Meet Eleanor Roosevelt

These carefully researched programs are based on Mrs. Roosevelt's autobiography, letters, speeches, and articles.  There are four segments in the Meet Eleanor Roosevelt series:
 

• Part I, 1884-1905:  Childhood and Adolescence - Mrs. Roosevelt's early childhood years through her courtship and marriage to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
• Part II, 1905-1945:  Wife, Mother, and First Lady - The years of her marriage, ending with Franklin's death in 1945.
• Part III, 1945-1962:  Private Citizen and First Lady of the World - The years following Franklin's death.
• Part IV, 1945-1948:  Advocate for Universal Human Rights - Years as chair of the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

Meet Eleanor Roosevelt has toured to public and private schools, colleges, libraries, churches, historical groups, nursing homes, and retirement communities.  It has been presented for the Northeast Regional Conference on Social Studies, League of Women Voters, United Nations Association, Girl Scout conferences, New Hampshire Chautauqua, and at Eleanor Roosevelt's Val-Kill home in Hyde Park, NY. It was also presented for Democrats Abroad in Paris and Heidelberg, and at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in China.

Elena Dodd, Actress/Co-author, graduated from Wellesley College; she holds an M.A. in American Literature from Boston University and an M.F.A. in Writing from Vermont College of Union Institute and University. Her special interest in American playwrights led to working with new scripts in experimental groups in Boston. Previous performances as American historical characters include abolitionist Sarah Grimké at the University of Michigan, and Harriet Beecher Stowe at the John F. Kennedy Library. She is currently an actress and writer with The Streetfeet Women, a Boston-based multicultural ensemble co-founded with Mary McCullough in 1983, and a contributor to the group's 1998 anthology of prose and poetry, Laughing in the Kitchen

Josephine Lane, Director/Co-author, is a graduate of Radcliffe College. A professional actress since childhood, she has worked in stage, radio, and television in New York and Boston. She has taught acting privately and in schools and colleges, and in 1972 co-founded, with Mark Healy, The Acting Class, a professional training school. Under a Rockefeller grant she and other members of the Theatre Company of Boston toured inner-city schools, presenting scenes from contemporary and classical plays and teaching classes in which the writing of new scripts was encouraged through improvisation.

Audiences Respond . . .

I think many children have been made personally aware of a woman who demonstrated what it means to be a global citizen. In discussing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights I have been hesitant to use the name of the United Nations because it has become the focus of so much controversy. "Meet Eleanor Roosevelt" has given me new strength to say that the U.N. is the only organization that comprehensively addresses the need for a sustainable quality of life for all the world's people.
 - Marj Manglitz, United Nations Association, Lincoln, NE

We feel that the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt has returned to touch our lives.
 - Martha Sullivan, Hyde Park Free Library, Hyde Park, NY

E.R.'s warmth and charm came shining through.
- Ted Zalewski, Historical Interpreter of Teddy Roosevelt

. . . such a personal story that it has relevance to all who hear it.
 - Louise Luring, American Association of University Women of Vermont

Well written and researched . . . "Eleanor" appeared as if she were touring the country on the speaking circuit.
- Kevin Huffman, Communications Director, Old South Meeting House, Boston, MA

The performance was totally mesmerizing.
- Valerie M. Toner, Adult Services Librarian, East Providence, RI

. . . superb . . . every inch a First Lady.
- Charlotte Frey, Democrats Abroad, Heidelberg, Germany

"Eleanor Roosevelt" describing her years as a U.N. delegate (standing room only).
- Newsweek, September 18, 1995 (UN Fourth World Conference on Women, China)

The Wisdom of Eleanor Roosevelt

"No one can make you feel inferior without your permission."

"One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes."

"Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive."

"Where, after all, does respect for human rights begin?  In small places, close to home; in the everyday world of human beings-the neighborhoods they live in, the schools or colleges they attend, the factories, farms or offices where they work, where every  man, woman, and child seeks to have equal justice and opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little  meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."
                -Adapted from a speech by Mrs. R. in 1958 at the United Nations

"Perhaps the challenge of today is the ability to stay in the United Nations and watch ourselves as the leading democratic nation of the world, a nation which all the world watches . . . We have a difficult job because all of our failures are seen. At the same time, our successes are seen and, for that reason, I hope we are going to be strong enough, and imaginative enough, and take the future with enough spirit of adventure so that we will live it with joy and never grow hopeless."
                -Speaking of the United States and the United Nations in March, 1949

The following article was prepared by Elena Dodd for the New Hampshire Humanities Council's Summer 2003 Chautauqua, held in July 2003 in Keene and Portsmouth, focusing on the decades of the 1920's and '30's. Elena portrayed Mrs. Roosevelt in the distinguished company of H. L. Mencken, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Ford, Amelia Earhart, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. For sources of specific quotations in this article, please contact Elena Dodd.

At the threshold of the Roaring Twenties Eleanor Roosevelt was thirty-six. The oldest of her five children, Anna, was fourteen and the youngest, John, was four. She had survived profound emotional losses--the death of an infant son in 1909 and the discovery of her husband Franklin's romance with her friend and secretary Lucy Mercer in 1918. She had been introduced to politics in Albany, where her husband served in the State Senate, and in Washington, where he was Woodrow Wilson's Assistant Secretary of the Navy. At this point Eleanor had begun, tentatively, to cast off the role of society matron for which she had been trained from birth. By the end of the 1930's she had developed a career in writing for newspapers and popular magazines, published a memoir, built a far-reaching network of professional women colleagues, supported her husband's political career through his crippling attack of polio, and revolutionized the role of the United States' First Lady.

Encyclopedic accounts have been written of Eleanor Roosevelt's achievements in the White House; as a researcher and performer creating the persona of Mrs. Roosevelt, I find the 1920's equally interesting and less examined. It was a time when young women of my mother's generation, born after the turn of the century, were offered fascinating, challenging models for their lives. Eleanor herself was born in 1884, into New York's tightly protected cadre of elite families with its even more protected niche for women. The sea change through which she passed in the '20' reveals influences on women coming of age in those years, and by virtue of her consistent, visible image up to her death in 1962, it affects all of us born in the Twentieth Century--perhaps beyond. In 1920 Eleanor had been married for fifteen years. She had tried, more or less unsuccessfully, to fit the mold of a respectable upper-class woman as limned by her Grandmother Hall, who had brought her up after the early death of her parents (Eleanor's mother died when she was eight and her father when she was ten). "My grandmother thought of life only from a social point of view," she told an interviewer. "You were pleasant, and if you had to be unpleasant, you retired." A woman, moreover, was defined by responsibility for household and servants. "If you learned languages, if you were fortunate enough to be able to play the piano or sing a little bit, that was very pleasant. . .but everything you did was so that you would grace society." Perhaps the grandmother suspected that her shy, lonely granddaughter was destined to become something other than an ornament to New York salons; she sent Eleanor at fifteen to a school in England run by the brilliant, unconventional Frenchwoman Marie Souvestre.

Souvestre's lifestyle stood in sharp contrast to everything Eleanor knew: she lived with a female companion, involved herself in political affairs, and planned her life around her own passionate causes and interests. "Mademoiselle," as the students called her, expected independent thinking (she once tore up a student's paper because it merely parroted the ideas in her lecture) and perceived in Eleanor an inquiring mind, a latent love of adventure, and a gift for leadership. Souvestre nurtured the younger woman by taking her traveling in Italy and France, as well as providing an excellent liberal arts education. After three years, however, Grandmother Hall summoned Eleanor back home to undergo the ritual of being presented in Society. Obediently, if reluctantly, the youngster re-entered her grandmother's sphere of family, charitable work, social mixing with "our kind," and avoidance of public attention (except on the newspaper society page). To crown it all, she fell in love with and married her highly eligible distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The two women most devoted to her well-being--the domestic Mrs. Hall and the intellectual activist Mlle. Souvestre--define separate worlds Eleanor would struggle to integrate in the decades of the '20's and '30's.

I see Eleanor Roosevelt in these years in terms she defined herself: a person undergoing an "intensive education," not from books but from colleagues who offered alternatives to the safe but stultifying world of Grandmother Hall. It should be noted as well that in marrying Franklin, Eleanor acquired an even more powerful mother figure, Sara Delano Roosevelt. "It took me quite a number of years to emancipate myself," she said of her evolution from a docile, stay-at-home daughter-in-law to a controversial writer, lecturer, and organizer who chose her friends from every class and culture.

In 1920 she was just starting out, as in a sense were American women in general, now granted a citizen's right to vote. Eleanor moved her family from Washington back to New York after Franklin's unsuccessful campaign for Vice-President, and a whole network of teacher-colleagues opened before her. Women already involved in Democratic party politics recruited her to put out a newsletter; she joined the League of Women Voters and the Women's Trade Union League. What followed was the weaving of an enduring fabric of friendships and shared work that transformed Eleanor's life. The people she now chose as colleagues reflected a range of possibilities for women. Elizabeth Read, a lawyer, coached her on national legislation for the League of Women Voters and discovered an eager student. Elizabeth and her partner Esther Lape, a teacher and publicist, shared Eleanor's interest in labor problems, a concern since her days as a Junior Leaguer studying working conditions in New York's factories and stores. In get-togethers for dinner and poetry reading at Elizabeth and Esther's home in Greenwich Village, Eleanor witnessed a warm, hospitable household shaped by and for women.

She tested herself in the business world in partnership with another couple, Marion Dickerman, a school principal, and Nancy Cook, who ran the Women's Division of the New York Democratic State Committee. In the late 1920's Eleanor, Marion, and Nancy operated both a private school, Todhunter, in New York City and Val-Kill Industries, a small furniture factory which provided supplementary employment for farmers near the Roosevelt home in Hyde Park, New York. As close friends they shared a stone cottage in Hyde Park, designed and built by Franklin. Photographs of the three, smiling and casual, at the factory or on automobile trips, project a sense of fun and freedom. The trio ultimately came apart, perhaps because Eleanor was going on to another level of independence. A quarrel left her feeling alienated; typically, she did not discuss it. In addition, the factory did not turn a profit and in 1936 it was closed down. The building was remodeled into a permanent residence for Eleanor. Val-Kill Cottage stands as an eloquent symbol of the changes in its owner's sense of self, beginning as a public-spirited collaborative business project and becoming Eleanor's first real home, where she fashioned her own career and style of living. "I felt freer there," she wrote, "than in the big house [Franklin's family mansion]."

In 1928 Malvina Thompson entered Eleanor's life as a secretary, becoming a powerful and, as far as I can tell, largely unrecognized, creative force. "Tommy" was a friend to the whole family, from the days of Franklin's governorship in Albany until her death in New York City in 1953. Divorced and without children, she worked full time with Eleanor, lived in an apartment in the Val-Kill house, and spent free time with her lifelong companion, Henry Osthagen. In the glare of publicity that was the Roosevelts' normal condition she kept her privacy, meanwhile copy-editing Eleanor's writing, answering letters, listening to family problems, keeping favor-seekers away from the door. With all the force of her critical mind and professional training, yet without personal ambition, Tommy offered her boss an unswerving commitment. The person "who makes life possible for me," Eleanor said of her. The two maintained a grueling schedule of appointments and a vast correspondence, at home and on the road. At odd moments they produced the long-running "My Day" column: Eleanor dictated and Tommy typed the first draft; Eleanor made corrections and left the final draft to Tommy.

In the endless succession of studies and memoirs about Mrs. Roosevelt I have found no biography of Malvina Thompson. Photographs show her the perfect secretary in her conventional suit and neatly waved dark hair, an attentive, self-effacing presence. I sense from having talked with another Roosevelt secretary --Maureen Corr, who took over after Tommy's death--that Eleanor chose people of her own caliber for this job: highly intelligent, ready for hard work, adaptable to people and new situations, unswayed by flattery and manipulation. She needed a secretary who was also a trusted friend, this essentially lonely woman who made of her loneliness a tool for enormous activity and idealism. The person who worked by her side day after day would understand that, would have a generosity and dignity of her own.

If Tommy was a steady and reassuring presence, Lorena Hickok came into Eleanor's life in 1932 as an emotional whirlwind, a brilliant confidante, and at last a longterm friend. "Hick" was a top Associated Press reporter, assigned to cover Eleanor during Franklin's first presidential campaign. The tough newswoman who had made it in a man's profession and the visionary, practical First Lady fell in love with each other and for a few years were deeply involved, making trips together and writing daily notes. Much speculation goes on about this relationship. It was clearly, from their letters and writings, physical and romantic as well as intellectual and spiritual. Offering Eleanor a depth of simple affection and mutual pleasure that was missing in her marriage, Hick was also a marvelous writing coach, going over Eleanor's articles and teaching her the craft of journalism. Ultimately Hick sacrificed her newspaper career to their relationship, since as a close friend she could no longer report objectively on the Presidency. She left the AP to work for the New Deal administration, filing detailed, vivid reports on economic recovery projects around the country. Late in her life she retired to Hyde Park village, partly supported by Eleanor, and they stayed in touch to the end.

"My friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt soon ripened into a close and understanding mutual feeling," said Mary McLeod Bethune, another kindred soul and influential colleague. Bethune, founder of Bethune Cookman College in Daytona, Florida and head of the Negro Youth Administration, was leader of FDR's newly appointed "Black Braintrusters" in the mid-1930's. Eleanor Roosevelt had met Bethune in 1927 and recognized in her a person deeply dedicated to the nurture of young people. Bethune was ten years older than Eleanor; her family had known slavery, but she was born free and educated to become a Christian missionary. Having decided to found a teacher-training school in Florida she attacked the task with bold confidence, even facing down the Ku Klux Klan to protect her campus and students.

Perhaps it was part of Eleanor's gift to recognize genius when she saw it. She had been brought up ignorant of Black culture, taught racist attitudes, and by virtue of her marriage was tied to a political party that depended upon reactionary White Southerners for support. Slowly those handicaps dropped away in the process of her work and friendship with Mrs. Bethune. I believe these two made no essential distinction between "work" and "time off." Their idea of fun was to plunge into new ventures, organize the troops, and improve the quality of people's lives. They designed work projects, especially for young women, sought government appointments for promising African-American leaders, attended conferences together, and visited each other's homes--the President's house at Bethune-Cookman College and the White House in Washington. Eleanor Roosevelt gained a sophisticated point of view about the struggle of Black Americans and never afterwards refrained from pointing out that the notion of fighting for democracy meant nothing unless the United States broke its pattern of segregation at home.

American women read "My Day," saw their President's wife on newsreels crossing the country and turning up in unlikely places--an impulsive airplane ride over the Potomac at night with Amelia Earhart, a trip into the mines in West Virginia--and were encouraged to entertain a new sense of themselves. Despite her obvious privilege and unusual physical stamina Eleanor Roosevelt presented herself as an ordinary person who, without specialized talents or training (she never went on to college after Allenswood School), found life full of opportunities for service and daily adventure. She developed a didactic, calculatedly simple style that reached a huge audience of readers. She dispensed common-sense advice and opinions. "Mrs. Roosevelt, do you think four-letter words should be used in polite company?" "I didn't know," replied Eleanor dryly, "that there were any words that were not used in polite company." In the broadest possible arena she put to work the education absorbed from Elizabeth, Esther, Marion, Nancy, Tommy, Hick, Mary, and others I have had to leave out, but whose names are recorded in her letters and books. Her husband Franklin and his advisor Louis Howe were agents of education in the 1920's and 30's as well. During these decades Eleanor's natural curiosity was re-awakened and enriched so that a desire both to learn and to communicate increasingly informed her basic purpose--to make her life useful to other people.

Given Eleanor Roosevelt's expansion of knowledge and social action in the years before World War II, I find it hard to acknowledge a stark omission. Although in the mid 1930's she knew that Jews were being systematically stripped of rights and sent to their deaths by Hitler's regime, she was silent. Franklin's attempts to intervene were cut off by Congress and as far as I know, Eleanor did not protest. At home she worked tirelessly against discrimination, but she chose not to speak out on the international level although there were appeals from the Jewish community to do so, and she had received documented reports of the situation from Quaker workers in Europe. I don't clearly understand this failure except as a reflection of the country's collective moral paralysis. Perhaps the cause was partly the administration's limit on what a First Lady was permitted to talk about, and partly a decision to put her powers to work on the home front. Later on she wrote about the Holocaust in "My Day," poured her energy into alleviating the plight of refugees, and after the war provided outstanding leadership to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights; but in the 1930's she seemed unable to fight the disease of anti-Semitism.

When I put on a frumpy hat and fox fur to evoke the presence of Eleanor Roosevelt for an audience, I know that I represent only the most prominent of a host of feisty American women testing their freedoms in the Twentieth Century, some of whose names I have called here. From the debutante cotillion and the sweatshop sewing machine, from farms and small towns, from every kind of immigrant, slave, or native background, these women heard "You can't do this, you can only do that" and replied, "No thanks." Many of them met Mrs. Roosevelt herself in religious organizations, colleges, laboratories, theaters, community centers, CCC camps, military bases, union halls, political conventions, in their own kitchens, wherever there was energy for change. She identified with and was inspired by women in the midst of sorting out their hopes, their possibilities. She seems to give us all permission to go forward, with deep regard for one another and an open mind in the midst of turmoil, writing in her column as a matter of practical experience, "with each day comes new strength and new thoughts."

• Cook, Blanche Wiesen. Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 2: 1933-1938. New York: Viking, 1999.
• Goodwin, Doris Kearns. No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. New York: Simon ∓ Schuster, 1994.
• Lash, Joseph P. Eleanor and Franklin. New York: Signet, 1971.
• Roosevelt, Eleanor. The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt. Boston: G. K. Hall ∓ Co., 1984.
• _____________. This I Remember. New York: Harper ∓ Brothers, 1949.
• Russell, Dick. Black Genius and the American Experience. New York: Carroll ∓ Graff, 1998.
  

Some special notes:

Deepest thanks to all who made possible the successful tours of "Meet Eleanor Roosevelt" in Washington and New York states in March 2005. Special acknowledgment to Eileen Drath in Friday Harbor, WA and Joan Gould in Scotia, NY for the inspired energy that initiated the tours, awesome organization, and loving hospitality. Also to Dan Drath and George Gould. In Bellingham, WA, the hospitality of Pat and Tom Moses is equally appreciated. To these and all who helped bring "Mrs. R." to stages, schools, libraries, and to audiences of all ages, THANK YOU!