Tonight let us all tip our hats and raise a glass to the memory of Eleanor Roosevelt.

“Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of competence.”

~ Eleanor Roosevelt

November 7, 2012 marked the 50th anniversary of the passing of Eleanor Roosevelt. How can it be that one human being could be the focus of such ambivalence? She was one of the most loved—and one of the most hated—women of the 20th century.

Her FBI file was more voluminous than Al Capone’s, she was seen by J.Edgar Hoover as that huge a threat to the peace and security of the United States. At one point, the Klu Klux Klan put a price on her life. One prominent pillar of the plutocracy dismissed her life’s work, referring to her as some compulsive do-gooder, “with a housewife’s desire to redecorate.”

African Americans of her generation, and beyond, loved her more than any other white person. To the right wing she was (and still is) the mock-inducing poster girl of American Liberalism. To insufferable lefties like myself, she was (and remains) a secular saint.

To the people all over the world who struggled for human rights, she was the personification of all that was— and is—admirable about America. She was the First Lady of the world.

Born on the 11th of October 1884, it defies the limits of human fortitude that she was able to accomplish what she did. Unlike the stable, loving childhood of her future husband and distant cousin, Franklin, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt’s early years were an endless litany of sorrow and psychological turmoil.

Her mother was the beautiful society maiden, Anna Hall, who in 1883 married Elliot Roosevelt, the younger brother of Theodore. Anna could never accept her only daughter’s rather plain looks. Keeping her emotionally at bay, she referred to the little girl as “Granny.” Eleanor’s only solace was her drunken, drug-addicted father who was devoted to her.

When Anna died of diphtheria in December of 1892, Eleanor felt a strange indifference. “All that mattered to me was that I would soon be with my father,” she wrote many years later. When Elliot Roosevelt died from injuries sustained in an alcohol-related accident in the summer of 1894, Eleanor and her little brother, Hall, became orphans. They were bequeathed to the care of their stern and joyless maternal grandmother in Tivoli, New York. In the years that followed her father’s death, Eleanor withdrew from the world, a forlorn little girl with a lifetime of tragedy reflected in the eyes of a 9-year-old.

In 1899 at the age of 15, she was sent to the private “finishing school” Allenswood Academy in London, England. It was run by an elderly feminist educator named, Mademoiselle Marie Souvestre. The gentle, compassionate woman took the troubled teenager under her wing, and it was here that Eleanor Roosevelt blossomed.

She returned to the United States in 1902, and in 1904 became engaged to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When they were married on St. Patrick’s Day 1905, her uncle, President Teddy Roosevelt, walked her down the aisle. Now she could look forward to the role women of her class in that era were expected to play, that of the traditional wife of a professional man on the ascent. In the ensuing 11 years she gave birth to six children (one of whom died in infancy).

In 1918, her world imploded when she discovered her husband had been having an affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer. She offered Franklin a divorce, but his mother, the indomitable Sara, threatened to disinherit him. She was not about to see her grandchildren soiled by such a scandal.

Also, a divorce would have ended his political career. By this time Roosevelt was serving in the Wilson administration as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Even in 1918 he had his eyes on the White House. They both consented to save the marriage. Although they would never again share the physical intimacies of a husband and wife, they would forever remain devoted to one another.

Three years later in the summer of 1921, came the trauma that would change the family forever. Franklin was stricken with infantile paralysis. He would never again walk unassisted. It was generally agreed that the career of this rising young star of American politics was over.

This was the moment that Eleanor became transformed. She was determined that Franklin’s career would proceed.

With the help of FDR’s political adviser, an eccentric, brilliant and rumpled little man named Louis Howe, she became her husband’s “eyes and ears.” She stood in for him at as many political gatherings and meetings as possible. This shy and reserved woman even began to make speeches, not only in New York state, but all over the country!

Considering all he had going against him, Franklin’s physical and political recovery was impressive. Seven years after contracting polio he was elected governor of New York. On March 4, 1933 he was inaugurated the 32nd president of the United States.

She didn’t want to be First Lady. The night her husband was sworn in found her in a state of severe depression, almost to the point of despair. The thought of living out the the traditional role of the president’s wife—hosting teas for the ladies of Washington—filled her with dread.

Possibly without even being aware of it, she revolutionized the role. Her tenure as First Lady of the Land would set the standard against which all future ones would  be compared. Eleanor Roosevelt is without peer.

If there is a credit to be given to any single white person for the mass migration of black people from the “party of Abraham Lincoln” to the Democratic party, that credit should be given to Mrs. Roosevelt. Within a few years African Americans came to realize that they had a friend in the White House.

Franklin had to contend with the headache of dealing with a Democratic party that at that time was filled with southern racists. If he remained publicly passive on the subject of civil rights, privately was a different matter. She had his blessings—although at times she added to those headaches.

In 1937, a newspaper photographer caught her gently bending down and embracing a little “negro” girl who was presenting her with a bouquet of flowers. In exchange for the gift, Eleanor offered the child a smile one could read at midnight by. Newspaper editorials all over the land (particularly in the south of course) stood up as one in righteous indignation.

How could the First Lady of this grand and glorious land of ours allow herself to be seen bowing to and smiling at some wretched little pickininie??

Eleanor Roosevelt did not apologize. It was that kind of time in America. We’ve changed —for the most part—I think.

When the African American singer Marian Anderson wasn’t permitted to sing in Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution—for no other reason than the color of her skin—Eleanor promptly resigned her membership in that organization. She then made arrangements for Ms. Anderson to sing at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

It’s one of those moments in American history that one longs to have been alive to witness, a moment forever engraved in America’s soul and consciousness. It illustrated, more than any other single event of that time, America’s essential goodness.

On that sacred Easter Sunday, under the statue of the great emancipator, Marian Anderson sang Schubert’s Ave Maria before an integrated audience of 75,000 people—millions more across the land listened via the new medium of radio. Whom among the multitudes gathered would have dared to dream that they were bearing witness to the beginning of a long chain of events which would lead to the inauguration of the first African American president three score and ten years later?

When Franklin Roosevelt died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, even her friends predicted she would drift away into quiet obscurity. They were wrong. In fact, her most monumental achievement was ahead of her.

In 1946, President Harry Truman appointed Mrs. Roosevelt as a delegate to the General Assembly of the newly formed United Nations. On December 10, 1948, they adopted  the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document whose creation she, more than anyone, was responsible for.  It is one of her most impressive and enduring gifts to humanity.

At the end of her life she was depressed by what she saw as her failure as a mother. Her children were the very picture of dysfunction, with 19 marriages between the five of them. She was also tired, and yet she lamented to a friend in her final hours, “I still have so much to do.” She quietly passed from this world on November 7, 1962. She was 78.

Eleanor Roosevelt was a complex and, in many respects, tormented women.

The psychological scars of her childhood always lingered at the peripherals of her consciousness. She sought emotional intimacy from a husband who was unable to reciprocate. All her life she would seek it elsewhere from her closest friends. She could be loving and kind to some, and cold and aloof to others.

Given all that I’ve read, I’m not too sure I would have been content with her as a wife, mother or business partner. But, I would love to have been her friend—just to hang out with her. That would have been very cool. Can you understand why I love this woman so much?

Tonight let us all tip our hats and raise a glass to the memory of the First Lady of the world.

 

Tom Degan is a fifty-four year old video artist but now makes his name by writing about politics and current events on his blog, The Rant. “I was a Democrat, until they became GOP-lite. I am now nothing—a man without a party, as it were. That’s okay. I like the solitude. I am the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom….Okay, I’ll fess up. That’s a bald-faced lie. But I did get a ribbon of sorts when I was in the Cub Scouts.” Tom lives and resides in Goshen, NY, the most Republican little berg north of the Mason Dixon line. He’s “the most popular guy in town.” That’s also a lie. “I love children, little baby duckies and Glenn Miller’s recording of Moonlight Serenade. That’s the truth. So there.”

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Editor: Sara McKeown

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