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Eleanor Roosevelt

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Eleanor Roosevelt

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (October 11 1884 – November 7 1962) was an American human rights activist, stateswoman, journalist, educator, author, and diplomat. As the wife of President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt, the longest serving First Lady of the United States from 1933 to1945. An active First Lady, she traveled around the United States promoting the New Deal and visited troops at the frontlines during World War II. She was a first-wave Feminist (but opposed the Equal Rights Amendment), and actively supported the American Civil Rights Movement.

Roosevelt was active in the formations of numerous institutions, most notably the United Nations, 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.

Early Life

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born at 56 West 37th St. in New York City, New York to Elliott Roosevelt and Anna Eleanor Hall and was the favorite niece of Theodore Roosevelt. Following her parents' deaths, young Anna Eleanor was raised by her maternal grandmother, an emotionally cold woman, in an autocratic house. She was looked down upon by most of her family, presumably because of her plain looks and six foot tall frame. 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. Their marriage produced six children, Anna Eleanor, James, Franklin Delano Jr. (1909-1909), Elliott, Franklin Delano Jr. and John Aspinwall. However their marriage almost split over sexual explorations outside marriage by FDR -- see Franklin Delano Roosevelt for more information. She also had a contentious relationship with her domineering mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt, who at 5'10" was only 2 inches shorter than Eleanor.

Eleanor and Franklin were fifth cousins, once removed. They 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 is descended from the Johannes branch and Franklin is descended from the Jacobus branch.

In 1928, Roosevelt 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; some of her writings in her column would later cause friction with the mandarin Francis Cardinal Spellman, who was ultimately forced to come to Eleanor's Hyde Park home to bury the hatchet.

After a few years away from Washington, Hickok returned and lived in the White House with the first family in 1940. Eleanor Roosevelt and Hickok maintained a personal correspondence in which Roosevelt wrote to Hickok in 1933: "My Pictures are nearly all up & 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" and "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 some to conclude that Eleanor Roosevelt and Hicock 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 Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, has publicly disputed Cook's assessment that Roosevelt had a lesbian side.

Although she was still in her Uncle Teddy's good graces, Eleanor found herself at odds with his eldest daughter, Alice Roosevelt who was enraged that Eleanor not only snagged her cousin Franklin as a husband, but that Franklin, and now Eleanor, were members of the Democratic Party, which Alice viewed as an affront to Theodore Roosevelt's position as president. 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 TR's alleged favoritism towards Eleanor because she was more "Rooseveltian" than Alice.

First Lady

In 1939, the opera singer Marian Anderson was refused permission to perform at Constitution Hall in Washington because of her skin color. Roosevelt arranged for Anderson to perform from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, to a live audience of 70,000, and a nationwide radio audience.

During Franklin Roosevelt's terms as President, Eleanor was very vocal about her support of the 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—one of the biggest stains on his legacy, along with Japanese internment and the court-packing scheme. Eleanor became the connection to the African-American population instead, helping Franklin Roosevelt to win a lot of votes.

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.

File:Eleanor Roosevelt with Soong Mei-ling.jpg
Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Chiang Kai-shek

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. Here she entertained her circle of friends in informal gatherings. 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, she was instrumental along with René Cassin, John Peters Humphrey and others in formulating the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On the night of December 10, 1948, Roosevelt spoke on behalf of the Declaration calling it "the international Magna Carta of all mankind," and the Declaration was unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly later that night.

From the 1920s to her death she opposed the Equal Rights Amendment because it would prevent Congress and the states from passing special protective legislation she thought women workers needed.

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) 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 70's.

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.

Roosevelt survived her husband by nearly 18 years. Eleanor Roosevelt developed bone marrow tuberculosis, recurring from a primary 1919 infection and died at her Manhattan apartment on the evening of November 7, 1962, at 78. 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.

She was the first honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.

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.

Despite an intense campaign to have her awarded a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegians refused and she was never so honored. In 1968 she was awarded one of the Human Rights Prizes.

See also

Preceded by First Lady of the United States
1933–1945 		Succeeded by
Wikiquote has quotations related to Eleanor Roosevelt.

Reference

  • 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 Dec. 1948: 4. ProQuest. EBSCO. Indiana University, Bloomington.
  • "The Draft Declaration of Human Rights." The New York Times 19 June 1948. ProQuest. EBSCO. Indiana University, Bloomington.

Scholarly Secondary Sources

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