Roosevelt, Eleanor

Roosevelt, Eleanor (1884–1962), First Lady, humanitarian, social activist.Eleanor Roosevelt (ER) was born in New York City into an affluent, aristocratic, troubled family. Eleanor was eight when her mother Anna died, and ten when her beloved father Elliott died of alcoholism at thirty‐four. She was nurtured and influenced by her maternal grandmother and her paternal uncle Theodore Roosevelt.

Sent to Allenswood school in England at fifteen, Eleanor was inspired by headmistress Marie Souvestre. ER excelled, debated fiercely, made the first team at field hockey, and emerged a leader. But her grandmother insisted that she return to New York City to perform the debutante ritual of “coming out” when she was eighteen. In 1903, surrounded by friends who founded the Junior League as a smart‐set rebellion, including Mary Harriman and Jean Reid, ER taught dancing and calisthenics to the immigrant girls of New York's Lower East Side at their new University Settlement. There she met her mentors and allies, social work pioneers Florence Kelley and Lillian Wald (1867–1940).

Becoming engaged to her fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, she introduced him to issues of poverty and struggle; encouraged his Harvard studies; and promoted his ambitions. Their love deepened despite the opposition of his mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, and they married in 1905. Of their six children, five survived: Anna (1906), James (1907), Elliott (1909), Franklin, Jr. (1914), and John (1916). Sara Delano Roosevelt remained a dominant presence in their lives.

In 1910 FDR was elected to the New York State Assembly, and ER flourished in Albany's political climate. She established important alliances with reform politicians, notably Alfred E. Smith, Robert F. Wagner, and Frances Perkins. In 1913 President Woodrow Wilson named FDR assistant secretary of the navy, and their move to Washington was initially happy. But ER's life felt momentarily derailed when she discovered her husband's affair with her social secretary Lucy Mercer. She offered a divorce, but they agreed to carry on—to repair their hearts, and protect the children and his career. With FDR's nomination for the vice‐presidency in 1920, and ER campaigned fully for the first time.

During that failed effort, she forged a new partnership with Louis Howe, FDR's primary adviser, who became the bridge between them. Together, they battled to keep FDR interested in public life, and promoted his political ambitions during the years of his convalescence from polio. In the 1920s, too, ER became the center of a powerful network of political women in the Democratic party and the new League of Women Voters. With Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, ER campaigned for the U.S. membership in the World Court. With three partners, Marion Dickerman, Nancy Cook, and Caroline O'Day, she co‐owned Val‐Kill, a model furniture factory two miles from the Roosevelts' Hyde Park, New York, home. After her husband's death, she converted Val‐Kill into her residence. She also taught history and literature and was co‐principal at New York's Todhunter School, and edited the Women's Democratic News. By 1928, when FDR was elected New York State governor, ER was the women's political “boss” of the Democratic party, and a bi‐partisan leader for women's rights and equity.

In 1932 when FDR was elected president, ER's circle was in place to demand patronage, power, and New Deal justice for women. Her work with Mary (Molly) Dewson, secretary of labor Frances Perkins, Ellen Sullivan Woodward, Mary Anderson, Florence Kerr, and Hilda Worthington Smith, successfully enlarged the New Deal's scope. With Mary McLeod Bethune, Walter White, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), ER battled racial segregation and discrimination. In 1938 she helped launch the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, a network of race radicals dedicated to end the poll tax and all discrimination. In 1939 she resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) when it refused to permit Marian Anderson to perform in the DAR's Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickok (Hick), ER's intimate friend during the White House years, influenced her career as a writer, encouraged her to hold press conferences for women journalists only, and write a daily column, My Day.

Although ER generally supported her husband's policies, during the 1930s, they differed on such international issues as the World Court, collective security, and the Spanish Civil War. Journalist, editor, and radio broadcaster, ER was the only First Lady to disagree publicly with her husband. In This Troubled World (1938), she offered a point by point alternative to FDR's isolationist policies. On domestic issues FDR encouraged his wife to speak out. If she could “warm up” an issue, he would run with it. Their unique partnership allowed each to do more than either could have achieved alone. In the area of housing, for example, ER in 1934 with the support of her network created a model community, Arthurdale, in West Virginia, that became a prototype for other New Deal model communities.

ER lobbied less successfully for refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. In 1940, she became involved in a covert operation headed by Varian Fry that resulted in the rescue of over 2,000 refugees, including Hannah Arendt, Pablo Casals, Marc Chagall, Wanda Landowska, and Alma Mahler. But the State Department had Fry arrested and terminated the operation in 1941. During World War II, ER citicized the incarceration of Japanese Americans and campaigned for women's rights, civil rights, and the survival of New Deal programs.

Distraught by FDR's death on 12 April 1945 in Warm Springs, Georgia (and dismayed to learn that Lucy Mercer had been with him at the end), ER announced her retirement from public life. But President Harry S. Truman appointed her a delegate to the United Nations and she used the opportunity to carry on her vision of the best of FDR's legacy: a New Deal for the world; dignity for all people. She helped create the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which passed the General Assembly on 10 December 1948, and spent the rest of her life lobbying for the UN, human rights, and nuclear disarmament. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy appointed her chair of his new Commission on the Status of Women, which helped launch the second wave of the women's movement. Her final book Tomorrow Is Now, was published posthumously in 1963. She is buried beside her husband at Hyde Park.
See also Antinuclear Protest Movements; Civil Rights Movement; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Feminism; International Law; Internationalism; New Deal Era, The; Progressive Era; Racism; Settlement Houses; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

Joseph P. Lash , Eleanor and Franklin, 1971.
Joseph P. Lash , Eleanor: The Years Alone, 1972.
Susan Ware , Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism, and New Deal Politics, 1987.
Blanche Wiesen Cook , Eleanor Roosevelt, 1884–1933, 1992.
Allida M. Black , Casting Her Own Shadow, 1997.
Allida M. Black, ed., Courage in a Dangerous World: The Political Writings of Eleanor Roosevelt, 1999.
Blanche Wiesen Cook , Eleanor Roosevelt: The Defining Years, 1933–1938, 1999.

Blanche Wiesen Cook