She was the poor little rich girl who overcame huge obstacles to become the First Lady of
the World.
Orphaned at the age of nine, she took control of her own destiny, transforming herself from
a shy, fearful girl into a strong, socially aware, confident woman.
As the First Lady of the United States she took a ceremonial title and turned it into
a platform to help others, then going even further to develop the magna carta of the
modern age – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In today’s Biographics, we examine the very busy life of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Early Years Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born into one of
the richest families in America, the New York Roosevelts, on October 11, 1884.
Her parents, Elliot and Anna, were prominent New York socialites.
Anna was a strikingly beautiful woman who loved finery and perfection.
Eleanor could tell from an early age that she was a disappointment to her mother.
She was not pretty enough and was too shy and awkward.
In Eleanor’s eyes, her father, Elliot was a heroic figure.
He was handsome rugged and he-manly, which is not surprising considering that he was
the brother of future president and quintessential man of action, Theodore Roosevelt.
Elliot was a hunter who would travel around the world collecting trophies and stories
with which he would entrance his little girl.
Elliot and Eleanor, who he called Nellie, shared a special bond.
She later recalled . . . With my father, I was perfectly happy.
He was the center of my world and all around him, loved him.
Bu Elliot had a not so secret vice.
He was a raging alcoholic.
When he wasn’t playing polo or hunting elephants in Africa, he could be found at the Meadowbrook
Country Club drinking away the day.
He was an anxious, moody young man who was never able to relax.
Often, he would go off on extended drinking binges, to eventually stagger through the
door in an apoplectic state.
By her own later assessment, Eleanor was a plain looking child, without beauty and painfully
shy.
She was raised in the midst of privilege and wealth.
The family lived in a townhouse in Manhattan that was staffed with servants.
The infant Eleanor was cared for by a French nurse.
As a result, she learned to speak French before she could speak English.
When he broke his ankle in 1893, Elliot began adding laudanum and morphine to his diet of
mood-altering substances.
Anna tried to help him break his substance dependence but to no avail.
Then, after the birth of their second child, Elliot Junior, in 1889, there was a kind of
family intervention spearheaded by older brother Teddy.
He convinced Elliot to leave the family and head south in order to clean himself up.
Elliot returned after a few months, better but not cured.
He would wander the house at night, desperately looking for a drink to help him deal with
his chronic depression.
At her wits end, Anna persuaded him to take the family on a tour of European health resorts.
For six-year-old Eleanor the trip was magical.
After having been separated from him for months, she was now able to spend every minute with
her beloved papa.
She went out of her way to please him, dreading nothing more than displeasing him.
For his part, Elliot loved everything about his daughter apart from one thing.
She later recalled . . . I was not only timid.
I was afraid of everything – of mice, of the dark, of imaginary dangers.
In reminiscing about her childhood, Eleanor recalled in her autobiography . . .
Looking back, childhood and my youth was one long battle against fear.
Teddy Steps In By the time that a third child, a boy named
Hall, came along in 1891, Elliot was back to heavy drinking.
The family were in Paris and Elliot’s condition became so bad that he was confined to a sanatorium.
Anna and the children returned to New York.
It was now that big brother Theodore Roosevelt stepped in to take charge.
He sailed to Paris to confront his wayward brother.
He ordered him to spend two years apart from the family in order to overcome his demons.
He could only re-unite with his family when he had proven to Theodore that he was a changed
man.
On his return to the States, Elliot settled in to a small town in Virginia.
Back in New York, Anna was miserable.
She missed her husband desperately and seemed to be bitter with everything and everyone.
Eleanor was just as miserable.
She couldn’t understand why her beloved papa had gone away and missed him terribly.
Anna hired a private tutor for Eleanor, who would teach the girl in the upstairs parlour
of the Manhattan townhouse.
When Eleanor was seven, her mother began getting severe migraine headaches.
She would cloister herself in her bedroom with all the shades drawn for days on end.
Eleanor would spend hours sitting on her bedside, gently rubbing her mother’s forehead.
For the first time in her life, she felt as if she were being useful to Anna.
Double Tragedy Anna had surgery for an unknown illness just
before Eleanor turned eight.
Following the operation, she came down with diphtheria.
Within days, the twenty-nine-year-old mother of three was dead.
Eleanor was sent to live with relatives.
She was soon told that her father was on his way to see her.
This ray of light outshone the sadness of her mother’s passing.
She created the fantasy that she and her father would go off and live together in some faraway
place.
But that wasn’t to be.
Anna had stipulated in her will that the children were to be raised by her mother, Mary Livingston
Ludlow.
As a result, Anna found herself living in a gloomy Manhattan brownstone house.
In the Spring, both of Eleanor’s brothers contracted scarlet fever.
The baby got better, but three-year-old Elliot, Junior’s condition developed into diphtheria
and he died.
Anna’s only happiness came with the infrequent visits of her father.
But Elliot was still drinking heavily and Eleanor’s grandmother put a stop to the
visits.
In the summer of 1894, Elliot suffered from a fall while in a drunken stupor.
He fell into a coma and died.
Eleanor was devastated.
She later wrote . . . I continued living in my dream world as usual.
From that time, I knew in my mind that my father was dead, but yet I lived with him
more closely probably than when he was alive.
Eleanor and younger brother, Hall, now orphaned, lived with their grandmother and her four
grown children in th Manhattan house.
They were raised with the strictest discipline.
Her grandmother made Eleanor dress like a little girl in dark, gloomy clothing.
This invited ridicule from the other girls in the neighbourhood.
At the age of fourteen, Eleanor was allowed to attend her aunt’s annual Christmas party.
She hated it, later writing . . . The others all knew each other and saw each
other often.
They were all much better at winter sports . . . I knew of course that I was different
from all the other girls.
And, if I had not known, they were frank in telling me so.
That evening she stood dejectedly against a wall and watched her cousin, Alice, dancing
with an attractive distant cousin by the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Eleanor was mortified when, after the dance was finished, the sixteen-year-old boy approached
her and asked her for the next dance.
Finishing School At the age of fifteen, in fulfilment of her
mother’s wishes, Eleanor was sent to the Allenswood Academy, a finishing school just
outside of London, England.
She spent three years there, from 1899 to 1902.
The academy was headed a French woman named Marie Souvestre.
The goal of the academy was to turn out independent thinking young women who challenged the stereotypical
role of women.
Eleanor flourished in this environment.
Madame Souvestre only allowed the girls to speak French, which put Eleanor at an immediate
advantage.
She was a fluent speaker and spent the first evening in animated conversation with the
headmistress while the other girls sat around nervously.
Eleanor quickly gained the confidence and self-assuredness that had been lacking at
home.
She immediately became a favourite among the girls and the teacher’s pet.
It was from Madame Souvestre that she developed a compassion for the less privileged members
of society and a desire to use her privileged position to help others.
Coming Out In 1902, Eleanor returned to New York.
The seventeen-year-old was ready to be presented to high society.
This occurred by way of a special coming out party.
It was a night that she did not remember fondly, writing . . .
It was simply awful.
It was a beautiful party, of course, but I was so unhappy, because a girl who comes out
is so utterly miserable if she does not know all the young people.
Of course, I had been so long abroad that I had lost touch with all the girls I used
to know in New York.
I was miserable through all that.
With that painful experience out of the way, Eleanor started to get involved in settlement
work in New York.
Encouraged by her uncle Theodore, she began to work to help improve the living conditions
of New York’s poor people.
Her work consisted of exposing the terrible working conditions of the many sweat shops
that employed children and women for dangerous and gruelling shifts for a pittance of pay.
Finding Franklin During the summer of 1902, Eleanor was on
a train to visit her grandmother, when she happened to meet up with the boy who had asked
her to dance at the Christmas Party all those years ago.
Franklin Roosevelt was the fifth cousin of Eleanor’s father.
The pair struck up a conversation with Eleanor soon discovering that this young man had some
depth to him.
He was interested in the very social concerns that she was passionate about and was fascinated
when she described the working conditions she had witnessed.
Eleanor and Franklin maintained a correspondence which developed into a romance.
They were engaged on November, 22, 1903.
Franklin’s mother, Sara Ann Delano, was opposed to the union and tried to dissuade
her son, but to no avail.
Wedding plans were made, with adjustments to fit in with Uncle Theodore who was now
President of the United States.
Teddy proudly gave the bride away on March 17, 1905.
Because of the President’s attendance, the wedding was the talk of the town.
After the nuptials were completed, the couple went on a three-month honeymoon tour of Europe.
Returning to New York, they moved into a New York townhouse that was paid for by Franklins
mother, who still was not happy with her son’s choice of wife.
The home was connected to Sara’s residence by a sliding door and she ran the roost in
both dwellings, much to Eleanor’s chagrin.
Motherhood and Social Work Over a period of ten years, starting in 1906,
the Roosevelt’s would have six children.
Still, Eleanor liked neither the act of procreation nor the fact of being a mother.
She later wrote that . . . It did not come naturally to me to understand
little children or to enjoy them.
While Eleanor spent her time in raising children, her husband progressively climbed the political
ladder.
By 1918, he had already served as a New York State Senator and was the assistant secretary
of the Navy.
He had also been busying himself with more amorous affairs.
Eleanor was unpacking her husband’s suitcase one day, when she stumbled across a stack
of love letters addressed to him.
They were from her social secretary, a girl named Lucy Mercer.
It turned out that Franklin had become disillusioned with his domestic life and was planning to
divorce Eleanor and take up with Lucy.
But when his mother threatened to disinherit him if he caused such a scandal, he changed
his mind.
From that point on, Eleanor consigned herself to a loveless marriage of political convenience.
She threw herself into her social work, which was the only thing that gave her pleasure.
During the war years, Eleanor worked as a volunteer for the Navy Relief Society and
the American Red Cross.
Then, in 1919, she became a translator for the International Congress of Working Women.
In 1920, Franklin, who was known by the public as FDR, ran on the Democratic ticket for Vice
President of the United States.
The Republicans won the White House that year and Roosevelt returned to his law practice
in New York.
Polio In August, 1921, the Roosevelts vacationed
at their resort home in New Brunswick, Canada.
At that time there was an international polio epidemic around the world.
Franklin contracted the illness and became paralysed from the waist down.
Eleanor threw herself into the role of nurse and comforter.
She convinced her husband to remain in politics, despite his mother’s urgings that he retire
and live out his life as a country gentleman.
Throughout the early 1920’s Franklin underwent a tortuous routine of physical therapy.
Eleanor was at his side the whole time.
Yet, she also found time to extend her own social activity, joining the Women’s Trade
Union League, an organization that worked to achieve fair treatment and better salaries
for working women.
She also became a board member of the Women City Club of New York.
She developed her public speaking ability and became an in-demand speaker around New
York.
During this period, Eleanor also founded a business called Val-Kil Industries.
This was a furniture factory which employed women to build and decorate colonial style
furniture.
As if all that wasn’t enough to keep the mother of six busy, she was also the co-owner
and a teacher at the Todhunter School for Girls in New York City.
By 1928, FDR was ready to re-enter the political arena.
Again, Eleanor was right by his side.
He ran for and became the Governor of New York.
Eleanor was now First Lady of New York.
She was very active in the role, becoming according to her husband, his eyes and legs.
Even though FDR’s inability to walk was hidden from the public, Eleanor did all the
travelling for him.
In the process she delivered speeches on his behalf.
The position gave her an ideal opportunity to fulfil her social agenda.
First Lady In 1932, FDR was propelled to the White House.
On March 4, 1933, Eleanor was sworn in as First Lady of the United States.
It was a role that she had been dreading.
She had known every First Lady of the Twentieth Century up to that time, and was certainly
not keen to spend her days hosting luncheons and planning state occasions.
From the outset, Eleanor was determined to revolutionize the role of the First Lady.
She saw the role as the ultimate position of influence by which she could bring real
change for the underprivileged.
She continued and even extended her social activities.
Two days after becoming First Lady, Eleanor set the stage by holding the first ever press
conference held by a First Lady.
She would go on to hold another 347 of these conferences during her husband’s presidency.
She also began writing a daily newspaper column which became a major platform for her to espouse
her views.
The column was widely syndicated across the country.
The most important ear to take in Eleanor’s message was her husband.
She brought him stories from all over the country of hardship and injustice.
These no doubt had an influence on many of Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives during
the Depression years.
Effecting Change Eleanor was a responsible for bringing a civil
rights agenda to the White House.
In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution denied black singer Marian Anderson the right
to perform at Carnegie Hall.
Eleanor immediately came to Anderson’s aid and was instrumental in organizing an open-air
concert at the Lincoln Memorial that was attended by 75,000 people.
During World War Two, Eleanor’s role became international in its scope.
She undertook a dangerous trip to the South Pacific Theatre of war in order to bolster
the troops.
The following year she undertook a goodwill tour of Latin America.
She wanted to do more, including going to Europe to work for the International Red Cross,
but was dissuaded by Presidential advisers.
Eleanor actively lobbied to allow European refugee children to immigrate to the United
States, along with Jews and other groups who were under Nazi oppression.
She was partially successful, helping 83 Jewish refugees in to the country on one occasion.
At the end of the war, however, she stated that her greatest regret was that she was
unable to convince the President to accept more escapees from Nazi tyranny.
Widow With the war drawing to a successful conclusion,
Franklin Roosevelt suddenly died.
On April 12th, 1945, he suffered a cerebral haemorrhage while visiting Warm Springs, Georgia.
Eleanor’s grief was complicated by the information that her husband’s long-time mistress, Lucy
Mercer Rutherford, had been with him when he died.
Franklin had never given up on Lucy, despite giving that impression to Eleanor.
Letters and phone calls continued throughout the 1920’s.
During the White House years, he would invite Lucy to visit when Eleanor was away.
FDR recruited his daughter Anna to help arrange these clandestine visits.
Anna knew the depth of the relationship and was a willing accomplice.
This is something that deeply hurt Eleanor when she learned about it after FDR’s death.
There has been much speculation regarding Eleanor’s extra marital activity.
The focus of the attention is on a political reporter by the name of Lorena Hickock.
Lorena and Eleanor became constant companions.
There are many surviving letters between the couple that could be interpreted as being
romantic in nature.
It was also common knowledge that Hickok was a lesbian.
The relationship may or may not have been physical but there is little doubt that the
two women loved each other.
Finding herself suddenly out of the White House, Eleanor retired to the family estate
at Hyde Park.
She could see no future as a public person and made her mind up to fade into the sunset.
But new President Harry Truman had other ideas.
He called Eleanor the First Lady of the World and offered her a position as a delegate to
the newly created United Nations.
Her sense of duty kicked in and she accepted the role.
In 1946, she became the first chairperson of the United Nations Commission of Human
Rights.
She was instrumental in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, working with
the UN until 1953.
The final decade of Eleanor’s life was spent giving speeches and making occasional appearances.
Throughout the 1950’s she gave an average of 150 speeches a year, many of them on behalf
of the United Nations.
She received a slew of awards and honorary titles and was the recipient of the first
annual Franklin Delano Roosevelt Brotherhood Award in 1946.
The End In 1960, Eleanor was diagnosed with aplastic
anaemia following an accident in which she was hit by a car in New York.
She was treated with steroids but this made things worse.
A dormant case of tuberculosis in her bone marrow was activated and it was this that
led to the cardiac arrest that killed her on November 7, 1962.
She was 78 years of age.
The following day, President Kennedy ordered that every US flag around the world be lowered
to half mast as a tribute to the First Lady of
the World.