CREDIT: Associated Press
IN NOVEMBER 1938, 1,500 people, African American and white, packed into the city auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama, to kick off the four-day Southern Conference on Human Welfare. The gathering was organized to address the South’s serious social problems, including poverty, poor education, and the infamous poll tax that prevented black citizens from voting. The next morning the auditorium was surrounded by police. Police Commissioner Bull Connor ordered the integrated crowd to separate their seating according to race or face arrest. The crowd obeyed, with black people sitting on one side, and white people on the other. Arriving late was the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, along with African American educator Mary McLeod Bethune and Aubrey Williams, head of the New Deal’s National Youth Administration. Roosevelt sized up the situation and sat down on the side with the African Americans. One of the policemen tapped her on the shoulder and told her to move. Instead, she calmly moved her chair between the white and black sections and there she remained.
Throughout her life Roosevelt stuck with her principles and fought on behalf of America’s most vulnerable citizens. Over time, she became friends with a widening circle of union activists, feminists, civil rights crusaders, and radicals whose ideas she embraced and advocated for both as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wife and adviser and as a political figure in her own right.
Although she came from a long line of privilege, Roosevelt had a difficult childhood. Her father, Elliott Roosevelt, was an early influence on her social consciousness, taking her with him when he visited the Children’s Aid Society or served up Thanksgiving dinner to newsboys. By the time Roosevelt was ten, both her parents had died. She was sent to live with her maternal grandmother, a formidable woman who wanted to groom her for New York’s elite society. Her prominent relatives included her uncle, Theodore Roosevelt, who became president when Eleanor was seventeen.
Her early education consisted of a private tutor and a year in an Italian convent school. Her first and most influential mentor was Marie Souvestre, who ran Allenswood, a feminist, progressive boarding school for girls outside London that Roosevelt attended from 1898 to 1902. The school taught classical languages and the arts, and Souvestre gave Roosevelt special instruction in history and philosophy. Souvestre was a demanding thinker who challenged her students with her liberal ideas against colonialism and anti-Semitism. She invited Roosevelt to be her traveling companion through France and Italy during holiday breaks from school and encouraged her to be an independent and confident woman.
In 1902 Roosevelt’s grandmother insisted she return to the United States to get down to the business of becoming a debutante. Roosevelt was nearly six feet tall and willowy, with prominent teeth and a weak chin—not the social belle that her mother had been and that her grandmother wished her to be.
Roosevelt quickly realized that she preferred volunteering with social reform groups to going to fancy balls. From 1902 to 1903 she volunteered at the Riverton Street Settlement House on the Lower East Side, teaching exercise and dance to children. Unlike her peers, who arrived in carriages, she insisted on taking public transportation, forcing herself to overcome her fears and walk even at night through the Bowery, a low-rent area.
She also became immersed in the National Consumers League (NCL), led by Florence Kelley. Through the NCL, she investigated and publicized dreadful working conditions in garment factories. She also met many progressive activists who shaped her political consciousness.
In 1902 she was riding a train when her distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Harvard student, happened to board, and they spent the next two hours in easy conversation. That began their discreet romance, which he at first kept hidden from his domineering mother. It was by accompanying Eleanor that Franklin was first exposed to New York’s dismal tenements. For the rest of their lives together, Eleanor was FDR’s unofficial guide and conscience regarding the suffering of the poor, workers, African Americans, and women.
They were married in 1905 when she was twenty and he twenty-two, with her Uncle Theodore walking her down the aisle. During the first several years of marriage and young motherhood, she grew increasingly depressed under the thumb of her mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt, who insisted on running the household. Eleanor was able to escape Sara’s domination when the couple moved to Albany, New York, after FDR was elected to the state legislature in 1910. She learned that she had a gift for politics and soon became one of FDR’s most trusted advisers. She also lobbied for causes she believed in—eliminating poverty, improving working conditions, women’s rights, and education—and was better at connecting with people than was FDR.
By 1916 the couple had had six children, including one son who died as a baby. Franklin’s appointment as assistant secretary of the navy in 1913 brought the Roosevelts to Washington, DC, and was the beginning of national prominence. It also marked a difficult turning point in their relationship, when Eleanor discovered Franklin’s long-term affair with her social secretary Lucy Mercer. Deeply distressed, she offered him a divorce. They remained married, however, in a loyal political partnership.
World War I offered Roosevelt an outlet for her organizing talents. She organized a Union Station canteen for soldiers on their way to training camps, led Red Cross activities, supervised the knitting rooms at the navy department, and spoke at patriotic rallies. She visited wounded soldiers in the hospital and led an effort to improve conditions at St. Elizabeths Hospital, a mental hospital in Washington.
During the postwar Red Scare, Roosevelt renewed her reform impulses. She became active in several groups that the attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, considered dangerously radical. She coordinated the League of Women Voters’ legislative efforts, mobilizing members to lobby for bills. She raised money for the Women’s Trade Union League, worked for bills regulating maximum hours and minimum wages for women workers, and forged friendships with such labor activists as Rose Schneiderman, with whom she walked picket lines. J. Edgar Hoover, a close aide to Palmer who later became FBI director, kept a file on Roosevelt for years.
As FDR’s political fortunes rose—first to governor of New York in 1928 and then to president in 1932—Eleanor constantly had to find her footing as a public person. While governor, FDR was stricken with polio, leaving him unable to walk. Eleanor became his eyes and ears, investigating conditions at hospitals, asylums, and prisons.
Eleanor’s involvement with reform movements prepared her to become the most influential and politically progressive first lady in American history. “No one who ever saw Eleanor Roosevelt sit down facing her husband and holding his eyes firmly [and saying] to him ‘Franklin, I think you should’ or, ‘Franklin surely you will not’ will ever forget the experience,” wrote Rexford Tugwell, a key FDR aide.
She became a key player in the Democratic Party, not only mobilizing voters but also pushing the party to support progressive legislation and to give women a larger voice in party affairs. She effectively pushed FDR to appoint women (including Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins) to key positions in government. She developed a tight circle of close women friends who were her main confidants, including Associated Press political reporter Lorena Hickock, with whom she eventually had an intimate friendship.
When she became first lady, she devoted considerable time to those hardest hit by poverty, visiting an encampment of World War I veterans (called Bonus Marchers) in Washington, sharecroppers in the South, and people on breadlines in San Francisco and in the slums of Puerto Rico. Her public support for union organizing drives among coal miners, garment workers, textile workers, and tenant farmers (including the racially integrated and left-wing Southern Tenant Farmers Union) lent visibility and credibility to their efforts. She invited union organizers, women activists, and others to the White House and seated them next to FDR so he could hear their concerns.
In 1933 she began holding her own press conferences, for women reporters only, in part to preserve their jobs during the Depression. Her influence was such that the president often had her float ideas to journalists and others to see how they would fly politically.
Eleanor was much bolder than FDR in opposing racism, segregation, and lynching. She became a close friend of Walter White, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), serving as his advocate within the White House, and she made a point of publicly joining the civil rights organization. Whereas FDR was worried about losing white southern votes, Eleanor took public and principled stands. On civil rights issues, she agitated; he waffled. But sometimes she prevailed. In 1939 she resigned in protest from the Daughters of the American Revolution after that organization refused to rent its Constitution Hall to opera singer Marian Anderson, who had previously sung at the White House. Instead, Roosevelt worked behind the scenes to arrange for Anderson to sing to 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial. In February 1940 she shared the stage with the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins and the Socialist Party’s Norman Thomas at a National Sharecroppers Week forum at a New York hotel. Before and during World War II, she worked with White, Aubrey Williams, A. Philip Randolph, and others to eliminate racial discrimination in the armed forces and in private defense employment.
She developed a strong voice as a public speaker and prolific writer of magazine articles and books. Her syndicated column My Day, about her life in the White House, appeared six times a week in some 180 papers around the country. She also lectured and spoke frequently on the radio.
The American people found her approachable and caring, even as she was ridiculed in the press as being both dowdy and a publicity hound. During her first year in the White House, more than 300,000 people wrote to her. She personally answered many of the letters and forwarded the rest to federal agencies for a response.
She was actively involved for decades in promoting peace and international understanding as well. She tried to convince FDR to support the Permanent Court of International Justice, commonly called the World Court, which had been set up after World War I to settle disputes among nations. Privately FDR agreed with the idea, but he considered it politically too risky and allowed the Senate to reject US membership in the court by a seven-vote margin.
Starting in 1939, as the Nazis were engaged in genocide against Jews, Eleanor fought for special legislation to admit Jewish refugees, especially children, to the United States, but without FDR’s public support the idea went nowhere.
During World War II—in which all four of the Roosevelt sons served—Eleanor, then fifty-nine years old, visited troops in London and in the South Pacific. She won over Admiral William Halsey, who had derided her for what he considered her do-goodism and meddling, when she spent exhausting days personally comforting wounded soldiers. “She alone had accomplished more good than any other person, or any group of civilians, who had passed through my area,” Halsey said.
After FDR’s death in 1945, Eleanor assumed she would retire, but the new president, Harry S. Truman, sought her advice. He also appointed her to the five-person U.S. delegation at the first meeting of the UN General Assembly held in London in 1946. She played a surprising and pivotal role, addressing the full assembly, without notes, and swaying the vote against forced repatriation of refugees, allowing them to choose where they wished to settle.
For three years, Roosevelt lobbied, debated, and maneuvered to get the United Nations to adopt a statement on human rights. In 1948 she chaired the UN Human Rights Commission, and under her leadership the General Assembly, meeting in Paris, passed, at 3:00 a.m. on December 10, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, still a landmark document. According to a December 10, 1988, column by Richard Gardner in the New York Times, “Then something happened that never happened in the United Nations before or since. The delegates rose to give a standing ovation to a single delegate, a shy, elderly lady with a rather formal demeanor, but a very warm smile. Her name, of course, was Eleanor Roosevelt.”