Introduction

Sunday at the White House began much like any other. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt described it as a “quiet” morning, although the staff was preparing for a luncheon of thirty guests, including close friends, visiting relatives, and government officials. President Franklin D. Roosevelt would take lunch privately in his study with his most trusted adviser, Harry Hopkins. Tensions had been steadily mounting between the United States and the increasingly belligerent Japanese. The president had been up late the night before, drafting a message to the Japanese emperor. So on Sunday, FDR was enjoying a few moments of private relaxation with Hopkins, his Scotty dog, Fala, and his stamp collection. ER was “disappointed but not surprised” that her husband passed on the big luncheon crowd.¹

It was December 7, 1941.

At 1:47 p.m., Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox telephoned the president with news that Japanese airplanes had attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. The attack would kill more than 2,400 military personnel and civilians and strike a heavy blow on the US Pacific Fleet. Before long, the White House corridors filled with military officials and political aides. ER overheard the news and said good-bye to her guests. FDR was clearly occupied, so ER spent the afternoon in her sitting room. She worked on correspondence, keeping an ear cocked to the hallway traffic coming and going from the president’s study. She also revised her script.

As it happened, ER was scheduled to make her regular fifteen-minute national radio appearance that evening. The first lady’s program was called Over Our Coffee Cups, airing on 122 stations of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and sponsored by the Pan-American Coffee Bureau, an organization representing seven Latin American coffee-growing countries. The program was one in a series of commercially sponsored prime-time radio shows that ER hosted while she was first lady. On that Sunday afternoon, the president dictated to his secretary the “date which will live in infamy” speech he would deliver to Congress and on national radio the next day. The first lady was across the hall rewriting her upcoming broadcast.

At 6:45 p.m. on her live broadcast, in her calm, measured voice, ER explained that the president was meeting with his cabinet and members of Congress and had spent the afternoon conferring with diplomatic and military officials. She explained that Congress would have a full report on the situation the next morning. Then, as she often did, ER cast herself as the radio listeners’ fellow citizen, rather than the first lady. “We, the people, are already prepared for action. For months now the knowledge that something of this kind might happen has been hanging over our heads,” she said. “That is all over now and there is no more uncertainty. We know what we have to face and know that we are ready to face it.” Then Mrs. Roosevelt’s words grew more personal.

Speaking to the women of the country, she noted that she had a son on a Navy destroyer somewhere at sea. “For all I know he may be on his way to the Pacific,” she said. Two other Roosevelt children lived in cities on the Pacific coast and could be vulnerable to Japanese attack. ER said she understood the anxiety women would suffer over loved ones in the service or living in danger zones. But she called on American women to go about their daily business, determined to press on. “We are the free and unconquerable people of the United States of America,” she said. Then ER spoke briefly to America’s young people. A great opportunity to serve their country lay ahead, she told them: “I have faith in you! Just as though I were standing on a rock and that rock is my faith in my fellow citizens.” With that, the first lady moved on to the previously scheduled theme of the program, Army morale, and an interview with a soldier from Fort Dix.2

It was a remarkable broadcast at a critical moment in the nation’s history. With America under attack, the public heard first not from their president but from his wife. By going on with the show, ER could ask the American people to carry on as well. And she was careful to keep her proper place in the feminine sphere by addressing the nation’s women and young people. On an evening when millions of Americans were gathering by the radio for news, it was an unprecedented moment for a first lady.

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had adopted radio as a communication tool when the medium was so new no one was certain what place it would find in American culture. In 1932, the year FDR was first elected president, some 65 percent of American households owned a radio. The two primary broadcasting companies, NBC and CBS, were well established. Surveys found that listeners in the 1930s spent an average of more than four hours a day listening to radio broadcasts. By 1940, radios were in 81 percent of American households.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was a consummate broadcaster, but ER was the radio professional. During her years in the White House, ER made some three hundred radio appearances, about the same number as her husband. But for dozens of those broadcasts she got paid handsome talent fees by advertisers. Her shows were sponsored by the makers of cold cream, mattresses, coffee, typewriters, building materials, and beauty soap. It was a novel and controversial career for a president’s wife. ER was criticized for commercializing her White House role and for meddling in public affairs best left to her husband. But ER was also praised for making thoughtful observations on world events, for helping unify the nation during the Depression and World War II, and for bringing Americans into more intimate contact with the White House and the presidential family.

In 1932, before FDR took office, ER declared that it was “impossible for husband and wife both to have political careers.”3 She denied having any particular political influence on the future president. But in ways both subtle and direct, ER’s radio programs and other media work did far more than reflect her personal views. She helped publicize FDR’s New Deal. She alerted the nation to the growing threat of world war. Once the fighting started, ER helped rally the home front. She battled her husband’s critics. At the same time, her radio work challenged conventional restrictions on women as broadcasters and as political professionals. “ER set a new pace, new goals, a new understanding of what was possible and acceptable for women to achieve,” historian Blanche Wiesen Cook writes.⁴ ER did so in a medium, radio, that historians have argued had an “incalculable impact” on American life and politics, but that scholars and intellectuals have tended to ignore.⁵

Radio was just one of the bully pulpits ER used to influence public opinion. Her column, “My Day,” was syndicated in ninety newspapers at its peak. She traveled extensively around the country and the world. Although these efforts have been widely noted by historians, far less has been said about ER at the radio microphone. In fact, few contemporary listeners have ever heard these programs.

ER was a first lady of firsts. She was the first president’s wife to fly in an airplane. She was the first to testify before Congress. She was the first to hold a government job, to address a national political convention. ER’s independence and determination—including her hours before the radio mike—fueled scalding criticism from those who deplored her views, disliked her voice, or thought a proper first lady should confine herself to managing domestic life in the White House. Toward the end of her first year as first lady, Time magazine suggested that ER was using the executive mansion “less as a home than as a base of operations.” It reported on her exhaustive daily schedule, her seemingly boundless energy, and “her countless crusades.”6 A writer for Good Housekeeping magazine said she initially thought ER’s commercial work “was not only bad judgment and bad taste but bad ethics as well.”⁷ Though the writer came to admire ER, the impulse was clear: first ladies, however accomplished, were expected to maintain a kind of dignified obscurity.

Today, it is unthinkable that a president’s spouse would host a commercially sponsored program on radio or television or an Internet website. As Cook points out, such an arrangement would be condemned as “an illegal or immoral conflict of interest” today.⁸ While it was controversial in Mrs. Roosevelt’s day too, she generally shrugged off the criticism. According to historian Maurine Beasley, ER was the first president’s wife to openly use the media for her own professional and political purposes. “Undaunted by the technology of modern communications, she became its master,” Beasley writes.⁹

ER liked being able to talk directly to Americans on such a vast, immediate scale. She also liked the money. In the 1930s, ER earned more from a single appearance on one of her radio programs than the average American worker made all year. An independent income allowed ER to support people and charities she cared about. During the Depression, she sent some of the money to struggling Americans who wrote to her for help. Much of her radio earnings went to the American Friends Service Committee to support Arthurdale, a New Deal project for displaced coal miners in West Virginia. The experiment in subsistence homesteading became a favorite of ER’s. It also mattered to ER that she have her own work with her own sphere of influence. In her broadcasts, speeches, and newspaper columns, ER would challenge conventional thinking about women and work. “Isn’t it a fact that women have always worked, often very hard?” ER asked an audience in 1936. “Did anyone make a fuss about it until they began to get paid for their work?”10

When a letter writer from Long Island complained to ER that, at $500 a minute, she was overpaid for her radio work, ER wrote back saying she agreed. “The reason they are willing to give me this money is, of course, because my husband is the president,” ER wrote. She was unapologetic: “It puts money in circulation, the money is spent for a good purpose, and these people could not otherwise be helped.”¹¹ ER’s fee put her among the highest-paid radio talent in the nation. But she didn’t offer to work for less.

In her twelve years as first lady, ER hosted eight commercially sponsored radio shows. While she occasionally used the White House radio studio created for FDR’s Fireside Chats to make noncommercial broadcasts, all the paid programs appear to have originated in network studios. Some programs were aimed specifically at women listeners, such as It’s a Woman’s World—a series of Friday-evening programs on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), sponsored by Selby Arch-Preserver Shoes. Topics included daily life at the White House and the rigors of official entertaining. In a 1937 NBC series sponsored by Pond’s, ER discussed slum housing, the problems of working women, and how to properly educate a daughter for the twentieth century. The longest-running series—and perhaps the most important one in ER’s White House years—was Over Our Coffee Cups. The twenty-eight weekly shows ran on Sunday evenings from September 1941 to April 1942. It was ER’s most overtly political radio series up to that time. She attacked FDR’s isolationist critics, deplored anti-Semitism, and called on Americans to defend the free-speech rights of those with whom they disagreed.

Intellectuals “smirked at what they considered trite comments” in ER’s radio programs and newspaper writing, according to Maurine Beasley, but the first lady’s ideas appealed to average Americans.12 In 1944, a writer for The American Mercury magazine tried to explain ER’s popularity to its readership of sophisticates. ER’s writing connected with common people, the magazine said, because “she expresses herself in the same sort of platitudes and clichés that they might use.”¹³ Blanche Wiesen Cook argues that “kernels of bold political truth” can be found “buried in boring fluff,” and that the importance of ER’s writings should not be trivialized. Her prose may have been plain, but the context of her message is what commands attention; no first lady had come remotely close to being the kind of public, political figure that Eleanor Roosevelt insisted on being.¹⁴

Radio listeners responded readily to ER’s broadcasts, flooding radio stations, network headquarters, and the White House with mail. In 1933 alone, ER received some 300,000 postcards and letters. Much of the mail praised her. Jessica Alexander of Staten Island wrote, “Your little ‘lecturettes’ are so well chosen and so beautifully delivered that at home we look forward to Friday nights with great anticipation.”¹⁵ From Ithaca, New York, Mary Resch wrote, “We feel that you possess the ability of reaching and interesting those in high places as well as those in more lowly walks of life—the plain people—of who I am one.”¹⁶ A Republican from Summit, New Jersey, said he had never voted for FDR and did not agree with his politics, but admired ER’s courage and her capacity to unite Americans, “regardless of race, creed, color or political affiliations.”¹⁷

Letter writers were also free with their criticism. A fourteen-year-old Texas girl complained, “When I read how you get $3,000 for each radio broadcast you make, I can’t help but think how unjust this world is. Here I sit, straining my ears to hear the sound of your voice with a little crystal set . . . Can’t you suggest a way that I can get a radio so I can hear the music and talks and news from outside my very small little world?”18 Pleas for money, help finding a job, or the gift of a radio were common themes of mail to ER (and to FDR, too) during the Depression. Mrs. E. L. Couture of Arlee, Montana, sent a typed postcard with this warning: “If your husband doesn’t muzzle you he will be impeached before the close of his first year in the White House.”¹⁹ Betty Jones of Mattoon, Illinois, chided ER for wanting “to be too much in the limelight” for a first lady.²⁰ J. Winter Davis of Toledo, Ohio, wrote sarcastically about what he described as ER’s snake-oil show of a radio program: “Now we have a blueblood society lady, born bred and reared in the purple, in a patronizing voice, giving us all kinds of advice. What an uplift this has been. The effect has been magical.” Davis was astonished and apparently chagrined when ER wrote back to him with a firm, courteous defense of her broadcasts. He quickly replied to express a newfound admiration for the first lady’s radio work: “I think it is fine, almost noble to do this, knowing as you stated that you would be the object of much criticism.”²¹

Most commercial radio programs in the 1930s and ’40s were produced by advertising agencies on behalf of the sponsors. Ad companies paid the radio network for air time and covered all the costs of production, including fees for the hosts, guests, and performers. Over the course of her career, ER employed several radio agents to make deals with the ad companies. Some of the biggest ad firms in New York signed her on, including J. Walter Thompson and Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne. ER’s 1932 broadcasts for Pond’s beauty cream were part of that company’s larger advertising campaign in which well-known society ladies endorsed the product. She never directly recommended a product or read commercial copy in any of the programs from her White House years. But it was certainly a coup for Pond’s to line up the president-elect’s wife for its Friday-night broadcasts. Radio Guide tittered that “plucked and unplucked eyebrows arched” at ER’s commercial broadcasts, and the $1,500 she was paid for each one—a salary that would be higher than the president’s if annualized.22 The Hartford Courant observed that Mrs. Roosevelt’s career would be of no public concern if being first lady were not a full-time job of its own. Furthermore, “the dignity of the president and of the country cannot but suffer when his name is used for commercial purposes.”²³

In 1940, the liberal columnist John T. Flynn suggested that the Roosevelts’ children had also enjoyed unusual success in the media based on their proximity to what he called “The White House, Inc.” James Roosevelt had a lucrative job in Hollywood. Elliott Roosevelt had both management and on-air jobs in radio. Daughter Anna Roosevelt Boettiger had dabbled in radio, appeared in newspaper ads, and wrote for a Hearst newspaper of which her husband was publisher. But Flynn complained that ER outpaced them all.²⁴

Conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler, initially an admirer of Eleanor Roosevelt, later became a relentless critic, not just of her but also of FDR and the New Deal. He was particularly scolding of how the Roosevelts “commercialized the presidency.”²⁵ He reminded his readers of a 1942 broadcast ER made after returning from a wartime visit to London. The program was sponsored by what, to Pegler, was a fishy-sounding group: the Council on Candy as a Food in the War Effort. The council was a public-relations scheme backed by American candy manufacturers. There was no attempt to obscure the connection between ER and the council; it printed up attractive brochures, under the council’s name, with the text of ER’s remarks and a picture of her before the microphone.

During her twelve years in the White House, ER appeared on the radio more frequently in an unpaid capacity than she did to earn a paycheck. She promoted civic organizations, government programs, or progressive politics in dozens of speeches that were broadcast live on local and national radio for causes ranging from polio research to civil rights for African Americans to the Girl Scouts. Over time, the American public grew accustomed to their unusually active first lady, and, increasingly, they respected her. One NBC-backed mail-in poll proclaimed ER “The Outstanding Woman of 1937.” 26 The next year, a Gallup poll found that 67 percent of Americans approved of her conduct, 33 percent disapproved—higher positive numbers than FDR’s. In a 1938 poll, Hearst newspaper critics named ER radio’s “outstanding non-professional.” She did not have a commercial program at the time.²⁷

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s tenure in the White House coincided both with the ascendancy of radio as a mass medium and the rise of American celebrity culture. Movie and radio stars filled popular new magazines. Crooners, vaudeville performers, comedians, and opera stars rode the radio waves. As the first couple of this emerging mass media, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt revolutionized how the nation related to its chief executive and family. It’s arguable, in fact, that they were the first modern couple to inhabit the White House—a couple in which each had his or her own career, political activities, controversies, and constituencies. Each was uniquely skilled in conveying the sense on radio that he or she was talking one-on-one with the audience. Americans responded to this new, conversational White House in kind. They swamped the residents of the executive mansion with an unprecedented tide of mail, much of it marked “personal.”

Earlier presidents had appeared on radio, but FDR is widely regarded as the first presidential candidate to truly master radio as a source of political advantage. And he set the standard for all to follow. FDR honed his radio voice as governor of New York from 1929 to 1933. To bypass the Republican-controlled legislature and the near monopoly by Republicans on state newspapers, FDR broadcast a series of informal-sounding monthly chats to the people of New York. ER said her husband came by his command of the microphone naturally. “His voice lent itself remarkably to the radio. It was a natural gift, for in his whole life he never had a lesson in diction or public speaking,” she wrote.28

The Roosevelts took to radio as the medium itself caught fire. The first commercially licensed radio station in the United States was KDKA in Pittsburgh. In 1920, it began broadcasting from the roof of the Westinghouse Electric factory, which owned the station and built radio receivers. Virtually no one owned a radio set, but on election night that year, KDKA broadcast news of Warren G. Harding’s victory in the presidential election, passing along returns phoned in from the local newspaper. Other broadcast stations soon popped up and radio became a consumer craze.

In the 1930s, radio became a vital tool of American politics and governance. Early adopters of the new technology included populist politicians Huey Long in Louisiana and Floyd B. Olson in Minnesota, as well as the incendiary radio priest Charles Coughlin and aviator Charles Lindbergh, whose widely broadcast speeches opposed American involvement in World War II. Some social commentators believed radio would unleash new democratic energies, creating a “national town meeting” on the air. A number of programs used the town meeting motif explicitly. Others, as scholar Jason Loviglio writes, feared “hypnotized audiences falling under the sway of irrational forces like fascism, communism, or even a corrupt and bankrupt capitalism.”²⁹

FDR’s administration understood and used the power of radio to sell the New Deal and, later, to mobilize Americans to oppose the Axis powers. The radio networks were willing accomplices. Radio came under increasing federal regulatory scrutiny in the 1930s; network executives curried favor with the FDR administration by providing free airtime for dozens of government-produced public-service programs that promoted New Deal initiatives. During World War II, the networks offered up choice slots in their schedules for war-bond rallies and home-front morale shows.

The early public discussion of radio’s influence on society and culture reads much like the initial promises and dangers seen in the twenty-first-century Internet revolution. Some predicted radio would be a powerful force for democratizing information and spreading knowledge to a vast population previously divided by geography or income. But the new technology also raised anxieties. Observers worried about the propriety and taste of the radio programs that would penetrate the sanctity of the home. In 1932, journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote a series of reports for the New York Times analyzing radio as a “great unknown force.”30 She observed that radio listening was a passive, vicarious experience with a “dazing, almost anesthetic effect upon the mind.” But McCormick also saw a new mass audience in the formation: “More inclusive, more rural, more domestic, whatever you think of its taste more broadly American.”³¹

Radio was the first truly mass medium, linking great cities and remote hamlets in the same instantaneous event. Some radio critics feared that if families stayed home with the wireless it would erode civic involvement and compete with traditional social gatherings. But others believed radio would draw Americans together as never before, creating the kind of informed, ideal republic imagined by the nation’s founding generation. Historian Susan Douglas notes that Americans have repeatedly expected new technologies—the telephone, the television, the Internet—to solve society’s problems.

With all the breathless predictions today about how the Internet will democratize communication and flatten hierarchies among Americans, to bring about a new republic in cyberspace, we should remember that radio . . . was going to provide culture and education to the masses, eliminate politicians’ ability to incite passions in a mob, bring people closer to government proceedings, and produce a national culture that would transcend regional and local jealousies.32

Radio both changed and reflected America’s social conventions. For example, early radio executives had mixed feelings about women in broadcasting. Surveys showed that women listeners did the majority of the family shopping, so they were an audience that local stations and national networks naturally hoped to reel in. Collier’s magazine noted in 1932 that “practically every sizable advertising agency now has a specialized radio staff” that included women.³³ On the air, women were generally assigned to homemaking shows, soap operas, or musical performances. There were exceptions, such as national talk-show host Mary Margaret McBride or news commentator Dorothy Thompson. But radio experts claimed that listeners of both sexes preferred male voices “for material of a matter-of-fact variety—for news and weather reports, political speeches and lectures.”³⁴ Broadcast managers—most of whom were men—believed that “women do not like to be convinced by other women in discussions of politics and similar momentous matters.”³⁵ Radio technicians maintained that early microphones and radio transmission equipment responded poorly to higher-pitched female voices. Given these assumptions, Eleanor Roosevelt’s radio role as both a public figure and a news commentator was unusual.

This anthology represents the first collection of Eleanor Roosevelt’s broadcasts to be published. Unfortunately, only a fraction of Eleanor Roosevelt’s radio broadcasts survive in audio recordings. In the early years of radio, live programs could be recorded onto a flat transcription disk, the grandmother of the record LP. If recordings were made—especially of ER’s first commercial programs—the disks may not have survived. Archival copies of many live programs were never made. As the technology improved, transcription recordings became more routine at the radio networks. NBC created a division to record programs in 1935. CBS followed suit several years later.

Many of the scripts for Eleanor Roosevelt’s radio broadcasts are archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York. But the paper record is far from complete. When giving a public address before a crowd or group, ER frequently spoke from brief notes or completely extemporaneously. If the speech was being broadcast nationally—as many of hers were—it is often the case that no transcript was produced, or at least did not survive. ER’s commercial programs were all scripted in advance. Most of these are preserved at the FDR library. Many scripts are clearly the copies that ER used on the air. Like any radio professional, she often made last-minute word changes by hand. Hers is a distinctive and sometimes hard-to-decipher scrawl.

Piecing together a complete and authoritative list of ER’s radio appearances may be impossible. She was on the radio so frequently—often as a guest on local and national programs hosted by others—that no central count appears to have been made; references to her radio broadcasts keep popping up in local newspapers and other sources.

It was sometimes a challenge for ER to fit the radio broadcasts into her crowded daily schedule. She traveled the country tirelessly, both for her own purposes and to report back to FDR on real-world social conditions during depression and war. ER’s radio contracts stipulated that her broadcasts might originate from the nearest radio station as well as network studios in New York or Washington. In July 1934, ER broadcast the first of her Selby Shoe programs from Chicago, after a busy day at the Chicago Century of Progress International Exposition. In June 1937, she left the receiving line at the Delaware wedding of her son, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., just long enough to make a broadcast for Pond’s and slip back to the festivities.

Unlike her husband, Eleanor Roosevelt was not considered a radio natural, at least not at first. Variety panned her initial series of commercial broadcasts as “social register ballyhoo.” It said ER “speaks rather banally and abstractly—and is perhaps not the best mike voice.”36 In 1935, Radio Guide said “her work before the microphone left much to be desired.”³⁷ Her voice, initially, was criticized for being too high-key. So she hired a voice coach and practiced. In 1940, Movie and Radio Guide ranked ER number two of radio orators; FDR was number one. By 1945, ER was praised in the New York Times as a model speaker, with a “kindly” voice and “smooth delivery.”³⁸

ER churned out a lot of words: a daily newspaper column, dozens of radio scripts, thousands of letters, speeches, lectures, essays and magazine articles, and twenty-seven books. Occasionally an advertising agency or one of the organizations she was representing would offer a draft script for her to consider. ER always insisted, however, that she was the final author of all the material connected to her name. In much of her day-to-day writing, ER appeared to spend little time on close revision. She often dictated pieces to her secretary, Malvina Thompson. In many of the radio scripts, whole sections were crossed out, a common practice to shorten the program after rehearsal so it would fit the allotted time.

By contrast, FDR and his speechwriters might labor over one of his Fireside Chats through many drafts. FDR aide and speechwriter Samuel Rosenman remembered: “The preparation of some of the speeches or messages took as many as ten days, and very few took less than three.”³⁹ FDR also conserved his use of the chats for times of crisis or political urgency. Many average citizens wrote to him asking that he appear more often on the radio, even weekly. But Roosevelt held back. While he appeared hundreds of times on radio, it was most often while at some kind of event, such as dedicating a bridge, addressing the Boy Scouts, or campaigning for office. The Fireside Chats were different. FDR spoke slowly and directly to the American people. The nation responded by supporting his policies and electing him four times.40

On more than a dozen occasions, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt appeared on the radio on the same day, often broadcasting from different cities. They rarely appeared together on the same radio programs, and these broadcasts were generally from such public events as the laying of a cornerstone for a building. It seems they never reached into American homes, as a pair, in the kind of intimate broadcast they both specialized in separately; ER never sat down with FDR by the radio fireside.

It is unclear how closely FDR or his administration paid attention to ER’s radio work. Some of his aides and cabinet members worried about potential political fallout when ER addressed racial prejudice or other controversial topics. In an autobiography published after FDR’s death, ER said, “He never asked me to refrain from speaking my own mind.”⁴¹ But in 1936, the New Yorker reported that FDR either instructed or asked ER to decline a series of thirteen commercial broadcasts. “He has put his foot down several other times, too. We don’t know what the objections have been,” the article said.⁴² It was an election year in 1936, and ER kept a markedly low radio profile. She did no commercial broadcasting that year, and made far fewer unpaid radio appearances than in other years.

In 1939, columnist Arthur Krock discerned an increasing level of coordination between FDR’s political agenda and ER’s statements and writings. They were clearly a “political team,” he wrote.⁴³ Blanche Wiesen Cook points out that while FDR rarely acknowledged ER’s influence, he encouraged her to engage in the public debate on issues. Cook writes: “She served as a sounding board and a front runner. He knew he could restrain her, but he rarely tried.”⁴⁴ Samuel Rosenman said ER would often read a draft of the president’s speeches, and was “very helpful” on scripts related to youth, education, or consumer interests.45 Joseph Loviglio contends that FDR’s radio speeches tended to emphasize national unity, while ER’s radio talks emphasized diversity and respect for social, cultural, and gender differences. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin observes that the Roosevelts were extraordinary political allies, and that they relied on each other to achieve their separate, sometimes parallel, goals. Goodwin writes, “She was the agitator, he was the politician.”⁴⁶

FDR died on April 12, 1945, just a few months into his fourth term as president. When her coffee-sponsored program ended in 1942, ER had ceased doing commercial radio broadcasts for the duration of the war. But during wartime she appeared frequently on radio to promote the Allied effort. Less than a month after FDR’s death, on May 8, 1945, ER made a brief broadcast to mark V-E Day. In the following months and years, ER would be deeply involved in building public support for the United Nations. In December 1945, US President Harry S. Truman appointed ER as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly. She played a central role in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Historian Allida Black observes that once ER was “freed from the constraints of the White House,” she challenged American liberals to fight harder for civil rights, civil liberties, and world cooperation.⁴⁷

Three years after the death of her husband, ER resumed her commercial broadcasting work. In 1948–49, she appeared on a daily American Broadcasting Company (ABC) radio program with her daughter, Anna Roosevelt. It was called The Eleanor and Anna Roosevelt Show. Anna hosted while her mother checked in from various parts of the country and the world. Topics ranged from homey subjects to international relations. In 1950, ER teamed up with her son Elliott for a daily, forty-five-minute program on NBC. The 12:30 p.m. slot became available when veteran daytime broadcaster Mary Margaret McBride switched from NBC to ABC. It was a peculiar rivalry—if it even was a contest—because ER and McBride were old friends and even appeared on each other’s programs. In the course of 233 broadcasts, Eleanor and Elliott Roosevelt interviewed a wide range of notables, from the colorful actress Tallulah Bankhead to author John Steinbeck to D-Day hero Gen. Omar Bradley. Critics praised Mrs. Roosevelt’s performance but lamented her son’s sometimes crass readings of commercial announcements that linked ER with the product being pitched.

Like many other radio veterans, ER made early forays into television. She both hosted and appeared on current-events programs. But radio was a more familiar and natural fit. The intimacy and reach of network radio helped ER humanize and expand the conventional dimensions of the first lady’s role. Many people hated her and her husband. But millions of Americans came to regard Eleanor Roosevelt as a frequent and welcome guest in their homes, sitting down next to the radio as if they were sitting next to her. In 1940, one of those listeners was Rosa Allen in Long Beach, California. Allen wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, “No other First Lady of the Land has ever thought [to] give quite so much attention to the people at large, and I want to assure you that this has brought you very near the hearts of most of us.”48 In 1934, Marie Hurley wrote to say that, as a “shut-in at the age of 84,” she was blessed to be able to hear the voice of “the most remarkable woman, who has to my knowledge, ever occupied the White House.”⁴⁹