Eleanor by David Michaelis Book Summary

Recommendation

Eleanor Roosevelt led a life of public service and private struggle, a testimony to the power of purpose and perseverance. The niece of US president Theodore Roosevelt, she was orphaned at an early age, then studied abroad before marrying her fifth cousin, future US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was unfaithful to her, and she sought love from others, but their personal and political partnership endured. As first lady, Eleanor condemned racial discrimination and other social injustices. She went on to guide the United Nations toward its adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Take-Aways

• Eleanor Roosevelt was an orphan from an affluent family. Her relatives nicknamed her “Granny” because she was such a serious child.
• After studying abroad, Eleanor married her fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
• Eleanor bore six children and became more active in public service and politics after FDR’s unfaithfulness in 1918.
• Eleanor actively assisted FDR’s run for vice president in 1920, and helped him in politics and public life throughout his career.
• As FDR rose to the presidency, Eleanor emerged as a public figure promoting peace, racial justice and the welfare of women.
• A defender of the downtrodden, Eleanor helped guide the UN to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Eleanor Book Summary

Eleanor Roosevelt was an orphan from an affluent family. Her relatives nicknamed her “Granny” because she was such a serious child.

Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City on October 11, 1884. By then, the marriage of her parents Elliott Roosevelt and Anna Hall Roosevelt was unraveling. Her father was the elder brother of Theodore Roosevelt, Eleanor’s “Uncle Ted,” the 26th US president. The Roosevelts lived in New York and shared a family fortune.

Eleanor was an unusually serious girl with a grave manner, which her mother repeatedly mocked, frequently “in front of company.” Eleanor was happy when she was near her beloved father, and did more than her mother to help him cope with his alcoholism. In 1891, Elliott’s drunken binges led his sister, Bamie, to initiate steps to declare him legally insane, drawing embarrassing newspaper coverage. Eleanor lost contact with her father as her mother threatened divorce and demanded a trial separation. Eleanor blamed Anna for her father’s exile. When she died of diphtheria in 1892, Eleanor, age 8, “shed no tears.” Left with her maternal grandmother, she hoped for more time with her father, but he died in a fall three years later.

After studying abroad, Eleanor married her fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Eleanor danced with her fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt at an 1899 New Year’s Eve party. That year, Grandmother Hall sent her to Allenswood, a southwestern London boarding school. Headmistress Marie Souvestre required her girls to speak French all day, but Eleanor soon felt welcome. When Mademoiselle Souvestre selected groups of girls to spend time after lunch and dinner discussing their ideas with her, she often chose Eleanor. She recalled these as the happiest days of her early life. She regarded Mademoiselle as a great influence, second only to her father. 

“When Mademoiselle had important guests to dinner – illustrious literary or artistic figures, as well as one or two Prime Ministers of England and France’ whom she sat on either side of herself – Eleanor had no trouble contributing from her place opposite the adults.”

In 1901, Eleanor learned terrible truths about her late father. She’d believed he had died in Virginia. In fact, he was at his mistress’s Manhattan apartment, gobbling drugs and “guzzling alcohol” before his suicidal leap from a window. Eleanor learned she had a half-brother, Elliott Roosevelt Mann. His mother, housemaid Katie Mann, took a blackmail payoff from the Roosevelts after threatening to disclose little Elliott’s paternity. After Uncle Ted won the 1904 presidential election, Eleanor and FDR appeared as a couple for the first time at the inaugural ball. They wed March 17, 1905. The people closest to FDR said his emotional interior was impossible to discern, and Eleanor gradually accepted his routine refusal to discuss his feelings. She rated honeymoon sex as “less than pleasant,” but by her 21st birthday she was three months’ pregnant. 

Eleanor bore six children and became more active in public service and politics after FDR’s unfaithfulness in 1918.

By 1916, Eleanor would give birth to six children, with one dying in infancy. After each birth, a grim mood gripped her, not the joy she believed a mother should feel. FDR dazzled the children with “the illusion of the personal,” leaving Eleanor to raise them. Like Uncle Ted, FDR launched his political career in the New York legislature. Eleanor’s “need to be needed” led her to manage their home “as an extension of Franklin’s senate seat.” In 1912, FDR won re-election, but Uncle Ted lost his third-party presidential bid. FDR became assistant secretary of the US Navy under Woodrow Wilson.

“When she did think about Washington, it worried her that she didn’t know a soul.’ She was afraid of [making] all kinds of stupid mistakes’.”

In 1913, Lucy Mercer, 23, became Eleanor’s social secretary. Jealous because FDR found her attractive, Eleanor fired her in 1917. Five days later, Mercer began working with him at the Navy. 

After the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Eleanor led a knitting service for the Navy Red Cross that delivered nearly 9,000 articles of clothing to support the war effort. These voluntary activities exposed “her natural capacity for organization.” She earned additional respect as a Red Cross canteen captain.

Eleanor found Mercer’s love letters to FDR in his suitcase after he returned, ailing, from a trip abroad. If Eleanor had exposed their relationship, the secretary of the Navy would have fired him, and the scandal would have ended his political career. His dominating mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, intervened to keep Eleanor from divorcing FDR. “Mama” warned FDR that he would inherit none of her wealth if his marriage ended. Eleanor insisted that FDR demonstrate his desire for her as his life partner, even a platonic one. They stayed together, but slept in separate rooms.

After the war, the American Red Cross asked Eleanor to inspect a government-operated psychiatric hospital which had a Navy ward for soldiers and sailors suffering from shell shock, now identified as PTSD. Her reports that underfed patients often attacked each other in the unsanitary, overcrowded and poorly staffed facility led Congress to increase funding for the hospital.

Eleanor actively assisted FDR’s run for vice president in 1920, and helped him in politics and public life throughout his career.

In June 1920, FDR attended the fractious Democratic National Convention to support Governor Alfred E. Smith as the presidential nominee. Delegates settled on the Ohio governor, James Cox, who chose FDR as his vice president, putting what one newspaper called “a honey of a name” on the ballot. Eleanor campaigned visibly, and gave an interview supporting the League of Nations as a way to avoid wars and sustain peace. However, Cox and FDR lost badly to Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Roosevelt emerged as a likely 1924 presidential candidate, but in 1921, polio paralyzed his legs and nearly derailed his career. Eleanor worked with his chief adviser Louis Howe to convince reporters that FDR was recovering from a nasty cold. They eventually told the public that FDR had previously been a “formerly suffered” polio.

“Gradually, they built their partnership around independent versions of themselves.”

Eleanor befriended Nancy Cook, assistant to the director of the Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Party, and her life partner, Marion Dickerman. They traveled together statewide urging women to vote for Smith, who won re-election as governor.

In 1924, FDR found therapeutic relief at a resort in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he regained feeling in his toes after he started “walking” in a pool of warm water from the mineral springs. He eventually spent $200,000, some two-thirds of his wealth, to buy the resort.

As FDR rose to the presidency, Eleanor emerged as a public figure promoting peace, racial justice and the welfare of women.

Woodrow Wilson’s endless effort to create a “universal organization” to prevent wars shaped Eleanor’s quest for peace and human rights. Enjoying the great regard of women activists, Eleanor gave frequent speeches. She urged women to advocate for US participation in the World Court as she entered the third phase of her evolving public identity – from president’s niece to the wife of a Naval administrator and political figure to being a politician “in her own right.”

At the 1928 Democratic National Convention, FDR nominated Al Smith as president. FDR had learned to move with leg braces and a cane despite his paralyzed legs. Some delegates wept as he rose with a big smile and lumbered to the podium on the arm of his son Elliott. His thunderous speech “shook the walls and the roof.” The Smith campaign assigned Eleanor to turn out women voters against the Republican nominee, secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover. Roosevelt won his race to be governor of New York by a hair, and Eleanor got credit for his victory. After Hoover defeated Smith, FDR became the likely 1932 Democratic presidential nominee.

Democrats nominated him, and he won, taking office in March, 1933. In his first scripted statement as victor, he thanked Howe but did not mention Eleanor, who held her own press conference. 

In 1933, Eleanor pushed to open emergency relief camps for women, and gained a reputation as a “friend to jobless women.”As first lady, she worked on affordable housing for poor and older people. Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickok became Eleanor’s friend and occasional travel companion. Eleanor developed a “grand passion” for “Hick.” They were close, but gradually came to spend less time together. 

Eleanor tried to raise awareness of “domestic violence and malnutrition,” among other conditions of poverty.  She drew both praise and notoriety by writing a national newspaper column, “My Day.” Unlike any previous first lady, Eleanor frequently traveled to assess social problems and inform FDR and his administration about the plight of people like Black Americans and tenant farmers. President Roosevelt denied her pleas to support desegregation, anti-lynching laws and reforms to fix discriminatory New Deal relief programs. He didn’t want to upset the white supremacists who controlled much of Congress.

“Eleanor’s bewilderment at her husband’s abandonment of basic American rights and freedoms took the form of private objection.”

As FDR campaigned for a second term, critics accused Eleanor of marital neglect, misuse of tax money, mental instability, support of communists and plans to remarry. Undeterred, voters in 46 of the 48 states chose FDR over Kansas governor Alf Landon. As FDR’s second term began, the public saw Eleanor as an “urban liberal Democrat.” 

She spoke in 1938 at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham, Alabama. A local law required Blacks and whites to sit apart, so she sat in the section reserved for Blacks. When police told her to move, she put her chair in the center aisle. The conference condemned Jim Crow laws and decided to never hold conferences in segregated cities. Eleanor’s inspections of Washington’s public welfare institutions and jails revealed horrors. In one jail, she caught â€œa certain odor” in the mess hall, and found an electric chair used for executions concealed under a tarp next to a table where inmates ate.

A defender of the downtrodden, Eleanor helped guide the UN to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In May 1940, the German military launched “total war in Western Europe.” The war revived FDR’s appeal, and he carried all but 10 states in the election that year, becoming the first US president to win three terms. A year later, Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor. The next night, 30 Japanese warplanes flew over San Francisco, but dropped no bombs. 

“The same startled recognition began to repeat in other places, as people meeting her found themselves astonished that the Eleanor before them was far more lovely than the homely Mrs. Roosevelt of pictures.”

Eleanor spoke against the ensuing rise in racial hatred directed against citizens of Japanese ancestry. But in February 1942, FDR ordered West Coast authorities to remove people of Japanese descent from their towns, freeze their bank accounts and incarcerate them in “relocation centers.” Eleanor was shocked, especially since no Japanese invasion or spying case materialized. The issue left “a lasting wedge between them.” 

As his fourth term began, FDR felt weak and went to Warm Springs to recover. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage there on April 12, 1945. When Eleanor flew in, she found out that Lucy Mercer had been with FDR for the last three days of his life. Eleanor spent five minutes in the room alone with FDR’s body before emerging “dry-eyed.”

The new president, Harry Truman, asked Eleanor to serve at the first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. She led a committee to assist World War II refugees. The General Assembly agreed to investigate their plight, and headlines hailed the victory of “Mrs. FDR.”

Dr. David Gurewitsch, handsome and 18 years younger, became Eleanor’s personal physician after they met in 1940. After the war, they shared a fogged-in layover for several days in Ireland en route to UN business in Geneva. He remained her friend, traveling companion, confidant and later – along with his wife – her eventual housemate for the rest of Eleanor’s life.

Truman said he would accept her as his 1948 running mate, but Eleanor repeatedly refused to seek office. Now she felt “free to speak her mind” to her newspaper readers. She condemned Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, comparing his witch hunt for communists to “a gestapo in our midst.” In Paris with the US delegation to the 1948 UN General Assembly, Eleanor delivered a speech in French, advocating human rights and attacking Soviet abuses. Moments after the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, every delegate shared in a standing ovation for Eleanor, an unprecedented acclamation for the “world’s foremost champion of human rights.” 

The day she turned 75, Eleanor began hosting Prospects of Mankind, a public TV program. Her guests included John F. Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson, Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger. She proposed that the Democrats nominate Stevenson for president and Kennedy for vice president, though she criticized what she saw as JFK’s lack of authenticity. Kennedy won the party’s nomination on July 13, 1960, and “converted” Eleanor’s opinion. She campaigned for him nationwide. After his election, JFK named her chair of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. Under her leadership, the commission identified equal-pay complaints and other issues that became â€œthe agenda of the women’s movement.”

“Between sunrise and sunset…she wanted to put the whole world right.”

After contracting an untreatable form of tuberculosis and suffering an apparent stroke, Eleanor Roosevelt died on November 7, 1962, exactly 30 years after FDR won his first term as president. The guests at her funeral included President Kennedy, two former presidents, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the governor of New York, the mayor of New York City and UN representatives from several countries.

About the Author

David Michaelis is the best-selling author of Schulz and Peanuts and N.C. Wyeth, which won the Ambassador Book Award for biography.

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