Roosevelt at the magazine and chose the questions for her to answer, about ten each month. The topics were again a mix of the personal and the political. It replaced an earlier, failed weekly column that focused strictly on White House entertaining.
The subject of each day was usually a reflection of an issue, individual, incident or event she had encountered or engaged in, giving the worlds a genuine first-person account of life near the presidency. Written in simple, almost bland language, the column helped to craft her image as an accessible average American wife and mother — despite the reality that she was hardly that.
Initially, many of the columns were light in nature, giving the public a glimpse at the amusing and poignant anecdotes entailed in her daily life as the wife of the president and mother of his children. In short time, however, she used the column to touch on larger public issues, controversies in which she was involved — and even to provoke public debate.
Although she claimed in that the President never interfered in the content of her columns, she did later write that he often shared Administration ideas or reports, or other information with the intention of her presenting it casually in the column to gauge public reaction. The column was a useful public relations tool for the Administration as well, for she could provide a seemingly spontaneous glimpse into his work or reactions to legislation in a way that shaped a long-range plan.
She found it relatively easy to do, usually occupying about a half an hour each day. After the White House, she continued the column but the contents became more partisan as she voiced stronger opinions on global issues and Democratic Party politics. On many occasions, Eleanor Roosevelt found that a subject she felt required closer consideration was best served by her writing about it in a lengthy magazine article.
She had no one exclusive contract with a publication, giving her the freedom to choose specialized venues to reach target audiences. Eleanor Roosevelt had nearly a decade of experience as a radio commentator by the time she became First Lady. In she signed with NBC Radio to carry her radio shows with various commercial sponsors.
In the number and length of the broadcasts were increased to twenty-six fifteen-minute broadcasts. The lengthiest and most famous of her series, however, took place on Sunday nights spanning seven months from to The Pan-American Coffee Bureau that represented a consortium of eight Latin American coffee-producing nations sponsored these. During her tenure as First Lady, it is estimated that she gave about 1, speeches, whether it was to an organization involved in social issues important to her agenda as a presidential spouse or a paid lecture.
She wrote all of them herself, although it was usually a mere outline rather than a prepared text from which she spoke. On occasion, she relied on experts in or out of the federal government to provide specifics or statistics to bolster the case she might be making in the speech.
Initially, her presentations seemed to lack impact not only due to the rambling nature of her remarks, but the sound of her voice. Somewhat strident and high-pitched, with a distinctly elite-class accent, she eventually learned to become a relaxed public speaker and to then hone her message and modulate her voice, taking lessons with vocal coach Elizabeth von Hesse.
In , she contracted with the W. Colston Leigh Bureau of Lectures and Entertainments to do two annual lecture circuit tours a year. Her audiences were usually large organizations, sometimes as numerous as 15, people in attendance.
Although Rose Cleveland was the first First Lady to publish a book during her incumbency, none have published more books while serving in that role than did Eleanor Roosevelt. This Troubled World and The Moral Basis of Democracy took the same technique but applied it to war-preparedness. Her second work of fiction took on a poignant currency. The book with which she was most widely associated during her tenure as First Lady was This Is My Story , the first of what would be her three-volume autobiography, providing a somewhat abstracted version of her lonely childhood and difficult early married years, taking her story up to , as FDR struggled to overcome his polio.
She permitted all of her public appearances and events to be filmed by newsreel companies, whether or not it was at the White House. Apart from those of her public speeches that were filmed for newsreels, Mrs.
Roosevelt did not merely appear in the brief films shown in movie theaters but often spoke, delivering some type of public service message. These meetings of celebrities from the world of entertainment and politics not only drew guests to the January events, but were also filmed for newsreels that were shown in theaters across the country, after which theater attendants would pass collection jars for donations from movie patrons.
She continued to appear with movie stars in later years on behalf of war-related causes and became comfortable with humorously trading in what had become established as her popular persona. In one motion picture short shown throughout the country, for example, she promoted a charity by attempting to purchase a 25 cent raffle ticket with a dollar bill from comedienne Jack Benny, famous for his parsimony.
As First Lady, Mrs. With her Ladies Home Companion column, beginning in August of , she actually encouraged the citizenry to write her directly. Shortly into her tenure as First Lady, she found her office had become something of a clearinghouse for the most desperate individuals and families left homeless, jobless or hungry as a result of the Great Depression. As many of the New Deal emergency relief agencies were still being established, she took it upon herself to have the individual letters referred to existing federal agencies that might be of direct assistance, charitable organizations or even wealthy private individuals whom she knew might be able to help.
She was not able to respond by handwritten letter or even signed typed letter to all of these requests for aid, but she did do so in a surprising large number of cases. Having discovered that form letters used by her predecessors dated back to Frances Cleveland and offered little support or hope, she established a new system for herself in which every individual received an effective response.
In many instances this meant that Eleanor Roosevelt engaged in direct and ongoing written contact with various federal department agency heads to continue efforts to eradicate or respond to problems in their domain. In the first year of the first FDR term, she received , letters, in the first year of the second term, it dipped to 90, and in the first election year of the third term, it again rose, to , As the US entered World War II, a greater percentage of her public correspondence came from US servicemen and their families, often reporting sub-standard conditions or illegal practices which official War and Navy Department reports might otherwise neglect to address.
Omnipresent in American life for a full one-dozen years at a time conjunctive with strides in communication technologies, Eleanor Roosevelt became the first First Lady to widely enter the general popular culture, a caricatured image affixed as much to the political as well as entertainment landscape of her eras. Usually with affection, but sometimes with scorn, her physical presence, with an emphasis on the protrusion of her upper teeth and flying fur-piece at her neck, made her a frequent target of highly political cartoons in daily newspapers.
She was easily skewered for her own policy views or statements, but criticism aimed at her was often a displaced attack on the President. I breakfasted in Idaho and lunched in Indiana! I opened up a Turkish bath in Helena, Montana! I launched a lovely ferris wheel, then dined in Louisiana! As President, Franklin Roosevelt initiated an extensive network of social and economic reform programs, intended to provide an immediate federal government response to the devastation the Great Depression had wreaked on the lives of a majority of Americans.
Several general constituencies found themselves the focus of these reforms, including the business and manufacturing, housing, farming, labor unions. While Eleanor Roosevelt took an active interest and was well versed in the nuances of all these elements, her focus was based on her experiences in the reform movement. Her efforts can be largely seen as focusing on providing immediate aid and relief to citizens who were homeless, hungry and unemployed.
Besides specific programs she fostered, promoted or became involved in behind the scenes, Eleanor Roosevelt maintained her general interest in all of the New Deal by serving as a liaison between the citizens who needed help and the best programs to answer their needs.
Those whom she most often sought to ensure equal and fair treatment on behalf of were women, African-Americans, youth, and coal miners.
Finally, Eleanor Roosevelt did not believe that government intervention was the sole means to alleviate the affects of the Depression and she supported numerous private charities, though she worked primarily with and donated her own private funds to the American Friends Service Committee.
In this November newsreel, among the first filmed of her speaking as First Lady, Mrs. As part of this general role, she undertook frequent trips around the United States, to even the most remote regions, where she came to inspect various New Deal programs — usually without announcement so program directors could not suddenly disguise problems.
Sometimes the issues she felt needed addressing, change or improvement hinged on small matters; other times, she detected a consensus among the recipients of the programs. Upon returning to Washington, she made either written or verbal reports to the President, his staff and department heads for the problems to be addressed.
She drove her car, took the trains and flew by airplane to do this. The First Lady often travelled alone, refusing to be trailed by Secret Service agents. The agency acquiesced only after she had demonstrated ability for self-protection with a gun they insisted she carry. She agreed to this, but never felt the need to use it. While she made many of her day trips to New York City from Washington and cities in between by either automobile or train, she just as frequently hopped on a plane to make the short flight.
Almost exclusively, however, she used air flight to make her far-flung trips across the entire nation, making many coast-to-coast trips by plane. Later, in , the First Lady provided a statement of endorsement of air travel, and posed for a photograph that appeared in national magazines; paid for appearing in the print advertisement, she donated her earnings to charity.
Flying also led her to create a strong friendship with the legendary female aviator Amelia Earhart. After a famous dinner at the White House, Earhart took the First Lady for a flight to Baltimore and coaxed her into briefly taking over control of the vehicle.
When Mrs. Roosevelt later flew to address the National Democratic Convention, she wrote of her excitement at being able to take longer control of plane. Among a network of women who had mostly been professional educators, journalists, attorneys, and union leaders in the reform movement during her previous years in New York or who had worked in the Democratic Party at the national or New York state level, Eleanor Roosevelt was the central figure.
The First Lady was successful in changing both the Civil Works Administration and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to expand to include divisions that dealt specifically with the problems faced by unemployed women. Further, she suggested the individuals who would be appointed to lead the bureaus. Similarly, when she learned that the Civilian Conservation Corps, which provided forestry work to young people, was available only to men, she successfully pressed for the same program for young women.
It was not just as recipients of federal government programs or as employees of the federal government that Eleanor Roosevelt carried her advocacy. She consistently addressed gender inequity in American life wherever she saw it. She believed women should be given universal military training and even that housewives should be allowed to work only regular hours and be salaried for it.
Far more than her husband, she believed the U. The larger white population at that time as nothing short of radical viewed this, yet it never persuaded her to restrain her words and deeds. Often it was a singular, unambiguous action intended as a symbol that prompted a public facing of the issue. Invited to the African-American Howard University, for example, she wanted herself photographed as two uniformed male honor guards escorted her in.
The picture was widely printed, often used to prompt angry racist attacks on her. No one single act as First Lady, however, more dramatically illustrated her belief than her much publicized February 26, resignation from the Daughters of the American Revolution when that organization adhered to local racial restrictions and refused to rent its Constitution Hall for a concert by opera singer Marian Anderson. While she was not responsible for, nor attended the ensuing public concert by Anderson on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial two months later, she strongly supported it.
Privately, the First Lady reflected that when she had come to the point of no longer thinking about greeting her friend Mrs. Bethune with a peck on the cheek, as she did with her white friends, she had come to outgrow her own early prejudices. She also sought support for the bill elsewhere, such as the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching.
The First Lady also became the first white resident of Washington, D. In , she attended and addressed the annual conventions of both organizations. She worked in tandem with these organizations and also on individual efforts. Within the New Deal programs of the federal government, she made efforts to forge more racial equity.
She pushed for those administering the Agricultural Adjustment Act to acknowledge how white landowners regularly discriminated against African-Americans and similarly pressured the Resettlement Administration to do so on behalf of black sharecroppers. She sought to make certain that African-Americans were paid the same wage within the ranks of administrative workers in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration.
By seeking to ensure that African-Americans were beneficiaries of New Deal programs, and cultivating prominent political figures within the community, Eleanor Roosevelt — and through her, FDR, were key factors in the historic shift of African-American support from the Republican Party and their legacy from Lincoln to the Democratic Party.
The NYA gave out grants to college students who agreed to work part-time, thus giving them some income without having to drop out of school; it also provided job training to those not in school. In her book This I Remember , Eleanor Roosevelt acknowledged her role in helping to create the National Youth Administration, which FDR established on June 26, "One of the ideas I agreed to present to Franklin was that of setting up a national youth administration It was one of the occasions on which I was very proud that the right thing was done regardless of political consequences.
The division provided unemployed young people with apprenticeships, vocational training and work projects. She toured several dozen of the sites around the nation, and behind the scenes frequently evaluated the success and failures of the program with its officials, attended its regional conferences with state directors and served as a direct liaison to the President.
Eleanor Roosevelt was inspired by the call to social justice and world peace advocated by the American Student Union, which was composed of college student activists. When they sought her support for the American Youth Act, to mandate federal aid to all American young people who lived in need, she refused, feeling it was expensive and unrealistic.
Nonetheless, she took a front-row seat during House Un-American Activities Committee hearings when they grilled ASU leader Joseph Lash she had befriended, and later defended their initial good intentions.
Under the direction of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, a tape-recording was made of the First Lady and the student leader Lash visiting in a hotel room, unknown to them; some suggested it indicated a physical relationship but there is no evidence of this. Once FDR discovered this, he was enraged and ordered all transcripts and tapes destroyed.
While Hoover seemingly followed the order, he continued to use espionage to track the activities of the First Lady through her White House tenure and beyond, believing that she was aligned, unwittingly or not, with subversive organizations that threatened the stability of the U. She had been an avid supporter of the initial effort to bring these professions under eligibility of the Works Progress Administration and successfully lobbied the President to this end; he signed the legislation on June 25, She publicly opposed a Congressional funding decrease to the programs, and the closing of the theater program.
Administered by the Department of Interior, it helped resettle communities where a workforce in a predominant occupation had been devastated by the economic turndown. The urge to provide a viable life and relief to the coal-mining families there led to her unofficially directing what would become the first of the New Deal resettlement projects, located some thirty miles away, in Arthurdale.
Witnessing the efforts of the private charity group, the American Friends Service Committee to provide self-help programs there, she discussed the effort with the President and he had it established as a federal project.
Feeling a sense of personal responsibility to help the impoverished coal-mining families as soon as possible, the First Lady used her clout to have Arthurdale functioning as quickly as possible. Within months some fifty prefabricated houses were bought and delivered to the site — only to find they did not fit the foundations.
At great expense, an architect was hired to adapt the houses. Co-operative farming, crafts production, and other small industry were established, though proved less lucrative than hoped. While able to lure General Electric to establish a vacuum cleaner assembly plant there, it did not succeed.
More successfully she sought private donations from wealthy Americans to establish a hospital and clinic, including the young tobacco heiress Doris Duke after she made a visit with the First Lady to Arthurdale, as seen in this newsreel:.
Critics in Congress managed to defeat a Public Works Administration allocation for a post office equipment factory. She was unable to convince administrators to include African-Americans in the new community. Although it provided quality housing, it was not until defense industry was established there, during the war-preparedness era that the unemployment problems become alleviated.
She nevertheless remained committed to the community, particularly the school system that she helped establish through private donations. She further visited other federal homesteads, illustrating her belief in their essential soundness as a method of helping people helping themselves. Eleanor Roosevelt was a strong supporter of labor unions, though she refused to be seen as a foe of industry. Instead, she sought to encourage mediation over striking.
As a working newspaper columnist, Eleanor Roosevelt joined the American Newspaper Guild, the first known First Lady to join a labor union. She would be elected, on a write-in vote, as a delegate to the local Industrial Union Council but with the charge that communist interests dominated the organization, she declined and privately urged the guild to disassociate with the council.
Initially, she felt that the task of shaking hands and hosting tea parties as her Social Secretary Edith Helm had urged her to do. In short order, however, she came to respect the value which the public placed on her as a living symbol, along with the often lifetime impression of being received in the White House. Despite her omnipresence in national life as an overtly political figure, she also hosted the annual Easter Egg Roll, dressed formally to welcome guests at state dinners and receptions, toured visitors through the historic rooms of the old mansion, posed for charitable fundraising campaigns, christened ships and planes, opened bazaars and attended luncheons.
She also often greeted guests herself at the White House north portico entrance door, whether they were there for a social call or business meeting.
As First Lady, she also chose forms of entertainment at receptions, dinners and other social events which reflected more fully the spectrum of the diverse American popular culture - such as her famously serving hot dogs to the King and Queen of England, and inviting modern dance choreographer Martha Graham to have her troupe perform in the White House.
As a housekeeper, she once recalled having dusty draperies pointed out to her, but felt that there were more pressing matters competing for her time than refurbishing the house. She did take particular pride in her renovation of one room in the mansion, a third floor sitting room which she outfitted with furniture made by the Val-Kill factory which she had founded and managed.
Her interest in the quality of food served in the house was also limited, her husband famously complaining about the blandness of meals served to even him. While she may be among the few First Ladies who regularly cooked - she ritualistically liked to make a large chafing dish of scrambled eggs on Sundays, it was as a sociable venue for her meetings and conferences on serious matters.
As for her personal appearance, she was as comfortable appearing in public wearing a hairnet and riding pants as she was in new and expensive gowns on state occasions. While she sometimes ordered a dress she liked to be made for her in several different colors to spare her what she considered a waste of valuable time trying on clothing, she was also voted among the best-dressed women at different points during her White House tenure and took pride in this.
She also accepted clothes at reduced rates in trade for permitting the stores to advertise her patronage by printing pictures of her in their items. While she might be said to have exemplified her own unique style with signature items such as her veiled and flowered hats and fur-collar neckpieces, she was following popular looks of her era, rather than seeking to popularize her own fashions for others. Although Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt maintained increasingly separate orbits of activities and friendships as the Roosevelt Administration would proceed, they remained mutually committed to each other as partners with a loving past, and continued to share the same general values in terms of how to best get the nation through the Great Depression and then World War II.
They continually maintained a dialogue on immediate and long-term domestic and international crises. After nearly all of her fact-finding missions across the country, she reported all the important details she knew would either interest him or provide insight into the mood of an individual or demographic she had met with, often providing her own analysis of their remarks or reactions.
Despite their largely separate travels, Eleanor Roosevelt did travel both domestically and outside of the nation, with the President, a fact often overlooked. This included tour of national parks in and and a state visit to Mexico, in She especially relished the western national parks trips where she had the chance to engage with Native Americans still living in some regions without being under the observation of large crowds.
Roosevelt would always diminish what she claimed was her influence on the President. It may have been true that she had no greater power to change his mind or sway his intentions than any others in his circle of advisers. As his wife, however, Eleanor Roosevelt could always gain access to, and make her case to him about matters she believed were of great importance. When, on many occasions, she seemed to visibly irritate him by raising serious issues and others sought to prevent her from upsetting him, she would still compose a memo or note to him that he would give attention and ultimately address.
In fact, even when she was reporting to him on an unpleasant reaction to one of his programs or statements or disclosing the disappointing truth of reality, he never took her findings or assessments for granted. While her focus remained largely on policy-related matters, others found that the First Lady had an excellent instinct for political matters.
She famously composed a detailed memo reviewing every potential issue that could arise as a threat to his successful winning a second term and his response to each matter she pointed out required twenty pages. Their family life was also of obvious mutual interests. Despite the numerous marriages and divorces of her four adult sons and one daughter, the First Lady never permitted her disappointments in their personal lives change her strong commitment to their well-being, making arrangements to see them all, even if it meant extensive travel to do so.
When the Roosevelts moved into the White House in , Anna Dall was going through a divorce and came to live there with her two young children. Both of them would later be romantically linked to the First Lady. In the case of Lorena Hickock, there is an extensive archive of personal letters between the two women that does indicate an intense emotional relationship at the least.
For periods during the first two Roosevelt terms, Hickok lived at the White House. Initially, Eleanor Roosevelt opposed FDR running for an unprecedented third presidential term in , but recognized the need for his leadership, as the nation appeared to likely join its allies in the growing global war with Germany and its allies.
To calm the growing discontent and call for party unity, the President called on his wife — who was then relaxing at their Hyde Park estate. Within hours, she managed to get a plane to fly her to Chicago, where she was driven directly to the convention hall.
She then addressed the delegates, becoming the first First Lady to do so. Anger about FDR breaking with history by seeking a third term also led to renewed attacks on the First Lady for her activism.
Although President Roosevelt began to shift his focus from the economic New Deal measures to getting the United States prepared for probably entry into the growing European war as an ally with the British, Eleanor Roosevelt did not lose sight of efforts she began in the early years of the Administration.
She remained committed to the principals of the New Deal. Notably, this included her interest in living conditions of Washington, D. She had first been introduced to the alley-dwellings of the capital city where many impoverished families had made their homes when she had first come to Washington in , and trailed First Lady Ellen Wilson in her efforts to clear the city of the sub-standard housing. Eleanor Roosevelt as First Lady managed to see the effort resumed to some degree, but its completion was abruptly ended with the onset of World War II.
Her interest extended to social institutions, which then came under the jurisdiction of the federal government since the U. Among the places she visited, Mrs. Roosevelt made inspection tours of a home for indigent elderly residents and a school and child care center.
She determined to have the deplorable and embarrassing conditions made public, to prompt necessary federal aid, leading her to become the first First Lady to testify before Congress on February 9, Here is some of her historical testimony:.
Increasingly, the First Lady received letters from around the world seeking her help in finding relatives dislocated by the war.
She also participated in publicity for Bundles for Britain and the British War Relief Society, charity organizations that provided clothing in the war-torn nation. She conducted her work both within the federal government, as well as with private organizations like the Emergency Rescue Committee and the U. Committee for the Care of European Children.
Forced to help refugees immigrate to the U. Despite lobbying Congress, she also failed to help push through the Child Refugee Bill that intended to permit 10, more children a year over an existing quota from Germany.
Link to Publisher's Website. A Spiritual Biography. Harold Ivan Smith. Louisville, KY:. Westminster John Knox Press. ISBN For other formats: Link to Publisher's Website. About the Reviewer s : Trena Trowbridge is an independent scholar. Eleanor was a faithful, cradle member of the Episcopal Church; Franklin was nominal.
Before polio, Sundays in good weather were much too valuable to be spent in church. Eleanor took great grief from her children for insisting they go to church when their father did not go! Eleanor had something of an encyclopedic memory of the New Testament—large portions of which she had memorized in French her first language. She particularly cherished the Eucharist because she felt that when she knelt at the altar she was not Mrs. Roosevelt, first lady, or UN delegate, but just another Christian.
Finally, Eleanor was very public about her faith. On issues of immigrants and refugees, Eleanor treasured the birth narrative of Jesus — that he was born to poor parents and was an immigrant — an immigrant whose life was threatened. Her service at the United Nations stretched her understanding of other faiths. Early she predicted that the United States would have to engage and understand the Muslim faith.
Her spirituality drove her conviction in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that everyone had a right to worship their own way and had the right to change their religious beliefs, affiliations and practices.
The launching of the United Nations was a complicated process, beginning with the organizing meeting in San Francisco, which erupted in tension between the Americans and the Russians. In thinking about the composition of a delegation, Truman selected diplomatic heavyweights.
And he chose Mrs. Of course, others interpret the data to suggest that Truman was getting Eleanor out of the country and out of his hair.
Initially, Eleanor was dumbfounded, retorting that she knew nothing about international law and had an estate to settle given FDR, a most complicated estate.
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