Women: She Was Eleanor

In 1933 The New Yorker carried a memorable cartoon showing two coal miners looking up goggle-eyed, and one exclaiming: “For gosh sakes. here comes Mrs. Roosevelt.” It was hilarious if only because it was so true: soon afterward Eleanor Roosevelt indeed descended into a coal mine. In those days she had not yet become controversial: to her critics she was a gadabout and do-gooder, to her admirers she was a dedicated friend of the oppressed, and to everyone, she was a marvel of omnipresent vitality. Later she aroused stronger passions; she was both hated and loved. But she outlived most of the controversy and became the world’s most admired and most talked-about woman. To the world, she was Eleanor.

As Eleanor, she wrote her own legend. She often mentioned her ugly-duckling childhood. She sadly recalled how she was ruled by a domineering mother-in-law. She constantly spoke of her innate shyness. She presented an image of sweet uncomplicated Eleanor, who occasionally oversimplified quite complicated issues, but whose heart was as big as all humanity. She never wrote “I think . . .”; she always wrote “I feel . . .” But in nurturing this legend, Eleanor Roosevelt did herself an injustice. She did feel—but she also thought. And she had one of the sharpest intellects that the U.S. has known. Did she know what she wanted? She never said so in so many words, but all of her strivings and all of her little lectures and admonitions would add up to a U.S. in which all were equal, but the rules should be changed to give unequal favor to the ones left behind. Although she never lived to see it, she was until the day of her death the most effective advocate of welfare-state equalitarianism.

Eleanor cared nothing about female fashion or protocol. She could happily journey off to England for a visit with King George and Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mother Mary, and the Winston Churchills carrying just one evening dress, two day dresses, one suit and a few blouses. She could delightedly entertain the King and Queen at Hyde Park with a hot dog and mustard picnic—that was real Americanism. She knew she was homely, so she scorned lipstick and powder, always considered comb and hairbrush sufficient.

Girlhood Granny. Yet, simple as she tried to portray herself, she was a complicated woman with an agonizingly complex background. Her mother, Mrs. Anna Hall Roosevelt, was a beautiful lady with little capacity for motherhood. Eleanor remembered standing in the parlor doorway at home as a child, “often with my finger in my mouth.” and hearing her mother tell visitors: “She is such a funny child, so old-fashioned that we always call her Granny.” Recalled Eleanor, “I wanted to sink through the floor in shame.”

She rejected her past—because it was filled with tragedy. Her mother died of diphtheria when she was eight. She had a deep love for her father Elliott, a jolly man, a big-game hunter and a younger brother of Teddy Roosevelt. He called her “Little Nell.” But he died, with alcoholism as a contributing cause, when she was nine. Eleanor went to live with her maternal grandmother, Mrs. Valentine Hall, a stern disciplinarian. She was horribly unhappy until she went off to a French finishing school in England. There she came to recognize her own mental powers. “More and more,” she recalled, “I used the quickness of my mind to pick the minds of other people and use their knowledge as my own.”

Tears & Fears. Yet even after marrying her fifth cousin once removed, handsome Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor had little confidence in herself, often broke into tears for no clear reason. She was afraid of the nurses who took care of the six children who arrived in ten years, resented her mother-in-law’s attempts to dominate her husband. “I do so want you to learn to love me at least a little,” she once wrote Mrs. Sara Delano Roosevelt, who had opposed the marriage. She concentrated on her growing family, took little interest in her husband’s election as a New York state senator, was only dutifully involved in his service as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President Wilson. “I was always a part of the public aspect of our lives, still I felt detached and objective, as though I were looking at someone else’s life.”

It took more sorrow to make Eleanor become Eleanor. In 1921 Franklin was stricken with paralytic polio. She nursed her husband, fought off his mother’s inclination to keep him an invalid at the family home in Hyde Park. She also encouraged Franklin to seek the governorship of New York, which he won in 1928. She was less than enthusiastic about his pushing on to the presidency, but once he decided to run, she worked hard.

“Such Little Things.” In the White House, Eleanor Roosevelt, still protesting that she was basically shy, blossomed into the most assertive First Lady in U.S. history. She began writing a daily newspaper column, “My Day,” which was carried by as many as 90 newspapers. She was far more New Dealish than F.D.R. ever thought of being. But he knew better than to try to censor her. Once, when she asked his advice about a column, he replied: “Lady, this is a free country.” Her own attitude about her varied activities was that ”I always felt that if Franklin’s re-election depended upon such little things that I or any member of the family did, he could not be doing the job the people in the country wanted him to do.”

She quit the Daughters of the American Revolution when the organization refused to let Negro Singer Marian Anderson use its Washington hall. Her constant fight for racial equality made her beloved by Negroes and hated by many Southerners, who took their revenge in what became known as Eleanor stories. She urged TVA-like projects for the Missouri and Mississippi River valleys. She sought wages-and-hours legislation for farm hands and household servants, and in days when such things seemed to matter less, lent her prestigious name, sometimes indiscriminately, to many causes.

Four Words. All the while, Mrs. Roosevelt remained vividly alive. She learned to lower her voice. Her glowing eyes and eager smile inspired warmth. Her travels averaged 40,000 miles in each of her first eight years in the White House. When war broke out, she carried greetings from the President to U.S. servicemen from London to the South Pacific, returned with personal messages for their families. In one South Pacific hospital she horrified her escorts by bursting into a particular ward to handshake and kiss the patients. The trouble was that the ward was set aside for those with venereal diseases.

In April 1945. Eleanor Roosevelt followed her husband’s casket from a white cottage at Georgia’s Warm Springs, down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue, into the flower-scented East Room of the White House. “Is there anything I can do for you?” asked the new President, Harry Truman. Replied Mrs. Roosevelt, “No, but is there anything we can do for you?” When she returned home to Manhattan the following week, she dismissed waiting reporters with four words: “The story is over.”

U.N. Crusader. It was not. She con tinued her column, wrote 15 books, conducted regular programs on radio and television, supported Adlai Stevenson at the Democratic conventions of 1952, 1956 and 1960. In all of these efforts her gentle manner concealed a fighting spirit. She had a way of infuriating her opponents by making their efforts, and not hers, seem partisan. She became a powerful force for reform in New York City’s Democratic Party, led in the successful attempt to kick out Carmine De Sapio as Tammany Hall’s boss.

Last week, at 78, Mrs. Roosevelt died of a complication of ailments (see MEDICINE). By the time of her death many of the causes she had fought for had become accepted. Many others were no longer at issue, and the world had come to judge her not by her causes but by her indefatigable heart and her humanity. The United Nations, in a rare unity, hushed its debates for a minute in her honor, and her devoted friend Adlai Stevenson spoke her epitaph: “Her glow had warmed the world.” The three Presidents who had succeeded her husband in office were at the graveside as she was buried beside Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the rose garden at Hyde Park.