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And by, Stevie’s Super Soap.
Stevie’s Super Soap for super suds.
“Every year around Christmas-time, the Gallup Poll conducts an annual popularity contest,
assigning reporters to put this question to a cross-section of the American public: ‘What
woman living today in any part of the world do you admire the most?’
Last year, for the eleventh time, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt was a shoo-in winner.
What does this prove?
Just this: In a society where a pro-Communist atheist and criminal sex-pervert like the
late Caryl Chessman can be built up into a great national hero and an international martyr
through the power of the Communist-kept press, it proves only that it is possible to build
up almost anyone as a public idol.”
(1)
Let me set the table for you.
If you visit the First Lady’s exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American
History, you’ll find an space full of dresses and dishware.
Colorful china sit below black and white photographs of the First Ladies who made the selection,
juxtaposing the priority palette of porcelain over personality.
There’s a tendency to define presidential spouses with banalities, a sentiment they
go unexamined; they didn’t run for office, and so bear no responsibility.
You might find this the correct approach.
Withholding the unelected from public scrutiny is justifiable.
“I really don’t care.
Do you?”
All this belies that upon seeing a neatly set table, some choose to shatter the glasses.
In the case of Eleanor Roosevelt, a shattering which would produce reaction, including from
the author of what you heard before.
She was the most active First Lady to ever bear the title.
When Franklin was elected governor of New York in 1929, she declined to give up her
writing or her activism, choosing instead a partnership with her husband that lasted
through to their White House years (2,381).
To Eleanor, anything less than a life spent advocating issues of importance was a misappropriation
of her effort, a failure to live up to what her uncle Theodore Roosevelt had called the
“strenuous life”(3).
The rule of thumb here is that I usually only flash a book on screen if I’ve actually
read it, but I actually checked this one out from the library just so I could make this
point (4).
Eleanor was so concerned that the White House would hold back her activism that a close
confidant named her book on Eleanor: the “Reluctant First Lady”.
She left notes for FDR everyday on what should be done, often engaging in hours-long discussions
with him on presidential affairs (6.31).
She joined the women’s social reform network in demanding the benefits of the new deal
be extended to women, openly challenged FDR over public policy in her “My Day” newspaper
column, and in regular press conferences (5).
She advocated public health, housing, education, federal job initiatives, anti-austerity, youth
employment, equal pay, and civil rights (6,70-77).
When the Daughters of the American Revolution denied performer Marian Anderson the opportunity
of singing in Constitution Hall, Eleanor resigned her membership, and arranged so Anderson could
perform at the Lincoln Memorial.
It’s hard to overstate just how ceaseless and how different Eleanor was, not just compared
to other First Ladies, but to any of her contemporaries.
However, there’s a darkness here.
Before the White House, when FDR fell victim to a paralytic illness in 1921, it was Eleanor
that held the family together, and carried on political business through the initial
months.
She brought him friends and advisers, kept his political mind and still limbs as stimulated
as best she could, fostering hope for a political career beyond his current trauma (2,311).
It was an effort that came at the price of deep sadness.
She spent one afternoon inconsolably sobbing, punishment for her composure.
She was a radical and she was a partner, an activist and an aristocrat, a disrupter and
part of the establishment.
Unceasingly active yet often depressed.
To understand Eleanor, we need to go a little bit deeper, as her contradictions originate
early in life.
Contradictions that lead to her greatest accomplishment.
Eleanor’s childhood was one of privilege and pain.
Being born into the powerful Roosevelt family meant never lacking in funding or influence.
But her aristocratic origins belie family dysfunction.
One of her earliest experiences was, after rescue from a sinking ship, being left by
her parents for being too tearful and scared to board another (2,48).
Her mother, cold to Eleanor and never willing to accept parenthood over hedonism, died of
diphtheria when Eleanor was only 8 (7,16).
Her father, who she adored, was an alcoholic and institutionalized, and died when she was
nine.
At 15, in part to keep her uncle from molesting her, Eleanor’s grandmother sent her across
the Atlantic to Allenswood Academy outside London.
There were many rules for the girls at Allenswood.
Obedience and passivity were of no value, only curiosity and inquisitiveness brought
reward.
The students of Allenswood were to speak French at all times, even though they were just outside
London.
The collegiate environment was harsh; disorderliness was punished by having your belongings thrown
onto your stripped-down bed (2,103-5).
And yet, the rigours and structure of the institution made the years at Allenswood the
“healthiest” of Eleanor’s life.
She adored the intellectual dinners, the team sports, the chance to overshadow her classmates
with superior mastery of French, the moments to display emotions openly and socially, even
sadness, crying.
What made Allenswood so effective, so radical?
It was an all-girls institution at the turn of the 20th century, an English school fiercely
dedicated to women’s education in a time when they were unable to vote and barred from
attending Universities in the same way as men.
Only in 1920 did Oxford accept women as full members, Cambridge not until 1947 (8&9).
The Headmaster, Marie Souvestre, believed that for women to survive in a man’s world
they needed to learn skepticism, to assert themselves, to prove they were just as capable
(105).
she served as a powerful feminine authority to girls like
Eleanor.
There’s a great passage Blanche Wiesen Cook’s biography of Eleanor, the first volume, in
which she describes the radicalism of Marie Souvestre:
“...Souvestre’s international school thrived at the height of and in the heart of patriarchal
Victorian society, in a time when education was, in more mundane circles, considered dangerous
to a woman’s mental health, a pathway to madness and sterility.
Independent creative education for women was also thought to be dangerous for society.
It would lead to votes for women, public activity, socialism, agnosticism, utopianism, opposition
to war, the dissolution of the empire.
It was positively subversive.
Marie Souvestre entertained it all.
Her ideas were dangerous,” (2,104).
And that’s the thing.
The irony of Eleanor’s education is that it was an aristocratic exercise of the wealthy-
sending children over long distances for disciplinarian education from stentorian headmasters.
But the authoritarianism at Allenswood pushed Eleanor to oppose the status quo in society
at-large; in effect, the radical order gave Eleanor the tools to be a disruptor.
Her inclination to be more than just a mother and hostess First Lady was likely born just
after her time at Allenswood, when she visited the White House of her uncle
Theodore, and saw his wife Edith Roosevelt playing the role of housekeeper within halls
of power.
At the same time she was witness to Theodore’s sisters, her aunts, acting as unofficial advisors
to the president (7,10).
When her time came to be First Lady in 1933, she took both routes, transforming the office.
But her life’s accomplishments were more than just those of FDR and the time in the
White House.
Following Franklin’s death and the conclusion of World War II, president Harry Truman asked
now former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to be a delegate to the newly formed United Nations.
Her appointment was met with great skepticism; the political establishment saw her as inexperienced,
naive, and incapable as she sailed to the UN conference in 1946.
Thanks to some help from the professionals at the AP Archive, and their partner, MovieTone,
we were actually able to find digitized newsreel footage of her arrival to share with you.
It’s really cool.
Arriving with Eleanor are two of her critics, Senators Connally and Vandenberg.
Presenter: Queen Elizabeth, docking at Southampton, had aboard many delegates to the United Nations
General Assembly.
By far the most interesting arrival was that of Mrs. Roosevelt, widow of the late president.
The mayor of Southampton was there to welcome her, and Mr. Stettinius, who heads the American
delegation.
Also in the delegation were Senator Connally on the right, and Senator Vandenberg, who
is of course a representative of the Republican Party.
On landing, Mrs. Roosevelt had this to say, Eleanor: “I’m very glad to be back in
England at peace.
And I hope that our mission will be a successful one, and that we will set up an organization
which can keep peace throughout--” Presenter: And Senator Vandenberg…
After that interesting cutoff, Eleanor provided disruption of her own.
Knowing she was the only female delegate to the Assembly, and realizing that her failure
would mean she might be the last, she took on the work with rigor, impressing both her
colleagues and critics, earning herself a post as chairman of the committee tasked with
drafting a declaration of human rights (10,25).
It seemed a culmination of Eleanor’s life.
Not only was she putting her lifelong political skills to use, but she was doing it in a pluralistic
way, using her power, as she always did, to include the powerless.
The Universal Declaration codified 30 rights of all people.
The committee struggled to balance the rights of the individual and the rights of the state.
They nonetheless laid out for survivors of the greatest global conflict that “All human
beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights..without [any] distinction of any
kind”(11).
Childhood and family were “fundamental to society”; men and women were equal in these
dignities.
Though the drafting of the universal declaration of human rights took on a western form, it
pulled from tradition around the world, including economic and social rights not found in the
French Declaration of the Rights of Man, nor the American Declaration of Independence or
constitution (10,58&73).
Its passage through the assembly with 48 yes votes and 8 abstentions shows the political
skill with which it was maneuvered in the three year drafting process.
It was a document of the possible.
To navigate the negotiation between the committee members representing nations of various size
and philosophy, Eleanor’s privileged multilingual and international education was invaluable.
Her political nature and seeing inside the Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt White Houses
gave her unparalleled preparation for policy making.
But if her skills were born of privilege, her values were born of suffering, of facing
insecurity, inadequacy, death, knowing the losses and obstacles life had to offer.
To promise children of world security and family, she first had to lose her own.
To know that gender was of less content than character, she had to be judged on it herself.
To empathize with the tears of another, she had to accept her own.
To break the system, to be a revolutionary, she first had to be part of the system, dealt
an exceptional lot in life, and like many brilliant minds, to feel extraordinary pain.
And that’s the paradox of Eleanor Roosevelt.
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