Everyone of a certain age, in every part of the United States, has an Eleanor Roosevelt story. Some say she was a good wife but a bad mother, a good friend but a bad wife, a bad woman with Communist friends, a good woman with Communist friends, a reckless and wicked activist with black friends, a good and visionary leader with black friends. Her life continues to illuminate our ongoing political and social divides. She is bellwether and key to the enduring controversies of the twentieth century.
To contemplate ER’s life and times has been an exciting journey, a quest filled with discovery and surprise, agony and delight. ER wrote or dictated countless words many hours each day, every day. There are miles and mountains of ER’s words, and those written by hand are often difficult to decipher. Even her great friend Lorena Hickok was occasionally perplexed. On 20 May 1937, Hick queried: “What is it you offer to send me, a Bible or a Girdle?… Since you mention it right after something about your riding and spell it with a small ‘b’—it might be a bridle. On the other hand, I have no horse, so a Bible would make better sense. I’m very curious!”
Words ER dictated, and typed, are frequently connected to long reports, official papers, articles, columns, books—endless material to document many facts, especially the details and strategies of ER’s influence and power.
My gratitude to the archivists and researchers who facilitated the search through the hundreds of manuscript boxes that comprise Series 70 at the FDR Library is profound. My former graduate student Paula Gardner coordinated a splendid team to look through each box. Without the excavations and photocopies made by Paula Gardner, Sue Murray, and Renah Feldman, this would have been a different book.
As with Volume I, this book could not have been written without the involvement of good friends, scholars and activists working for women’s rights, peace, and justice.
Clare Coss was partner and companion throughout the research, writing, and editing process. As far as possible, we retraced ER’s steps and met people who knew her in Greenwich Village, Washington, Detroit, Saint Louis, Chicago, and Campobello; at Arthurdale; in Warm Springs and Roswell, Georgia; in the high Sierra of Yosemite National Park; in San Francisa) and Los Angeles.
We toured Arthurdale and the surrounding region with Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and environmental activists Regina Birchem and Dan Boleff. Their knowledge of Appalachia, the coal counties and devastated rust-belt areas so in need of another New Deal and other Arthurdales, dramatized all the information we gleaned as we visited Arthur-dale, West Virginia, and Norvelt, Pennsylvania.
I am particularly grateful to Arthurdale Heritage Foundation’s excellent staff—especially Bryan Ward, Deanna Hornyak, and historian Barbara Howe—and enthusiastic residents, including Marilee Hall and Annabelle Mayor, for an unforgettable journey in time and community. As Bryan Ward noted, Arthurdale may have been dismissed as a wasteful failure, but the 165 homes on three to five acres never failed the people. Of the original homesteaders and their descendants, eighty-three percent are still there—private home owners, who were once given an opportunity to work and survive by their government.
For ail the snickers about waste and losses, for ER and the people of Arthurdale, it represented security, and it remains a usable model to end homelessness and deprivation, urban crowding and rural waste., It is a program for national development and housing security urgently needed, yet to be seriously considered.
In Norvelt, Pennsylvania, Mary Wolk, then eighty-nine, took a day to tour us through the American Friends Service Committee model community for miners and steel workers, where Clarence Pickett and ER encouraged Doris Duke to consider privately funding model-home building, which she did. Mary Wolk thought the community should be called Brightness because everything “was so bright and airy and the future seemed so bright.” But the town unanimously voted to name it after Eleanor Roosevelt, Norvelt, “and that was prefect.”
The Atlanta Historical Society facilitated a marvelous March 1994 week that Clare and I spent contemplating ER’s southern roots. From Atlanta to Bulloch Hall, the home of her paternal grandmother Mittie Bulloch, one takes a short drive to Roswell, Georgia, where administrator Pam Humphries and docent Deborah Gammon gave us a cordial tour through the home and grounds. From there, we drove to Warm Springs and benefited from the tour and materials given us by Beverly Bulloch, director of development, and Diane Blanks.
We are especially grateful to them, and to the residents of Warm Springs who opened their homes and shared their memories with us.
Hillary Rodham Clinton kindly arranged a tour through the family and private quarters of the White House. Curators Betty Monkman and Lydia Tederick generously prepared archival material and photographs to illustrate Roosevelt arrangements, including the seven-drawer highboy FDR at some point placed as barrier in front of his wife’s connecting door.
In New York City, Dean Dresser thoughtfully arranged our visit to ER’s private Greenwich Village retreat, rented from Esther Lape, at 20 East 11th Street; and Pat Paterline took time to tour us through ER’s 1930’s sanctuary.
For a delightful visit to Hick’s Little House on the Dana estate at Mastic Beach in Center Moriches, I want to thank Doris Dana for her tour into the past with Hick and her father, Bill Dana; and the current owner, Anne Farr for her consideration and assistance.
Over the years, Clare and I visited Campobello several times. I am particularly grateful for the weekend seminar arranged by Linda Cross Godfrey, where we enjoyed the hospitality and warmth of that rugged island’s local residents: Evelyn Bowden, Vera Calder, Elayne Gleason, Bette Lank, Cecille Matthews, Kathleen MacFeat, Lena Mills, Trudy Newman, Susan Plachy, and John McCarthy of the Lubec Light. I also want to thank the generous staff of the Roosevelt-Campobello International Park: Anne Newman, Carolyn Parker, and Jane Radcliffe.
A special joy of our location research was our effort to follow ER’s trail to a remote lake in the High Sierra within the Yosemite National Park. We tried to get there on our own. One year, well on our way, we were turned back by a sudden electric storm, which we ignored until lightning bounced off our boots. Finally, we agreed to seek professional help. I called Elizabeth Stone O’Neill, the biographer of ranger-naturalist Carl Sharsmith and author of the beautiful Meadow in the Sky: A History of Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows Region. We had never met, but I admired her books and was determined to get to Lake Roosevelt. She promised to find “the perfect guides,” and introduced us to Ann Abbott.
Ann coordinated our trip to Lake Roosevelt, with intrepid Sierra Club guide Victoria Hoover, who forged the path to our goal. In July 1994, fifty years after ER and Hick camped at Lower Young Lake, we imagined ER’s steps from there to the long, narrow mysterious lake named in her honor. We decided to go on foot, though ER rode on horseback. You cannot actually see this glacial lake until you are virtually upon it. Above the tree line, surrounded by meadows of tiny wildflowers, heather and snowbanks, it ripples with ice throughout the year. We presumed that after her journey, ER dove right in—and so did we. I am deeply grateful to Vicki Hoover, Ann Abbot, and Clare Coss for this incomparable lifetime adventure; and to Betty and Carroll O’Neill for all we have subsequently experienced together in the High Sierra.
After our Yosemite trips, we visited in San Francisco with Agar and Diana Roosevelt Jaicks; Andy and Janet Roosevelt Karten, and Eleanor Roosevelt II. I am deeply grateful to ER’s nieces for their family albums and many resources and I cherish their friendship and support for this project.
I am thankful to Jack Meyer, in Los Angeles, who arranged a most moving visit with ER’s great friend Mayris (Tiny) Chaney and her daughter Michelle Martin.
Biographers and historians depend on archives and libraries, and I deeply value the important work done by the keepers of ER-related papers. The FDR Library is a congenial and helpful environment, enhanced by the concern and diligence of its professional staff, Frances Seeber, John Ferris, Mark Renovitch, Hallie Galligan, Susan Elter, Paul McLaughlin, and Ray Teichman, among others.
The Columbia University Oral History Project, under the superb direction of Ron Grele, is a unique resource for ER. I want to thank Tobias Markowitz for his research into the many interviews at Columbia, and Frances Madeson for her year as research assistant in New York’s magnificent Public Library archives.
I want to acknowledge archivists at Harvard University Houghton Library, and the staff at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. Until her untimely death, the hospitality of Schlesingers director Pat King made every visit to Cambridge a delight. I particularly appreciate the kindnesses of Eva Mosely, Susan Van Sorlis, and Barbara Haber; and researcher Heidi Sander.
At the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University, I thank archivist Warner Pflug and research assistant Sandy Kimberly. I am, as always, grateful to David Wigdor, at the library of Congress, and at the State Department Historical office to David Patterson and William Slaney. For materials relating to Washington’s Housing Commission, Dorothy Provine of the District of Columbia Archives is a treasured resource.
In Arizona, I am indebted to Harold Clarke and Bert Drucker for use of the Esther Lape collection in their possession; and to the archivists at the Arizona Historical Society, which houses the Isabella Greenway collection, notably Adelaide Elm and Rosemary Adeline Byrne. I am grateful to Isabella Greenway’s son John Greenway for his memories and insights, and to Harold, Mary, and Bill Coss, Annette Kolodny and Dan Peters, for their hospitality in Tucson.
I appreciate the steady commitment of the overworked, efficient, and skilled editorial team at Viking: Barbara Grossman, Courtney Hodell, Reeve Chace, Beena Kamlani, and Wendy Wolf. Deftly, and with good cheer, Beena and Wendy helped trim, shape, and shepherd a towering historical pile into a liftable volume. I hope readers will peruse the footnotes, the last refuge for exiled material.
Charlotte Sheedy, forever friend and agent, was always available for advice, encouragement, and comfort.
Many friends, students, and colleagues generously shared their research with me, pointed me to additional sources, sent books, articles, precious documents. I thank Mimi Abramovitz, Christie Balka, Maureen Beasley, Louise Bernikow, Allida Black, Adrienne Fried Block, Renate Bridenthal, Chris Brown, Joseph Ceretto, Anni Chamberlain, Sandi E. Cooper, Page Delano, Louise DeSalvo, Candace Falk, Abe Fenster, Joanne Grant, Bill Hannegan, Elizabeth Harlan, Alice Kessler-Harris, Susan Heske, June Hopkins, Glenn Horowitz, Mim Kelber, William Loren Katz, Susan Koppelman, Barbara Kraft, Brooke Kroger, Andy Lancet, Richard Lieberman, Deborah Ann Light, Thomas Litwack, John F. McHugh, Midge Mackenzie, Gerald Markowitz, Trudy Mason, Ted Morgan, David Nasaw, Marilyn Niemark, Ernest Nives, Eleanor Pam, Nancy Pinchot Pitman, Marjory Potts, David Rattray, Gerda Ray, Merle and Martin Rubin, Scott Sandage, Pierre Sauvage, Dagmar Schultz, Barbara Sicherman, Gloria Steinern, Alisa Solomon, Martha Swain, Amy Swerdlow, the late Patricia Spain Ward, David Wyman, and Larry Wittner. There were many others, and endless kindnesses; I apologize for those names momentarily missed.
I deeply appreciate Dr. Michael Brody’s gift of the facts and documents of ER’s relationship with the Brodsky family, and Eleanor Lund Zartman’s memories of her aunt, ER’s closest assistant, Malvina (Tommy) Thompson.
William P.T. Preston’s many feats of friendship included rare books, and a deck upon which to relive the days of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare with Virginia Durr and Patricia Sullivan. I treasure these times, and those with Marge Frantz, concerning her father Joseph Gelders, and the SCHW; and with Abbott Simon and the late Vivian Cadden for their memories of the American Youth Congress.
Sandi E. Cooper and Alice Kessler-Harris took time out from their relentless schedules to read parts of what was initially a two-thousand-page manuscript. Gerald Markowitz read the entire manuscript, in its several incarnations, and helped transform a casual Luddite into a modern computer user. These were herculean acts of friendship and generosity, for which I am forever and profoundly grateful.
I am grateful to John Jay College’s president, Gerald Lynch, and Provost Basil Wilson; to Frances Degen Horowitz at the Graduate Center; and to my generous colleagues and students. Throughout this process, I have depended on the spirit and vision of the women’s biography seminar, and I thank you all.
This book, indeed my entire life, has been fueled and replenished on a regular basis by a network of love and support. In addition to those named above, a community of family and friends had sustained me; and I marvel at everybody’s ability to put up with my nonsocial absorption in the past. For their forbearance and understanding, I thank my amazing mother, Sadonia Ecker Wiesen; my heroic sister, Marjorie D. W. Lessem; my nephews, Daniel Wayne and Douglas Jed Lessem; my nieces, Clare Ellen and Katie McGuire.
For hospitality and many nourishments in various locales, I am grateful to Marge Barton, Mary Frances Berry, Mindy Chateauvert, Frances Clayton, Rhonda Copelon, Marilyn Fitterman, Sharron Good, Jane and Jay Gould, Alvia Golden, Lucille Goodman, Gay Hemphill, Lyla Hoffman, Deborah Ann Light, Sandy Rapp, Claire and Jessie Reid, Patsy Rogers, Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Lucius Ware, Leslie Weisman.
This book is in part dedicated to the memory of four women who supported and influenced this project in countless ways; their lives of example, love, and courage continue to advance ER’s legacy: Bella Abzug, Diana Roosevelt Jaicks, Audre Lorde and Connie Murray.
Finally, this book would have been impossible without Clare Coss’s keen discernment and galvanizing companionship. She emboldened and envigorated the entire quest.