AS A LITTLE GIRL, ELEANOR wrote to keep herself company as much as to express herself. She read her poems to her mother, but seldom; her mother never asked to hear them. Other than that, she was too timid to impose her thoughts on others.
That was then. Now her shyness was overwhelmed by exuberance. Her voice boomed, ideas forming at so fast a rate that they exceeded the available forums: a press conference here, the occasional speech there, a magazine article, or a meeting with her husband and his advisers about matters of national or international import—these were simply not enough anymore. She needed more reach, more expansiveness for the serious matters on her mind these days—and even for her musings, which might have been far less serious but were equally appealing to her, deserving of her time and ability. She simply could not keep herself to herself any longer.
Fortunately, many awaited to offer her opportunities.
Monte Bourjaily was the top executive of the United Feature Syndicate, and had been an admirer of the First Lady even before her assumption of the title. As Eleanor wrote about their first meeting, “He said he felt sure that if I would write a daily column in the form of a diary it would be of great interest to the people of the United States, who were curious about the way anyone who lived in the White House passed their time, day by day.” Eleanor could not resist. In January 1936, she signed a five-year contract to produce a column that would appear in newspapers six times a week, from Sunday through Friday. It would be called “My Day.”
She could not wait to get to work.
“I dictate it directly to [my secretary] Miss Thompson,” Eleanor said, explaining how she turned out her pieces, “who takes it on the typewriter; then I correct it and she makes a final copy and sends it off by wire.” The result was one of the most popular columns in the history of American journalism. Eleanor would write it from 1936 to 1962—twenty-six years, six times a week, no days off except Saturday!—and failing to meet her deadline only once. It was a remarkable feat, regardless of the length of her columns (and hers were shorter than most others in American papers) or their literary or intellectual merit. It is even more remarkable when one takes into account the fact that the author was fifty-two years old when she began her new assignment, seventy-eight when she ceased. The number of pieces she produced was in excess of eight thousand! It was a full-time job all by itself, but only one of several full-time jobs she took on.
Given that her columns were to be, in effect, diary entries, she had license to write whatever she wanted. Her first essay could not have begun in a more homey fashion: “I wonder if anyone else glories in cold and snow without an open fire within and the luxury of a tray of food all by one’s self in one’s room.” Her last entry, which ran on September 14, 1962, was of an entirely different nature. “I often wonder, as I note how nervous we seem to be about Communist build-up in our world, why our country does not use new initiative to think out fresh approaches to the uncommitted people all over the world.”
The latter column was more typical of “My Day,” which expounded not just on the Communist buildup but on other significant issues of her days: the end of the Depression; the beginning, waging, and end of World War II; the beginning and waging of the Cold War; soaring food costs; the role of women in broadcasting, both radio and television; and, most poignantly, writing courageously through her sorrow, Harry Truman’s sudden ascendancy to the Oval Office.
Never before has a sudden change of presidents come about during a war. Yet, from the time that Mr. Truman . . . walked into my sitting room and I told them of my husband’s death, everything has moved in orderly fashion. There was consternation and grief but, at the same time, courage and confidence in the ability of this country and its people to back new leaders and to carry through the objectives to which the people have pledged themselves.
That this attitude established itself so quickly is a tribute to President Truman, to the members of the Cabinet, and to the Congress. But above all, it is a tribute to the people as a whole and it reaffirms our confidence in the future.
She wrote about relations with the Third World, the Yale Plan on Alcoholism, migratory farmworkers, the Berlin Blockade, and a “world government” to regulate the use of atomic power.
I can quite understand why men like Prof. Einstein feel that a world government would answer the problem, but any of us who have worked in the United Nations realize that we will have to learn to crawl before we learn to walk. If the great nations find it so hard to agree on the minor points at issue today, how do any of these hopeful people think that a world government could be made to work? People have to want to get on together and to do away with force, but so far there are many throughout the world who have not advanced to the point of really wanting to do this.
And she wrote about such issues as the Taft-Hartley Act, Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters, the John Birch Society, military aid to the Arab states, and the Soviet launching of astronaut Yuri Gagarin into earth orbit.
It is certainly almost breathtaking to think that a man flew into space and was gone 108 minutes circling the earth and during the trip talked to the ground by radio. . . .
The Soviets, naturally, have great pride in being first to achieve scientific advances which some of us look upon as more or less incomprehensible developments but which we feel sure will eventually have more meaning to us all.
There were even times, although not many, when she opened doors to her private life that were normally kept under lock and key.
I was usually shy and frightened because I lived an entirely lonely life, with few children of my own age nearby. I had no ear for music and therefore danced extremely badly! My father sang well, loved music and had a real sense of rhythm. My mother played the piano and danced well. Something was certainly left out of me—at least at that early age—and what little appreciation of music I since have acquired has been acquired with toil and effort and was certainly not a gift of the gods!
Eleanor’s “My Day” was not written in a formal manner, which was to be expected since the writing had started out as dictation. But that the First Lady of the United States was so informal, communicating to her readers as casually as if she were speaking to them, gave her columns the feeling of a conversation with an interesting, effusive, and well-informed friend. She chatted, rather than pontificating. She was there with those who wanted her company, in their homes, just a flip of the page away. Her column made her unique among presidential wives, although, as will be seen, there were a good many Americans who did not care for it, did not want her gibbering away at them—disdained her, in fact. They would not invite her into their domiciles under any circumstances.
AS TAXING AS “MY DAY” might have seemed, Eleanor wanted still more outlets for herself. There was Chiang Kai-shek to address and the Spanish Civil War, the new Social Security Administration and Mahatma Gandhi, Brown v. the [Topeka] Board of Education, and Fidel Castro. Eleanor’s natural intelligence, the childhood in which she spent so many lonely hours devouring books, and her newly gained entrance to the nerve center of international events—all of these combined and combusted within her, compelling her to think more, to write more, to speak more.
She crammed as many of her interests as she could into her column, but when the North American Newspaper Alliance offered her a contract to do one piece a month, $750 for five hundred words, she could not say yes fast enough. She was instructed to write “as one woman to another, of your problems as the woman of the household,” albeit hers was certainly no ordinary household.
Redbook, McCall’s, the North American Review, Current History, and Success were among the magazines that asked her to contribute, and she did, energetically. For Redbook, she wrote “Women Must Learn to Play the Game As Men Do.” For Cosmopolitan, a different magazine in those days from what it later became, she wrote a short-lived column. For McCall’s, she assented to a monthly question-and-answer page for a time. She even wrote the captions—although, admittedly, they were longer than usual captions, more like short essays—for a photo spread on the Depression in Look. The following appeared beneath a picture of a bread line in Chicago.
In 1933, I think we were a people who had given way to panic. Some people were facing starvation; they were justified in their fears. Others, facing a situation not nearly so serious, were nonetheless filled with misgivings because they could not see a serene future ahead. Until this period of panic, we had as a nation been remarkably free from any constant national fears, even though we participated in two wars within my memory.
Also in 1933, her first year in the White House, she somehow found time to return to the Women’s Democratic News with a monthly effort called “Passing Thoughts of Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt.” But most of her thoughts were enduring, not passing, and that is what attracted S. J. Woolf of the New York Times Magazine. When he finished interviewing her for a lengthy profile, he called Eleanor “the strongest argument that could be presented against those who hold that by entering politics a woman is bound to lose her womanliness and her charm.”
She also turned out volumes of memoirs, several of them sources for this book. Most notably: This I Remember, This Is My Story, and The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt.
She was not only the most literarily prolific First Lady the United States has ever had; she was one of the most prolific of all authors of her era. To be fair, though, it is worth repeating that most of her writings began in spoken form, dictated and then transcribed by her secretary, after which Eleanor made final edits. It is an easier way to proceed than starting from scratch on paper and turning out draft after draft. And she was certainly not as polished as many a full-time author. But she was herself on paper, the same person that she was with friends or at a public event, and most readers were engaged, commending her earnestness while enjoying a glimpse at her rarified position.
IN 1934, HER INTEREST IN the role of women in radio increased greatly when she became one of the first. She accepted an offer from Johns Manville, the insulation and roofing corporation, to do a six-minute program for which she was paid $3,000, a figure that many of today’s radio “personalities” would envy. Again, as was the case with her previous journalistic endeavors, most, if not all, of the money went to charity.
Later, she appeared on other programs. Among them: “Current Events,” part of the Pan-American Coffee Bureau Series, which aired during the first two years of US participation in World War II; The Eleanor and Anna Roosevelt Show, Anna being her daughter, broadcast on ABC; and other offerings on the NBC network and WNBC, the network’s station in New York.
Her move to television was a natural one. Her first position before a studio camera was as host of a Sunday afternoon program whose format might be summarized as “tea with Mrs. Roosevelt.” She presided over a silver urn, sitting on a couch with her guest, as if in her living room. It was a gracious, almost old-world setting, and the star was by this time an old hand at putting people at their ease. And while both Churchill and [Soviet politician Andrei] Vyshinsky declined her invitations to join her for televised tea, Albert Einstein, who stubbornly avoided radio and television appearances, made an exception for Mrs. Roosevelt.
Another of her TV programs, of a consistently more substantive nature, was Prospects of Mankind, on PBS. And there were others: substantive and lighthearted, formal and casual—all of this from the former wallflower.
Despite such a volume of work in radio and television, her producers often found it difficult to find sponsors, even after her years as First Lady had ended. Her first few attempts at television failed to attract so much as a single advertisement. She was, after all, a controversial figure, and the majority of American businesses thought it safer not to be associated with her for that reason, despite the audience she could attract. Whereupon her agent, Thomas L. Stix, was approached with a proposal he never expected. He was asked whether Eleanor would be willing to do—of all things—a margarine commercial!
It was a chore for which she would be well paid, but Stix was hesitant. She would come in for a lot of criticism on the grounds that it was undignified, he cautioned her, but if it were successful she would no longer be “poison” to sponsors. She thought it over and the next day she told him, “I’ll do it. For that amount of money I can save 6,000 lives,” thinking of the number of CARE packages the approximately $35,000 fee would purchase. She did the commercial and the protests poured in. “The mail was evenly divided,” she said. “One half was sad because I had damaged my reputation. The other half was happy because I had damaged my reputation.”
But it worked. Americans bought so much Good Luck margarine that if cows had had the sense to fear unemployment, they might well have done so.
In addition to her previous association with Johns Manville, such disparate entities as “Selby shoes, a mattress company, even food and beverage concerns paid for her broadcasts” in the future. Occasionally she even found herself with a waiting list of prospective sponsors. And more than occasionally there were outbursts against the high salaries she was paid, as well as continuing opposition to her being paid at all.
Which meant that Eleanor had to keep on explaining. “The money I earned from all of my radio work and some of my writing during the years I was in the White House,” she said to critics, “I felt should be used not simply for charity donations but primarily to help people help themselves. Because that is also the philosophy of the [American] Friends [Service Committee], I chose them to handle the money for me.”
ELEANOR’S VOCAL CORDS SEEMED NEVER to tire. Thus, Louis Howe’s gruff advice: “Get out and talk,” he told her, and with that, the First Lady, seemingly with time to kill, took to the lecture circuit.
In 1936, a month-long tour began in Pennsylvania and ended in Michigan. “On 8 November in Philadelphia, she addressed an audience of two thousand at Temple University, where she made a rousing speech on the need for democratic action and community activism.” Another lecture tour, earlier in 1936 and ranging farther geographically than the later one, was called “Ways of Peace,” and like every other word she uttered in a public forum that year, its purpose was to return her husband to the White House for a second term. Her speeches went well, she wrote to him, but the experiences had been wearing ones. “It would be easy to be a lecturer or the wife of the President but both, Oh! My.” And a columnist, a radio commentator, a television hostess . . .
In non-election years, however, most of her lectures were made on behalf of her own ideas and philanthropic concerns, not her husband’s platform. And she seemed to have more ideas about more subjects than could ever be quantified. Thus, writing her speeches was probably the most demanding of all her means of expression.
Today’s stars of the lecture circuit have three or four stock addresses, general in content, that they deliver over and over, choosing the one most appropriate for their audience. They add a few lines to refer to a particular item in the news, and to the specific interests of their listeners, perhaps poking fun at a few prominent members of the audience; essentially, though, they are like standup comedians, delivering only material that has been tested and proven on previous occasions.
But, for the most part, Eleanor’s talks were different, full of detail and related to the most current of current events. As a result, and with assistance, she usually produced a new speech for each audience. Sometimes, the demands proved so great that her talks were largely improvised, but no less lacking in substance for their not having been written down. She knew her subjects even without the aid of a script.
When she became a private citizen again after more than a dozen years in the White House, she accepted a speaking engagement in Saint Petersburg, Florida. But no sooner had her appearance been announced than a bomb threat was phoned in. “Isn’t it ironical,” Eleanor said, “that in the Communist countries I have visited there has never been so much as an unkind word?”
Assuming that the caller was one of the many she encountered who opposed her support for Negro causes, and who did not really have the nerve to wreak violence, she said she would go ahead with the speech anyhow.
Those who had initially planned to attend also went ahead anyhow. But once the auditorium had filled and Eleanor was introduced, a security official of some sort stepped to the podium and announced that the auditorium was to be vacated immediately. It is not clear why the program was allowed to start and then so suddenly stopped, but Eleanor was furious. And furthermore, she was unwilling to comply. Her audience might have been herded outside, but she would not budge. Remaining on stage for as long as it took the venue to be searched for an incendiary device, she was even calm enough to sit and doze. It was an admirable display of fortitude on her part.
But there was another display, even more admirable: “[Eleanor] was touched by the courage of a little woman, possibly of her own age, who lingered on in the front row, protesting, ‘If I’m going to be blown up, I can’t think of any better company to be blown up with.’”
No bomb was found. The speech went on as scheduled, although considerably later.
AS A SEVENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD WIDOW—STILL WRITING “My Day” six days a week, remember—she became a visiting lecturer at Brandeis University. Offered the honorific “professor,” she turned it down, explaining that, since she had not even attended college, she did not deserve to be addressed so grandly. A year later, still at Brandeis, she refused to have a car pick her up at the Boston airport and bring her back to campus. As she had done from time to time as First Lady, she took public transportation. She wanted no special treatment. She had never thought of herself as a Swell and was not about to start now.