Eleanor Roosevelt

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Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (October 11 1884 – November 7 1962) was an American political leader who used her stature as First Lady of the United States, from 1933 to 1945 to promote the New Deal of her husband Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as Civil Rights. After his death she built a career, as author and speaker, as a proponent of the New Deal Coalition and spokesperson for human rights. She was a first-wave Feminist (although she opposed the Equal Rights Amendment) and created a new role model for First Lady. Roosevelt was active in the formations of numerous institutions, most notably 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 travels to promote human rights.

1 Biography
- 1.1 Early life
2 Parents' early deaths
3 Education
- 3.1 Eleanor Meets FDR
4 Marriage difficulties
5 Ongoing controversy over her sexuality
- 5.1 First Lady of the United States
- 5.2 Life after the White House
  - 5.2.1 The Catholic issue
  - 5.2.2 New York and national politics
6 End of an extraordinary life
7 See also
8 References
9 Further reading
10 External links

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Biography

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Early life

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born at 56 West 37th St. New York City, New York to Elliott Roosevelt and Anna Eleanor Hall and was the favorite niece and goddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt. Eleanor's family was descended from Claes Martenszen van Rosenvelt who emigrated to New Amsterdam (Manhattan) from the Netherlands in the 1640s. His grandsons, Johannes and Jacobus, began the Oyster Bay and Hyde Park, New York branches of the Roosevelt family. Eleanor was descended from the Johannes branch while her future husband, Franklin was descended from the Jacobus branch.

The former President served as a surrogate father to the future First Lady. She never went by Anna Eleanor except in signing checks and other official documents and always preferred to be called Eleanor. Roosevelt is also a descendant through her mother's family, of William Livingston, a signer of the U.S. Constitution. Two brothers followed young Anna Roosevelt. The Roosevelt family was completed with the addition of Elliott Jr. (1889-1893) and Hall Roosevelt (1891-1941).

Image:Eleanor Roosevelt & father Elliot in 1889.jpg

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Parents' early deaths

Following her parents' deaths, young Anna Eleanor was raised by her maternal grandmother, an emotionally cold woman, in an autocratic house on Newbridge Avenue (now East Meadow Avenue) in East Meadow, New York. She was looked down upon by most of her family, presumably because of her plain looks and six foot tall frame.

Although she was still in her Uncle Theodore's good graces, Eleanor found herself at odds with his eldest daughter, Alice Roosevelt. In the season prior to the wedding of Franklin and Eleanor, newspapers began reporting that Eleanor had more claim to good looks than any of the other Roosevelt cousins, angering Alice. Alice was also jealous because of Teddy Roosevelt's seeming favoritism towards Eleanor because she was more "Rooseveltian" than Alice.

Image:Eleanor Roosevelt at 15.jpg

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Education

With the encouragement of her Aunt Anna "Bamie" Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt's sister, she was sent to a Allenswood, a girl’s boarding school in England where she studied from 1899 to 1902. At Allenswood the headmistress, Mademoiselle Marie Souvestre, made a lasting impression. Souvestre had a fierce interest in liberal causes and the summers Eleanor spent traveling Europe with her as well as her studies in history, language and literature gave her an abiding interest in social justice as well as the knowledge and poise to articulate her opinions clearly and eloquently. She listed Souvestre as one of the three major influences in her life and said of her: "Mlle. Souvestre shocked one into thinking, and that on the whole was very beneficial." At that school, Eleanor seemed to come out of her shell of childhood loneliness and isolation. She thrived both academically and emotionally. When it was time for her to return to New York, her mentor, Mll. Souvestre did her best to prepare her for a return to the far less structured world of the Hyde Park Roosevelts.

Image:Eleanor Roosevelt at 18.jpg

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Eleanor Meets FDR

In 1902 Eleanor ran into her cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Harvard student, and they began a discreet courtship which led to their engagement in November 1903. Eleanor and Franklin were fifth cousins, once removed. Sara Delano Roosevelt, FDR's mother, was dead set against the match and managed to delay their marriage for 16 months.

On St. Patrick's Day (17 March) 1905, she married Franklin D. Roosevelt; President Theodore Roosevelt took the place of his late brother in giving Eleanor's hand to her husband to be. Almost immediately after the ceremony, Eleanor's new mother-in-law insisted on dominating the young couple's daily life. "Mother" went so far as to choose their first home, three blocks from her own, decorated and furnished it to her tastes and hired the staff to run it.

Their marriage produced six children, Anna Eleanor Jr., James, Franklin Delano Jr. (1909-1909), Elliott, Franklin Delano Jr. and John Aspinwall.

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Marriage difficulties

Despite the Roosevelt's happy start, their marriage almost split over Franklin's affair with Eleanor's social secretary Lucy Mercer (later Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd). Eleanor would continue to have a contentious relationship with her domineering mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt, who at 5'10" was only 2 inches shorter than Eleanor.

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Ongoing controversy over her sexuality

Although seemingly never causing a problem within her marriage, Eleanor is believed by many historians today to have been bisexual. This continues to be a controversial topic. In 1928, she met Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickok, a White House correspondent. They became close friends after Hickok conducted a series of interviews with Roosevelt in 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, in 1940, Hickok returned and lived in the White House with the first family. Eleanor Roosevelt and Hickok maintained a personal correspondence in which Roosevelt wrote to Hickok in 1933:

"My Pictures are nearly all up and I have you in my sitting room where I can look at you most of my waking hours! I can't kiss you [in person] so I kiss your picture good night and good morning...Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips."

These letters, as well as the fact that Hickok burned Roosevelt's letters after her death, have led most to conclude that Eleanor Roosevelt and Hickok were lovers. The biographer Doris Faber tried to suppress the surviving letters between the two, concerned that they would be 'misunderstood'. Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of one of Roosevelt's most extensive biographies, made a well-documented argument for a love relationship between the two in her work. Doris Kearns Goodwin, who wrote a prize-winning biography of Franklin and Eleanor ("No Ordinary Time"), has publicly disputed Cook's assessment that Roosevelt had a lesbian side.

Along with allegations of the First Lady being bisexual, she had at least two other affairs during her marriage. The first, with Earl Miller, she and FDR's bodyguard, supposedly eclipsed her lesbian affair; the second was with Joseph Lash. The story is that love letters between Lash and Eleanor were intercepted by the President, and that the first lady was taped during a hotel stay in Chicago while she and Lash had intercourse, and the tapes were fowarded to the President, who confronted her about the ordeal.

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First Lady of the United States

During Franklin Roosevelt's terms as President, Eleanor was very vocal about her support of the American Civil Rights Movement and African-American rights. However, her husband needed the support of Southern Democrats (notoriously racist) to advance other parts of his agenda. FDR therefore did not take on the cause of civil rights. Eleanor became the connection to the African-American population instead, helping Franklin Roosevelt to win a lot of votes.

In 1939, the opera singer Marian Anderson was refused permission to perform at Constitution Hall (owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution) in Washington. Roosevelt arranged for Anderson to perform on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, to a live audience of 70,000, and a nationwide audience of millions on radio. She also resigned her membership in the D.A.R. over the incident.

Roosevelt opposed her husband's decision to sign Executive Order 9066 which resulted in the internment of 110,000 Japanese nationals and American citizens of Japanese descent in internment camps in the west. In 1943 Roosevelt, along with Wendell Willkie and other Americans concerned about the mounting threats to peace and democracy during World War II, established Freedom House.

Roosevelt also accepted large amounts of money from her activities in advertising. The Pan-American Coffee Bureau, which was supported by tax revenues from eight foreign governments, paid Roosevelt $1000 a week for advertising. When the State Department found out that the First Lady was being paid so handsomely by foreign governments they unsuccessfully tried to cancel the deal.

Image:Eleanor Roosevelt with Soong Mei-ling.jpg

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Life after the White House

Following the death of her husband in 1945, Roosevelt continued to live on the Hyde Park Estate, in Val-Kill, the house that her husband had remodeled for her near the mainhouse. Originally built as a small furniture factory for Val-Kill Industries, Val-Kill afforded Eleanor with a level of privacy that she had wanted for many years. The home served as a private sanctuary from her domineering and oppresive mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt (Faber 1983). Roosevelt also entertained her circle of friends in informal gatherings at the house. The site is now the home of the Eleanor Roosevelt Center at Val-Kill, dedicated to "Eleanor Roosevelt's belief that people can enhance the quality of their lives through purposeful action based on sensitive discourse among people of diverse perspectives focusing on the varied needs of society."

After World War II, Roosevelt played an instrumental role with René Cassin, John Peters Humphrey, and others in drafting the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Roosevelt served as the first chairman of the U.N. Human Rights Commission (Glendon 2000). On the night of September 28, 1948, Roosevelt spoke on behalf of the Declaration calling it "the international Magna Carta of all mankind" (James 1948). The Declaration was unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948 (Kenton 1948). It was her crowning achievement.

From the 1920s to her death in 1962, she became involved heavily in politics. She opposed the Equal Rights Amendment because it would prevent Congress and the states from passing special protective legislation she thought women workers needed (Pfeffer 1996).

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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 she had attacked proposals for federal aid for nonreligious activity (such as bus transportation) for students at Catholic schools. Spellman pointed out 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 she never could shake her belief that the Catholic schools were less than 100% democratic--like their Church--and did not deserve 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 Franco's 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. (Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone pp 156-65.)

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New York and national politics

In 1954 Tammany Hall boss Carmine DeSapio campaigned against her son, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., in the New York Attorney General election and successfully defeated him. 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. Eventually their efforts were successful, and in 1961 DeSapio was removed from power.

Roosevelt was a close friend of Adlai Stevenson and was a strong supporter of 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 but John F. Kennedy received the presidential nomination instead.

She was responsible for the establishment of the 2,800 acre (11 km²) ([1]) Roosevelt Campobello International Park on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, in 1964, following 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 70s.

Roosevelt was an accomplished archer, and one of the first modern women to participate in the sport of bowhunting. Her exploits as a 20th-century Diana are well documented in the writings of her male bowhunting contemporaries Fred Bear, Howard Hill and Saxton Pope. A close personal friendship with J.E. Davis, editor of Ye Sylvan Archer, which was a popular bowhunting magazine of the time, led to an invitation to author several articles for that publication. Roosevelt's tales of her hunting excursions were well received, though they did not serve to further the cause of women's liberation: in keeping with the chauvinistic standards of the time, Roosevelt's stories were published under the masculine pseudonym "Chuck Painton" to avoid offending the magazine's overwhelmingly male readership.

One of Roosevelt's prized trophies, the taking of which was immortalized in her poignant 1937 account Outwitting the Rompala Buck (Ye Sylvan Archer, v2), for many years graced the mantle above the fireplace in her husband Franklin's presidential library. It is now held as one of the organizing artifacts of the Community Forum Collection of the Smithsonian Institution.

Notably, the song "Mrs. Robinson" by Simon and Garfunkel was written about Roosevelt. The duo needed to give Mike Nichols a song for the film The Graduate, so they changed the lyric from "Roosevelt" to "Robinson". The song was so unfinished that the now famous "dee-dee-dee" section was simply added to fill in unwritten lyrics.

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End of an extraordinary life

Image:Mrs Roosevelt.gif In 1961, all volumes of her autobiography were compiled into The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt, which is still in print some 45 years later.

Eleanor Roosevelt survived her husband by nearly 20 years. She developed bone marrow tuberculosis, recurring from a primary 1919 infection, and died at her Manhattan apartment on the evening of November 7, 1962. She was 78 years old.

Roosevelt was buried next to Franklin D. Roosevelt in Hyde Park, New York on November 10, 1962. So revered was she among the public that a commemorative cartoon published at the time simply showed two angels looking down towards an opening in the clouds with the caption "She's here", since no introduction was needed.

Mrs. Roosevelt maintained a strong loyalty to "Uncle Ted" even some forty years after his death. Among her belongings was her membership card for the Theodore Roosevelt Association.

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.

In 1968 she was awarded one of the United Nations Human Rights Prizes. There was a campaign to award her a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize, however the Nobel Prize has only once been awarded posthumously. [2]

Roosevelt is the ninth most admired person in the 20th century, according to Gallup.

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References

Faber, Harold. "An Upstate Focus for Eleanor Roosevelt Centennial." New York Times 6 Nov. 1983, Metropolitan Desk: 54. Academic. LEXIS-NEXIS. Indiana University, Bloomington.
Glendon, M.A. "John P. Humphrey and the Drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights." Journal of the History of International Law 2000: 250-260. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Indiana University, Bloomington.
James, Michael. "Soviet Rights Hit by Mrs. Roosevelt." New York Times 29 Sept. 1948: A4. ABI/Inform Global. ProQuest. Indiana University, Bloomington.
Kenton, John. "Human Rights Declaration Adopted by U.N. Assembly." New York Times 11 Dec. 1948: A1. ABI/Inform Global. ProQuest. Indiana University, Bloomington.
Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt, Da Capo Press ed., 1992, paperback, 439 pages, ISBN 03680476X, dacapopress.com
Manly, Chesly. "U.N. Adopts 1st Declaration on Human Rights." Chicago Daily Tribune 11 December. 1948: 4. ProQuest. EBSCO. Indiana University, Bloomington.
Pfeffer, Paula F. "Eleanor Roosevelt and the National and World Women's Parties." Historian Fall 1996: 39-58. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Indiana University, Bloomington.
"The Draft Declaration of Human Rights." The New York Times 19 June 1948. ProQuest. EBSCO. Indiana University, Bloomington.