Willard Sterne Randall - Eleanor Roosevelt: The People’s First Lady

Few women personified the changing lives of American women in the twentieth century more than Eleanor Roosevelt. A New York aristocrat brought up with all the privileges and handicaps of a woman of her class, she was raised under the watchful tutelage of her endlessly energetic and domineering uncle, Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-fifth president of the United States, until he personally gave her away to a cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was himself bent on occupying the White House.

Never very far from wealth and power, she never had to support herself or would have been allowed to try. Surrounded by servants and private tutors, she was schooled at home until she was 15 and didnt learn to swim or drive until she was 40. Her long, slow evolution from a sheltered Victorian debutante to the worlds best-known and most respected advocate of human rights after World War II closely paralleled the painful emancipation of American women during her nearly 80 years of life.

Born Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, on October 11, 1884, her father, Elliott, was Teddy Roosevelts younger brother. Her mother, Anna Ludlow Hall, was a famous beauty descended from the Livingstons, land barons who had settled thousands of acres along the upper Hudson River in the eighteenth century.

Eleanors fathers family had arrived in America even earlier: They were among the original Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam and were wealthy merchants, importers, and mine owners, connected by marriage to many of New Yorks leading families. Both sides of her family had long considered themselves members of the countrys ruling class.

Always serious, often sad, and frequently shy, Eleanor wasnt attractive in the conventional sense like her mother or many of the girls in her social set. In those days, beauty mattered much more than brains. Young women were raised to marry and have children, and their primary asset was their appearance.

Eleanor felt ugly. And her mother considered her so. As a child, she would hide when guests came over and suck her fingers until her mother called out to her, Come in, Granny. Her mother would then, to Eleanors embarrassment, complain, Shes such a funny child, so old fashioned that we call her Granny.

Eleanor struggled to please her mother. It wasnt easy. She did find one way to do it, according to the historian Geoffrey Ward, which was that her mother was subject to migraines, and Eleanor would come and sit and rub her brow for hours and learned from that that the way to be loved was to be useful. And I think that was a lesson that stayed with her all her life.

Another source of Eleanors sadness was her father. A sensitive man whom she adored, Elliott Roosevelt spent much of her early childhood away from home playing polo, riding to hounds, competing in horse shows, drinking, recovering in sanitariums, and taking long voyages with his hunting and gaming friends. When she was two, her father stopped working; on her fourth birthday, the Roosevelt clan gathered for a lavish party. Eleanor threw her arms around her fathers neck and told him that she loved everybody and knew everybody loved her. Shortly after that, her father shattered his ankle while rehearsing somersaults for a society circus. The ankle healed improperly and was broken again. He treated the pain with liberal doses of alcohol, morphine, and opium.

When Eleanor was five, her brother, Elliott, Jr., was born. Her father only drank more and rode more recklessly. When her Uncle Teddy received legal papers accusing Elliot Sr. of impregnating a former family servant, her father fled the Austrian sanitarium where he had taken refuge, moved his family to Paris, and took a mistress. Theodore Roosevelt urged Eleanors mother to leave her husband. Instead, she had another of his children. Eleanors brother, Hall, was born while seven-year-old Eleanor was sent off to a convent outside Paris. That year, 1891, Theodore Roosevelt filed suit to have his younger brother Elliott declared insane. The suit failed, but the scandal hit the New York newspapers. Elliott Roosevelt demented by excess... Wrecked by liquor and Folly he is now confined in an Asylum for the insane..., proclaimed the New York Herald on August 18, 1892.

Theodore Roosevelt did convince the family to send Eleanors father into exile in Abingdon, in southwestern Virginia, ostensibly to oversee the familys coal mines, but actually to dry out. Once again, Eleanor was heartbroken by their separation.

There was little affection between Eleanor and her mother, who kept up a busy social schedule, leaving her children with servants and tutors all day, only seeing them after afternoon tea. She would read aloud to all her children. Then, after the boys were put to bed, she would, when she was home, give Eleanor a solitary hour in the evening.

Eleanor attended classes her mother arranged for a small group of the daughters of her wealthy friends. By age seven, Eleanor could neither read nor write. Her new routine was soon interrupted when her mother underwent surgery, and, while recovering, contracted diphtheria and died at the age of 29. In a scene she would never forget, she sat in a dark room in grandmothers house in New York, as her father, allowed home briefly from Virginia, told his children of his grief. In her autobiography, she wrote nearly a half century later how she had promised that:

Someday I would make a home for him again, we would travel together and do many things... to be looked forward to in the future... that he and I were very close and someday would have a life of our own together.

But her father had to return to Virginia, where he wrote long letters to his dear little Nell. She saw him again the following year, when her younger brother, Elliott, also died of diphtheria.

When he did move back to New York City, Elliott Roosevelt took another mistress, continued to drink heavily, and rarely visited Eleanor. In August of 1894, after a bout of delirium tremens, he died. When Eleanor Roosevelt, age 10, was told of his death, she said simply, I did want to see father once more. She lapsed into my dream world, where she was to remain closer to her father than she had ever been when he was alive.

As a ward of her autocratic and deeply religious grandmother, Virginia G. Hall, Eleanor lived in a New York mansion. In the summer, they traveled to her country estate in Tivoli, New York. Through her adolescent years, she studied French and history, but never played with other children. When invitations came from classmates, the answer was always no. Only rare family reunions broke the gloom, most often at Theodore Roosevelts home, Sagamore Hill, at Oyster Bay, Long Island. She was, he insisted, his favorite niece. To prove it, he tried to teach her to swim in Long Island Sound, which completely terrified her.... he thought hed teach me as he taught all his own children, and he threw me in. And I sank rapidly to the bottom, she remembered. Then he fished me out and lectured me on being frightened.

When she was 14, she attended a party where she saw her sixth cousin, Franklin. The two had met as children. Eleanors grandmother kept her in short little girl dresses, and she had more than one reason to blush, yet she refused the loan of a more stylish gown from another cousin. Franklin asked her to dance. He was young and gay and good looking, she recalled, and I was shy and awkward and thrilled when he asked me...

It was probably Theodore Roosevelts idea to send her away to a finishing school shortly after she turned 15. She dreaded separation from her family, but she set her mind to succeeding when she arrived in England and found her way to Allenswood, outside London, where her beautiful Aunt Bamie, Elliott Roosevelts sister, had once been a student. It was her good fortune to find there a remarkable headmistress, Marie Souvestre who, for the next three years, lavished time and affection on Eleanor, refining so many of her instincts. An atheist, a free thinker, and a woman unafraid of all sorts of Victorian conventions and censure, Souvestre was the intimate of many writers, politicians, and artists in England and France. She made the sensitive American girl her protg and, in the summers, her companion as they traveled through Europe. At Allenswood, Eleanor emerged as a leader of the student body. Her school years, she later wrote, were the happiest of her long life. She especially loved traveling: