“Her very presence lit up the room.”
“She was the ugliest woman I ever saw.”
“She was the most beautiful woman I ever met.”
“Her voice could shatter glass; and she was so unbearably righteous.”
“She changed my life, just by caring.”
“Once Eleanor Roosevelt decided to ice you out you could be frozen to death.”
“You don’t think she was really smart, do you? I mean, she hardly understood the New Deal, and knew nothing about foreign policy.”
“We were warned: If you behaved that way and said those things you’d wind up like Eleanor Roosevelt—too tall, too unattractive, too strident for any man.”
“You could never invite her to dinner. You would never know quite who she would bring along—Blacks, Jews, Sapphists in slacks, rude communist youths. It was so unsettling.”
“We have already had a woman in the White House. Everybody knows she was president; that was why he was called Franklin D’Eleanor Roosevelt.”
“She was so open to young people, and to social and cultural changes. Even when young people became disrespectful and began wearing the oddest clothes and using foul language, Eleanor Roosevelt remained completely unruffled. She used to say: ‘There are only two unacceptable four-letter words, Hate and Wars.’”
“People always made fun of her physical incapacities, and made her out to be rather awkward and feeble. But shortly after the war, I was living in Greenwich Village and we all had those long green corduroy skirts, country-style skirts, and quite the rage after all those war years without cotton. I was running for the Fifth Avenue bus, which had that marvelous open-air roof, and all of a sudden there was this long-legged woman with quite a stride running for that bus. She was much faster than I was, and I really noticed because she was wearing that same skirt. She hopped on just as the bus pulled out, and held out her long arm and with a very firm grip pulled me aboard. And I got on right into the smiling face of Eleanor Roosevelt.”
“The thing is, she was so modest. She never thought of herself as exceptional or extraordinary or important. Whenever we traveled, she was genuinely surprised that people made a fuss. Once, when she returned from a tour to promote the United Nations, we landed in an airport that had laid down a red carpet and there were children with flowers and quite a display, and she said: ‘Oh, look! Somebody significant must be flying in.’”
DURING THE DECADE I RESEARCHED AND RECONSIDERED Eleanor Roosevelt, I learned that even today, more than a hundred years after her birth and thirty years after her death, nobody is neutral about Eleanor Roosevelt. There are those who mock the person, focus on her teeth and voice and other cartoon characteristics, long before they reveal how much they despise her politics, most notably her interest in civil rights and racial justice, or in civil liberties and world peace.
Many judge her naïve because she supported “causes” and was “taken in” by united-front communists and radicals. Still others believe that she was never “duped” by radicals but actually supported unitedfront communists and causes, and was for decades a considerable security risk. John Edgar Hoover kept a running record of Eleanor Roosevelt’s every word and activity from 1924 (when she supported the United States’ entrance into the World Court and that “un-American” body the League of Nations) until her death. Indeed, ER’s vast FBI file is one of the wonders of modern history.
The vigor of contempt and rage elicited by Eleanor Roosevelt continues to frame much of the discourse about women with power, access to power, or the appearance of power.
In many ways Eleanor Roosevelt remains a bellwether for our belief system. A woman who insists on her right to self-identity, a woman who creates herself over and over again, a woman of consummate power and courageous vision continues to challenge our sense of what is acceptable and what is possible. To this day, there is no agreement as to who Eleanor Roosevelt was, what she represented, or how she lived her life. Her friends and her detractors have made extravagant claims of goodness and mercy, foolishness and naïveté. She has acquired sainthood and been consigned to sinner status. Many of us, especially those of us born daughters in a world that encouraged daughters to sit along the sidelines of action, are drawn to her because of her vision and her commitment to an activist’s life. She continues to haunt our memories and inspire our days, because she never gave up on life; she never stopped learning and changing. She worked to transform our world in behalf of greater dignity and more security for all people, for women and men in equal measure.
As I contemplated Eleanor Roosevelt’s life, my interest in her grew. Even when her selection of words, her political decisions, her personal choices caused me to wonder or wince, or even to cringe, I recognized at every stage of her life a purposeful journey: to become brave, to communicate and to act upon what she believed.
BORN INTO A FAMILY RAVAGED BY THE DISEASE OF ALCOholism and self-destruction, ER was forever attracted to people who evoked her father. She believed that we were “born to be used”; and she never minded being “used” by those who required help, or support, or simply encouragement. If her father dominated many of the choices she made in her romantic life, she specifically refused to emulate the lives of her mother and her aunts. Determined to be active rather than idle, determined to be neither depressed nor long-suffering, ER turned to her great teacher, Marie Souvestre, who introduced an alternative way of being—assertive, independent, and bold.
Over time, ER mastered her teacher’s special counsel: “Never be bored; and you will never be boring.” For ER, every day was busy, exciting, full; and she always credited Marie Souvestre for her essential understanding of her full capacities. ER considered her school years in England (1899-1902) the “happiest years of my life,” and believed that “whatever I have become since had its seeds in those three years of contact with a liberal mind and strong personality.” During the 1920s, ER returned to a community of women who helped restore a sense of ambition that she had suppressed in the first decade of her marriage.
A political woman in a world ruled by men, Eleanor Roosevelt was frequently embattled. But she always agreed with British activist Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, who said: “The only life worth living is a fighting life.” A team player, surrounded by allies and hard-fighting friends, ER understood that politics was not an isolated, individualist adventure.
For all the cavils, the criticisms, and the jokes, for all her own limitations, Eleanor Roosevelt was, and is, among the most admired women in United States history. For the past ten years, the question of whether she merited admiration or censure has seemed to me far less interesting than the process of re-creating a life that has so very much to tell us about survival and activity, consciousness and change.
AS I CONSIDERED THE PEOPLE IN ER’S LIFE WHO ENHANCED her endless quest, and accompanied her remarkable journey, her refusal to be stopped by critics and cartoonists, by enemies and rivals, her refusal even to allow occasions of betrayal and cruelty to restrain her optimism, I sensed a great and passionate commitment to life and to loving that many associate with spirituality.
For some, religion and spirituality are about sin and damnation, repression and restriction, fundamental laws to be accepted without interpretation. For others they are about community and connectedness. For some, spirituality is love, and above all a sense of responsibility, enabled by love. Eleanor Roosevelt frequently spoke and wrote about what spirituality meant to her: She participated in an undefined ethic that embraced the world community. It was not about fear and damnation, or about specific knowledge or duty. Rather: “In the infinite extent of the universe it is a direction of the heart.”
This is not to imply that Eleanor Roosevelt was more a mystic than an activist. For almost fifty years, she was a very tough politician entirely at home in the smoke-filled rooms where deals were made on a daily and nasty basis. Above all, she was the leading woman politician, actually the women’s “boss” of the Democratic Party. Although she later denied her share of power and influence, throughout her lifetime she was honored for her role by the women she most immediately influenced and empowered. One gets a sense of ER’s political understanding in the timeless advice she offered to women working in politics in 1936:
You cannot take anything personally.
You cannot bear grudges.
You must finish the day’s work when the day’s work is done.
You cannot get discouraged too easily.
You have to take defeat over and over again, and pick up and go on.
Be sure of your facts.
Argue the other side with a friend until you have found the answer to every point which might be brought up against you.
Women who are willing to be leaders must stand out and be shot at. More and more they are going to do it, and more and more they should do it.
Above all, ER insisted: Every political woman needs “to develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide!”
IN TOMORROW IS NOW, HER LAST BOOK, PUBLISHED POST-humously in 1963, she wrote that “there is no more liberating, no more exhilarating experience than to determine one’s position, state it bravely and then act boldly.” Action creates “its own courage”; and courage, she always believed, was as contagious as fear.
Her commitment to a life of engaged political action involved the most pressing and controversial issues of the twentieth century: women and power, race and class, war and peace; issues of justice, economic security, and human rights. Her views changed slowly over time. She became an antiracist activist, although she began her public career steeped in the sensibilities of the Old South, filled with distorted and ugly images of blacks and Jews. The distance she traveled on issues of race, gender, and class, her ability to stand up for what she believed, involved conscious struggle.
The 1920s was a decade of dramatic transition that shaped the course of all subsequent changes in ER’s life. Politically the postwar world was realigned; and personally ER’s life was momentarily shattered by her discovery of her husband’s affair with her own friend and social secretary, Lucy Mercer. Their marriage endured an agonizing reappraisal that profoundly affected ER’s temperament. She abandoned timidity, and a matronly caution that had made her seem remote, occasionally austere. She proceeded to meet new people, make new friends, and open her life to new adventure.
After 1920, she joined the world of postsuffrage feminist activists, notably Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, who lived in Greenwich Village. Like Louis Howe—the only friend she fully shared with FDR—ER’s best friends were public women and men, concerned as she was with the great events of political life. One of her first intimates, Howe encouraged and supported ER’s personal and public quests. His counsel and advice, with that of Lape and Read, enabled her to realize the full range of her political interests and skills. Later, other friends—like Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman, and Caroline O’Day—involved her in publishing, teaching, and business enterprises. Some, like Bernard Baruch, protected her from the treachery of political sharks and financially supported the social causes that most moved her. Others, like Earl Miller and Lorena Hickok, were there for her alone, and devoted themselves to her interests. Bodyguard and squire, Miller protected ER, filled her home with music and laughter, built her a tennis court, and taught her to dive. Hick was responsible for ER’s decision to hold affirmative-action press conferences, for women journalists only, and encouraged ER to write what became one of the most popular syndicated columns in the country, “My Day.”
ER’s friends influenced her politically, as she influenced them: Mary McCleod Bethune, Walter White, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray moved her further along the road in the civil-rights struggle than she might otherwise have traveled. Her young friends in the leadership of the antifascist student movement—notably Joseph Cadden, Trude Pratt, and Joseph Lash—allowed her to consider the dimensions of radical antifascism, and to understand the perils of communist loyalties with more personal concern than she otherwise could have done. Her own shift away from a rather crude anti-Semitism and casual race consciousness depended significantly on her friendships with radical Jewish students, as well as with her contemporary friends Elinor and Henry Morgenthau, and with Carrie Chapman Catt, who in August 1933 organized a Christian Woman’s Protest Against the Atrocities Suffered by Jews in Hitler’s Germany. ER’s crusade for freedom during and after the fascist era is a story of perseverance, and the greatest integrity.
SUSTAINED AND EMBOLDENED BY HER INTIMATE FRIENDS AND the wide-ranging feminist network of activist women and political men who accompanied her throughout the White House years and beyond, ER became nonconformist and followed the impulses of her own vision, and the needs of her own heart.
As I considered Eleanor Roosevelt, it was necessary to confront certain stereotypes that have limited our understanding; to turn the prism, refocus the lens, and widen the scope. A vastly enhanced picture emerges. She was a dutiful wife, and also a submissive daughter-in-law. She was an unprepared and unhappy mother, and a daughter devoted to an illusory father. She was also a woman in struggle, dedicated to modernity. A feminist leader and competitive politician, she was a woman with power who enjoyed power. She was, in her own words, “an adventurer”:
Learning and living. But they are really the same thing aren’t they? There is no experience from which you can’t learn something…. And the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
You can do that only if you have curiosity, an unquenchable spirit of adventure. The experience can have meaning only if you understand it. You can understand it only if you have arrived at some knowledge of yourself, a knowledge based on a deliberately and usually painfully acquired self-discipline, which teaches you to cast out fear and frees you for the fullest experience of the adventure of life….
I honor the human race. When it faces life head-on, it can almost remake itself….
Eleanor Roosevelt wrote those words in January 1960, at the age of seventy-six. In You Learn by Living, a collection of reflective essays, she intended to explain her life’s philosophy. She was moved, above all, by “an avid desire” to “experience all I could as deeply as I could.”
Although she was at the center of a movement of feminists and activists during her own lifetime, Eleanor Roosevelt has only belatedly been reclaimed by contemporary feminists. When, during the first years of the 1970s, a new feminist awakening sought to rediscover the contributions of our foremothers, suffragist, philanthropist and lifelong activist Esther Lape wrote ER’s daughter Anna and several others with dismay: Why do these new feminists celebrate Jane Addams, Carrie Chapman Catt, Lillian Wald, and fail even to recognize Eleanor Roosevelt?
To Esther Lape, who died in 1982 at the age of one hundred, the work and vision of an entire feminist community—a circle of intimate friends connected to Eleanor Roosevelt—seemed to be trivialized and ignored. It was in fact an historical outrage, born of closed archives, court biography, misogynist interpretation, misinformation. As in the case of the women of Bloomsbury, ER’s British contemporaries, the work and the words were in the hands of sons and surrogate sons who rarely sought to address or even recognize the complex relationships of very complex lives. They tended to praise the fathers, condemn the mothers, and misunderstand the others. It would be easy to blame the sons and surrogate sons for the failure of our historical record, but that would be only partly accurate. ER, as much as Virginia Woolf or Vita Sackville-West, played a role in what we were allowed to know.
Marriages hid romances; romances were discreet and buried in archives; archives were until recently closed. Although ER kept much of the historical record, the private details of her life with others and with FDR were entirely obscured in three volumes of memoir and several autobiographical essays. With certain exceptions, such as FDR’s momentous affair with Lucy Mercer, ER’s appointed heirs follow her lead: If a subject appeared in her books, it appeared in theirs.
ER’s memoirs were understated, self-deprecating, monuments to discretion and silence. Written during and immediately after the White House years, they reveal extremely painful truths about her own childhood, but nothing of her relations with her husband. Her friends, his friends, the intensity of love and affection that made their lives so complex and extraordinary are erased. More than that, ER never missed an opportunity to discount her influence, to minimize her power, and to discredit her work. As a young social investigator and settlement-house worker before her marriage, she did a bit—but “I feel sure I was a very poor teacher.” She implied that she was lazy and capricious: “I rather imagine that by spring I was quite ready to drop all this good work and go up to the country and spend the summer in idleness and recreation!”
And so Eleanor Roosevelt consciously, determinedly, joined that historical tradition about which Muriel Rukeyser wrote:
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.
ER herself gave us all the images of homeliness, helplessness, and inadequacy that have since become the clichés of her life. She created for the future a picture of rectitude and quietly encountered duty, of constant if not thankless service to her husband, children, and grandchildren. She told us nothing of her political ambitions or of the intimate details of her private life. And virtually every book written subsequently caters to her own presentation.
NOW RECENTLY OPENED ARCHIVES, ER’S FBI AND STATE DEpartment documents, and access to the letters of long-ignored friends give us another set of facts by which to interpret a woman’s life. More than twenty years after her death, we discovered that for decades, ER had had a very full private life, well known to her husband, her mother-in-law, her children, and many of the scores of people who shared her intimate life and her public work.
If her heirs followed her lead and honored her discretionary code, they can hardly be faulted. But the continual almost hysterical reactions to the intimate life revealed in her correspondence (a correspondence she carefully preserved for the historical record) suggests another pattern: Our generation is as prudish as our “Victorian” forebears when faced with the real lives of historically significant women.
For over twenty years, women historians and literary critics have insisted upon the connection between the personal and the political. In the words of Virginia Woolf: “The tyrannies and servilities of the one, are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.” In thinking about the personal and the political in the life of Eleanor Roosevelt, I have turned frequently to the writings of Virginia Woolf. The two were contemporaries, and they had much in common. For years their power, the complexities of their lives, and their feminism were denied to us. Even during national conferences held to celebrate her centennial year in 1984, the feminist aspects of ER’s life and work were angrily rejected. Indeed, an “Eleanor Roosevelt Mobile” toured the country stripped of any photographs of her closest women friends and displayed the banner headline “Eleanor Roosevelt Was an Antifeminist.”
Without her essential vision, the forcefulness of her political activism, and the details of her intimate life, Eleanor Roosevelt has been lost in an historical lie. Above all we have been denied access to that core subject so intriguing to students of life, that place where sex and power converge.
The issue of sex and power is assumed to be central to the lives of great men. When looking at the lives of great women, we continue to divide the world into saints and sinners, and we make assumptions based on race and class, even looks. White, Protestant, aristocratic, and “unattractive” women are not supposed to flourish in the political arena, and are not presumed to have sex or independently passionate interests. Regarding these women, all questions concerning that wondrous crossroads of sex and power have been traditionally disallowed.
We have tended to constrict the range of historical inquiry about women, failing even to ask life’s most elemental questions. We have been encouraged to disregard the essential mysteries of a woman’s life: What is energy and where does it come from? How do we channel energy—to write, to organize, to love? How do we acquire courage, develop vision, sustain power, create style? What is the connection between chronic undiagnosed illness, depression, suicide, and the refusal to acknowledge the fullness of a woman’s capacities, her right to love and to lead?
Until recently, historians and literary analysts have preferred to see our great women writers and activists as asexual spinsters, odd gentlewomen who sublimated their lust in their various good works. But as we consider their true natures, we see that it was frequently their ability to express love and passion—and to surround themselves with likeminded women and men who offered support, strength, and emotional armor—that enabled them to achieve all that they did achieve. The fact is that our culture has sought to deny the truths and complexities about women’s passion because it is one of the great keys to women’s power.
Born in 1884, ER reached adulthood long after Queen Victoria was dead. Nevertheless, all explanations of her life have continued to assure us that she was limited by her Victorian upbringing, confined to her Victorian sensibilities. Even in 1984, a contemporary historian assured us that ER “was imprisoned in the cage of her culture.”
To “encage” Eleanor Roosevelt seems to me a remarkably limited reading of a woman’s life. It is not simply the language one revolts against; it is the failure to consider a woman’s wants and needs, including her range of choice and freedom to have, or not to have, sex; it is the failure to consider the nature of passion, lust, and love in a woman’s life.
The “true” Victorian woman was assumed to be virtuous, compliant, passive, dependent, and childlike. She was meant to have neither influence nor authority. For her, pursuing a college education was as dangerous as riding a bicycle, or a horse astride. Our culture’s seemingly endless devotion to the Victorian woman is actually more about mindlessness than about sexlessness. The Victorian woman was, above all, deprived of the capacity for free thought and independence. A simple and compliant figure, she ran from ambition and refused the trappings of power.
Now nothing shatters the myth of the angel in the house, the fragrant spirit in the garden, so fundamentally as the appearance of the independently passionate woman, who chooses her mate, her partner, her lover, for reasons of her own, and according to the needs and wants of her own chemistry. The myths of Victorian prudery and purity have been history’s most dependable means of social control. Class-bound and gender-related, obscured by privets and closets and vanishing documents, establishment lust has followed the dictates of establishment culture: traditionally for men only.
Eleanor Roosevelt has been a persistent victim of this effort at social control. Portrayed as a Victorian wife and mother, she has been rendered a saint without desire, an aristocratic lady without erotic imagination. We have even been told that she birthed six children because she knew nothing about the “facts” of life. But then we learn that she was a lifelong member of the Birth Control League. We have been told, over and over again, based exclusively on her daughter’s casual observation, that ER considered “sex an ordeal to be borne.” Beyond the fact that such a remark raises the question of FDR as a lazy and selfish lover, ER maintained a dedicated optimism concerning love: She encouraged the romances of her young friends and children, supported their divorces, provided safe havens for trysts and liaisons, and expressed relief when they stepped out of painful marriages and into new relationships. Not unlike her own mother-in-law, but with a vastly different emphasis, Eleanor Roosevelt could be quite meddlesome.
After a period of intense self-discovery, during World War I, ER forged for herself new and intimate friendships with two lesbian couples, Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, and Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman. Later her relationships with Earl Miller and Lorena Hickok were erotic and romantic, daring and tumultuous, though so many letters have been lost or destroyed that the full dimensions of her love will remain to some degree a mystery of interpretation. Most grievously, all of Earl Miller’s long, daily letters, written from 1928 until ER’s death in 1962, have disappeared without a trace.
How, then, do we assess ER’s intimate life? We might begin by acknowledging that the disappearance of so many documents was not an accident, but rather a calculated denial of ER’s passionate friendships. In the case of her demonstrated ardor for Lorena Hickok, the denials have been high-strung and voluble; and ER’s romantic love for her younger friend Earl Miller, which began when she was forty-five and he thirty-two, has been dismissed almost without hesitation.
And yet it is now clear that ER lived a life dedicated to passion and experience. After 1920 many of her closest friends were lesbian women. She honored their relationships, and their privacy. She protected their secrets and kept her own. Women who love women, and women who love younger men have understood for generations that it was necessary to hide their love, lest they be the target of slander and cruelty. For over a century, scandal and love have seemed so entwined that it has been merely polite to love in private. The romance of the closet, and the perspective of the fortress, became necessary barricades against bigotry and pain.
In the closet, romance between women developed its own ceremonies: coded words and costumes, pinky rings and pearls, lavender and violets. The closet allowed one to avoid embarrassed smiles, discomfort, a friend’s disdain, a parent’s shock, a child’s confusion. For some the closet was lonely and disabling. For others it was entirely satisfying and intensely romantic—its very secrecy lent additional sparkle to the game of hearts. The romance of the closet had a life of its own.
Public women of Eleanor Roosevelt’s generation, long protective of their private lives, see nothing particularly valuable about our insistence, today, on greater openness. I was told quite frankly during one interview: “I have been in the closet for sixty years; why the hell should I come out for you?” During another interview, a veteran British journalist exploded: “Listen, you young reporters are wrecking everything. We had much more fun before it all started coming out.” Both women believed that hateful stereotypes followed in the wake of trivializing labels. Ultimately, they argued, the public woman, no matter how talented or independent, could not be free outside the closet, and the potential for scandal threatened work, publication, and influence.
Over the years, in Greenwich Village and at Val-Kill, Eleanor Roosevelt created homes of her own, with members of her chosen family, private, distinct, separate from her husband and children. Even as First Lady, ER established a hiding house in a brownstone walk-up that she rented from Esther Lape in Greenwich Village, at 20 East 11th Street. Away from the glare of reporters and photographers, she stepped outside and moved beyond the exclusive circle of her heritage to find comfort, privacy, and satisfaction. In conventional terms, ER lived an outrageous life.
She never considered her friends or her friendships secret or shameful. Her family and her friends lived in one extended community. For decades, there was Eleanor’s court and Franklin’s court, which included Missy LeHand, his live-in secretary and companion. After ER’s death, her friends might deny one another, in private or in print. But during her lifetime, they had to deal with one another. They sat across from one another at Christmas and Thanksgiving. They were invited to the same parties, and the same picnics.
Although ER never wrote a word for publication about the stirrings of her heart, she purposefully saved her entire correspondence with both Lorena Hickok and Esther Lape. After her death, Hickok and Lape sat around the open fire at Lape’s Connecticut estate and spent hours burning letter after letter. To date, no correspondence between Esther Lape and her lifetime companion, Elizabeth Read, has been found. Although Lape had agreed to be interviewed by an archivist for ER’s oral-history project, she changed her mind and sealed her interview. After Hick’s death, her sister burned another packet of letters found in her home. What is left is sufficient to detail a thirty-year friendship marked by the most intense ardor for at least six years, but what has been lost is immeasurable: not only the Lape letters, but ER’s correspondence with Earl Miller and Nancy Cook; the letters between Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman; and all of Caroline O’Day’s correspondence, covering a lifetime of activism and three terms as member of Congress at large.
With the documentary record in tatters, we cannot be certain about what ER felt or believed on subjects about which she remained forever elusive. We can only conclude, with Virginia Woolf: “When a subject is highly controversial—and any question about sex is that—one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.”
Eleanor Roosevelt never lived a sheltered or protected life. The “Victorian” world of her father, and subsequently her young uncles and aunts, involved alcoholism, adultery, child molestation, rape, abandonment. ER grew up with scandal, understood its nuances, and hated it. For years she lived according to a code of her own design created to avoid the kind of suffering she knew as a child. But by 1918 she understood that there was no code on earth that could protect her or her family against scandal and pain. So she opted for self-fulfillment and meaningful work. She pursued the course of her convictions, and determinedly ignored all the attacks made against her.
In February 1942, when her public activities as one of the most outspoken women in American public life, and her friendship and support for young radicals and Jews, were much in the headlines, ER wrote to novelist Fannie Hurst: “I am indifferent to attacks on me, but I hate to see other people hurt. However I intend to go on fighting for the things in which I believe, and will undoubtedly furnish plenty of ammunition for attacks.”
ER confronted every issue that traditionally served to diminish a woman’s life. She never succumbed to malaise or chronic illness; she triumphed over anorexia; and she consciously rejected suicide. She could be cold, passive-aggressive, and impatient. Never permitted to cry in public as a child, she scolded her children and grandchildren when they seemed to her emotionally self-indulgent. She once became very annoyed at a child who seemed to be crying all over the White House halls, and insisted he find a bathtub to sit in until he was through. When her own emotions were riven, she went off by herself and spent hours walking or sitting in a park. She was rarely direct or confrontational. If she ever shouted in anger or hurt, there is no record of it. For many years, however, she was accompanied wherever she went by dogs trained by Earl Miller to protect his “Lady.” They snarled and barked; growled and jumped; tugged and nipped; finally, they bit people with such ferocity they had to be sent away.
ER did on several occasions take to her bed in anguish and depression. But the migraines that had plagued her adolescence and the first decade of her marriage subsided as the life she carefully knit together began to serve her: one life, one weave, dedicated to experience, adventure, and power.
But it was not power over others that she sought. Her experiences as a woman caused her to appreciate the elements of empowerment, of shared power in partnership with others. Her lifelong capacity to identify with individuals and groups in need, mistreated, misunderstood, or despised had its origins in her own struggle.
Eleanor Roosevelt was a woman of principle who understood the vagaries of politics and competition. And she always advised her friends: “If you have to compromise, be sure to compromise up!” She personally carried her commitment to liberty, individual freedom, equal rights, civil rights, and human dignity into tiny villages and hamlets as well as into the citadels of government authority.
During the first White House years, she struggled to create a New Deal for women as well as for men, and was among the first to see race relations as the primary issue America would have to confront if it were to move into its future as a united, liberal, and progressive nation. Long before her husband and most of his advisers, she publicly connected white supremacy in the United States with white supremacy in Hitler’s Europe. To fathom North America’s failure to respond to the Holocaust, it is necessary to reconsider Eleanor Roosevelt’s early and lonely public opposition to racism in the United States, as well as her own crusade against fascism in Spain and in support of Jewish refugees from Europe—which is discussed in Volume Two of this biography.
After the White House years, Eleanor Roosevelt devoted her life to the achievement of human rights worldwide. The United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights promised dignity, political influence, and economic security to all the people of this planet. It was adopted on 10 December 1948 largely as a result of the vision, stamina, and personal diplomacy of ER, then the United States’ representative to the United Nations.
For Eleanor Roosevelt, a sense of urgency for a Declaration of Human Rights was created by the Holocaust, by the victims beyond tally of that Social Darwinist category Hitler introduced into the mainstream of world politics: “Lives that are not worth living.” Eleanor Roosevelt was among the first civilian witnesses to speak with Holocaust survivors, to tour concentration camps, to consider the needs of the future as mandated by that historical moment. And she wondered: “When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?” In an article for The Annals of the American Academy, she wrote that history “clearly shows that we arrive at catastrophe by failing to meet situations—by failing to act where we should act…. [The] opportunity passes and the next situation always is more difficult than the last one.”
ER touched the imagination of people everywhere, because she included in her vision people of all economic and social classes. The magnetism of her profound sincerity caused people to believe, with her, that there was hope for a more generous future. There was really nothing radical about her views, or her efforts. But it is amazing how radical simple decency has been made to seem.
Just as slavery mocked for so many years the Declaration of Independence, so did racism and the coils of the Cold War mock the Declaration of Human Rights. During Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration, all efforts in behalf of international peace and human rights, especially economic and social rights, were condemned as suspicious, if not overtly communistic. President Eisenhower, who privately opposed the excesses of Senator Joseph McCarthy, publicly mocked ER and noted in 1954 that opposition to the U.N.’s human-rights agreement was an effort “to save the U.S. from Eleanor Roosevelt.”
When ER was removed from her official tour of duty at the U.N., she walked across First Avenue and offered her time and energy to the American Association for the United Nations. From 1953 to 1962, she traveled around this country and around the world with her message of peace and human dignity. ER understood that it would take as much energy and vision, as much money and dedication, to win a war for the intrusion of morality and decency into the international arena as it would to win any other war.
In 1958, she wrote:
Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual persons; the neighborhood …; the school or college …; the factory, farm or office…. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.
After FDR’s death on 12 April 1945, ER contemplated a return to “private” life. But she was urgently moved by the great unfinished agenda that faced the postwar world. After a lifetime of struggle to find her own role, she was fearless and unencumbered. Although she refused to run for political office, maintaining that women were still insufficiently organized, she agreed to serve on the United States’ first delegation to the United Nations General Assembly. She called her memoir of the postpresidential years On My Own, and as she embarked for London told reporters: “For the first time in my life I can say just what I want. For your information it is wonderful to feel free.”
For the rest of her days, she traveled the world in order to bear witness, to write, and to speak out: “One must never turn one’s back on life. There is so much to do, so many engrossing challenges, so many heartbreaking and pressing needs.”
Esther Lape, Lorena Hickok, and Earl Miller remained constant and steady companions. A most surprising assortment of friends, including Bernard Baruch, proposed marriage. But ER’s life was increasingly dedicated to world politics, and her younger friends, Trude and Joseph Lash, Adlai Stevenson, and her last great friend, physician, and traveling companion, David Gurewitsch. She remained the subject of occasional criticism, and continued to attract controversy. While Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called her “more subversive and dangerous than Moscow,” her own vigorous anticommunist activities astounded many. She agreed to do TV commercials for money, and her friends and enemies were finally united in disapproval. ER noted the difference: Her friends were sad that she had besmirched her reputation; her enemies were glad that she had besmirched her reputation. She taught at Brandeis University, hosted a monthly television program on the “prospects of mankind,” and chaired John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, which heralded the contemporary feminist movement; and she campaigned for world development.
Long before most of America’s leadership appreciated the changing needs of this planet, ER did. She opposed the growing reliance on armaments and military solutions, and during the last weeks of her life wrote a column anticipating what remains today the primary challenge of our time:
It has always seemed to me that we never present our case to the smaller nations in either a persuasive or interesting way. I think most people will acknowledge …that we have given far more military aid to these nations than economic aid. It is not very pleasant to palm off this military equipment on people who really are not looking for it….
In view of this, why don’t we offer them something they really want? For one thing, most of them would like food. Many of them …know that wider training of their people is essential …and hence a primary need is aid to their education system….
Until her death on 7 November 1962, ER was committed to a liberal vision. In Tomorrow Is Now she looked to the future with pragmatic optimism. But for the future to be “more rewarding,” she concluded, the United States needed to resurrect with conviction and daring the good American word “liberal,” “which derives from the word free…. We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us.”
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT’S PERSONAL AND POLITICAL JOURNEY reflects the full range of the complex tides of the twentieth century. She addressed the most controversial issues of state, none of which have become any less pressing. She made the noblest values seem globally achievable, and she believed particularly in the power of people, community by community, and in the power of ideas to transform society. She wrote that social change required that ideas be faced with imagination, integrity, and courage. That was how she lived her life.