6. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT ONCE FLEW WITH AMELIA EARHART.
The groundbreaking aviator inspired Eleanor to apply for her own pilot’s license and even took her on a flight from D.C. to Baltimore in 1933. After Earhart vanished on her round-the-world attempt, Roosevelt told reporters, “I am sure Amelia’s last words were ‘I have no regrets.’”
7. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT WROTE A SYNDICATED NEWSPAPER COLUMN FOR 27 YEARS.
Eleanor Roosevelt sits with her dogs at Val-Kill, her cottage in Hyde Park, NY.
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM // PUBLIC DOMAIN
From 1935 to 1962, Roosevelt composed six articles a week about her political views and personal life. Simply titled “My Day,” the column featured her musings on such hot topics as Prohibition, Pearl Harbor, and Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt. In all that time, Eleanor missed only a single week’s worth of deadlines, following her husband’s death in 1945.
8. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT PROTESTED SEGREGATION LAWS IN BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA.
In 1938, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare held its inaugural meeting in Birmingham. Upon arriving, Roosevelt sat directly beside an African American associate, ignoring the designated whites-only section. After being told that Birmingham’s segregationist policies prohibited white and Black persons from sitting together at public functions, Roosevelt asked for a ruler.
“Now measure the distance between this chair and that one,” she said. After examining the gap separating the sections for white and Black attendees, Roosevelt placed her chair an equal distance between them. “They were afraid to arrest her,” one witness claimed.
9. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT STARRED IN A MARGARINE COMMERCIAL.
Roosevelt advertised a range of products, from mattresses to hot dogs. Her appearance in a 1959 TV spot above helped establish margarine as one of America’s favorite spreads. This appearance netted the former first lady $35,000, which she used to purchase 6000 care packages for impoverished families.
10. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT HELPED DRAFT THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS.
President Harry S. Truman appointed Roosevelt as the U.S. representative to the United Nations Human Rights Council in 1946. In this role, she became a driving force behind the U.N.’s Declaration of Human Rights, which more than 50 member-states eventually worked together to compose.
American Youth Congress and National Youth Administration The American Youth Congress was formed in 1935 to advocate for youth rights in U.S. politics, and it was responsible for introducing the American Youth Bill of Rights to the U.S. Congress. Roosevelt's relationship with the AYC eventually led to the formation of the National Youth Administration, a New Deal agency in the United States, founded in 1935, that focused on providing work and education for Americans between the ages of 16 and 25. The NYA was headed by Aubrey Willis Williams, a prominent liberal from Alabama who was close to Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins. Speaking of the NYA in the 1930s, Roosevelt expressed her concern about ageism, stating that 'I live in real terror when I think we may be losing this generation. We have got to bring these young people into the active life of the community and make them feel that they are necessary.' In 1939 the Dies Committee subpoenaed leaders of the AYC, who, in addition to serving the AYC, also were members of the Young Communist League. Roosevelt was in attendance at the hearings and afterward invited the subpoenaed witnesses to board at the White House during their stay in Washington D.C. Joseph P. Lash was one of her boarders. On February 10, 1940, members of the AYC, as guests of Roosevelt in her capacity as first lady, attended a picnic on the White House lawn where they were addressed by Franklin from the South Portico. The President admonished them to condemn not merely the Nazi regime but all dictatorships. The President was reportedly booed by the group. Afterwards, many of the same youth picketed the White House as representatives of the American Peace Mobilization. Among them was Joseph Cadden, one of Roosevelt's overnight boarders. Later in 1940, despite Roosevelt's publication of her reasons 'Why I still believe in the Youth Congress,' the American Youth Congress was disbanded. The NYA was shut down in 1943.
Arthurdale Roosevelt's chief project during her husband's first two terms was the establishment of a planned community in Arthurdale, West Virginia. On August 18, 1933, at Hickok's urging, Roosevelt visited the families of homeless miners in Morgantown, West Virginia, who had been blacklisted following union activities. Deeply affected by the visit, Roosevelt proposed a resettlement community for the miners at Arthurdale, where they could make a living by subsistence farming, handicrafts, and a local manufacturing plant. She hoped the project could become a model for 'a new kind of communit'y in the U.S., in which workers would be better cared for. Her husband enthusiastically supported the project.
After an initial, disastrous experiment with prefab houses, construction began again in 1934 to Roosevelt's specifications, this time with 'every modern convenience', including indoor plumbing and central steam heat. Families occupied the first fifty homes in June, and agreed to repay the government in thirty years' time. Though Roosevelt had hoped for a racially mixed community, the miners insisted on limiting membership to white Christians. After losing a community vote, Roosevelt recommended the creation of other communities for the excluded black and Jewish miners. The experience motivated Roosevelt to become much more outspoken on the issue of racial discrimination.
Roosevelt remained a vigorous fundraiser for the community for several years, as well as spending most of her own income on the project. However, the project was criticized by both the political left and right. Conservatives condemned it as socialist and a 'communist plot', while Democratic members of Congress opposed government competition with private enterprise. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes also opposed the project, citing its high per-family cost. Arthurdale continued to sink as a government spending priority for the federal government until 1941, when the U.S. sold off the last of its holdings in the community at a loss.
Later commentators generally described the Arthurdale experiment as a failure. Roosevelt herself was sharply discouraged by a 1940 visit in which she felt the town had become excessively dependent on outside assistance. However, the residents considered the town a 'utopia' compared to their previous circumstances, and many were returned to economic self-sufficiency. Roosevelt personally considered the project a success, later speaking of the improvements she saw in people's lives there and stating, 'I don't know whether you think that is worth half a million dollars. But I do.'
Civil rights activism
During Franklin's administration, Roosevelt became an important connection to the African-American population in the era of segregation. Despite the President's desire to placate Southern sentiment, Roosevelt was vocal in her support of the civil rights movement. After her experience with Arthurdale and her inspections of New Deal programs in Southern states, she concluded that New Deal programs were discriminating against African-Americans, who received a disproportionately small share of relief money. Roosevelt became one of the only voices in her husband's administration insisting that benefits be equally extended to Americans of all races.
Roosevelt also broke with tradition by inviting hundreds of African-American guests to the White House. In 1936 she became aware of conditions at the National Training School for Girls, a predominantly black reform school once located in the Palisades neighborhood of Washington, D.C. She visited the school, wrote about it in her 'My Da'y column, lobbied for additional funding, and pressed for changes in staffing and curriculum. Her White House invitation to the students became an issue in Franklin's 1936 re-election campaign. When the black singer Marian Anderson was denied the use of Washington's Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1939, Roosevelt resigned from the group in protest and helped arrange another concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Roosevelt later presented Anderson to the King and Queen of the United Kingdom after Anderson performed at a White House dinner. Roosevelt also arranged the appointment of African-American educator Mary McLeod Bethune, with whom she had struck up a friendship, as Director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration. To avoid problems with the staff when Bethune would visit the White House, Roosevelt would meet her at the gate, embrace her, and walk in with her arm-in-arm.
She was involved by being 'the eyes and the ears' of the New Deal. She looked to the future and was committed to social reform. One of those programs helped working women receive better wages. The New Deal also placed women into less machine work and more white-collar work. Women did not have to work in the factories making war supplies because men were coming home so they could take over the long days and nights women had been working to contribute to the war efforts. Roosevelt brought unprecedented activism and ability to the role of the first lady.
In contrast to her usual support of African-American rights, the 'sundown town' Eleanor, in West Virginia, was named for her and was established in 1934 when she and Franklin visited the county and developed it as a test site for families. As a 'sundown town', like other Franklin Roosevelt towns around the nation, it was for whites only. It was established as a New Deal project.
Roosevelt lobbied behind the scenes for the 1934 Costigan-Wagner Bill to make lynching a federal crime, including arranging a meeting between Franklin and NAACP president Walter Francis White. Fearing he would lose the votes of Southern congressional delegations for his legislative agenda, however, Franklin refused to publicly support the bill, which proved unable to pass the Senate. In 1942, Roosevelt worked with activist Pauli Murray to persuade Franklin to appeal on behalf of sharecropper Odell Waller, convicted of killing a white farmer during a fight; though Franklin sent a letter to Virginia Governor Colgate Darden urging him to commute the sentence to life imprisonment, Waller was executed as scheduled.
Roosevelt's support of African-American rights made her an unpopular figure among whites in the South. Rumors spread of 'Eleanor Clubs' formed by servants to oppose their employers and 'Eleanor Tuesdays' on which African-American men would knock down white women on the street, though no evidence has ever been found of either practice. When race riots broke out in Detroit in June 1943, critics in both the North and South wrote that Roosevelt was to blame. At the same time, she grew so popular among African-Americans, previously a reliable Republican voting bloc, that they became a consistent base of support for the Democratic Party.
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Roosevelt spoke out against Japanese-American prejudice, warning against the 'great hysteria against minority groups.' She also privately opposed her husband's Executive Order 9066, which required Japanese-Americans in many areas of the U.S. to enter internment camps. She was widely criticized for her defense of Japanese-American citizens, including a call by the Los Angeles Times that she be 'forced to retire from public life' over her stand on the issue.
Norvelt On May 21, 1937, Roosevelt visited Westmoreland Homesteads to mark the arrival of the community's final homesteader. Accompanying her on the trip was the wife of Henry Morgenthau Jr., the president's Secretary of the Treasury. 'I am no believer in paternalism. I do not like charities,' she had said earlier. But cooperative communities such as Westmoreland Homesteads, she went on, offered an alternative to 'our rather settled ideas' that could 'provide equality of opportunity for all and prevent the recurrence of a similar disaster in the future.' Residents were so taken by her personal expression of interest in the program that they promptly agreed to rename the community in her honor. The Norvelt firefighter's hall is named Roosevelt Hall in her honor.
Use of media
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In contrast to her usual support of African-American rights, the 'sundown town' Eleanor, in West Virginia, was named for her and was established in 1934 when she and Franklin visited the county and developed it as a test site for families. As a 'sundown town', like other Franklin Roosevelt towns around the nation, it was for whites only. It was established as a New Deal project.
Roosevelt lobbied behind the scenes for the 1934 Costigan-Wagner Bill to make lynching a federal crime, including arranging a meeting between Franklin and NAACP president Walter Francis White. Fearing he would lose the votes of Southern congressional delegations for ust before Franklin assumed the presidency in February 1933, Roosevelt published an editorial in the Women's Daily News that conflicted so sharply with his intended public spending policies that he published a rejoinder in the following issue. On entering the White House, she signed a contract with the magazine Woman's Home Companion to provide a monthly column, in which she answered mail sent to her by readers; the feature was canceled in 1936 as another presidential election approached. She continued her articles in other venues, publishing more than sixty articles in national magazines during her tenure as first lady. Roosevelt also began a syndicated newspaper column, titled 'My Day, which appeared six days a week from 1936 to her death in 1962. In the column, she wrote about her daily activities but also her humanitarian concerns. Hickok and George T. Bye, Roosevelt's literary agent, encouraged her to write the column. From 1941 to her death in 1962, she also wrote an advice column, If You Ask Me, first published in Ladies Home Journal and then later in McCall's. A selection of her columns was compiled in the book If You Ask Me: Essential Advice from Eleanor Roosevelt in 2018.
Beasley has argued that Roosevelt's publications, which often dealt with women's issues and invited reader responses, represented a conscious attempt to use journalism 'to overcome social isolation' for women by making 'public communication a two-way channel'
World War II
On May 10, 1940, Germany invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, marking the end of the relatively conflict-free 'Phoney War' phase of World War II. As the U.S. began to move toward war footing, Roosevelt found herself again depressed, fearing that her role in fighting for domestic justice would become extraneous in a nation focused on foreign affairs. She briefly considered traveling to Europe to work with the Red Cross, but was dissuaded by presidential advisers who pointed out the consequences should the president's wife be captured as a prisoner of war. She soon found other wartime causes to work on, however, beginning with a popular movement to allow the immigration of European refugee children. She also lobbied her husband to allow greater immigration of groups persecuted by the Nazis, including Jews, but fears of fifth columnists caused Franklin to restrict immigration rather than expanding it. Roosevelt successfully secured political refugee status for eighty-three Jewish refugees from the S.S. Quanza in August 1940, but was refused on many other occasions. Her son James later wrote that 'her deepest regret at the end of her life' was that she had not forced Franklin to accept more refugees from Nazism during the war. She soon found herself in a power struggle with LaGuardia, who preferred to focus on narrower aspects of defense, while she saw solutions to broader social problems as equally important to the war effort. Though LaGuardia resigned from the OCD in December 1941, Roosevelt was forced to resign following anger in the House of Representatives over high salaries for several OCD appointments, including two of her close friends.
Also in 1941, the short film Women in Defense, written by Roosevelt, was released. It was produced by the Office of Emergency Management and briefly outlines the way in which women could help prepare the country for the possibility of war. There is also a segment on the types of costumes women would wear while engaged in war work. At the end of the film, the narrator explains women are vital to securing a healthy American home life and raising children 'which has always been the first line of defense'.
In October 1942, Roosevelt toured England, visiting with American troops and inspecting British forces. Her visits drew enormous crowds and received almost unanimously favorable press in both England and America. In August 1943, she visited American troops in the South Pacific on a morale-building tour, of which Admiral William Halsey Jr. later said, 'she alone accomplished more good than any other person, or any groups of civilians, who had passed through my area.' For her part, Roosevelt was left shaken and deeply depressed by seeing the war's carnage. A number of Congressional Republicans criticized her for using scarce wartime resources for her trip, prompting Franklin to suggest that she take a break from traveling.
Years after the White House
United Nations
In December 1945, President Harry S. Truman appointed Roosevelt as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly. In April 1946, she became the first chairperson of the preliminary United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Roosevelt remained chairperson when the commission was established on a permanent basis in January 1947. Along with René Cassin, John Peters Humphrey and others, she played an instrumental role in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In a speech on the night of September 28, 1948, Roosevelt spoke in favor of the Declaration, calling it 'the international Magna Carta of all men everywhere'. The Declaration was adopted by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948. The vote was unanimous, with eight abstentions: six Soviet Bloc countries as well as South Africa and Saudi Arabia. Roosevelt attributed the abstention of the Soviet bloc nations to Article 13, which provided the right of citizens to leave their countries.
Roosevelt also served as the first United States Representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and stayed on at that position until 1953, even after stepping down as chair of the commission in 1951. The UN posthumously awarded her one of its first Human Rights Prizes in 1968 in recognition of her work.
In the 1940s, Roosevelt was among the first people to support the creation of a UN agency specialized in the issues of food and nutrition.
At that time, Frederick L. McDougall, an Australian nutritionist, wrote the “Draft memorandum on a United Nations Programme for Freedom from Want of Food”. McDougall strongly believed that international cooperation was key to address the issue of hunger in the world.
Roosevelt learned about the memorandum and arranged a meeting between McDougall and her husband, the president of the United States of America. Following the discussion, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations was created on 16 October 1945.
In 1955, Eleanor Roosevelt and McDougall visited the new FAO headquarters in Rome and pushed the United Nations Programme into creating the Food from Hunger campaign, which ultimately saw the light in 1960 after a series of negotiations.
The Campaign was created to mobilize non-governmental organizations against hunger and malnutrition in the world and help find solutions.
Other postwar activities and honors
Catholics comprised a major element of the Democratic Party in New York City. Roosevelt supported reformers trying to overthrow the Irish machine Tammany Hall, and some Catholics called her anti-Catholic. In July 1949, Roosevelt had a bitter public disagreement with Cardinal Francis Spellman, the Archbishop of New York, over federal funding for parochial schools. Spellman said she was anti-Catholic, and supporters of both took sides in a battle that drew national attention and is 'still remembered for its vehemence and hostility.'
In 1949, she was made an honorary member of the historically black organization Alpha Kappa Alpha.
She was an early supporter of the Encampment for Citizenship, a non-profit organization that conducts residential summer programs with year-round follow-up for young people of widely diverse backgrounds and nations. She routinely hosted encampment workshops at her Hyde Park estate, and when the program was attacked as 'socialistic' by McCarthyite forces in the early 1950s, she vigorously defended it.
In 1954, Tammany Hall boss Carmine DeSapio led the effort to defeat Roosevelt's son, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., in the election for New York Attorney General. Roosevelt grew increasingly disgusted with DeSapio's political conduct through the rest of the 1950s. Eventually, she would join with her old friends Herbert Lehman and Thomas Finletter to form the New York Committee for Democratic Voters, a group dedicated to opposing DeSapio's reincarnated Tammany Hall. Their efforts were eventually successful, and DeSapio was forced to relinquish power in 1961.
Roosevelt was disappointed when President Truman backed New York Governor W. Averell Harriman—a close associate of DeSapio—for the 1952 Democratic presidential nomination. She supported Adlai Stevenson for president in 1952 and 1956, and urged his renomination in 1960. She resigned from her UN post in 1953, when Dwight D. Eisenhower became president. She addressed the Democratic National Convention in 1952 and 1956. Although she had reservations about John F. Kennedy for his failure to condemn McCarthyism, she supported him for president against Richard Nixon. Kennedy later reappointed her to the United Nations, where she served again from 1961 to 1962, and to the National Advisory Committee of the Peace Corps.
By the 1950s, Roosevelt's international role as spokesperson for women led her to stop publicly criticizing the Equal Rights Amendment, although she never supported it. In the early 1960s, she announced that, due to unionization, she believed the ERA was no longer a threat to women as it once may have been and told supporters that they could have the amendment if they wanted it. In 1961, President Kennedy's undersecretary of labor, Esther Peterson, proposed a new Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. Kennedy appointed Roosevelt to chair the commission, with Peterson as director. This was Roosevelt's last public position. She died just before the commission issued its report. It concluded that female equality was best achieved by recognition of gender differences and needs, and not by an Equal Rights Amendment.
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Throughout the 1950s, Roosevelt embarked on countless national and international speaking engagements. She continued to pen her newspaper column and made appearances on television and radio broadcasts. She averaged one hundred fifty lectures a year throughout the 1950s, many devoted to her activism on behalf of the United Nations.
Roosevelt received the first annual Franklin Delano Roosevelt Brotherhood Award in 1946. Other notable awards she received during her life postwar included the Award of Merit of the New York City Federation of Women's Clubs in 1948, the Four Freedoms Award in 1950, the Irving Geist Foundation Award in 1950, and the Prince Carl Medal in 1950. She was the most admired living woman, according to Gallup's most admired man and woman poll of Americans, every year between 1948 to 1961 except 1951.
Following the Bay of Pigs in 1961, President Kennedy asked Roosevelt, labor leader Walter Reuther, and Milton S. Eisenhower, brother of President Eisenhower, to negotiate the release of captured Americans with Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Death
In April 1960, Roosevelt was diagnosed with aplastic anemia soon after being struck by a car in New York City. In 1962, she was given steroids, which activated a dormant case of tuberculosis in her bone marrow, and she died of resulting cardiac failure at her Manhattan home at 55 East 74th Street on the Upper East Side on November 7, 1962, at the age of 78. Her daughter Anna took care of Roosevelt when she was terminally ill in 1962. President John F. Kennedy ordered all United States flags lowered to half-staff throughout the world on November 8 in tribute to Roosevelt.
Funeral services were held two days later in Hyde Park, where she was interred next to her husband in the Rose Garden at 'Springwood', the Roosevelt family home. Attendees included President Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and former presidents Truman and Eisenhower, who honored Roosevelt.
After her death, her family deeded the family vacation home on Campobello Island to the governments of the U.S. and Canada, and in 1964 they created the 2,800-acre Roosevelt Campobello International Park
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