best eleanor roosevelt biography

A popular debutante and prominent figure among the New York City social elite, Anna Hall Roosevelt often stood out in a crowd with her strikingly upright posture, a stance many attribute to her skill as a horsewoman. She was also unusually athletic and robust, excelling at tennis.

By her era’s conventional standards, she was also considered to be physically beautiful and sometimes described as shallow and vain. Famously, she demeaned her only daughter’s sense of physical esteem by nicknaming the child “Granny,” because little Eleanor did not meet the mother’s expectation of physical beauty.

Between 1890 and 1891, during what was his third overseas trip, this time with his wife and two children at the time, his family committed Elliott Roosevelt to an asylum in France. A year later, his brother Theodore Roosevelt committed him to the Keeley Center in Dwight, Illinois in an effort to treat his alcohol addiction.

Within a period of just two years, Eleanor Roosevelt’s entire sense of family was decimated. Her mother died when she was eight years old. Her four-year old brother died the following year. Her father died the year after that. A family of five was reduced to two. The emotional toll it would surely have taken on her can only be surmised. She was left orphaned by 9 years and 10 months old. She and her remaining sibling, a second brother Gracie Hall, known as “Hall” (his mother’s maiden name) became the ward of her maternal grandmother, a formidable woman who lived in the Hudson River Valley.

Half-brother: Sometime between 1889 and 1891, Elliott Roosevelt fathered a son by Catherine "Katy" Mann, a German-American servant an Irish-American servant (born 26 September, 1862 Grunstadt Rhineland, Germany, died 13 April 1941, Brooklyn, New York) in the Roosevelt household; little to nothing is known of him, except that Elliott Roosevelt’s brother Theodore Roosevelt recognized the boy as his nephew and arranged a financial settlement with Katy Mann for her son’s care. His mother’s lawyers, however, apparently robbed the trust established for him. As First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt had some correspondence with her half-brother before his death, just five months before her sole remaining full sibling, Hall.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s paternal grandfather, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. (1831-1878) was a prominent New York philanthropist who helped found the New York Orthopedic Hospital and the American Museum of Natural History. A condition he made in helping found the museum was that it be opened seven days a week to make it available to working-class people, who often worked six days a week. He also served on the fundraising committee that paid for the stone pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s paternal grandmother Martha Bullock (1835-1884) belonged to a Georgia family that had held many prominent civic and military positions in the colonial, Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary eras and, with her husband, was a slave owner. She died eight months before Eleanor Roosevelt was born.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s maternal great-grandfather Valentine Hall, Sr. was an immigrant from Ireland to Brooklyn, New York, although his faith and place of origin in Ireland are unknown. The national origins of his wife, also identified as an immigrant, are unclear.

Among those First Ladies whose physical height is known, Eleanor Roosevelt and Michelle Obama are believed to be the tallest, both chronicled as being five feet, eleven inches in height.

Episcopalian. Although Eleanor Roosevelt would come to learn and respect the tenets of many different Christian sects and other faiths, she remained steadfast in her belief in the teachings of the faith into which she was born, baptized and married. Towards the end of her life, she wrote about her belief that there must be “some going on” after physical death, although she stated that neither she nor any other person could know what form it took.

Convent School, Italy, (approximately 1890-1891). During the period that she and her family lived in Italy, Eleanor Roosevelt’s father suffered another intense bout of alcoholism and was placed in a French asylum for recovery treatment. Her mother became depressed and, unable to cope with the crisis, placed Eleanor Roosevelt in a convent school. Beyond this fact, little about the experience is known including what, if any, educational training she received there.

Souvestre further took her as a travelling companion through France and Italy during school holiday breaks and opened up new worlds to her young student, including impoverished areas of the working-class, away from the typical tourist sights.

Although Eleanor Roosevelt was not interested in leading the social life of a debutante as her grandmother and other relatives expected, it was from the circle of other elite class women that she met others like herself who were interested in reform efforts to improve the lives of the impoverished masses that existed within deplorable living and working conditions. These debutantes had coalesced into a formal organization known as the “Junior League,” one of its founders being Mary Harriman Rumsey, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s. A Settlement House was a community center of sorts, a place to help improve lives for these workers, who were largely of the immigrant population by teaching useful skills and lessons to safeguard their own well-being. Different settlement houses were established in densely populated poor areas of cities. Helen Cutting, the mother of one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s friends, volunteered at a Settlement House on Rivington Street on the lower East Side of New York, and this is how the future First Lady was led there. She began her work as a teacher of dance and calisthenics, a way to use physical exercise and movement to improve health after long hours of work in a confined space.

Eleanor Roosevelt followed the lead of her fellow Rivington Street Settlement volunteer Helen Cutting, who also belonged to the National Consumer’s League, by becoming a volunteer investigator for the reform organization. Her work consisted of visiting the tenement apartments where workers both lived and worked under dangerous and unhealthy conditions in these so-called “sweatshops,” her first such visits being to those who were expected to turn out thousands of little artificial flowers that would be used on hats and other clothes for manufacturer’s, but for which they were paid so little money they remained in abject poverty.

A secret courtship ensued, resulting in their engagement, but FDR’s mother intervened, believing them too young to marry. Despite her enforcing a separation, Sara Roosevelt eventually conceded to permit the marriage.

The genealogical relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and FDR is fifth cousin, once removed. They share a mutual ancestor in Claes Martenszen van Rosenvelt (the translation of which means son of Marten of the rose field), who immigrated to America from Holland to the then-named New Amsterdam colony [New Y

*Following the death of her third child, Franklin Roosevelt, Jr. when he was less than a year old, the parents gave their fifth child, and third-born son, the same name upon his birth.

*Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. (the second so-named) was born in Canada, on Campobello Island)

*Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. (the second so-named) married more times than any other presidential child; he had a total of five wives.

This New York City home, however, remained the primary residence of Eleanor Roosevelt through the first eight of her twelve years as First Lady and became a base for her activities and place where the press often gathered to cover news stories in which she figured.

Following the 1941 death of Sara Roosevelt, the couple sold the home to nearby Hunter College and it became an inter-faith and inter-racial student center. Eleanor Roosevelt would continue to visit the house, delivering speeches and participating in activities of the women’s college. In 1941, the Roosevelts began leasing a townhouse on Washington Square Park, although it largely served as Eleanor Roosevelt’s primary residence away from the White House and would continue until nearly the end of her life.

After relocating to the state capital city of Albany, Eleanor Roosevelt began to attend legislative sessions and to build an interest in politics, particularly shocked at the omnipotence of “Tammany Hall,” the so-named entrenched Democratic Party leaders who controlled the legislative agenda and votes of state and city officials. FDR later stated that their tenure in Albany commenced her “political sagacity." 

Under the Woodrow Wilson Administration, FDR was appointed Assistant Navy Secretary (1913-1920). Eleanor Roosevelt fulfilled the social obligations then incumbent upon officials’ spouses, including the making and hosting of social calls among each other on specified days at specified times. She also joined some spouses in accepting the invitation of First Lady Ellen Wilson to tour the so-called alley dwellings of deplorable housing conditions of the capital city’s largely African-American underclass, the intention of which, to demolish the dangerous and unsanitary living spaces, was achieved by a congressional bill. Efforts to relocate the displaced individuals into permanent housing were usurped by US entry into World War I.

Subsequently, she was asked by a Navy Chaplain to provide emotional support a

At the conclusion of World War I, Eleanor Roosevelt worked briefly as a volunteer translator of French for the 1919 International Congress of Working Women when it convened in Washington, D.C. She also accompanied her husband in his tour immediately after the war’s end, touring battlefields, and returning as part of Wilson’s presidential party that went to Europe to negotiate the terms of the war’s end.

It was Howe who drew Eleanor Roosevelt far deeper into the machinations of a presidential campaign, and sharing with her his process of reviewing the candidate’s speeches and released statements. Although she accompanied FDR on his whistlestop campaign in 1920, she did not address crowds, nor respond directly to public inquiries, still considering it to be a social boundary not to be broken. That year, the Republican ticket won the presidency and FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt returned to their homes in Hyde Park and New York City, where FDR resumed his legal career.

These included:

An organization which kept women informed of political issues of the day and offered members a network of fellow professional women. Within three years of joining this organization, Eleanor Roosevelt would be elected to the board and then first vice president. She became the club’s literal voice, initiating her own career in radio with broadcasts intended to make women listeners informed on current political issues affecting them. Some of the public questions that she encountered included government low-income housing, access to birth control information for married women, child labor regulation, worker’s compensation, and protective measures for working women. Her work with the Club helped develop her own organizational, writing and speaking skills.

Led by both women of the elite class who had worked in the settlement movement and working-class women labor leaders, this organization sought to enlist more women members into trade unions, notably in the garment industry and to lobby state legislatures and Congress on fair wages and work hours. Eleanor Roosevelt also made enormous monetary contributions to the organization. During the worst year of the Great Depression, in her capacity as chair of the finance committee, she solely supported the organization for several months. She would also teach classes, host parties and provide literary readings as part of the educational broadening of working-class members. She would picket with the organization and be charged with disorderly conduct for doing so. In 1925, Eleanor Roosevelt testified before the New York State legislature advocating shorter hours for each workday for women and children.

With the goal of garnering Democratic candidates the votes and support of more women, the organization became a powerful venue in state politics. Eleanor Roosevelt became associated with it when she was invited by Nancy Cook to address the group. Soon her circle expanded to include the division’s other leaders – Cook’s lifetime partner Marion Dickerman, Caroline O’Day and Elinor Morgenthau. Eleanor Roosevelt helped create and sustain an outreach of the organization to rural counties. In 1924, through the division, she campaigned through all of New York State for Democrat Alfred Smith against her first cousin, Republican Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. in his gubernatorial election. Smith won, becoming an ally of Eleanor Roosevelt’s. She worked as treasurer and as editor of the division’s Women’s Democratic News monthly newsletter, eventually writing a monthly column in the publication called “Passing Thoughts of Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt.” The newsletter was eventually folded into a pre-existing national version in 1935.

With the goal of educating women on candidates and political issues, and engaging them into the political process, at both the state and national levels, the League was an important stepping-stone for Eleanor Roosevelt’s own political seasoning. Chairing a Legislation Committee, she conducted in-depth research on pending congressional bills and wrote a summary report of it with attorney and fellow member Elizabeth Read who would become a lifelong friend along with Read’s life partner, consumer advocate and educator Esther Lape. As a county and state delegate she attended the New York State and national conventions of the league, widening her circle of fellow women reformists and activists, and delivering lectures on policy related to infant mortality, and health, employment and housing issues facing women. She actively helped the state league achieve its goal of creating a division in every state county. As vice chair of the state league, she advocated for women’s support of international peace, gender equity in jury service and in prosecution of solicitation. Resigning her offices from the bi-partisan league in 1924, she remained an active member who promoted the ideals and platform of the Democratic Party, with which she became more overtly involved. She also began writing on a regular basis for the League of Women Voters of New York State’s newsletter, News Bulletin.

As a vigorous supporter of Eleanor Roosevelt helped to organize and chair with her friend Esther Lape a committee which sought to award the best plan that would ensure eventual world peace and get the U.S. to participate in a global justice system. The former Ladies Home Journal editor Edward W. Bok had proposed it. Her role was to establish a bipartisan Jury selection board of prominent Americans who would review the over 22,000 entries the committee received and to then promote the winning plan. The winner of the prize was to be awarded $100,000, half of which was to implement the winning plan if it was approved by the US Senate or a majority of the American people. The prize was awarded to former Adelphi College president Charles Levermore, who proposed immediate US cooperation with the “World Court,” the informal name of the Permanent Court of International Justice, a provision created under the League of Nations. The contest created controversy; the prevailing post-war mood and foreign policy sentiment being isolationist in nature, and critics charged that the Bok Prize was an effort to improperly influence Congress.

Eleanor Roosevelt accompanied Esther Lape when she was called upon to testify before the Senate Special Committee on Propaganda. Although the House voted in favor of the measure, it failed to received the necessary 2/3rds of the Senate. Eleanor Roosevelt was exposed to the efforts of world peace by suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt. She would also publicly support the Coolidge Administration’s Kellogg-Briand Treaty.

Encouraged by FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt and her friends Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook had built a colonial Dutch revival cottage in stone in 1925, on Roosevelt family property just two miles from the large estate “Springwood,” owned by FDR and his mother.

They founded and ran a small company that made furniture for the cottage, soon expanding the enterprise to make commercial pieces sold in New York. Production of the quality colonial era reproductions took place in what would end up becoming a four-story factory in Hyde Park, intended to employ jobless local workers.

Also with Dickerman and Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt purchased and helped to run this school on the East Side of New York City. When FDR was elected governor and then began in term in 1929, Eleanor Roosevelt continued to teach, though she began commuting to Albany several days a week, using her time on the train to grade her students’ exams and papers. She ended her formal role as a teacher once FDR became US President, but still took an active interest in the school and its students, inviting a group of them to the White House for annual events.

Eleanor Roosevelt had a lifelong career as a writer of books, introductions or other contributions to books, newspaper and magazine articles and columns. Her professional writing began with the publication of her first article, “Common Sense Versus Party Regularity,” published in the League of Women Voters News Bulletin on September 12, 1921. She would continue to write for the newsletters as well as the publications of the other political and civic organizations to which she belonged in the 1920’s. Her first piece in a commercial publication appeared in the October 1923 of Ladies Home Journal.

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In 1924 Eleanor Roosevelt served as the chair of the women’s delegation of the Platform Committee for that year’s Democratic National Convention. Eleanor Roosevelt was advocating the nomination of Al Smith of New York. She also successfully urged FDR to make his first public appearance after contracting polio by addressing the 1924 Democratic National Convention in favor of Smith.

Although she was unsuccessful in helping Smith win the party’s nomination that year, she remained a staunch advocate for his national candidacy through her state and national party work and her public speeches.

Four years later, during the 1928 Democratic National Convention, she headed all women’s activities for Smith’s efforts leading up to and following his nomination as the presidential candidate. She earned the trust of Smith and was able to help him gain access to and convince FDR to run as his successor as Governor of New York.

During this time she also hired an aide who would prove indispensible to her as First Lady and beyond, Malvina “Tommy” Thompson. Nicknamed “Tommy” Malvina Thompson would take on Eleanor Roosevelt’s formidable correspondence and travel arrangements. Being governor’s wife also gave her a broader platform beyond those within politics and reform movements and she utilized it advocate that more women try to develop lives, interests and talents that might take them beyond traditional women’s roles. As she wrote in magazine during these years, "It is essential to develop her own interests, to carry on a stimulating life of her own..." 

With her own formidable and independent political experience and skill, Eleanor Roosevelt could not help bring her b

She was instrumental in FDR’s reforming the Public Employment Service, as well as his promoting labor leader Frances Perkins from a committee member to head of the State Industrial Relations Commission. She further made the case for Perkins as New York’s Secretary of Labor and for her replacement at the Industrial Relations Commission, Nell Schwartz.

She began to substitute for the Governor when either his immobility or his schedule precluded his presence at political meetings and conferences. Furthering this role, she began to inspect schools, orphanages, hospitals, homes for aged, and other state-supported institutions as what she called his “eyes and ears.” In this role, she learned to poke into kitchens and garages, and check out plumbing, food service and electricity, rather than just taking the word of the director of the institution in question.

She put to use her growing but already considerable tactical skill in managing political personalities. When the Governor was organizing a conference of the state’s mayors, she was successful in helping convince him to open the invitation to both Republicans and Democrats. She often helped avoid intra-Democratic squabbles between FDR’s advisor Louis Howe and Jim Farley, manager of both Smith and FDR’s gubernatorial and FDR’s presidential campaigns. It was on Eleanor Roosevelt’s urging that the Governor decided not to keep two of Smith’s closest advisors, Secretary of State Robert Moses and Personal Secretary Belle Moskowitz.

As far as public campaigning, however, Eleanor Roosevelt was more visible on behalf of Herbert Lehman, the Democrat hoping to succeed her husband as New York Governor. She continued her role as intermediary between Farley and Howe, and reviewed the publicity of the National Democratic Committee’s Women’s Division, which were printed on colored-paper "rainbow fliers" – which were intended to appeal to women’s femininity. Mrs. Roosevelt backed her husband’s inclinations to break with tradition and attend the convention to accept his party’s nomination, flying with him to make the historic trip. 

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From November 1932 until March of 1933, however, Eleanor Roosevelt found herself increasingly depressed at the prospect of what being First Lady would mean. During this period, she befriended several women reporters who covered her activities, notably Lorena Hickok, Ruby Black and Bess Furman and shared her fears. Although she resigned her job as teacher at the Todhunter School, she did continue her lucrative career as a lecturer, freelance journalist, and radio broadcaster.

Although not yet First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt soon found herself publicly derided when she expressed her view that young girls should be permitted to drink beer if Prohibition was repealed, and the fact that one of her radio commercial sponsors was a mattress company. She was ridiculed in the Harvard Lampoon after she edited a magazine on post-natal care with the seemingly ridiculous title of “Babies, Just Babies.”

There were also false allegations that it had been Eleanor Roosevelt who had spurred on FDR to the presidency as some form of thwarted form of fulfilling her own political ambitions. In fact, at one point during the transition, she had the impulsive idea of filing for divorce as a way of escaping the inevitable and imminent limitations.

At the 4 March 1933 Inauguration, Eleanor Roosevelt joined the extensive number of Roosevelt family members, i

Following a tradition since the 1913 Inauguration, there was no official Presidential Inaugural Ball. However, Eleanor Roosevelt did appear in a white fur and gown at a charity fundraiser ball held that night, accompanied by several relatives. She would continue to do so, appearing at the 1937 and 1941 Inaugural balls. Due to World War II, there was no such event during the last Roosevelt inaugural, in 1944.

48 years old
4 March 1933 - 12 April 1945

No presidential wife served as First Lady for a period longer than did Eleanor Roosevelt – twelve years, one month, one week and one day. No First Lady served through two nationally traumatic events such as did Eleanor Roosevelt, presiding at the White House during the Great Depression and World War II. Unique to her tenure was the fact that the President was physically limited by his then-hidden condition of polio. Thus apart from finding a way to integrate her own professional interests and experiences into the public role of First Lady and assume the traditional management of the mansion’s functioning as a political-social arena, Eleanor Roosevelt worked closely with the President and his staff as an unofficial Administration representative and on policy-related issues.

Unlike her three immediate predecessors (Florence Harding, Grace Coolidge, Lou Hoover), Eleanor Roosevelt did not enter into the role of First Lady with specific plans to continue previous support for a constituency (Harding and animal rights and veterans, Coolidge and the hearing-impaired, Hoover and the Girl Scouts). All she knew for certain was that she would be active in word and deeds, especially in light of the devastation the Great Depression was continuing to have on the lives of millions of Americans. Her extraordinary history of experience and work in progressive advocacy policy, the media, education, and women’s issues, however, greatly informed her as she found her direction, established her agenda and relied on professional contacts. In terms of her life experiences and her evolving vision as First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt was unprecedented in comparison to others who had or would assume the role.

Knowing she could not deliver something that the new Administration had not promised, she was unsure of what she would say. The fact that the new First Lady arrived by driving herself into their encampment immediately impressed the veterans. They shared their struggles and frustrations with her, they discussed the war, and the brief visit ended with her standing on a chair and offering her heartfelt empathy and a promise that she would see if there was anything to be done to help them, but without promising anything further. She was startled to receive their warm and rousing cheers, and joined them in singing some of the popular songs of the war.

This initial visit showed Eleanor Roosevelt that she could genuinely relate to people who were suffering, without regarding to gender, age or socioeconomic class; it gave her confidence. While the gesture was purely symbolic, it also had a positive affect on the veterans, giving them a sense of hope about the new Administration and willingness to at least initially support the new President and his policies. “Hoover sent the army,” the saying among the veterans in the tent went, referencing the fact that the previous president had instructed that troops tear down their temporary shelters, “Roosevelt sent his wife.”

Perhaps there was no more important decision among her initial deeds as First Lady than her decision to continue her work as a writer, public speaker and media figure. It helped in her mission to inform the public, provoke discussion and debate on conversation, rally public support for efforts she believed in or promoted as part of the Administration. It helped to forge a permanent image in the public mind at the time of not just Eleanor Roosevelt as a distinct personality but to shift the perception of what “First Lady” could mean.

The idea emerged from her burgeoning friendship with Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickok as a direct measure to help women reporters keep their jobs during the depression. She conducted them to help keep the American people informed of her White House life and the political activities of the Administration, but to provoke national consciousness about larger issues and crises of the day, and to do so in newspaper print. The press conferences afforded her the chance to focus on breaking news whether it was the threat that Hitler presented to Europe or the endemic problems of Washington, D.C.’s social welfare institutions. They were, however, coordinated with the President’s Press Office and there is evidence that sometimes they felt it wiser to have the First Lady break news related to the President or the Administration, rather than through the West Wing. Some forty news organizations were credentialed to have one representative attend the First Lady press conferences, a certification that was controlled by the President’s Press Secretary (the position of First Lady’s Press Secretary did not yet exist).

After some initial press conferences taking place in the Green Room, Mrs. Roosevelt moved them to the private floor of the mansion, in the designated “Monroe Room” where she had replaced reproduction antiques of the Monroe Era, with sturdy furniture produced by Val-Kill Industries, the factory she helped to created. Initially, no direct quotation of the First Lady was permitted without her permission. She had an aide who attended and transcribed the exchanges. The conferences lasted about an hour. On occasion, she invited special women guests who might be visiting the White House to attend, giving the reporters access to them. In time print reporters for the radio broadcast were permitted to attend, but at no time were either still or moving cameras allowed in. Eventually, the weekly attendance swelled to 115 but was reduced drastically by the first year of World War II. Government information agency representatives were also permitted to attend, but not to ask questions. By 1942, the group formally organized as Mrs. Roosevelt’s Press Conference Association, with a five-member board that met monthly to review policy and membership. The last press conference was held 12 April 1945, several hours before the President’s sudden death.

In May of 1941, she began a new monthly column, “If You Ask Me,” for Ladies Home Journal, receiving $2500 a month. Journal editors reviewed the mail sent to Mrs. 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. Her column in this magazine continued through the rest of her White House years, until 1949, when she signed a five-year contract for a monthly column with McCall’s magazine.

Within three years, “My Day” was syndicated in 62 daily newspapers with a readership of over 4 million. It was distributed by the United Features Syndicate and earned her about $1000 monthly, a rate that shifted depending on the number of newspaper subscriptions. It replaced an earlier, failed weekly column that focused strictly on White House entertaining. Although “My Day”” was usually placed in the women’s section of a newspaper alongside advertisements targeted to the women’s market, they were widely read by men, especially those following politics.

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.

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. She addressed the moral necessity of civil rights, for example, in magazines ranging from The Saturday Evening Post to The American Magazine to The New Republic.

The Pan-American Coffee Bureau that represented a consortium of eight Latin American coffee-producing nations sponsored these. From these foreign countries, the First Lady earned $28,000 for the Sunday night series. While the primary audiences for her broadcasts were women, the shows she did during the immediate pre-war and wartime called on all citizens to support the President’s policies of support to England and volunteer their services as the U.S. entered the war.

In 1935, 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 15,000 people in attendance. They were charged $1000 per speech. Lasting about one hour each with a subsequent question-and-answer period, the groups were able to chose from one of six topics: “Typical Day at the White House,” “Problems of Youth,” “Mail of a President’s Wife,” “The Outlook for America,” “Relationship of the Individual to the Community,” and “Peace.” By the time she ended her annual lecture circuit work with the Leigh Bureau in 1941, she had made approximately 700 paid speeches.

, a call upon women to find confidence and strength in facing the hardships of the Depression. and took the same technique but applied it to war-preparedness. In 1935, her first work as an author of fiction was published, A Trip to Washington with Bobby and Betty - although the children’s story ended with a visit to the real-life President Roosevelt. Her second work of fiction took on a poignant currency.

Christmas: A Story (1940)

, 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 1924, as FDR struggled to overcome his polio. serialized the book for $75,000. The magazine issue carrying the first installment sold out quickly, about a quarter of a million consumers buying the magazine and instantly making it the highest circulated women’s magazine at the time.

The subsequent volumes to her autobiography were , which covered the period up to FDR’s death, and . An abridged version of all three was issued in 1961 as The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt and was updated to include the three subsequent years, concluding with JFK’s election, just two years before her death. In addition, her post-White House years saw her authoring another dozen works: , , , , , , , , , , , and (published posthumously in 1963).

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. In this one, she is seen and heard promoting the National Relief Administration outside of the Val-Kill factory, encouraging all businesses to follow the employment standards created by the new economic recovery program outlined by the President’s most famous and largest New Deal program of the Great Depression:

In her role as host of an annual national fundraising drive on behalf of the March of Dimes held on the President’s birthday and intended to eradicate infantile paralysis, the First Lady frequently appeared with famous movie stars of the era. 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.

As First Lady, Mrs. Roosevelt also narrated 1940’s (produced by her son) about a German pacifist, and , produced by the National Youth Administration, a 1942 color promotional film.

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 300,000 letters, in the first year of the second term, it dipped to 90,000 and in the first election year of the third term, it again rose, to 150,000. 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. Her emphasis on public correspondence was not merely a matter of common courtesy; she found it could often helped determine which public issues were important to tackle, saying “my interest…is not aroused by an abstract cause but by the plight of a single person.”

Most prominent among such examples was a Judy Garland depiction in the 1939 film , in which she sits to knit beside FDR as parodied by Mickey Rooney. “Eleanor” talk-sings: “My day, my day! 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!” Here is the sequence:

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 fact, in many respects she acted in concert with her predecessor Lou Hoover’s efforts to mobilize voluntary action on behalf of those citizens suffering the most from the economic crisis.

In this November1933 newsreel, among the first filmed of her speaking as First Lady, Mrs. Roosevelt addressed a confederation of women’s clubs in Chicago, and called on “the women” to combat the Great Depression:

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.

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.

As the first First Lady to sponsor White House conferences, she hosted several that focused specifically on meeting the needs of women: a November 2, 1933 White House Conference on the Emergency Needs of Unemployed Women, an April 30, 1934 White House Conference on Camps for Unemployed Women, an April 4, 1938 White House Conference on Participation of Negro Women and Children in Federal Welfare Programs, and a June 14, 1944 White House Conference on How Women May Share in Post-War Policy Making. 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.

Beginning in 1934, she worked closely with Walter White, the director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the First Lady vigorously and unapologetically pressed the President to support a proposed anti-lynching law – but failed to do so, due to FDR’s practical realization that southern Democrats might abandon his ongoing and future legislative agenda. She also sought support for the bill elsewhere, such as the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching.

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. The First Lady sought to aid private African-American institutions as well, including Howard University’s Freedman’s Hospital, for which she lobbied Congress to increase previous federal aid.

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.

In her book , Eleanor Roosevelt acknowledged her role in helping to create the National Youth Administration, which FDR established on June 26, 1935:

The division provided unemployed young people with apprenticeships, vocational training and work projects. She became perhaps the program’s greatest publicist, writing and speaking frequently of its progress. 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 the ASU came to Washington as one of many other such groups for an American Youth Congress convention, the First Lady invited the group leaders to the White House. 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. When communists, who urged US neutrality in Europe, dominated the group’s leadership she began to distance herself from the group. Nonetheless, she took a front-row seat during 1939 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings when they grilled ASU leader Joseph Lash she had befriended, and later defended their initial good intentions.

During the war, two-thirds of the group’s membership quit because of the communist leaders and joined the International Student Service organization which provided aid to war refugees and Eleanor Roosevelt followed, leading fundraising and publicity efforts.

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.S. government.

Eleanor Roosevelt was a vigorous supporter and then defender of the Works Progress Administration’s Writers’, Arts and Theater Projects, which gave work to the unemployed in those professions. 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, 1935. With its emphasis on the “common man,” and efforts to preserve regional and folk art and culture that had been largely ignored as a vita part of the nation’s heritage, she genuinely enjoyed reading the written works, and attending many of the exhibits and performances produced by the programs. She publicly opposed a 1939 Congressional funding decrease to the programs, and the closing of the theater program.

Eleanor Roosevelt was a proponent of the 1933 Federal Subsistence Homestead Division, a $25 million program that was part of the overall National Industrial Recovery Act. Administered by the Department of Interior, it helped resettle communities where a workforce in a predominant occupation had been devastated by the economic turndown.

After an August 1933 inspection tour of Scott’s Run, West Virginia, which was predominated by the coal mining industry, she witnessed the extreme poverty caused by unemployment and under-employment, and its many resulting affects. 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. The First Lady’s insistence that the houses be equipped with modern plumbing, electricity and refrigeration was then seen as a luxury in that era. 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. Eleanor Roosevelt’s so-called “baby,” Arthurdale was a mixed success. 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.

Eleanor Roosevelt revered and continued most of the traditional aspects of the First Lady’s role. 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.

Continuing a custom practiced within her own elite family, Eleanor Roosevelt also enjoyed pouring tea for private callers in the presidential living quarters –most of whom came not to make a social visit but rather to discuss pending policy or lobby for reform, legislation or raise issues they wished to get the President’s attention. 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. Eleanor Roosevelt’s interest in the arts was not that of a connoisseur but of one who believed in the value of music, dancing, film, poetry, painting, theater and architecture to a general society and to the emotional health and well-being of the individual and this was more firmly expressed in her support of the various arts programs of the WPA than in any innovations she undertook in the mansion itself.

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. This was a continuation of her “eyes and ears” role begun when he was Governor of New York.

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 1934 and 1937 and a state visit to Mexico, in 1939. 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.

Mrs. 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. Although she rigidly refused to assume an overt partisan role in public during her husband’s1936 re-election campaign and maintained her rule not to deliver campaign speeches

She did, however, assume a central role as FDR’s liaison with the National Democratic Committee chairman James Farley. 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 1933, Anna Dall was going through a divorce and came to live there with her two young children. Eleanor Roosevelt spent much of her leisure time in her first year as First Lady with her two grandchildren, popularly known as “Sistie and her daughter Buzzie.” Throughout the Administration, other grandchildren would also come to live briefly in the White House.

The First Lady had especially strong friendships, most notably with the former reporter Lorena Hickock, and a former New York State trooper Earl Miller. 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 1940, 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. Roosevelt’s preference for his vice-presidential candidate Henry Wallace nevertheless created discord at the convention that nominated him that year, being held in Chicago - even from the president’s own campaign manager. 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. She declared that they were living in “no ordinary time” – a reference less to the third presidential term and more to the vigilance necessary as the nation prepared to become involved in the world war.

Anger about FDR breaking with history by seeking a third term also led to renewed attacks on the First Lady for her activism. It manifested most prominently with a popular campaign button declaring, “We Don’t Want Eleanor Either.”

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.C. 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 1913, 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.S. Congress oversaw the capital city’s management. 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, 1940. Here is some of her historical testimony:

By 1940, America’s strongest European ally, England was at war with Nazi Germany, and the Roosevelts believed that U.S. involvement was inevitable. One of the First Lady’s greatest concerns during this period was the welfare of refugees – whether they were seeking escape from Spain’s civil war or the Nazi invasion of Holland. 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.S. Committee for the Care of European Children.

During the war, her advocacy on behalf of refugees continued and she openly disagreed with the State Department’s chief of visa operations Breckinridge Long who vigorously opposed any change in immigration restrictions. Forced to help refugees immigrate to the U.S. on a case-by-case basis substantially slowed to a trickle the number of appeals she was able to facilitate into entrance visa. Despite lobbying Congress, she also failed to help push through the Child Refugee Bill that intended to permit 10,000 more children a year over an existing quota from Germany.

Although the job was unsalaried, Eleanor Roosevelt became the first First Lady to assume an official working position during her incumbency, when she went to work as the assistant director of the Office of Civilian Defense on September 22, 1941.

While the director, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia directed efforts to obtain and stockpile fire department and other emergency supplies, in anticipation of potential attacks on the U.S., his other assistant director took charge of physical fitness and training. It was Eleanor Roosevelt’s job to foment a national volunteer force to work on the home front, rallied by the call of patriotism and to further ensure that the types of work they would be trained for would be viable for civilian defense.

Usually walking to the office, located about ten blocks away on Washington’s Dupont Circle, the First Lady hired her friend, the dancer Mayris Chaney, to develop a calisthenics program for children if they were constricted to bomb shelters – but she also taught recreational dancing to the Washington staff of the OCD. In addition, the First Lady’s friends Joseph Lash and Melvyn Douglas were both appointed to committee positions and drew federal stipends.

In short order the “fan dancer” and the First Lady’s “boondoggle” hit headlines and enraged members of Congress. The unrelenting criticism of her maintaining the job, coming from both in Congress and the media, began to damage the OCD’s viability at a time when it was being reorganized in the first weeks following American entry into the war. After a period of just five months, she felt she had no choice but to resign, believing future presidential spouses who might also do so would inevitably suffer the same criticisms.

Perhaps the most historical of Eleanor Roosevelt’s radio broadcasts was the one she did on the evening of December 7, 1941. Earlier that day, Japanese air forces bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. During the day, within hours of the attack, the entire nation heard the news that all knew would inevitably mean U.S. involvement in the world war. It would not be another full day before the President addressed the American people in his declaration of war before Congress against Japan and its allies. Thus, it was Eleanor Roosevelt who became the first national figure who spoke with the people about what this would mean, in terms of the changes of normal life and particularly for women and young men of enlistment age. Here is her original recording:

Eleanor Roosevelt would become an important symbol during World War II.

Whether as the mother of four sons who were active servicemen, putting the entire White House system on the same food and gas rationing system as the rest of the country, participating in air raids and learning how to use a gas mask, she made certain that her life in the White House mirrored that of the general population.

She had a victory garden planted on the South Lawn – as many citizens did on their lawns. She made frequent radio appeals for donations of money and blood to the Red Cross. Her multitude of volunteer wartime efforts also reflected the war work of American women, particularly in factories and other jobs that had been held by men who were now serving overseas. Throughout the war, in her remarks and writings, she continually underlined the purposes of democracy as the driving force for the sacrifices being made. In both the pre-war and war periods, she especially spoke out in strong language against the tyranny of fascism. She opposed the U.S. neutrality during the Spanish civil war, supporting the Loyalist government against the fascist uprising led by General Francisco Franco.

The American First Lady was an unrelenting and harsh critic in writing and in her press conferences of Germany’s Nazi Party leader and Third Reich leader Adolph Hitler and Italy’s fascist president Benito Mussolini. In turn, both dictators would attack her in their broadcasts and prompted their state-controlled media to eviscerate her in cartoons and editorials.

She also kept a long-view on decisions that would affect post-war life as well, opposing FDR, for example, who supported the construction of temporary housing structures that would be destroyed after their use. The First Lady believed that structures made to last would aid in later public housing needs.

Eleanor Roosevelt was emotionally troubled by the Roosevelt Administration’s February 1942 policy of interning Japanese-Americans in ten relocation camps in western states. The decision was based on claims that members of the minority group were spying on behalf of Japanese interests and intended to sabotage American defense efforts. The First Lady initially voiced her vigorous protest to the plan in public, and soon enlisted the Attorney General to fight the policy with the President. With public sentiment vigorously anti-Japanese, however, she lost her case, focusing then on their processing, making as certain as she could that they were evacuated from their homes with a semblance of dignity, and that families were kept together. Rapidly, she intervened with the War Relocation Authority to begin helping individuals to secure early releases from the camps. Further, she helped to facilitate access to the frozen bank accounts of and by Japanese citizens who’d been denied citizenship. In April 1943, she visited one camp in Arizona on the urging of FDR when demonstrations were held there. By November of that year, her disgust and shame at the camps seemed to have had some influence on FDR for he approved plans to begin letting individuals be given exit permits, though he maintained the general policy until after he had won his fourth presidential election, in 1944.

As early as 1935, Eleanor Roosevelt was receiving word directly from friends in Europe about the increasing mistreatment, harassment and threats to Jews by the rise to power of Adolf Hitler. While she continued to try and facilitate refugee status for individuals, she found resistance within the State Department to support of the Wagner-Rogers Bill that would have permitted Jewish children to emigrate to the United States. As she learned directly of the systematic murder of Jews began, the First Lady was unsuccessful in convincing her husband to make their rescue a priority of war. Still, she did not refrain from seeking to raise American public attention to the crisis, joining with Jewish-American leaders in their speaking tours and attending a benefit performance intended to raise sympathy for the victims who remained in concentration camps.

In large part, at least initially, Eleanor Roosevelt’s public activities during the war preparedness and wartime periods were intended to set an example for American women’s involvement in the effort. As men left jobs to join the service, women found themselves assuming mechanical and other professions traditionally held by men, the First Lady introduced a government information film that was shown widely in across the nation’s movie theaters:

She was largely successful in making the case to private industry who were government contractors that the so-called “Rosie the Riveters,” in factories should provide day care centers for those working women who also had the responsibilities of motherhood to young children, as well as in-house eating facilities and a grocery vendor who could bring food and other household needs to sell at the factories - sparing women the extra time to shop.

Despite her lobbying in favor of women workers receiving the same pay for the same work done by their male co-workers, however, she was unable to prompt any federal law ensuring this. She continued to serve as a point of help to those women who found themselves discriminated against in either industry or the service, such as her investigating discrimination against individual African-Americans at a Women's Auxiliary Army Corps base in Des Moines, Iowa. Believing strongly in the ability of women to also perform active duty in supportive roles, if not in direct combat, she was an early proponent of the Women’s Air Service Pilot program, forging an alliance with its initiator, the aviator Jackie Cochran, and its military sponsor, General Harold Arnold. 

Perhaps the one piece of legislation that she influenced which had the greatest and most lasting impact was the Fair Employment Practices Commission. It had come about when NAACP President Walter White and the President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters A. Philip Randolph demanded through her that the President that racially discriminatory policies in the defense industry and the armed forces desegregated. Otherwise, they threatened to call a massive protest march in Washington.

Through the First Lady’s persistent imploring, the President issued Executive Order 8802 to create a Committee on Fair Employment Practices, on 25 June 1941. It banned employment discrimination by both the federal government and defense contractors based on “race, creed, color or national origin.” It also established the commission, which oversaw that industries complied with the law. In turn, the protest plans were canceled.

Eleanor Roosevelt had felt strongly that the Armed Forces should be desegregated, but short of that, she did all she could on behalf of individual servicemen who alerted her to cases of discrimination. She also sought ways to illustrate the equal bravery and competence of African-Americans in the service. Perhaps her single greatest contribution in this area was her simple appearance in a photograph as black pilots flew her in a plane. The image not only gave immediate credibility to the Tuskegee Airmen’s participation in the war, but also prompted the President to shortly thereafter issue by executive order the creation of the Tuskegee Airman Program.

In no uncertain terms, however, did Eleanor Roosevelt accept the legitimacy of segregated armed services: she directly equated American racism with Nazi Aryanism.

Having served as honorary vice chair of the Red Cross since her first year as First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt became increasingly involved in recommending internal improvements to the organization and publicly leading blood donation and fundraising drives during the war. When she made overseas trips, she visited Red Cross units to ensure that servicemen were receiving all they needed, and she wore the organization’s uniform on her South Pacific trip in1943 as its unsalaried representative.

Invited by the Queen of England to review the wartime work of English women, Eleanor Roosevelt went to England from October 21 to November 17, 1942, making her the first incumbent First Lady to a make lengthy trip outside of the U.S. without the President (Ida McKinley had briefly visited Mexico in May of 1901 for a breakfast gathering and Edith Wilson had joined President Wilson for his post-World War I trip to Europe). She visited U.S. serviceman, including segregated African-American troops, reporting to the President on needed improvements in recreational facilities and other needs that were not being met. She also became the first First Lady to broadcast a message to foreign people, delivering a radio address on the BBC. The American First Lady’s trip to England created a sensation in the war-torn ally nation, as seen in this British newsreel:

She made her second international trip from August 17 to September 24, 1943 as a representative of the Red Cross, to the South Pacific islands, New Zealand and Australia. She went not only to also assess the unique tropical conditions the servicemen endured but also improve relations with the Australian government. She would see about 400,000 American servicemen at bases and hospitals, including a stop at Guadalcanal.

The second trip engendered public criticism that she had no right to travel so widely in wartime when others were limited, and that she had no right to wear the Red Cross uniform since she’d never received their requisite training. When she made her third wartime overseas trip from March 4-28, 1944, to bases in the Caribbean basin, Central and South America, she did not wear the uniform. During this third wartime trip, the American First Lady also visited the nation of Brazil for three days.

This newsreel compilation provides an overview of Eleanor Roosevelt’s role as a friend to the American “G.I. Joe” during her overseas trips. She makes a point about American democracy in action at the end:

In large part as a result of her international trips to visit U.S. servicemen, where she spent hours at hospital bedsides and joined in all meals in the mess halls, Eleanor Roosevelt forged many personal friendships with individual members of the various services. She carried on personal correspondence with them but also following up on their reports of problems or irregularities in the system. She also reviewed the routine letters sent by the President to families of the military who were killed in action and had them redrafted with a more humane tone. As an editorial in the Army’s newspaper Stars and Stripes observed, this woman whose own four sons were all on active duty, resembled their own mothers back home and that many came to think of and respond to her as such.

Like presidential daughters dating back to Martha Jefferson Randolph, Anna Roosevelt Dall Boettiger [Halstead], served for a period of several months as an unofficial surrogate First Lady. Unlike other First Daughters who assumed entirely the public role of hostess at White House events like state dinners and receptions, the duties assumed by Anna Roosevelt were both wider and narrower in scope. Since she served as a surrogate First Lady towards the end of her father’s presidency, as well as his life, and as World War II was accelerating towards its end, Anna Roosevelt’s importance to the Administration was less as a public hostess and more as a manager of the President’s private social life, which inevitably blended with his perpetual state of work.

With her overseas travels and accelerated activities during World War II, Eleanor Roosevelt was increasingly apart from her husband by the spring of 1944, whether at the White House, their Hyde Park estate, or what was called the President’s “Little Cottage” at Warm Springs, Georgia. At the same time, FDR had grown even more dependent upon the companionship of a personal aide and assistant, following the death of his devoted secretary and friend Missy Lehand. While the President’s cousin Daisy Suckley had become a larger presence in his circle, Anna Roosevelt moved into the White House to fulfill her role on a full-time basis. Thirty-eight years old at the time she moved from her home in Seattle, Washington, it was the second time she made the White House her home, and under similar circumstances.

At the time of her father’s election, Anna Roosevelt was estranged from her husband Curtis Dall, who she had married in 1926 and with whom she had two children (Anna Eleanor, born in 1927 and known as “Sistie” and later “Ellie,” and Curtis, born in 1930).

She and her children moved into the White House with her parents, and for two years she worked as a magazine editor and freelance writer of magazine articles and two children’s books about a fictional rabbit, “Scamper.” Although she often accompanied her mother at White House events, Anna Roosevelt did not assume any public role as a substitute for the First Lady during this first period of residency there.

In 1934, her divorce from Dall was finalized. A year later she married Clarence J. Boettiger, a divorced journalist and publisher of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and by him had one son (John, born in 1939). While residing in Seattle, Anna Roosevelt continued working as a writer, assuming a women’s column in her husband’s newspaper. Eleanor Roosevelt visited her daughter and her family on the West Coast on several occasions.

With the onset of World War II, Anna Roosevelt was able to secure her husband an officer’s commission by lobbying General Dwight Eisenhower. A year later, at her father’s request, she relocated with her youngest son to the White House. Other than several private parties for young people, and the small-scale, private entertaining of several members of European royal families who had sought refuge from the Third Reich invasion of their nations, there were no large state dinners or ceremonies at the White House. Instead, the President would have a few friends and close advisers join him for dinners. Anna Roosevelt’s focus was thus less on planning special events than seeing to the comfort of her increasingly infirm father and seeking out special guests he asked to join them.

The arrangement seemed, at least initially, to suit Eleanor Roosevelt who was unburdened of this responsibility and able to continue her focus on war work. When the First Lady returned from her 1944 trip to the Caribbean Basin, South and Central America and sought to lobby her weary husband on problems affecting members the armed services, Anna Roosevelt found herself in the position of having to keep her mother away from her father to protect him from becoming upset. This created a natural friction between the mother and daughter.

It reached a head a month after FDR’s fourth inauguration when the First Lady expressed her interest in joining him for the famous Yalta Conference with Allied leaders, the Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin and England’s Winston Churchill. Instead, ignoring the wishes of his wife, the President decided he wanted Anna Roosevelt to serve as his companion on the trip, on the weak premise that Churchill’s daughter Sarah would be accompanying her father.

While both Eleanor Roosevelt and Anna Roosevelt were aware of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s dramatically deteriorating health, neither sought to intercede with his doctors to assume a different course of his health care; it was an atmosphere dictated by the President, who acted with denial about his condition and refused to openly discuss the matter with any of his family or aides.

Neither Anna Roosevelt nor Eleanor Roosevelt was with him when he died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia on April 12, 1945. However, among those women present were Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, who had been the mistress of FDR during World War I. Her presence at FDR’s small White House gatherings through 1944 and early 1945 had been facilitated by at request by Anna Roosevelt. After his death, Anna Roosevelt confessed this to her mother. Eleanor Roosevelt was wounded by the betrayal and created a definitive breach between them.

Anna Roosevelt did help her mother with the rapid emptying of the family’s twelve years of accumulated possessions in the White House. The widowed First Lady moved out on April 23, 1945, just eleven days after her husband’s death.

Following her father’s burial, Anna Roosevelt and her husband relocated to Arizona where they bought a weekly newspaper the following year and turned it into the daily Arizona Times by 1947. Although she assumed the positions of columnist, executive editor, and publisher, by 1948 the endeavor failed and Anna Roosevelt returned to New York.

There she and her mother healed their breach and co-hosted a radio show for a year, until September of 1949. She then returned to her work as a magazine editor and freelance writer. That same year she divorced her husband, who committed suicide in 1950.

In 1953, Anna Roosevelt married for a third time, to doctor James A. Halstead and pursued a degree in social work at UCLA. In her third marriage, Anna Roosevelt merged her professional experiences with the work of her husband, assuming public relations leadership at medical institutions where her husband worked, from Syracuse to Iran to Kentucky to Michigan.

At her mother’s side through her final illness, Anna Roosevelt would go on to assume many of her late mother’s positions with organizations focused on women’s equality, human rights, liberal politics. Relocating to New York state, she died of throat cancer in 1975 and was buried in a Roosevelt family cemetery not far from her parents.

Shortly after she left the White House, the widowed Eleanor Roosevelt told reporters, “The story is over,” as far as any future role in public affairs. As events proved, she was entirely incorrect. She continued to be a familiar public figure in national life, writing books, her newspaper and magazine columns, moving her commentaries from radio to television, and delivering speeches. Her activities were largely in the areas of international peace and civil rights. She would assume political positions in jobs and commissions focused on issues of domestic and international consequence, all in an appointive rather than elective position.

Initially, the president’s widow returned to her home “Val-Kill,” located near the famous Hyde Park “Springwood” estate of her late husband. She completed the process of removing those items and furnishings that she did not believe had historical significance and were of personal value to her and her children. Although her husband had established the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidential library and museum in his lifetime, she maintained an interest in its oversight and attended ceremonies and events marking the institution’s evolution through the rest of her life.

While honors would soon come to her as a result of her own endeavors and achievements after her White House years, Mrs. Roosevelt always granted those requests by individuals and organizations to show tribute to her late husband’s memory.

In her immediate years of widowhood, Eleanor Roosevelt was on hand to welcome world leaders who came to pay their respects at the burial place of the late president. She also continued to keep his Scottie Fala as her own personal companion, the dog remaining an object of global interest and affection.

Although she always considered Val-Kill her true home and where she especially enjoyed entertaining friends during the summer, conducting meetings with political and other famous figures, and hosting family holiday gatherings, the former First Lady largely kept her base of operations in a series of New York City residences. Her Val-Kill home would be declared a National Historic Site in 1984, the centennial of her birth and be opened to the public as a museum.

With her proven dedication to global peace, Eleanor Roosevelt accepted the appointment by President Harry Truman to serve as the only woman among the five American delegates to the newly-created United Nations in December of 1945. She was in attendance at the historic first meeting of the institution in London, in January of 1946.

The State Department’s Office of Special Political Affairs declared that Eleanor Roosevelt was exceedingly successful in her new role, helping forge international support in the General Assembly for nearly all American proposals.

Eleanor Roosevelt became an unrelenting advocate for millions of oppressed and tyrannized peoples, calling on European colonial powers to grant independence to countries they conquered, advocating the creation of Israel as a Jewish homeland (which was a view that had evolved from her earlier lack of support for Zionism), and reminding the free world of the oppressions suffered by those who lived under repressive communist and socialist rule.

She stood firmly against the Soviets by pressing for the resettlement of refugees whom that nation claimed were political enemies of the state and must be repatriated. Her leadership denied the Soviet intentions denied in the General Assembly.

Certainly, the most enduring legacy of her life was her drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a result of her being initially assigned to the Social, Humanitarian and Culture Committee at the U.N. She wrote and edited portions of the document, managing to strike enough of a general balance that had relevance to the widely divergent cultures of the many nations, and won her own country’s support of the document.

In her later capacity as the Human Rights Commission chair, she presented the declaration to the U.N. General Assembly on 10 December 1948, which then passed it. The document remains as the principal guide to assessing a country’s treatment of its people. In this recording, she reads a portion of it:

Despite losing her job when the Republicans regained the White House in 1952, she proved her commitment to her belief in the U.N.’s vital role in the postwar world by working without salary as a spokesperson of the American Association of the United Nations. In this role, she espoused the values of the U.N. throughout the United States.

Although she resisted various suggestions that she run for public office herself, Eleanor Roosevelt remained deeply enmeshed in national Democratic Party activities, becoming one of the most powerful figures within it – though without title or salary. Always loyal to the party and friendly with her husband’s successor, Eleanor Roosevelt did not refrain from disagreeing with Truman. She was disappointed that he had not continued to fight for health care coverage once it was defeated and for his support of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Bill, which she opposed. On the other hand, she stood proudly with him on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in July of 1947, when he became the first President to address the NAACP.

Her support for and attendance at the first convention of the liberal anti-communist organization Americans For Democratic Action, founded in January 1947, gave it the necessary prestige to establish itself as a powerful organization. When it was later under attack by Senator Joseph McCarthy, she associated herself more widely with the ADA. Throughout the 1950’s, she would urge the ADA to adopt more moderate stances on issues like civil rights, not because her commitment had flagged but because she wished to avoid a deep schism within the Democratic Party between northern liberals and southern conservatives.

Eleanor Roosevelt attended and addressed the National Democratic Conventions in 1952 and 1956 in support of Adlai Stevenson, and in 1960 in support of John F. Kennedy.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s commitment to civil rights only increased after she left the White House. She successfully backed an effort to create the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and worked as a board member of the NAACP, among other civil rights organizations. She defied the threats of the Ku Klux Klan to deliver a speech to activists at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, and visited civil rights worker incarcerated for participating in protests.

She criticized the Eisenhower Administration as being too passive in the civil rights struggle and helped fundraise for those civil rights activists who employed nonviolent civil disobedience, most notably doing so with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks to sustain the boycott of the Montgomery, Alabama bus system because it remained rigidly segregated. She also proved instrumental in helping to make permanent the wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee that outlawed racial discrimination in federal employment or that with federal contractors.

It was not just the rights of African-Americans that continued to concern her. Increasingly pro-labor, the former First Lady served as the co-chair of a fundraiser for striking union members, organized by the National Citizens Political Action Committee.

Eleanor Roosevelt testified a last time before Congress in April 1962 in support of legislation that would guarantee gender pay equity. She also came to eventually support the Equal Rights Amendment, dropping her previous reservations about it. Her last official role was as chair of President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, which she chaired, delivering its report in December 1961.

Having no illusions about the human cost of the communist system, Eleanor Roosevelt viewed Soviet and Eastern European leaders and their intentions with a jaundiced eye, but believed strongly that continuing dialogue with them was vital.

Opponents of this view often cast her throughout the 1950’s as a secret communist, or at least sympathetic to the socialism, charges she had encountered as First Lady. She was a leading and, at times, lone voice of concern about civil liberties as Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted his hearings seeking out those who might have communist sympathies within the government.

Both in her capacity as a UN representative and with her status as a former First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt spent much of the twenty-two years between leaving the White House and her death in global travel.

In the immediate postwar years, she toured refugee camps of displaced Jews in the former Nazi Germany and of Palestinians in Jordan who had been displaced by the creation of Israel. Besides revisiting many of the European nations she had been to in earlier years, she also made her first forays to all of the Scandinavian countries, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Pakistan, India, Chile, the Philippines, Nepal, Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Morocco, The Soviet Union, and Iran.

In 1955, Eleanor Roosevelt went to Cambodia, in what was then known (along with Vietnam and Laos) as French Indochina. Some later discerned that she would have vigorously opposed the increased American military presence in Vietnam under Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, because she did not believe that France should seek to reclaim its colonial hold on the three Indochinese nations.

In all of these nations, she met not only with leaders, even if it proved to be contentious, but also with the everyday people. She found was particularly beloved in India and Pakistan because of her strong stand in favor of racial equality in the United States.

In 1953, she visited the site of Hiroshima, where the Americans had dropped the atomic bomb. As the widow of the Allied wartime leader, she felt it particularly important to make trips to the former Axis nations of Japan and Germany and to personally visit young schoolchildren in both an effort of healing of the recent past and encourage the democracy of their future.

Eleanor Roosevelt assumed an active role in the first Democratic Administration since Harry Truman’s. Despite her reluctance to support him as the Democratic nominee for the presidency in 1960, she took an avid interest in several initiatives of his Administration. She returned to interview him on two occasions for her regular radio broadcast. Here is a recording of her conversation with President Kennedy on the role and status of women in American society:

Besides her role as chair of the president’s commission on the Status of Women, she would serve on the Peace Corps Advisory Board, chair a public hearing on violence against civil rights workers, and co-chair the Tractors for Freedom Committee to expedite the release of Americans held prisoner in Cuba after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. In 1961 Eleanor and seven other former and future First Ladies, attended Kennedy’s inauguration.

From what is known about the varying degrees of contact that First Ladies have had with one another, it appears that Eleanor Roosevelt. Shortly before Mrs. Roosevelt’s death in 1962, there was a trend in the press to compare or link her legacy with that of the popular, incumbent at the time, Jacqueline Kennedy. Eleanor Roosevelt was an admirer of her as well, writing a column early in her successor’s tenure predicting great success for her. They had met on several occasions at Democratic Party events in the late 1950s, when Senator Kennedy was gearing up for his presidential run. At the time, however, Mrs. Kennedy felt resentment towards political attacks Mrs. Roosevelt had made on her husband.

Of all her predecessors, Eleanor Roosevelt had been closest to, and knew personally her aunt Edith Roosevelt. While the elderly woman did not visit her niece in the White House, they did maintain a strong correspondence with each other.

Among her earliest predecessors, Eleanor Roosevelt met Frances Cleveland on several occasions during the FDR presidency, and the latter, a loyal Democratic, was an outspoken supporter of both him and his wife

Before becoming First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt met Nellie Taft in Canada where both of their families maintained summer residences; Mrs. Taft, although a Democrat, suggested her support of the former’s overt political role and on several occasions joined each other at events in Washington.

When Eleanor Roosevelt first came to Washington in 1913 upon her husband’s appointment as Assistant Navy Secretary, she joined Ellen Wilson in her effort to eradicate Washington, D.C. of its alley dwellings.

It was during her time in Europe, following the end of World War I and the subsequent trans-Atlantic voyage back to the U.S. that Eleanor Roosevelt first came to know Edith Wilson. During the 1920s, while Mrs. Roosevelt was especially active in the Women’s National Democratic Club, she tried but failed to enlist Mrs. Wilson’s public involvement on political issues. Through all twelve years of the Roosevelt presidency, however, Eleanor Roosevelt frequently invited Edith Wilson as a guest to formal and informal events and the latter nearly always accepted, despite evidence showing she did not always approve of her successor’s activism. In later years, the two often saw one another and would inevitably pose together, at Democratic Party events in Washington.

Eleanor Roosevelt had brief encounters with two of her three Republican predecessors. In 1917 and 1918, she worked with Florence Harding, then the spouse of a U.S. Senator, at the soldier canteen established in Union Station. Following her husband’s election but before his inauguration, Eleanor Roosevelt attended the funeral of former President Calvin Coolidge when she had a chance to meet Grace Coolidge. They would have

Lou Hoover and Eleanor Roosevelt had formed a friendly relationship as neighbors while both of their husbands were serving in the Wilson Administration, and even picnicked together on one occasions. With the 1932 presidential race between their husbands, however, came resentments that never entirely healed. During the FDR presidency, however, the women were on at least friendly terms at a Girl Scouts leadership event in Boston where they both spoke.

Although they only worked together as First Lady and Second Lady for less than three months, from January to April of 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt formed a collegial relationship with Bess Truman that lasted until the former’s 1962 death. Almost always their contact was during Democratic Party events or those involving former Presidents and former First Ladies.

Eleanor Roosevelt and Mamie Eisenhower met on several occasions during and after World War II. While working at a wartime canteen in Washington, Mrs. Eisenhower served a plate of lunch to the visiting First Lady (who did not know the identity of her waitress). They had the opportunity to speak at events during the time that General Eisenhower was serving as president of Columbia University and head of NATO.

Although they did not become First Ladies until after her death, several of her successors met or saw Mrs. Roosevelt. Lady Bird Johnson was a congressional spouse during the FDR presidency and was not only a White House dinner guest but made home movies of Eleanor Roosevelt and they also met at congressional spouse gatherings that the First Lady attended. Before her marriage, while working in a hospital, Pat Nixon attended a social welfare conference in New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel where she heard the First Lady speak. Betty Ford was in the presence of Eleanor Roosevelt when they both attended the 1961 Kennedy Inauguration and later spoke of how, along with her mother, Mrs. Roosevelt served as a role model for her as a young woman. Nancy Reagan witnessed Eleanor Roosevelt deliver her 1940 speech to the Democratic Convention, held in Chicago where she then lived, seated with her mother and the mayor. As a young mother in the 1950s, Barbara Bush became a friend to the granddaughter of Eleanor Roosevelt and when the former First Lady came to visit the latter in Texas, she met the former.

Although she remained a widow, Eleanor Roosevelt did develop close emotional relationships that sustained and provided a depth of happiness in her personal life. The two men to whom she drew especially close were both married – Joseph P. Lash and her doctor, David Gurewitsch, and she also grew close to their wives, Trude and Edna, respectively. She often travelled with the couples. Her closeness to her doctor proved especially helpful after she was diagnosed and lived with aplastic anemia and tuberculosis for the last two years of her life.

Despite all of her power within the Democratic Party, labor and civil rights movement, and her high visibility in the national media, one of the most important aspects of Eleanor Roosevelt’s later life was her support for the small Wiltwyck School for Boys that had been established during her first term as First Lady.

Located across the Hudson River from the Roosevelt estate, its students were between the ages of 8 and 12 years old, and were mostly African-American youths who had been abandoned by their families, and neglected by society. The student body was composed largely of children from impoverished sections of New York City who had developed severe behavioral and emotional problems, and most ended up in the legal system to be classified as “juvenile delinquents.” During World War II, however, the school was in danger of closing due to lack of funds. Drawing on her own professional experiences in establishing the Todhunter School, Eleanor Roosevelt helped to save the institution, joining the board of directors and reorganizing it as a private institution, instead of being a project of the Episcopal City Mission Society. In the late 1940s through the early 1960s, the former First Lady regularly invited the entire student body to visit with her, hosting picnics and explorations of nature in the woods and by the streams adjoining the Roosevelt property. The First Lady devoted herself to raising as much money as she could to keep the school flourishing, and it continued to be a primary focus of her private life until her death, when she succeeded in helping it move to new headquarters in Westchester County.

As part of her fundraising efforts, Mrs. Roosevelt willingly faced criticism from even friends and family to film a television commercial for Good Luck margarine in 1957. Many of her admirers strenuously argued against what they believed would be viewed as compromising her dignity as a former First Lady. The fact that she earned $35,000 for just a few seconds of work appearing in the TV ad, allowed her to make an enormous financial donation to the Wiltwyck School as well as the Citizens Committee for Children of New York, which provided food, housing and education for other disadvantaged children of New York City who did not fit into the narrow age and gender parameters of the school. Here is the commercial:

November 7, 1962
Age: 78 years, 27 days
Burial: Hyde Park, N.Y.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s funeral was the first of a former First Lady to be attended by multiple First Ladies: Bess Truman, Jacqueline Kennedy and (future First Lady) Lady Bird Johnson, establishing a precedent for those who died chronologically after her. It was the first one of a former First Lady to be attended by the incumbent President (John F. Kennedy) since Theodore Roosevelt had attended that of Julia Grant in 1902 and, the only other example, that of Dolley Madison in 1849, when President Zachary Taylor delivered the eulogy.

Eleanor Roosevelt was born October 11, 1884 into a family of lineage, wealth, and uncommon sadness. The first child of Anna Hall Roosevelt and Elliott Roosevelt, young Eleanor encountered disappointment early in life. Her father, mourning the death of his mother and fighting constant ill health, turned to alcohol for solace and was absent from home for long periods of time engaged in either business, pleasure or medical treatment. Anna Hall Roosevelt struggled to balance her disillusionment with her husband with her responsibilities toward Eleanor and Eleanor's younger brother, Hall. As the years passed, the young mother became increasingly disconsolate.

An astute and observant child, Eleanor rarely failed to notice the tension between her parents and the strain that it placed on both of them. By the time she was six, Eleanor assumed some responsibility for her mother's happiness, recalling later in her autobiography that "my mother suffered from very bad headaches, and I know now that life must have been hard and bitter and a very great strain on her. I would often sit at the head of her bed and stroke her head . . . for hours on end."

Yet this intimacy was shortlived. Anna Hall Roosevelt, one of New York's most stunning beauties, increasingly made young Eleanor profoundly self-conscious about her demeanor and appearance, even going so far as to nickname her "Granny" for her "very plain," "old fashioned," and serious deportment. Remembering her childhood, Eleanor later wrote, "I was a solemn child without beauty. I seemed like a little old woman entirely lacking in the spontaneous joy and mirth of youth."

Her mother's death in 1892 made Eleanor's devotion to her father all the more intense. Images of a gregarious, larger than life Elliott dominated Eleanor's memories of him and she longed for the days when he would return home. She adored his playfulness with her and the way he loved her with such uncritical abandon. Indeed, her father's passion only underscored the isolation she felt when he was absent. Never the dour child in his eyes, Eleanor was instead his "own darling little Nell." Hopes for a happier family life were dashed however when Elliott Roosevelt died of depression and alcoholism nineteen months later. At the age of ten, Eleanor became an orphan and her grandmother, Mary Hall, became her guardian.

Eleanor's life with Grandmother Hall was confining and lonesome until Mrs. Hall sent Eleanor to attend Allenswood Academy in London in 1899. There Eleanor began to study under the tutelage of Mademoiselle Marie Souvestre, a bold, articulate woman whose commitment to liberal causes and detailed study of history played a key role in shaping Eleanor's social and political development. The three years that Eleanor spent at Allenswood were the happiest years of her adolescence. She formed close, lifelong friendships with her classmates; studied language, literature and history; learned to state her opinions on controversial political events clearly and concisely; and spent the summers traveling Europe with her headmistress, who insisted upon seeing both the grandeur and the squalor of the nations they visited. Gradually she gained "confidence and independence" and later marveled that she was "totally without fear in this new phase of my life," writing in her autobiography that "Mlle. Souvestre shocked one into thinking, and that on the whole was very beneficial." Her headmistress’s influence was so strong that as an Eleanor later described Souvestre was one of the three most important influences on her life.

When Eleanor returned to her family's West 37 Street home in 1902 to make her debut, she continued to follow the principles that Souvestre instilled in her. While she dutifully obeyed her family's wishes regarding her social responsibilities, she also joined the National Consumers League and, as a member of the Junior League for the Promotion of Settlement Movements, volunteered as a teacher for the College Settlement on Rivington Street. Her commitment to these activities soon began to attract attention and Eleanor Roosevelt, much to her family's chagrin, soon became known within New York reform circles as a staunch and dedicated worker. That summer, as she was riding the train home to Tivoli for a visit with her grandmother, Eleanor was startled to find her cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), then a student at Harvard, also on the train. This encounter reintroduced the cousins and piqued their interest in one another. After a year of chance meetings, clandestine correspondence, and secret courtship, the two Roosevelts became engaged on November 22, 1903. Fearing that they were too young and unprepared for marriage, and believing that her son needed a better, more prominent wife, Franklin's mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, planned to separate the couple and demanded that they keep their relationship secret for a year. Sara Roosevelt's plans did not work, and after a sixteen-month engagement, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt married Franklin Delano Roosevelt on March 17, 1905. President Theodore Roosevelt, who was in town for the St. Patrick's Day parade, gave the bride, his niece, away. The wedding made the front page of the .

Although Eleanor clearly loved Franklin, married life was difficult from the start. Sara Roosevelt chose their first home, a small brick dwelling three blocks from her own residence, hired the staff, chose all the interior decorations, and became Eleanor's most constant companion. Within a year, a daughter (Anna) was born; followed in rapid succession by James (1906), Franklin (1909, who died soon after birth), Elliott (1910), Franklin (1914), and John (1916). She later said of this period, "for ten years I was always just getting over having a baby or about to have one, and so my occupations were considerably restricted during this period." Moreover, as the Roosevelt family grew, in 1908 Sara Roosevelt gave the couple a townhouse in New York City, which was not only adjacent to her own home but which had connecting doors on every floor. While the two women were very close; their intimacy only reinforced ER’s sense of dependence and inadequacy. ER, as she began to sign her letters, was miserable, recalling that she was "simply absorbing the personalities of those about me and letting their tastes and interests dominate me."

All that started to change in 1911. Dutchess County elected her husband to the New York state senate. FDR asked her to leave Hyde Park and to set up a home for the family in Albany. Eager to leave the vigilance of her mother-in-law, ER tackled the move with enthusiasm and discipline. "For the first time I was going to live on my own," she recalled twenty years later. "I wanted to be independent. I was beginning to realize that something within me craved to be an individual."

By the time FDR left Albany to join Woodrow Wilson’s administration two years later, ER began to view independence in personal and political terms. FDR had led the campaign against the Tammany Hall block in the senate and an indignant ER watched in fascination as the machine attacked its critics. Outraged that a political machine could vindictively deprive its critics of the means to support themselves, ER lost a great deal of the naivete that characterized her earlier attitude toward government. "That year taught me many things about politics and started me thinking along lines that were completely new." FDR agreed, later telling a friend, Albany "was the beginning of my wife's political sagacity and co-operation."

Consequently, when FDR was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy in autumn 1913, ER knew most of the rules by which a political couple operated. "I was really well schooled now. . . . I simply knew that what we had to do we did, and that my job was to make it easy." "It" was whatever needed to be done to complete a specific familial or political task. As ER oversaw the Roosevelts’ transitions from Albany to Hyde Park to Washington, coordinated the family's entrance into the proper social circles for a junior Cabinet member, and evaluated FDR's administrative and political experiences, her independence increased as her managerial expertise grew. When the threat of world war freed Cabinet wives from the obligatory social rounds, ER, with her commitment to settlement work, administrative skills, disdain for social small talk, and aversion to corrupt political machines, entered war work eager for new responsibilities.

World War I gave ER an acceptable arena in which to challenge existing social restrictions and the connections necessary to expedite reform. Anxious to escape the confines of Washington high society, ER threw herself into wartime relief with a zeal that amazed her family and her colleagues. Her fierce dedication to Navy Relief and the Red Cross canteen not only stunned soldiers and Washington officials but shocked ER as well. She began to realize that she could contribute valuable service to projects that she was interested in and that her energies did not necessarily have to focus on her husband's political career. "The war," observed Ruby Black, a friend and early biographer, "pushed Eleanor Roosevelt into the first real work since she was married twelve years before."

Emboldened by these experiences, ER began to respond to requests for a more public political role. When a Navy chaplain whom she had met through her Red Cross efforts asked her to visit shell-shocked sailors confined in St. Elizabeth's Hospital, the federal government's facility for the insane, she immediately accepted his invitation. Appalled by the quality of treatment the sailors received, as well as the shortage of aides, supplies and equipment available to all the St. Elizabeth's patients, ER urged her friend, Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane, to visit the facility. When Lane declined to intervene, ER pressured him until he appointed a commission to investigate the institution. "I became," she wrote, "more determined to try for certain ultimate objectives. I had gained a certain assurance as to my ability to run things, and the knowledge that there is joy in accomplishing good."

The end of the war did not slow ER's pace or revise her new perspective on duty and independence. In June 1920, while she was vacationing with her children at Campobello, FDR received the Democratic nomination for Vice-President. Although both her grandmother and mother-in-law strongly believed that "a woman's place was not in the public eye" and pressured ER to respond to press inquiries through her social secretary, she developed a close working relationship with FDR's intimate advisor and press liaison, Louis Howe. Invigorated by Howe's support, ER threw herself into the election and reveled in the routine political decisions that daily confronted the ticket. By the end of the campaign, while other journalists aboard the Roosevelt campaign train played cards, Louis Howe and ER could frequently be found huddled over paperwork, reviewing FDR's speeches and discussing campaign protocol.

When Republican Warren Harding won the 1920 election, the Roosevelts returned to New York. FDR practiced law and planned his next political move as Eleanor Roosevelt considered her options. Dreading "a winter of four days in New York with nothing but teas and luncheons and dinners to take up [her] time," ER "mapped out a schedule for [herself]" in which she spent Monday through Thursday in New York City and the weekend in Hyde Park. She declined invitations to sit on the boards of organizations that wanted to exploit her name rather than use her energy, opting instead to join the Women's City Club, the National Consumers League, the Women's Division of the Democratic State Committee, and the New York chapters of the League of Women Voters and the Women's Trade Union League.

Despite her labeling the 1920s as a time of "private interlude" in , in the seven-year span between the onset of FDR's paralysis and his campaign for the New York governorship, Eleanor Roosevelt's political contributions and organizational sagacity made her one of New York's leading politicians. While still fervently committed to democratic ideals, she recognized that ideology alone did not provide the votes and skills necessary to win elections. Repeatedly she goaded women's and other reform groups to set realistic goals, prioritize their tasks, and delegate assignments. Her pragmatism attracted attention within the party and women's political organizations. Soon the publicized her clout, treating her as the "woman [of influence] who speaks her political mind."

After working with attorney Elizabeth Read and her partner, educator and consumer activist Esther Lape, ER agreed to chair the League of Women Voters Legislative Affairs Committee and to represent the League on the Women's Joint Legislative Committee. Each week, Eleanor Roosevelt studied the , examined legislation and committee reports, interviewed members of Congress and the State Assembly, and met with League officers to discuss the information she gathered. Each month, she assembled her analyses and presented a report for League members outlining the status of bills in which the organization was interested and suggesting strategies to help achieve its legislative goals. Moreover, ER also frequently spoke out at these monthly assemblies on such pressing non-legislative issues as primary reform, voter registration and party identification. Recognizing the extensive contributions she made, the League elected her its vice-chairman eighteen months later, after ER skillfully arbitrated a hostile internal organization dispute.

Ruby Black saw this time as the period when "Eleanor Roosevelt was traveling, not drifting, away from the conventional life expected of women in her social class." ER agreed, later characterizing the last part of 1920 as the beginning of "the intensive education of Eleanor Roosevelt." Polio did not strike FDR until the following summer; consequently, ER was already in a position to keep the Roosevelt name active in Democratic circles before illness sidelined her husband.

Throughout September 1922, ER, Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman and future New York Congresswoman Caroline O'Day traveled throughout the state to encourage the formation of Democratic women's clubs. Their organizational efforts created such strong support among the Democratic rank and file that at the State Convention in Syracuse the women attendees demanded that ER, Marion Dickerman and Caroline O'Day each be considered as the party's nominee for Secretary of State. The following month, as Democratic Women's Committee vice-president and finance chairman, ER edited and wrote articles for the discussing campaign strategies and the fall election.

By 1924, she joined the board of the bi-partisan Women's City Club, whose major objectives were to inform women about pressing political and social issues, introduce them in a pragmatic way to governmental operations and organize lobbing and publicity campaigns for club-sponsored issues. During her four-year tenure as a Club board member ER chaired its City Planning Department, coordinated its responses on housing and transportation issues, chaired its Legislation committee, pushed through a reorganization plan, arbitrated disputes over child labor laws, promoted workmen's compensation and, in a move that made banner headlines across New York State, strongly urged the adoption of an amendment to the Penal Law legalizing the distribution of birth control information among married couples.

Not all of the Roosevelts' friends supported her activism. Indeed, ER's political prominence created some in-house sarcasm among FDR's advisors. That May, Josephus Daniels taunted his former assistant secretary that he was glad that "I am not the only `squaw' man in the country."

Such inside joking did not curtail ER's political work. She attended the 1924 Democratic National Convention as chair of the women's delegation to the platform committee and as Al Smith's liaison to women voters. When the committee rejected her requests and the convention refused to choose Smith as its standard bearer, ER returned to New York undaunted. "I took my politics so seriously" she uncharacteristically recalled in , "that in the early autumn I came down to the state headquarters and went seriously to work in the state campaign."

Assiduously, ER courted voters throughout the state. New Yorkers living in the rural areas often neglected by the party heard her personalized appeals for support. She pledged to keep their interests in front of the party leadership, if the farmers would continue to make their demands known and to vote Democratic. But she also appealed to voters' more basic instincts. Despite her aversion to Tammanyesque practices, ER occasionally participated in her own version of negative campaigning, even if the candidate was a member of her own family. The Republicans nominated her cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., for governor. Without a second thought, ER tailed him around the state in a roadster topped with a giant steaming teapot in a flagrant attempt to associate her cousin with Teapot Dome corruption.

ER then took to print to promote her candidates with the same level of energy she displayed in her speeches. She expanded her audience, broadened her themes and carefully tailored her remarks. Within the next twelve months, she continued her regular articles for the League's and , and published four substantive political articles in publications ranging from the popular women's magazine to the more scholarly journals and .

So strong an impression did her organizational and administrative campaign skills make on the state's professional politicians that Belle Moskowitz and Al Smith both recruited her energies for Smith's 1928 presidential campaign. A longtime supporter of Smith, ER agreed to coordinate preconvention activities for the Democratic Women's Committee. The recognized ER's increasing political clout and featured a lead article on her influence in its April 8 issue. Ironically, as a result of this continuous activity, by the time her husband received the party's nomination for governor, Eleanor Roosevelt was better known among the faithful party activists than was FDR. The 1928 election presented a new challenge to both Roosevelts. New York state law prevented Al Smith, the Democratic presidential nominee, from seeking reelection as governor and Smith wanted FDR to succeed him. This decision placed ER squarely in opposition to FDR's most trusted aide, Louis Howe. Howe vigorously opposed FDR's candidacy and FDR, following his advisor's advice, refused to take Smith's phone calls. Smith, whose chief political advisor was a woman, appreciated the scope of ER's expertise and the influence she held in her husband's innermost political circle. Consequently, Smith turned to ER, who had enthusiastically endorsed his candidacy and who was the only individual who might counteract Howe's opposition, to intercede with FDR. ER agreed, phoned her husband, told him that "she knew he had to do what he felt was expected of him," handed the phone to Smith, and left to address a Smith campaign rally.

Her action does not mean that Eleanor Roosevelt unequivocally endorsed her husband's electoral aspirations, however. She feared that FDR's victory would undermine all her hard-won independence. "It became clear," James Roosevelt later wrote, "that she felt if father won, she would lose" the autonomy she had worked so painstakingly to develop.

By the early 1920s, the Franklin Roosevelt-Eleanor Roosevelt relationship had begun to move away from an alliance defined by marital responsibilities and more toward a professional collaboration between peers. ER's discovery in 1918 of FDR's affair with Lucy Mercer, her social secretary, destroyed martial intimacy and encouraged ER to look elsewhere for closeness. While both treasured their friendship with Louis Howe and FDR enjoyed most of ER's associates, the separate strong attachments ER and FDR formed with different co-workers and companions were the rule rather than the exception in the Roosevelt households.

Indeed, the few old friends and Democratic party commitments the Roosevelts shared were enough to sustain a friendship, but not an intimate one. Competing pursuits and divergent communities encouraged the Roosevelts to follow different paths and to develop separate lifestyles. "It is essential," ER responded when asked her to define a modern wife's job, for the woman "to develop her own interests, to carry on a stimulating life of her own. . . ." As a result, by the time FDR was elected governor, the Roosevelts had developed separate, distinct personal and political support systems.

With her ties to reform movements and women's political associations expanding, ER carefully and deliberately developed her own network. Caroline O'Day and Elinor Morgenthau became her life-long intimate friends. With Democratic Women's Committee colleague Nancy Cook and her partner Marion Dickerman, with whom ER taught and who would later administer the Todhunter School for Girls in New York City, Eleanor Roosevelt built Val-Kill, her home away from the Roosevelt house.

While ER and FDR both expanded their levels of commitment to the state Democratic Party and promoted the same candidates, they began to form different views of the political process. Although both Roosevelts realized that politics was part ego, part drive, and part conviction, they differed as to which component they valued the most. If politics was part game and part crusade, ER tolerated the game for the sake of the crusade. To her dismay, FDR enjoyed all its aspects. To the extent that FDR failed to reverse this trend, he could no longer depend upon ER's unqualified support. Consequently, by 1932, as ER responded to a friend who confessed to voting for Norman Thomas, that "if I had not been married to Franklin," she too would have voted for the Socialist candidate.

ER’s attitude does not mean, however, that once FDR assumed the governorship that she played the game more than she struggled for reform. The dilemma the return to Albany presented ER was one of continuing independence: one of time management, rather than political fidelity. ER's bid for personal freedom was a more strenuous and longlasting campaign than her husband's 1928 run for office.

Thus, Eleanor Roosevelt was not thrilled with the prospect of returning to Albany, a goldfish bowl in which all her movements would be both confined by and interpreted through her husband's political prestige. She told her son James that "she knew that [FDR] had wanted her to become active in politics primarily to keep his case in the public eye" and that he "would expect her to move into the shadows if he moved into the limelight." This shift depressed her immensely. As Marion Dickerman later told FDR biographer Kenneth S. Davis, ER's "dread" was so strong that it fostered a rebellion which "strained at the leash of her self-control."

Yet ER also realized that her political expertise and her new support system was an outgrowth of, and therefore a by-product of, her relationship with FDR. Never did she fully expect FDR to withdraw from public life or expect that she would be immune from its scrutiny. Instead, Eleanor Roosevelt concentrated on how to find the most appropriate manner to promote two careers at once, how best to pursue her separate interests in ways that did not undermine her husband's public standing. The three keys to her freedom, the Democratic Women's Committee (DWC), the Todhunter School for Girls and Val-Kill, lay outside Albany. Therefore, the extent to which ER could maximize her independence was directly parallel to the extent to which she could efficiently divide her life between the Governor's mansion and the family's East 65th Street residence in New York City. She knew how threatening this would be to some pundits. So, immediately after the election, ER launched her own media campaign to make the press treat her various activities in the most positive light possible. When a reporter asked her the day she became New York's First Lady what her new schedule would be, Eleanor Roosevelt responded that although she would resign her DWC positions, she would still support the furniture factory at Val-Kill and commute to New York City three days a week to continue her government and English literature classes and to fulfill her administrative responsibilities at Todhunter.

Her duties in New York City did not preclude political contributions to FDR's administration. She successfully lobbied Democratic National Chairman John Raskob for increased allocations to the Democratic State Committee and raised seed money for the Women's Activities Committee. Furthermore, in Albany and in other locales throughout the state which she visited, ER began to apply the political finesse she demonstrated earlier in arbitrating League of Women Voters disputes to resolve disagreements within FDR's inner circle. With her friend Henry Morgenthau, ER pressured FDR to invite both Republican and Democratic mayors, rather than just the officials who supported FDR's goals, to the State Mayors's Conference. She regularly brokered conflicts between FDR intimates Louis Howe and Jim Farley and acted as a political stand-in when FDR could not or chose not to participate in the discussion.

ER's contributions were not limited to crisis management. Aware of how difficult it was for a politician and his staff to face unpopular decisions, Eleanor Roosevelt championed the appointment of individuals who had the nerve to disagree with FDR upfront. She lobbied successfully for Frances Perkins' appointment as state Secretary of Labor and for Nell Schwartz to fill the vacancy Perkins' appointment left on the State Industrial Commission. Believing that she knew Smith better than FDR did, ER strongly objected to FDR retaining any of Smith's cabinet. In particular, she opposed Belle Moskowitz's appointment as FDR's personal secretary and Robert Moses' reappointment as secretary of state, writing her husband in Warm Springs that "by all signs Belle and Bob Moses mean to cling to you." If he was not careful, she continued, "you will wake up to find R.M. Secretary of State and B.M. running Democratic publicity at the old stand unless you take a firm stand." Furthermore, she testified before various senate committees on behalf of protective labor legislation and was not afraid to criticize FDR's plan for unemployment insurance.

The 1932 presidential campaign assaulted Eleanor Roosevelt's adaptability with increasing frequency. Although she supported FDR's political ambitions out of loyalty both to him and the Democratic party, ER astutely recognized the attacks she would encounter if she continued to pursue her individual projects with the same vigor she applied in the past. For his part, FDR continued to promote the image of "his Missus" as part of the Roosevelt team. Nevertheless, ER knew that this was a political screen designed to enhance her symbolic value to the campaign. What her future role would be was uncertain.

Therefore, once the election was decided, ER inadvertently turned to the media to test her public standing. Whereas during the race she often told interviewers she "would be very much at home in Washington" if FDR was elected, after FDR won, she confided her dread to reporters she trusted. Riding in a day coach to Albany with Lorena Hickok on November 9, 1932, Eleanor Roosevelt unburdened her thoughts for the record. "I never wanted it even though some people have said that my ambition for myself drove him on. . . . I never wanted to be a President's wife." Fearful that her support for her husband would be misunderstood, she clarified her stance.

For him, of course, I'm glad - sincerely. I could not have wanted it any other way. After all I'm a Democrat, too. Now I shall have to work out my own salvation. I'm afraid it may be a little difficult. I know what Washington is like. I've lived there.

The American press, like the American public, was divided over how professionally active a First Lady should be. Although Eleanor Roosevelt's preinaugural commitments were in the same fields as the positions she held while First Lady of New York, criticism of her commercial radio and journalism contracts increased. Suddenly, ER found herself ridiculed in such diverse publications as , and the . By February, the press increasingly interpreted ER's professionalism as commercialism. "All through January and February and right up until March 2, the day they left for Washington, Eleanor Roosevelt continued to do the things she had always done,” Lorena Hickok recalled. The papers continued to carry stories about her. And some people continued to criticize her. They just could not get used to the idea of her being `plain, ordinary Eleanor Roosevelt.'"

Although Eleanor Roosevelt admitted to her friend that she would "curtail somewhat her activities" because she "suppose[d] [she] had made some mistakes," ER refused to abandon the expertise she had worked so diligently to achieve. Aware of the criticism her position would provoke, she argued that she had no choice but to continue. "I'll just have to go on being myself, as much as I can. I'm just not the sort of person who would be any good at [any] job. I dare say I shall be criticized, whatever I do."

Eleanor Roosevelt's aversion to any other role was so strong that in the week before the inaugural, she impetuously wrote Dickerman and Cook that she contemplated divorcing FDR. She told Hickok, in a quote for the record, that she "hated" having to resign her teaching position at Todhunter, saying "I wonder if you have any idea how I hate to do it." Increasingly sympathetic to ER's dilemma and aware of the potential repercussions of such statements, Hickok in her Associated Press piece portrayed ER as upbeat and confident: "The prospective mistress of the White House thinks people are going to get used to her ways, even though she does edit , wears $10 dresses, and drives her own car."

Clearly, when Eleanor Roosevelt entered the White House in March 1933, she did so reluctantly. Although she supported FDR's aims and believed in his leadership abilities, ER feared that her husband's political agenda, in addition to restricting her movements and curtailing her personal independence, would force her to minimize the political issues nearest and dearest to her heart. Once FDR won the election, he asked her to resign her positions with the Democratic National Committee, the Todhunter School, the League of Women Voters, the Non-Partisan Legislative Committee and the Women's Trade Union League. She then announced that she would no longer take part in commercial radio events and that she would refrain from discussing politics in her magazine articles. Though she tried to avoid it, public expectation was redefining her career and it hurt. "If I wanted to be selfish," she confessed earlier to Hickok, "I could wish that he had not been elected."

Questions "seethed" in ER's mind about what she should do after March 4, 1933. Afraid of being confined to a schedule of teas and receptions, ER volunteered to do a "real job" for FDR. She knew that Ettie Rheiner (Mrs. John Nance) Garner served as an administrative assistant to her husband the Vice-President, and ER tried to convince FDR to let her provide the same service. The President rebuffed the First Lady's offer. Trapped by convention, she begrudgingly recognized that "the work [was FDR's] work and the pattern his pattern." Bitterly disappointed, she acknowledged that she "was one of those who served his purposes."

Nevertheless, ER refused to accept a superficial and sedentary role. She wanted "to do things on my own, to use my own mind and abilities for my own aims." She struggled to carve out an active contributory place for herself in the New Deal–a challenge not easily met. Dejected, she found it "hard to remember that I was not just `Eleanor Roosevelt,' but the `wife of the President.'"

Eleanor Roosevelt entered the First Hundred Days of her husband's administration with no clearly defined role. Her offers to sort FDR's mail and to act as his "listening post" had been rejected summarily. Moreover, the press continued to pounce on each display of ER's individualism. When she announced in an inauguration day interview that she planned to cut White House expenses by twenty-five per cent, "simplify" the White House social calendar, and serve as FDR's "eyes and ears," reporters discovered ER was just as newsworthy after the inaugural as she was before.

ER's relations with the press during the spring and summer of 1933 did nothing to curtail their interest. On March 6, two days after her husband became president, Eleanor Roosevelt held her own press conference at which she announced that she would "get together" with women reporters once a week. She asked for their cooperation. She wanted to make the general public more aware of White House activities and to encourage their understanding of the political process. She hoped that the women reporters who covered her would interpret, especially to American women, the basic mechanics of national politics.

Despite her initial intent to focus on her social activities as First Lady, political issues soon became a central part of the weekly briefings. When some women reporters assigned to ER tried to caution her to speak off the record, she responded that she knew some of her statements would "cause unfavorable comment in some quarters" . . . [but] I am making these statements on purpose to arouse controversy and thereby get the topics talked about."

ER then made the same argument to the public when she accepted an offer for a monthly column from . Announcing that she would donate her monthly thousand dollar fee to charity, ER then proceed to ask her readers to help her establish "a clearinghouse, a discussion room" for "the particular problems which puzzle you or sadden you" and to share "how you are adjusting yourself to new conditions in this amazing changing world." Entitling the article "I Want You to Write to Me," ER reinforced the request throughout the piece. "Do not hesitate," she wrote, "to write to me even if your views clash with what you believe to be my views." Only a free exchange of ideas and discussion of problems would help her "learn of experiences which may be helpful to others." By January 1934, 300,000 Americans had responded to this request.

From her first days in the White House, this desire to remain part of the public propelled ER's New Deal agenda. She, more often than not, greeted guests at the door of the White House herself; learned to operate the White House elevator; and adamantly refused Secret Service protection. Yet there also were signs that she intended to be a serious contributor to the Roosevelt administration. She converted the Lincoln bedroom into a study and had a telephone installed. She urged FDR to send Hickok out on a national fact-finding tour for the Federal Emergency Relief Association in the summer of 1933. Working closely with Molly Dewson, who replaced ER as chair of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee, she pressured the Administration to appoint women to positions of influence throughout the New Deal programs. The Dewson-ER lobbying effort helped Rose Schneiderman join the NRA Labor Advisory Board, Sue Sheldon White and Emily Newell Blair join the NRA Consumer Advisory Board, and Jo Coffin become assistant public printer. And when the Washington Press Corps refused to admit its women members to its annual Gridiron dinner, ER gleefully threw herself into planning a "Gridiron Widows" banquet and skit for women officials and reporters.

When ER read Hickok's accounts of the squalid conditions in the West Virginia coal town of Scott's Run, she was appalled and moved immediately to address the problems. She met with Louis Howe and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to argue that the Subsistence Homestead provision of the National Industrial Recovery Act would help address the community's problems. She succeeded and became a frequent visitor to the new community, Arthurdale. There she was photographed square dancing with miners in worn clothes and holding sick children in her lap. This image, when linked with her strong commitment to building the best living quarters the funds could provide, served as a lightning rod for critics of the New Deal and they delighted in exposing each cost overrun and each program defect.

While most historians view ER's commitment to Arthurdale as the best example of her influence within the New Deal, ER did more than champion a single anti-poverty program. Continuously she urged that relief should be as diverse as the constituency which needed it.

"The unemployed are not a strange race. They are like we would be if we had not had a fortunate chance at life," she wrote in 1933. The distress they encountered, not their socio-economic status, should be the focus of relief. Consequently, she introduced programs for groups not originally included in New Deal plans; supported others which were in danger of elimination or having their funds cut; pushed the hiring of women, blacks, and liberals within federal agencies; and acted as the administration's most outspoken champion of liberal reform.

Eleanor Roosevelt did not immediately begin to push programs. Rather, as her actions to modify the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and the Civil Works Administration (CWA) show, she waited to see how the programs FDR's aides designed were put into operation and then lobbied for improvements or suggested alternatives. When the needs of unemployed women where overlooked by FERA and CWA planners, ER lobbied first to have a women's divisions established within both agencies and then to have Hilda Worthington Smith and Ellen Sullivan Woodward appointed program directors. She then planned and chaired the White House Conference on the Emergency Needs of Women and monitored the Household Workers' Training Program which was born during the conference.

ER addressed the problems of unemployed youth with the same fervor she applied to women's economic hardships. This also was not a politically popular position for her to take. The unemployed youth of the 1930s underscored several fears adults had for society. Conservatives saw disgruntled young people as a fertile ground for revolutionary politics while progressives mourned the disillusionment and apathy spreading among American youth.

ER thought that camps in the Civilian Conservation Corps, while providing temporary relief for some youth, did not meet this need. Furthermore, because the camps were supervised by military personnel and only provided instruction in forestry, ER believed that an additional program tailored to the special needs of youth was urgently needed. In mid-1933, she pressured Harry Hopkins to develop a program for youth which would provide a social, rather than a militaristic, focus. ER argued that the specific problems facing youth needed to be recognized, but only in a way which fostered a sense of self-worth. By providing job skills and education, she hoped that the program would foster a sense of civic awareness which in turn would promote a commitment to social justice. Then youth would be empowered to articulate their own needs and aspirations and to express these insights clearly.

Although historians disagree over how major a role ER played in establishing the National Youth Administration (NYA), her imprint upon the agency's development is indelible. Established by an executive order signed by FDR on June 26, 1935, the NYA was authorized to administer programs in five areas: work projects, vocational guidance, apprenticeship training, educational and nutritional guidance camps for unemployed women, and student financial aid. Clearly ER's preference for vocational guidance and education triumphed over the CCC relief model.

Moreover, ER was both the agency's and youth's natural choice for confessor, planner, lobbyist, and promoter. She reviewed NYA policy with agency directors, arranged for NYA officials and youth leaders to meet with FDR in and out of the White House, served as NYA's intermediary with the president, critiqued and suggested projects, and attended as many NYA state administrators conferences as her schedule allowed. Last but not least, she visited at least 112 NYA sites and reported her observations in her speeches, articles and "My Day," the daily column she began in 1936. ER took such satisfaction in the NYA that when she briefly acknowledged her role in forming the agency, she did so with an uncharacteristic candor. "One of the ideas I agreed to present to Franklin," she wrote in , "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."

Just as she listened to the concerns of youth, ER also met with unemployed artists and writers to discuss their concerns. When they asked for her support for a Public Works Arts Project, she agreed immediately and attended the preliminary planning meeting. Seated at the head table next to Edward Bruce, the meeting's organizer, ER knitted while she listened to Bruce propose a program to pay artists for creating public art. Advocating a program in which artists could control both form and content, Bruce recruited supporters for federally financed work appropriate for public buildings. Sitting quietly through most of the discussion, ER interrupted only to question procedure and to emphasize her support of the project.

ER became PWAP's ardent public and private champion. When PWAP artists were sent to Civil Conservation Corps camps in mid-1934 and produced over 200 watercolors, oil paintings, and chalk drawings portraying camp life, ER enthusiastically opened their "Life in the CCC" exhibit at the National Museum. When 500 PWAP artworks were displayed at Washington's Corcoran Gallery, she dedicated the exhibit and declared that in addition to its artistic merit, the works liberated society greatly by expressing what many people could find no words to describe.

After Bruce was appointed PWAP director, he proposed that artists be eligible for WPA programs. Immediately he solicited ER's support. She agreed that artists were in need of government aid and supported the WPA venture, in the process entering the internal dispute over whether FERA should fund white collar programs. With the support of FERA administrator Harry Hopkins, ER lobbied FDR to endorse Bruce's concept. The President agreed, issuing an executive order on June 25, 1935 which created the Federal One Programs of the Works Progress Administration: the Federal Writers Project, the Federal Theater Project, and the Federal Art Project (formerly PWAP).

Eleanor Roosevelt continued to run administrative interference after the programs were in operation. When Jean Baker, director of the WPA Professional and Service Products Division, gave into pressure from conservatives who wanted to place the program under local control, ER then convinced Hopkins that Baker should be replaced. Hopkins agreed and filled Baker's post with ER's close friend, Ellen Woodward.

ER also continued to promote the project despite its increasingly controversial image. When Hallie Flanagan asked for assistance in convincing Congress that the Federal Theater Project was not an heretical attack on American culture, ER agreed on the spot. The First Lady told Flanagan that she would gladly go to the Hill because the time had come when America must recognize that art is controversial and the controversy is an important part of education.

Despite the fervor with which ER campaigned for a more democratic administration of relief through the establishment of women's divisions, NYA and the three Federal One programs, these efforts paled in comparison to the unceasing pressure she placed upon the president and the nation to confront the economic and political discrimination facing Black America. Although the First Lady did not become an ardent proponent of integration until the 1950s, throughout the thirties and forties she nevertheless persistently labeled racial prejudice as undemocratic and immoral. Black Americans recognized the depth of her commitment and consequently kept faith with FDR because his wife kept faith with them.

ER's racial policies attracted notice almost immediately. Less than a week after becoming First Lady, she shocked conservative Washington society by announcing she would have an entirely black White House domestic staff. By late summer 1933, photographs appeared showing ER discussing living conditions with black miners in West Virginia, and the press treated her involvement in the anti-lynching campaign as front page news. Rumors of ER's "race-baiting" actions sped across the South with hurricane force.

ER refused to be intimidated by rumor. She mobilized Cabinet and Congressional wives for a walking tour the Washington's slum alleys to increase support for housing legislation then before Congress. After being intensively briefed by Walter White ER toured the Virgin Islands with Lorena Hickok in 1934, investigating conditions for herself only to return agreeing with White's initial assessments. In 1935, she visited the Howard University's Freedman Hospital, lobbied Congress for increased appropriations, and praised the institution in her press conferences. FDR's disapproval kept her from attending the 1934 and 1935 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) annual conventions; however, his cautiousness did not affect her support of the organization. Indeed, she telegraphed her deep disappointment to the delegates. She then joined the local chapters of the NAACP and National Urban League, becoming the first white D.C. resident to respond to the group’s membership drives. And, in contrast to FDR who refrained from actively supporting anti-lynching legislation, a very public ER refused to leave the Senate gallery during the filibuster over the bill.

As the 1936 election approached, Eleanor Roosevelt continued her inspections and finally convinced FDR to let her address the NAACP and National Urban League annual conventions. When published the famous cartoon of miners awaiting her visit, Mrs. Roosevelt aggressively defended her outreach to minorities and the poor in a lengthy article for . Directly she attacked those who mocked her interest. "In strange and subtle ways," she began, "it was indicated to me that I should feel ashamed of that cartoon and that there was certainly something the matter with a woman who wanted to see so much and know so much." She refused to be so limited, she responded to those "blind" critics who refused to be interested in anything outside their own four walls.

The liberal and conservative press gave such action prominent coverage. When ER addressed the National Urban League's annual convention, NBC radio broadcasted the address nationally. When she visited Howard University and was escorted around campus by its Honor Guard, printed a picture of ER surrounded by the students on its front page while castigating ER for conduct unbecoming to a president's wife. Mainstream media such as the and questioned the extent to which ER would be "a campaign issue."

ER increased her civil rights activism in her second term as First lady. She continued her outspoken advocacy of anti-lynching legislation, served as an active co-chair of the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax, spoke out in favor of National Sharecropper's Week, urged Agricultural Adjustment Act administrators to recognize the discriminatory practices of white landowners, pressured FERA administrators to pay black and white workers equal salaries, and invited black guests and entertainers to the White House. With NYA administrator, Mary McLeod Bethune, she convened the National Conference of Negro Women at the White House and publicized the agenda the Conference promoted. She also pressured the Resettlement Administration to recognize that black sharecroppers' problems deserved their attention and lent her active endorsement to the Southern Conference on Human Welfare (SCHW).

Often the public stances ER took were more effective than the lobbying she did behind the scenes. When ER entered the SCHW's 1938 convention in Birmingham, Alabama, police officers told her that she would not be allowed to sit with Bethune, because a city ordinance outlawed integrated seating. ER then requested a chair and placed it squarely between the aisles, highlighting her displeasure with Jim Crow policies. In February 1939, ER resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution when the organization refused to rent its auditorium to the internationally known black contralto, Marian Anderson. ER then announced her decision in her newspaper column, thereby transforming a local act into a national disgrace. When Howard University students picketed lunch stands near the university which denied them service, ER praised their courage and sent them money to continue their public education programs. And when A. Philip Randolph and other civil rights leaders threatened to march on Washington unless FDR acted to outlaw discrimination in defense industries, ER took their demands to the White House.

By the early forties Eleanor Roosevelt firmly believed the civil rights issue to be the real litmus test for American democracy. Thus she declared over and over again throughout the war that there could be no democracy in the United States that did not include democracy for blacks. In she asserted that people of all races have inviolate rights to property. "We have never been willing to face this problem, to line it up with the basic, underlying beliefs in Democracy." Racial prejudice enslaved blacks; consequently, "no one can claim that . . . the Negroes of this country are free." She continued this theme in a 1942 article in the , declaring that both the private and the public sector must acknowledge that "one of the main destroyers of freedom is our attitude toward the colored race." "What Kipling called `The White Man's Burden'," she proclaimed in , is "one of the things we can not have any longer." Furthermore, she told those listening to the radio broadcast of the 1945 National Democratic Forum, "democracy may grow or fade as we face [this] problem."

When during World War II Eleanor Roosevelt dared to equate American racism with fascism and argued that to ignore the evils of segregation would be capitulating to Aryanism, hostility toward her reached an all-time high. Newspapers from Chicago to Louisiana covered the dispute and numerous citizens pleaded with J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, to silence her. Refusing to concede to her opponents, she continuously asserted that if the nation continued to honor Jim Crow, America would have defeated fascism abroad only to defend racism at home.

Eleanor Roosevelt said the same things in private that she did in public. Whether interceding with the president for Walter White, Mary McLeod Bethune, A. Philip Randolph, or W.E.B. DuBois; raising money for Howard University or Bethune-Cookman College; investigating discrimination black women encountered while stationed at the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps base in Des Moines, Iowa; pressing the Fair Employment Practices Commission to investigate complaints; or supporting anti-segregation campaigns and anti-lynching legislation, ER pressed to keep civil rights issues on the top of the domestic political agenda. Consequently, throughout the war years, her standing with civil rights leaders increased while her standing with some key White House aides decreased.

While the advent of World War II reenforced ER’s commitment to the New Deal and social reform, it also allowed her to expand the scope of her activities at home and abroad. Even before the war began, concern for the plight of European refugees fueled her work with such groups as the Emergency Rescue Committee and the U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children. She also helped Varian Fry in his efforts to aid Jews escaping Nazi-occupied Europe. At the same time, ER responded to many individual appeals for help but stringent U.S. immigration laws restricted her efforts. In an unsuccessful effort to change the laws, ER lobbied Congress particularly on behalf of the Child Refugee Bill which would have allowed an additional 10,000 children a year above the German quota to enter the United States over a two-year period.

Once the war began in December 1941, she continued to aid individual refugees, work with organized groups and did not hesitate to criticize the State Department’s interpretation of the immigration laws, especially the obstructionist position of visa operations chief Breckinridge Long. She did have allies within the department, however, most notably Assistant Secretary of State Sumner Welles with whom she worked closely to secure additional entrance visas. Still, ER would have been the first to admit that she never achieved all she hoped for in the cause of refugee relief and resettlement.

On the home front, ER wanted Americans to learn from the mistakes of World War I and win both the war and the peace that would follow. To that end, she did all she could do to promote democracy and maintain civilian morale in a variety of different venues. For example, she actively urged women to work out outside the home, particularly in defense industries, and lobbied to have day care centers and take-out kitchens built in factories. She also strongly supported equal pay for equal work. She encouraged volunteerism generally and even served briefly as deputy director of the Office of Civilian Defense until Congressional criticism over alleged favoritism and boondoggling forced her resignation in February 1942. Mindful of the continuing discrimination against African Americans she played an important role in the establishment of the Fair Employment Practices Commission which outlawed discrimination in industries that received defense contracts and helped ensure that African American units such as the Tuskegee Airmen participated in combat operations.

Nor did ER neglect the military. She was a strong supporter of the new women’s military services and the armed forces in general. She corresponded with several individual soldiers and worked to address their concerns. She helped soften the tone of FDR’s standard condolence letter to the families of military personnel killed in action and used her column to place the GIs’ concerns before Congress and the public. ER also toured military installations at home and abroad. She made extensive visits to both the European and Pacific Theatres where she visited military hospitals, ate in the mess halls and in one case walked down a road to say good by and good luck to truckloads of men on their way to the battlefront.

ER angered some White House aides by her insistent demand that New Deal reforms continue during wartime. Vowing that she would not put the New Deal away in storage, ER pressured FDR's aides, liberal leaders, and concerned Americans to remember that there was an economic emergency in addition to a military one. Thus, by the 1944 presidential election, the two camps within the Roosevelt Administration became even more clearly defined.

This division became apparent as the campaign got under way. ER and FDR’s conservative campaign manager, Robert Hannegan, opposed each other. She thought he was too focused on winning at the expense of issues she considered important while he resented her support of Henry Wallace and her activism on behalf of African Americans. Consequently ER was less influential in Democratic party councils than she had been in previous presidential elections. Publicly she campaigned in a non-partisan fashion----what she described as “making non-political speeches about registering and voting” and used her column to discuss such political issues as full employment and housing without referring to the campaign. Behind the scenes she also encouraged FDR to take a more active role in campaigning especially after his poll numbers dropped in September 1944. Once FDR was elected in November, she urged him to keep domestic matters at the top of his agenda, telling the president and his aide Harry Hopkins, that they were “under moral obligation to see his domestic reforms through, particularly the organizing of our domestic life in such a way as to give everybody a job.”

When FDR died April 12 1945, ER was well prepared personally and politically for the challenges facing her. She had close confidants, colleagues, and friends to turn to for support. And, although she was hurt to find that Mercer had been with FDR when he suffered a fatal stroke, she quickly recovered and resumed her commitments.

The question ER faced in 1945 was what her public role would be. Invitations poured into the White House, her apartment in New York City, and her home at Val-Kill. Now that she was no longer First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt was anxious to leave the White House. Within a week of FDR's death, she had coordinated his funeral, responded to friends' condolences, overseen the boxing of possessions acquired and documents generated during her twelve years in Washington, said goodbye to colleagues and staff, and pondered her future. Despite the intensity of this schedule, ER made time April 19th to host a farewell White House tea for the women's press corps. Although the reception was a private affair, ER did answer some questions for the record. After scoffing at various rumors of her own political ambitions, ER declared that her only aspirations were journalistic ones. The next evening after arriving in Manhattan, she faced those questions for a second time. Confronted by a small group of photographers and reporters outside her Washington Square apartment, ER refused to comment on their speculations. "The story," she said, "is over."

Despite these denials, politicians, pundits and the public openly speculated on what actions Eleanor Roosevelt should take next. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and New Jersey Congresswoman Mary Norton urged ER to join the American delegation to the conference charged with planning the United Nations. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes pleaded with her to run for the United States Senate while New York Democratic party leader Ed Flynn argued that she should be the Empire State's next governor. Others proposed that she be the new Secretary of Labor. Even the syndicated columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop belatedly joined the conjecture, satirically suggesting that their cousin become Truman's new political "medium."

Close friends and the media reinforced this expectation. As they rode the train from FDR's Hyde Park funeral back to Washington, Henry Morgenthau Jr. recommended that FDR's estate be settled as soon as possible so she could speak out to the world, arguing that it was most important that her voice be heard. After encouraging her friend to take a brief rest, Hickok reminded ER that she was independent now, freer than she had ever been before, and that “a very important place awaited” her. The Associated Press agreed, succinctly summarizing the pressures confronting ER with this front page headline: "Mrs. Roosevelt Will Continue Column; Seeks No Office ."

Eleanor Roosevelt had her own expectations about the future; however, unlike her friends and the media, she was undecided about what actions she should take to achieve them. Fearing that her public life died along with FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt struggled to set her own course. Although she declared her determination not to continually be seen as a former First Lady, ER feared that without the ear of the president she would lose the influence she struggled so diligently to attain. At times she succumbed to these anxieties only to encounter jocular criticism from those closest to her. When a self-pitying ER informed young friends that she merely wanted to write, visit her family, and live a peaceful life, Trude Lash teasingly suggested that they all go buy ER a lace cap as a retirement gift.

But as ER reflected on her life, she drew confidence from the way that she had handled previous political expectations. In New York, she had managed her career as teacher, journalist, and political organizer without discounting her responsibilities as the Empire State's first lady. In the White House, she revolutionized the role of First Lady by constantly acting in ways that were new to the position. She was the first (and only) First Lady to hold regular press conferences, write a daily newspaper column, publish books and articles, travel the nation on speaking tours, chair national conferences in the White House, address national conventions of social reform organizations, give a keynote address at her party's presidential convention, represent her nation abroad, travel battlefields, and direct a government agency. Clearly, she had numerous skills which could be applied to politics outside the White House.

Yet these new boundaries did not mean that new politics would follow. Eleanor Roosevelt had no plans to forsake the goals and ideals of the New Deal. In fact, she planned to do the exact opposite. If FDR had abandoned Dr. New Deal to become Dr. Win the War and resented her insistent wartime references to domestic problems, ER anticipated that his successor would be even less likely to pursue the controversial reforms FDR had postponed. She recognized that if the New Deal was to re-enter the political arena, she would have to assist in orchestrating its return. Whether she did this by promoting candidates or policy was up to her. The path she selected was not the pivotal point in her strategy. What was important was that she select a mode of operation which allowed her the greatest leeway in pursuing her own goals while she protected her husband's legacy.

For the next seventeen years of her life, until her death November 7, 1962, Eleanor Roosevelt carefully walked this line. She published , her memoirs of her years in the White House. She gladly lent her name to Democratic Party fundraisers, campaigned for local, state and national candidates, and hosted events commemorating FDR's major accomplishments.

But it is her efforts as a politician in her own right that make her post White House years so unique. In December 1945, Harry Truman appointed her to the United States delegation to the United Nation where she stunned delegates with her political finesse she displayed in overseeing the drafting and unanimous passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Although some of her colleagues on the U.S. delegation were initially skeptical of her appointment, ER soon won them over with her political acumen and diplomatic skill. Future secretary of state Dean Rusk who then headed the State Department’s Office of Special Political Affairs described her and another future secretary of state John Foster Dulles as “the two best vote getters we had. Somehow finding room in their schedules, they met and worked hard on every delegate. In those years [they] produced overwhelming majorities on almost anything we wanted in the General Assembly.” Even the Soviets with whom she often clashed respected her skill and tenacity in argument.

Ironically ER’s initial assignment to the UN’s Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee which was considered “safe” turned out to be the most contentious because the group dealt with an early Cold War issue: repatriation of displaced people, particularly those who feared return to the countries of origin because of their political views. In the committee and before the General Assembly, ER refuted the Soviet contention that these people were traitors or collaborators and argued that they should not be forced to return home. Each time the Soviet recommendations were voted down by sizeable margins and ultimately the UN and its subsidiary agency, the International Refugee Organization, came down in favor of resettlement rather than repatriation.

Important as her work on refugee issues was, ER’s efforts on behalf of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) have had the greatest long-term impact. As chair of the subcommittee that drafted the UDHR she played a critical role in the creation of the declaration skillfully creating an atmosphere that permitted blending the ideas and norms of different cultures together in a document nations around the globe could assent to while marshaling U.S. support for swift passage of the declaration by separating it from a legally binding (and more problematic) covenant . Later as chairman of the Human Rights Commission, she presented the document to the General Assembly and was instrumental in its passage. Today, more than 50 years after its passage, the UDHR remains the touchstone of the global Human Rights movement and a key component of an international system that provides for international scrutiny of the way in which a nation treats its citizens.

While conscious of her role and responsibilities as a member of the American delegation, ER rarely hesitated to disagree with the government position especially when she felt the U.S. was not showing enough moral or political leadership on international issues. As a strong supporter of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, she openly criticized President Truman when he withdrew his support for the UN partition plan in favor of a plan to place Palestine under a temporary international trusteeship. In a letter to Secretary Marshall, ER argued that the decision “more or less buried the UN. I can hardly see how it can recover and have the slightest influence, since we are the only ones who could give it any force and we now have been the ones to take it away.” Taking her argument public, she told readers of My Day, “We have taken the weak course of sacrificing the word we pledged and, in so doing, have weakened the UN and prevented it from becoming an instrument to keep peace in world.”

At the same time she balanced the requirements of her position as an instructed delegate and the dictates of her own conscience especially on issues of civil rights for African Americans and other peoples of color. She ardently supported independence for people seeking to free themselves from colonial rule as well as for those behind the Iron Curtain, and she was tireless in her efforts to foster good relationships with newly-independent nations who wished to remain unaligned with either the Eastern or the Western bloc.

ER was equally indefatigable in her support of the United Nations calling it “the one hope” for peace. During and after her seven years as a delegate, she traveled extensively abroad investigating social, economic and political conditions in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific. Everywhere she went she urged support for the UN and its humanitarian and diplomatic aid. At home she campaigned vigorously for the UN via “My Day,” books and articles and, after 1952, traveled the country as a volunteer for the American Association of the United Nations.

Worried that FDR's death had deprived liberals of the leadership they needed to make America a more just democracy, ER pressured Democratic officials and liberal leaders to practice what they preached. Comfortable with her own power, ER remained uncomfortable with both consensus liberals and communist-front sympathizers. She remained dissatisfied with Truman, and he entered the election of 1948 without her endorsement. Yet as disappointed as she was with the Democratic Party in 1948, she refused to abandon the Democrats to promote a third party unsure of its membership or its principles.

The early postwar years were a difficult time for ER and for the country. Both were grappling with the consequences of unforeseen circumstances of FDR’s sudden death and the problems inherent in converting from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy. Housing shortages, inflation and labor strikes dominated the headlines. At the same time, the reform spirit of the New Deal was dissipating as a more conservative spirit took hold in Congress and the nation at large. No longer tied to FDR’s needs, ER became increasingly vocal on these and other social and economic issues such as health care and education especially when it became apparent that the Truman Administration lacked the will and the ability to resolve them. Her principal vehicle for communicating her views remained My Day but she also did not hesitate to confront Truman personally when she felt it was necessary.

Two themes consistently pervaded her activism during this period. One was that America’s future security depended on a sound economy that promised jobs to all who wanted to work and a healthy, well-educated citizenry committed to the principles of democracy and equality. The other was America’s emerging role as international leader. In her mind the two were linked. In September 1945, she asked readers of My Day, “The eyes of the world are on this nation. How can we expect the nations of the world to sit down together and solve their problems without war if we do not use the same mechanism to successfully in settling our domestic problems?”

Among the issues ER championed in the early postwar years were the continuation of wage and price controls, full employment legislation and national health insurance. She also backed labor’s demands for increases in wages, supported its National Citizens Political Action Committee (NCPAC) and served as honorary co-chair of a committee to raise funds for striking workers. At the same time, she opposed the Taft-Hartley anti-union bill calling it “a bad bill” and advised Truman that the Democrats could not “out conserve the Republicans” and expect to be re-elected.

During this period ER also intensified her activism on behalf of civil rights speaking out more insistently in favor of anti-lynching legislation and an end to the poll tax. She also called for desegregation in housing, education, and other public facilities as well equal opportunities in employment and housing. She supported legislation to make the Fair Employment Practices Commission permanent and argued for the establishment of a Civil Rights Division within the Department of Justice.

ER entered the Eisenhower presidency committed to making the Democratic Party less glued to the consensus agenda of price controls and fair deals and more supportive of racial justice and tolerant of political dissent. Indeed, ER's perception of racial justice grew as she aged. She served on the national board of directors for the NAACP, CORE, and other major civil rights organizations. Her friendships with civil rights leaders and her experience chairing investigations of race riots, visiting internment facilities, and combating violent segregationist backlashes, continually exposed her to the brutal nature of American racism. Soon the Ku Klux Klan had placed a bounty on her head, and the number of death threats she received for her civil rights stance increased.

Despite the opposition she incurred, ER refused to moderate her position. She continued to insist that racial injustice was the biggest threat to democracy. Americans must reject racial stereotypes and “face the fact that equality of opportunity is basic to any kind of democracy.” The complaints of African Americans were in her view “legitimate. We have expected them to be good citizens and yet in a large part of our country we haven’t given them an opportunity to take part in our government.”

As the civil rights movement gathered momentum in the fifties, ER stepped up her critique and regularly criticized the Eisenhower Administration for its poor record on the issue, particularly its non-support of the Supreme Court’s ruling and its failure to submit civil rights legislation to Congress. One of her most pointed attacks occurred in 1958 during the controversy over the integration of Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas, when, in her August 23 column, she challenged Eisenhower in My Day to put the power of the presidency behind the African American teenagers on the front lines of the struggle. “Instead of sending troops, I wish President Eisenhower would go down to Little Rock and lead the colored children into the school.”

Her involvement with Democratic Party leaders and liberal interest groups also showed her daily the superficial nature of liberal commitment to racial justice. Gradually she moved away from counseling patience and working within the system to supporting those activists who staged grand public events designed to force the political system to recognize the shallowness of its promises. She helped raise funds for those young civil rights activists coordinating the “jail, no bail” campaign. She led workshops on human rights for activists enrolled in the Highlander Folk School and she gave consistent support to Allard Lowenstein’s investigative crusade against apartheid, his call for graduate student engagement in campus civil rights protests, and his work with disgruntled, disenfranchised New Yorkers. And she continued to support (despite the opposition of many of her husband’s advisors) the Southern Conference Education Fund.

ER simultaneously struggled to support civil liberties while criticizing American communist activism. Once again uncomfortable with the stringent dictates of vital center liberalism, ER frequently opposed cold war liberals who argued that communism had no place in American politics. Not only was she the first nationally prominent liberal to oppose Joseph McCarthy, she was also the only liberal to oppose the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Smith Act from their inception. Despite the rapidity with which Adlai Stevenson and other liberals deserted Alger Hiss after his conviction, ER refused to let her disappointment in Hiss's judgment dictate her reaction to his conviction. This placed her in heated conflict with Richard Nixon, whom she viewed as one of the most dangerous men in American.

Discouraged by Stevenson's defeats in the 1952 and 1956 elections, ER approached the campaign of 1960 with mixed emotions. Convinced that the party needed a new vigorous vision to win the election and implement reform, ER nevertheless could not convince herself that John F. Kennedy (JFK) was the answer to the liberals' dilemma. His moderation on civil rights, his evasion on McCarthy, his reliance on machine politics, and his father's conduct during World War Two, only reinforced ER's opposition to his election. Yet Kennedy realized that he needed her support and traveled to Hyde Park to meet with her. She was still not convinced that he was a true liberal but she was willing to give him a chance. By October, when JFK had made concessions to civil rights, ER actively campaigned for him. (For more on the ER-JFK relationship, see .)

After JFK’s inauguration, ER pressured the president to appoint women to executive positions within his administration. When he dallied and then only appointed nine women, she requested a meeting and handed him a detailed three-page list of women and the positions for which they were qualified. When his administration received widespread criticism for its lack of attention to women’s concerns and labor and consumer activist Esther Peterson proposed that a President’s Commission on the Status of Women be created to examine policies and positions related to women’s employment and civil, economic, and political rights, JFK appointed ER chair and Peterson its vice-chair. After chairing the commission’s first meeting February 12, 1962, she told readers of “My Day” that “the effort, of course, is to find how we can best use the potentialities of women without impairing their first responsibilities, which are to their homes, their husbands and their children.” In April, she took the commission’s work to Congress when she testified in support of legislation guaranteeing equal pay for equal work. In August, she met with the president to present the commission’s interim report.

Eleanor Roosevelt spent the last two years of her life tired and in pain, but she rarely curtailed her schedule. Battling aplastic anemia and tuberculosis, she nevertheless continued to speak out on issues relating to racial justice, world peace, and women's rights. Outraged by the violence the Freedom Riders encountered in Mississippi and Alabama and discouraged by the tepid response of the Kennedy Administration, ER eagerly agreed to a request from CORE in May 1962 to chair a public hearing charged with investigating law enforcement officials acts against the protestors. When the hearing did not get the attention she thought it deserved, she lobbied the publishers of the major newspapers and the editors of the major television news shows to instruct their reporters to investigate the violence civil rights workers often confronted.. After failed Bay of Pigs invasion, which she labeled “this unfortunate raid,” she joined Walter Reuther to chair the Tractors for Freedom Committee to facilitate the release of Americans held in Cuba. She eagerly accepted appointment to the Peace Corps advisory board and lent vocal support to its work in her columns and speeches. Perhaps most startling, she dropped her four-decade opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, arguing that “law, custom, and the forgetfulness of men” kept women out of many jobs they sought, and telling the Lucy Stone League that she no longer believed the ERA would undermine the women’s safety at work since they could join unions and “there was no reason why you shouldn’t have [the ERA] if you want it.”

During the early fall, she returned home to Hyde Park where she struggled to complete her last book, , in which she pleads for racial, political, and social justice. “Staying aloof is not a solution,” she wrote, “but a cowardly evasion.”

Eleanor Roosevelt died November 7 in a New York City hospital at the age of seventy-eight. She is buried her next to her husband in the rose garden on the family estate in Hyde Park, New York.

The papers of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt are housed in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York. The papers are voluminous and are divided into two sections: 1884-1945 and 1945-1962. Those interested in investigating ER's life should also consult the following collections which are also housed at the FDR Library: Franklin D. Roosevelt papers, Lorena Hickok papers, Molly Dewson papers, Henry Morgenthau papers, the Eleanor Roosevelt Oral History Project, Anna Roosevelt Halstead papers, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. papers, Joseph P. Lash papers, and the Democratic Women's Committee papers. Record Groups 59 and 84 of the State Department files housed at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC house invaluable, albeit highly disorganized, material on ER’s work in American diplomacy and human rights. The United Nations records of the activities of the Human Rights Commission and Committee Three, the commission on humanitarian, social, and cultural issues.

The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project at George Washington University houses documents collected from more than 100 archives around the world that relate to ER's post-White House political life. It also houses a complete collection of ER's My Day column, which ER wrote from 1936-1962.

Anthologies of ER documents are available. Joseph Lash has edited two collections of ER's correspondence (new York: 1982) and (New York, 1984) which reflect her political and personal opinions. Robert Cohen’s (Chapel Hill, 2002) offers a thorough portrait of the appeals ER received in during the early years of the New Deal. Other collections focus on ER’s relationship with a one person. Steve Neal’s (New York: 2002) offers a selection of their most important communications. Ruth McClure’s (New York, 1984) reflects ER’s relationship with this renowned Catholic reformer. Bernard Absell’s (New York, 1982) offers a keen insight into the complex, caring relationship the two Roosevelts shared. Lastly, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project and Charles Scribner’s Sons will publish in summer 2006.

Eleanor Roosevelt was a prolific writer. She wrote four autobiographies, , , , and as well as several monographs, the most important of which are , , , and . Her column "My Day" was published six times a week from 1936 until 1962 and is a wonderful source for her daily activities and political position. She also wrote a series of monthly columns: "Mrs. Roosevelt's Page" for the (December 1937 until January 1941) and "If You Ask Me," for (May 1941 - 1949) and (1949 through 1962). John A. Edens' (Greenwood Press, 1994) provides the most extensive and thoroughly annotated compilation of ER's articles to date.

Maurine Beasely has edited all the remaining transcripts from ER's press conferences, (New York, 1983) and assesses ER's career as a journalist in (Urbana, 1987). Susan Ware's study (Cambridge, 1981) clearly illustrates ER's influence within the Administration and reform circles.

There have been dozens of works published about ER. Of those contemporaries close to ER who wrote biographies of her, the best are Lorena Hickok, (New York, 1962 and Ruby Black, (New York, 1940).

Although many have tried, most biographers create a superficial one dimension portrait of ER. Blanche Wiesen Cook's (New York, 1992) is a thorough and thoughtful reconstruction of her life before the White House. Joseph P. Lash's (New York, 1970) is the most comprehensive study of ER's White House years published to date, despite its protective slant. Joan Hoff Wilson and Marjorie Lightman's anthology (Indianapolis, 1984) offers a scholastic assessment of ER's political education and political performance before and during her tenure as First Lady. Jan Pottker’s presents fresh interpretation of this ever-evolving relationship.

Unfortunately, ER's post White House career has not yet received equal treatment. Lash's (New York, 1972) presents only a cursory depiction of her activities after FDR's death. The only serious study of ER's contribution to diplomacy is Jason Berger's (New York, 1981). Allida M. Black's discusses ER's evolving commitment to civil rights, civil liberties, and Democratic Party reform .