Eleanor Roosevelt

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born on October 11, 1884, in Manhattan, into one of New York's oldest and wealthiest families. Her father, Elliott Roosevelt, was the younger brother of Theodore Roosevelt, the future president. Her mother, Anna Hall Roosevelt, was a celebrated society beauty who found her serious, shy daughter a disappointment and reportedly called her Granny ^[1].

Childhood ended early. Her mother died of diphtheria in 1892, when Eleanor was eight. Her younger brother Elliott Jr. died months later, and her father, an alcoholic who had been largely absent, died in 1894. The orphaned girl was sent to live with her strict maternal grandmother, Mary Hall, in Tivoli, New York ^[1].

The turning point came at fifteen, when she was enrolled at Allenswood Academy, a girls' boarding school outside London run by the French educator Marie Souvestre. Souvestre took an interest in the awkward American, encouraged her to think independently, and traveled with her through Europe. Roosevelt later described her three years at Allenswood as the happiest of her young life, and biographers treat the school as the place where her confidence and social conscience took root ^[2].

Back in New York for her society debut in 1902, Eleanor began a courtship with her fifth cousin once removed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then a Harvard student. They married on March 17, 1905, and her uncle, President Theodore Roosevelt, gave the bride away. Between 1906 and 1916 she bore six children, one of whom died in infancy, while living under the close supervision of her domineering mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt ^[1].

Franklin's political rise pulled her into public life. She managed the household through his terms as a New York state senator and as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, and during the First World War she volunteered with the Red Cross and visited wounded sailors. In 1918 she discovered letters revealing Franklin's affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer. The marriage survived as a political and family partnership, but the discovery pushed Eleanor toward building an independent life ^[2].

When polio paralyzed Franklin's legs in 1921, Eleanor became his stand-in, keeping his name alive in New York Democratic politics. Through the 1920s she worked with the League of Women Voters, the Women's Trade Union League, and the women's division of the state Democratic Party. With friends she co-founded the Val-Kill furniture workshop near Hyde Park and taught history and literature at the Todhunter School in Manhattan, work she continued even after Franklin won the governorship of New York in 1928 ^[3].

Franklin Roosevelt's election in 1932 brought Eleanor to a role she initially dreaded, fearing it would end her independent career. Instead she remade it. She held press conferences reserved for female reporters, a practice that pushed newspapers to keep women on staff, and in 1936 began My Day, a syndicated newspaper column she wrote six days a week for more than a quarter century ^[3].

During the Depression she traveled constantly, inspecting relief projects, coal mines, and rural communities, then reporting back to a president who could not travel easily. She championed programs for unemployed youth, backed the creation of the National Youth Administration, and pressed New Deal agencies to include women and Black Americans. In 1939, after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let the Black contralto Marian Anderson sing in Constitution Hall, Roosevelt resigned from the organization, and Anderson performed instead at the Lincoln Memorial before some 75,000 people ^[4].

The Second World War extended her reach. She served briefly as assistant director of the Office of Civilian Defense, visited American troops in Britain, the Pacific, and the Caribbean, and defended Tuskegee Airmen and other Black servicemen against discrimination in the military. Her advocacy for Jewish refugees before and during the war met resistance inside her husband's own administration, a failure she regretted. She was still First Lady when Franklin died on April 12, 1945 ^[3].

Widowhood opened the most consequential chapter of her public career. In December 1945 President Harry Truman appointed her a delegate to the first United Nations General Assembly in London. Some fellow delegates doubted her qualifications, but her handling of a contentious debate over the repatriation of wartime refugees, argued against the Soviet delegation, won over skeptics in both parties ^[5].

In 1946 she became the first chair of the new UN Commission on Human Rights, where she guided the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights through nearly two years of negotiation among delegates with clashing legal traditions and Cold War loyalties. The General Assembly adopted the declaration in Paris on December 10, 1948, without a dissenting vote, and delegates gave Roosevelt a standing ovation. The document remains the foundation of modern international human rights law, and its adoption is the achievement most often cited in any account of Eleanor Roosevelt achievements ^[5].

She served at the UN until 1953, resigning when Dwight Eisenhower took office, then volunteered for years with the American Association for the United Nations to build public support for the organization. President John F. Kennedy reappointed her to the UN delegation in 1961 and named her the first chair of his Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, a post she held until her death ^[6].

Roosevelt's private world centered on Val-Kill, the stone cottage at Hyde Park that Franklin had built for her and her friends in the 1920s. After his death she made it her permanent home, receiving world leaders, students, and family there in deliberately plain surroundings. It is now the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site, the only such site dedicated to a First Lady ^[7].

Her friendships were intense and sustaining. Her long correspondence with the Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickok, running to thousands of letters, has prompted continuing scholarly discussion about the nature of their bond. She also maintained close working friendships with the political operatives Louis Howe, who first coached her in public speaking, and with younger allies such as her physician David Gurewitsch ^[2].

Her politics grew steadily bolder on civil rights. She joined the NAACP board of directors in 1945, pushed Truman on desegregation of the armed forces, and by the late 1950s was publicly supporting the civil rights movement despite hate mail and, according to FBI files, threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Her FBI file, built up under J. Edgar Hoover, ran to thousands of pages ^[4].

Age barely slowed her schedule. Through the 1950s she wrote books and columns, lectured across the country, campaigned twice for Adlai Stevenson's presidential bids, and traveled to India, Israel, Japan, the Soviet Union, and dozens of other countries, often interviewing heads of state for her writing. Her autobiographical volumes, including This Is My Story (1937) and On My Own (1958), were gathered into The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt in 1961 ^[6].

In 1960 she was diagnosed with aplastic anemia, and doctors later found bone marrow tuberculosis. She kept working almost to the end, chairing the women's commission and writing her final book, Tomorrow Is Now. She died at her Manhattan home on the Upper East Side on November 7, 1962, at the age of 78, and was buried beside Franklin in the rose garden at Hyde Park. Presidents Kennedy, Truman, and Eisenhower attended the funeral ^[1].

Few American public figures have redefined an inherited role so completely. Every Eleanor Roosevelt biography returns to the same point: she took a position with no constitutional duties and used it to argue for the poor, for women, for Black Americans, and for refugees, then carried that work onto the world stage. Truman's phrase, First Lady of the World, became her informal title ^[6].

Her institutional legacy is easy to trace. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been translated into more than 500 languages and shapes constitutions and treaties worldwide. The Presidential Commission on the Status of Women she chaired helped set the agenda for the American women's movement of the 1960s. Gallup polling has repeatedly placed her among the most admired women of the twentieth century ^[5].

Memorials followed. A statue of her stands in Riverside Park in New York City, the first monument to a First Lady in the city, and she is a central figure at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and the Val-Kill historic site. For readers gathering Eleanor Roosevelt facts, the simplest may be the most telling: a shy, orphaned girl who thought herself plain and unwanted became, by wide agreement, the most influential First Lady in American history ^[7].