ACTIVIST AND UNITED NATIONS DELEGATE UNITED STATESYou gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. . . . You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
The little girl held tightly to Eleanor’s hand as they walked through the dark slum. She was coughing and shivering in the cold night air.
“Will she be all right?” asked Franklin, wrapping her in his coat.
“I think so,” answered Eleanor, her voice heavy with worry, “but we need to get her home and into bed.”
Home, however, was not much better than the street. They took the girl to the dirty, overcrowded tenement room she shared with her large family. The ceiling was a sheet of tin, the floor a few rough planks, and the walls tarpaper; the cold wind whistled through many holes. They could see one stained mattress in the corner and a small table with no chairs. Otherwise, the room was bare. A single candle lit the faces of the girl’s parents and siblings. They looked hungry and tired.
Eleanor was used to seeing this kind of suffering; she’d been working with poor immigrant families for months. But Franklin was shocked. All the way home, he said again and again, “I can’t believe human beings live that way.” Nor could he believe that a girl of his social class was immersed in that world. But Eleanor wasn’t like the other girls he knew.
Eleanor was just eighteen when she introduced Franklin Roosevelt—the man who would become her husband and, later, president of the United States—to a world he had never seen. (And she would continue to enlighten her husband and affect change upon the world for the rest of her life.) As a teen, she changed lives one at a time; as an adult, she would help people on a grand scale. Historians have called her “the most influential woman of our times,” and many would argue that Eleanor did more to fight poverty, racism, sexism, and other injustices than any other woman in history. She was truly the “First Lady of the World.”
The self-assurance Eleanor would be known for in later years was virtually nonexistent during her childhood. Born to a well-known, upper-class family, Eleanor was raised to be no more than a wealthy debutante and wife. For this job, a girl’s main asset was beauty, not brains. Eleanor’s mother was just such a beauty and worried over her daughter’s looks. She often hurt the feelings of her serious, shy child by calling her “Granny.” Eleanor’s father, on the other hand, always let his “little Nell” know she was his favorite.
In spite of their wealth, the Roosevelts were not a happy family. Eleanor’s parents fought bitterly about her father’s drinking and affairs. And just when things looked like they couldn’t get any worse, Eleanor’s mother had her father committed to an asylum to receive treatment for his alcoholism. Even after his release, he didn’t come home, and Eleanor missed her father terribly. But tragedy really struck when Eleanor was eight: her mother came down with diphtheria and died. The children saw their father briefly for the funeral but were packed off to live with their grandmother, as their father was still deemed unfit to raise them.
Grandmother Hall was a stern woman. Her house was a big, drafty, depressing place where noisy playing was forbidden; Eleanor retreated even further into herself, and books became her escape. Her only joy was visiting her father, but this was also stressful, as he grew more and more unpredictable. Once, he took Eleanor to his private men’s club in New York City and left her sitting out on the sidewalk. Six hours later, the doorman finally figured out who the girl was and told her Mr. Roosevelt had left hours before. She had to take a cab home. Two years after her mother’s death, Eleanor’s father died after taking a bad fall while drunk. Any happiness Eleanor had known disappeared. This sadness would plague her for the rest of her life, but from her painful childhood sprang her empathy and desire to help others who were suffering.
She finally escaped the dreariness of Grandmother Hall’s house when she was sent away to boarding school in England. Allenswood Academy, a girls’ school outside London, was run by a free-thinking French woman named Marie Souvestre, who believed women should be more than ornaments—they should think for themselves. She taught her girls not only about literature and art but also about social and political issues.
Sou, as the students called her, took a special interest in her shy American student. She brought Eleanor with her to Europe and encouraged her self-reliance by having the young girl make all their travel arrangements. Eleanor recalled, “I felt that I was starting a new life, free from all my former sins and traditions. . . . This was the first time in my life that my fears left me.”1 Eleanor learned, explored, debated, and began to find herself; she was happy for the first time in her life.
Eleanor’s happy freedom did not last long, however. Before she could start her senior year at Allenswood, Grandmother Hall called her back to America. Again, it was not her intellect that mattered to her family. Eleanor was a debutante, after all, and at age eighteen, it was time for her to make her official introduction to society. Although she was horrified, Eleanor had to obey. She returned to New York and began her rounds of parties and dances. Never good at small talk, Eleanor preferred to discuss serious issues, which was not considered ladylike.
But school had begun a transformation in young Eleanor that could not be stopped. Despite the endless social events on her calendar, she always found a way to bring meaning into her life. She volunteered in settlement houses—shelters for the thousands of immigrants flooding into New York at that time. Working with poor families was a revelation for Eleanor. At Allenswood, they had discussed poverty and injustice, but this was the first time she saw the reality of it. Unlike other high-society women, who just donated money, Eleanor gave her time—and lots of it. She had always wanted to be useful, and now there were people who really needed her. She dove in.
Many of the families Eleanor worked with labored in sweatshops—factories that forced people to work long hours in terrible conditions for very small amounts of money. Eleanor began visiting these places and reporting her findings to the National Consumers League. She was terrified at first but found strength in the anger these visits made her feel: “I saw little children of four or five sitting at tables until they dropped with fatigue.”2
During her social debut, Eleanor did meet one young man who was attracted to her ideas and opinions: handsome Franklin Delano Roosevelt, her fifth cousin, once removed. Franklin loved talking with her and thought she was the most fascinating woman he’d ever met. When he picked her up at the settlement houses, she opened his eyes to the world that existed outside their privileged cocoon. He’d never realized how much his fellow Americans were suffering, right under his nose. Franklin was deeply interested in the realities of life, and Eleanor showed him those realities. When he proposed, she was surprised and asked why he would choose someone so plain. He told her that with her by his side, he might one day amount to something.
But after marriage, Eleanor buried her newfound independence and social passion. Her domineering mother-in-law, her husband’s career, and her constant pregnancies discouraged her from pursuing her own dreams. Over the next ten years, Eleanor gave birth to six children, five of whom survived.
As Franklin’s political career took off, Eleanor’s life improved. They moved away from his overbearing mother, and Eleanor began to emerge from her shell. When the United States joined the fight in World War I, she got involved in her social causes again. She joined the Red Cross and cofounded the Navy Relief Fund, which served meals to hungry soldiers traveling through Washington, DC. While inspecting hospitals for the Red Cross, she discovered the horrible living conditions and treatment of the mentally ill (many of whom had suffered breakdowns while fighting in the war). For the first time, Eleanor utilized her husband’s political connections and was able to get increased funding to these institutions.
During this time of rebirth, Eleanor was dealt another blow: she discovered Franklin was having an affair. For a woman whose childhood love had been uncertain, her husband’s lie was crushing. “The bottom dropped out of my own particular world,”3 she recalled. She had lived her life according to Franklin’s needs for over a decade; now she would have to stand on her own again. She offered Franklin a divorce, but he refused—partially because it would ruin his career but also because he still cared for her. From then on, however, their marriage was more of a business partnership.
After discovering Franklin’s affair, Eleanor had him build her a country house, which she named “Val-Kill” for a nearby stream. It was her haven and a hangout for her women friends. Franklin was only allowed to visit.
Eleanor dove into politics. Women had recently won the right to vote (in 1920), so she joined the League of Women Voters to help them make intelligent voting choices. She kept members up to date on issues like labor reform and children’s rights, and she helped edit the Women’s Democratic News. She even worked for the Women’s Trade Union League, a radical feminist group fighting to decrease the workweek, raise minimum wages, and end child labor. When she and some friends took over the Todhunter School for Girls, Eleanor discovered another passion: teaching. As a teacher, she could push and inspire her students as Sou had pushed and inspired her.
In addition to her own interests, Eleanor continued to assist her husband and his career. In 1921, Franklin was diagnosed with polio, a paralyzing disease. He had difficulty walking for the rest of his life, relying on a cane, bulky leg braces, or a wheelchair. He also relied on his wife. When Franklin was elected governor of New York in 1928, she began visiting state institutions he could not access, doing on-site inspections for him, reporting on what needed to be improved.
In 1929, the stock market crashed; banks and businesses failed, farmers lost their land, people lost their homes, and twelve million Americans lost their jobs. It was the start of the Great Depression. Franklin decided to run for president during this difficult time, promising to give the voters a “New Deal”: new relief programs, new jobs, new houses. Eleanor, however, was not excited about the idea of becoming First Lady. At that time, the wife of the president was expected to host dinners, make small talk, and look good on her husband’s arm—tasks Eleanor had hated since she was a teen. And she dreaded giving up her political and social work. But when Franklin won in 1932, Eleanor made the most of her new role.
Just as young Eleanor was unlike any girl Franklin had ever met, Eleanor was unlike any First Lady the nation had ever seen. As one Maine lobsterman put it, “She ain’t stuck up, she ain’t dressed up, and she ain’t afeared to talk.”4 Franklin held press conferences and so did Eleanor—that was a first. And to encourage newspapers to employ more women, she only allowed female reporters into her popular press conferences. She also felt that struggling Americans needed some encouraging contact from the White House, so Eleanor gave radio talks, wrote monthly magazine articles, and wrote a popular daily newspaper column called “My Day.” She wrote the column for nearly thirty years; at its height, it appeared in ninety papers across the country and was read by more than four million Americans.5
She did not give up her political work either; she now played a more powerful role from behind the scenes. As always, she had a considerable influence on her husband, convincing him to put women into top government posts. She traveled the country, reporting back to him on how Americans were surviving the Depression and whether government programs were helping. And Eleanor brought comfort and reassurance to the communities she visited, becoming a champion of the poor.
Eleanor was the first president’s wife to earn her own money through her writing, lecturing, and radio and TV broadcasts. Her salary was usually higher than her husband’s, but she donated most of it to charity.
Eleanor also fought racism. She invited black political leaders and poor farmers to the White House to discuss issues, and she supported the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in their fight for equal rights, as well as a controversial federal law against lynching (the hanging to death of blacks without trial and often without any reason besides racial hatred). She was harshly criticized for her beliefs, and not even Franklin had the courage to pass the anti-lynching law (he needed the support of racist politicians for the New Deal programs). Politician Adlai Stevenson II applauded her courage: “Long before the civil rights issue moved to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness, she was there, earning public abuse for her quiet reminders of the inequalities practiced in our land.”6
In 1939, the strength of her convictions was put to the test. Eleanor belonged to a prestigious group called Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR); members were women from old, important families like the Roosevelts. When the DAR refused to let Marian Anderson, a world-famous singer and friend of Eleanor’s, perform at the DAR’s Constitution Hall because she was black, Eleanor was outraged and took a very public stand.
She announced her resignation from the DAR and condemned their racism. Her action drew worldwide attention to the cause and got all of America talking about equal rights. She then helped arrange for Marian to sing a free concert at the Lincoln Memorial. In front of an enormous statue of the president who freed the slaves, Marian gave an electrifying performance to a crowd of seventy-five thousand people. As she sang the spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” the audience was moved to tears.
But the trouble brewing in America was eclipsed by the war exploding in Europe. By 1939, World War II was underway, and a year later, Franklin was elected to an unprecedented third term as president (presidents now can only serve two terms). Although Eleanor was generally a pacifist, she believed that America had to stop Hitler’s quest for world domination and his extermination of the Jews. She took on her first official government position when she became the director of the Office of Civil Defense.
At fifty-nine, Eleanor traveled to the war front in the South Pacific to check on the troops and boost morale. At first, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey was against her visit, thinking a woman on the battlefield would be a nuisance. But Eleanor proved him wrong by conducting a thorough inspection of the hospitals and visiting each wounded soldier, asking his name, if he needed anything, and if she could take a message home for him. Admiral Halsey changed his tune, saying, “She alone had accomplished more good than any other person, or any group of civilians, who had passed through my area.”7 Eleanor worked so hard—traveling twenty-three thousand miles to visit seventeen islands and four hundred thousand men—that she lost thirty pounds!
During her trip to the South Pacific, Eleanor visited the indigenous people of New Zealand, the Maori. They were so taken with the friendly First Lady, they named her Kotoku, or “White Heron of One Flight,” after a magical creature from their legends that is seen just once in a lifetime.
Franklin’s health held out just long enough to make sure America and its allies won the war. After he died in 1945, most people expected Eleanor to pack her bags and retire from public life. Instead, she began working for world peace. Since the end of World War I, she’d been advocating for an international peace-keeping organization, and in 1945, her dream came true when the United Nations (UN) was formed and President Truman asked her to be a delegate. During her seven years with the UN, Eleanor was the only woman to represent the United States. Though other members had doubted her abilities when she started, she quickly changed minds, working to create and fight for a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And when it was finally passed, the delegates gave Eleanor a standing ovation.
When Eleanor’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights was finally adopted by the UN after years of hard work, she was so elated that she—a 64-year-old—took a running slide down the UN’s marble hallway!
As she entered her seventies, Eleanor never slowed down. After the war and her work in the UN, she passionately believed that America needed to stay involved in the world, not retreat. Realizing her diplomatic expertise, Truman sent her to India, Pakistan, and the Middle East to build relationships for the United States. And in 1961, Eleanor was again appointed as a UN delegate by newly elected president John F. Kennedy. When she returned to her old job, she was greeted by her second standing ovation!
After her husband, Franklin, died, it was suggested that Eleanor run for president herself. She laughed it off—she didn’t think America was ready for a woman president. But she believed that in a few years, a younger woman could run and win.
At a time in life when most women in her generation would be sewing quilts or relaxing in a rocking chair, Eleanor stayed active, both physically and mentally. “I could not, at any age, be content to take my place in a corner by the fireside and simply look on,” she said. “Life was meant to be lived.”8 And she continued to live her life—working as a professor at Brandeis University, lobbying for the Equal Rights Amendment, campaigning for her favorite candidates—until her very last day. In 1962, just after her seventy-eighth birthday, she died of tuberculosis, and the world lost one of its greatest heroines.
Eleanor devoted her life to improving the world—first, as a young woman, volunteering for those who needed her help; then as First Lady, advising her husband and responding to the needs of America; and finally on her own, as a delegate to the United Nations. She entered politics because of her husband but remained because of her own beliefs and passions. Even when her outspoken opinions on controversial issues—women’s suffrage, civil rights—got her in trouble, Eleanor refused to back down. She stood up for what she believed in and what she thought was right. This courage and strength of character made her one of the most admired, respected, and powerful women in the world.
If anyone were to ask me what I want out of life, I would say the opportunity for doing something useful, for in no other way, I am convinced, can true happiness be attained.
—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT