people attended. (Constitution Hall had a seating capacity of only 2,000.) Not among the audience was Eleanor Roosevelt, “who did not want to steal the limelight from Anderson as her Uncle Teddy did on her wedding day.”
Eleanor championed the Tuskegee Airmen, whom the Army deemed unfit to fly. She met with A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and made a “half-hearted attempt” to dissuade him from organizing a march on Washington with 100,000 protesters expected to participate. Eleanor’s lack of success prompted the president to issue Executive Order 8802, which prohibited racial discrimination in the nation’s defense industries and federal agencies.
Eleanor worked behind the scenes to ease the distress of 120,000 Japanese American detainees at California internment camps by arranging furloughs for college age young women to study at Eastern schools, where they would encounter less prejudice, and work furloughs for men to get jobs in the towns where the camps were housed.
In 1940 the Democratic Party asked Eleanor to put Franklin’s name in nomination for a third term. She declined until the party increased the number of women delegates, which it did. Eleanor delivered her “No Ordinary Time” speech making the case for an unprecedented third term for her husband. Urbin listed several contemporary American women politicians indebted to the First Lady’s activism: “Barbara Boxer, Hillary Clinton, AOC, Kamala Harris, Geraldine Ferraro and Bella Abzug.”
Turning point number five happened in 1945, when Franklin died from a cerebral hemorrhage and stroke. Said Eleanor, “The story is over.” Urbin said that sentiment lasted “one and a half weeks” before she was back out there. “Eleanor was now free from worry about doing something wrong and hurting FDR’s career. She was free to pursue her own mission to cast her own shadow.” And it was a long shadow indeed.
Her husband’s successor Harry Truman appointed Eleanor to the US delegation to the United Nations. Over two years Eleanor helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which passed unanimously and lists 30 rights as Human Beings. She acted as Kingmaker, endorsing Senator John F. Kennedy for president in 1960, but not before he added more Civil Rights to the Democratic Party platform. (The Voting Rights and Housing Acts were passed in Lyndon Johnson’s administration, in 1964 and 65, after Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.)
Urbin called Eleanor a “futurist, who looked for opportunities. ‘Here’s the world I’m in. Here’s the world I want to be in.’” She promoted hearing aids for seniors, the March of Dimes and the American Cancer Society. Eleanor was a much sought after pitchwoman. But she added a caveat to contracts that she could say whatever she wanted in commercials. In an ad for margarine she likened the ease and quickness of spreading it on bread to the proliferation of atomic weapons. According to Urbin the ad ran once.
Urbin rhetorically asked, “How did an awkward young woman of limited education become a world leader? Cursed with a high-pitch voice that would flutter, Eleanor created an inner oasis and gave herself pep talks that what she had to say was more important than her fears.”
Eleanor Roosevelt died November 7, 1962.
