American First Lady, the wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States from 1933-1945. Her father was the younger brother of Theodore Roosevelt and her mother a society beauty who died of diphtheria when Eleanor was eight years old. A few months after, scarlet fever claimed her brother’s life. She was a shy, solemn, lonely, insecure and serious little girl, awkward and homely.
At 15, Eleanor entered a girl’s school near London where she intellectually excelled. In 1902, she volunteered to teach the children of the immigrant poor. A year later, 1903, Franklin D. Roosevelt, a senior at Harvard, proposed to Eleanor. They married on 17 March 1905 in New York City. They had six children, including one who died in infancy. Their children were plagued with many broken marriages (19 among the 5 of them), failed businesses and other personal setbacks.
In 1918, Eleanor discovered several love letters written to her husband by her secretary Lucy Mercer, with whom he was having an affair. This event destroyed the marriage, which continued in name only as they led separate lives. Her physical relations with her husband apparently ended at that time.
At a time when the First Lady was to be seen and not heard, Eleanor Roosevelt broke that precedent. She was active in such progressive causes as the League of Women Voters as well as the Women’s Trade Union League. She helped found the private Todhunter School in Manhattan and taught history and government part-time. She was both an activist and an educator. One of the most gracious and beloved First Ladies in history, she was active in social, humanitarian and cultural work.
In the 1920s, she became prominent in the NY Democratic party. She was regarded as a public figure in her own right as well as a valuable asset to FDR when he was elected president in 1932. She briefly held an official position in her husband’s administration, becoming Director of the Office of Civilian Defense. However, she resigned from this position in order to spare her husband the negative publicity that rose from conservative criticism over the left-wing ties some of her appointees had.
On 11 August 1921, while at Campobello, Roosevelt was stricken by polio. For the most part, he was able to conceal the extent of his disability from the public and he continued a public career, being elected to the highest office for four terms.
By 1933, Eleanor was not only a savvy political spouse but an intuitive political operative in her own right. She had also attained considerable stature as a writer, magazine editor, lecturer, and radio personality; and with three partners was proprietor of a girls’ school in Manhattan, as well as a crafts factory upstate producing furniture, pewter and woven goods. She sought relief from her busy public and personal life in a rural household near Hyde Park, NY, which she maintained apart from her family. There at Val-Kill cottage, she entertained a coterie of intellectual, politically motivated women, one of whom was Lorena Hickok. Maintaining fortitude during her husband’s infidelities, she had a deeply meaningful relationship with this woman friend; their correspondence indicates the extent of their love for one another. Many feel that the relationship was sexual; others declare that her strongly bonded relationships with both men and women were never more than platonic. Eleanor left no confessions in this regard and no eyewitnesses.
Franklin Roosevelt died while still in office on 12 April 1945 in Warm Springs, Georgia. After his death, Eleanor was appointed by President Truman to the US delegation in the United Nation General Assembly, a position she held until 1953. President Truman called her the ‘First Lady of the World’. While at the UN, her most outstanding achievement was chairing the commission that drafted the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights. The first volume of her memoirs, “This is my Story,” appeared in 1938.
On 7 November 1962 Eleanor Roosevelt died at the age of 78 from tuberculosis in New York City.
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