It's Friday, Oct. 11, 2024, the day of the week when I reprise a quotation intended to be uplifting or enlightening. Since today is the birthday of Eleanor Roosevelt, patron saint of modern first ladies and a continuing source of inspiration to principled progressives, I'll be quoting ER today.
On October 11, 1884, Elliott Roosevelt and Anna Hall Roosevelt, a socially prominent New York couple, welcomed a little girl into the world. They named her Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, although she was called Eleanor. She did not have a happy childhood. Her mother, who had been a great beauty, was disappointed in Eleanor's appearance. Both her parents died before she was 10 years old. She was sent to live with a maternal grandmother, and then at 15 she was shipped off to Europe for "finishing."
What she really did at an English boarding school called Allenswood was learn: languages, literature, history, and other cultures. Eleanor returned at 18 and made her debut in New York society. It wasn't a happy night – she no longer knew the young people in her social circle – but two years later Eleanor became reacquainted with a distant cousin who shared her surname. He was an ambitious young 1904 Harvard graduate named Franklin, and their alliance would change U.S. history.
Americans, even those who ought to know better, invariably express surprise at the depth of a first lady's influence. It's a lesson we keep learning anew.
The first president's wife to be derisively referred to as "Mrs. President" wasn't Jill Biden or Hillary Clinton or Eleanor Roosevelt – or even Edith Wilson. It was Dolley Madison. The first time a first lady reviewed U.S. troops in the field was when Abigail Adams did so. The first to do open battle with newspaper editorialists was Mary Todd Lincoln; the first to issue a press release under her own name was Frances Cleveland; the first to openly support women's suffrage was Nellie Taft … and so on.
Yet, Eleanor Roosevelt did occupy a singular place in U.S. history. She did all those things in her 12 years as first lady and so much in the remaining 17 years of her life that this morning's essay can barely do her career justice.
She held her own press conferences, championed the rights of racial minorities and women, campaigned for Democrats, personally inspected conditions at the bottom of coal mines, penned her own newspaper column, bolstered the spirits of U.S. fighting men during World War II while bucking up their wives and mothers here at home.
It might be said that Eleanor was compensating for what was missing in her marriage. Or, it might be said that this peripatetic woman had more energy, passion, and commitment to social justice than could be easily accommodated by any institution – marriage, the role of first lady, U.S. diplomat.
When Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945, his widow told reporters gathered at Hyde Park, "The story is over." But it wasn't over for her. In 1945, Harry Truman appointed Eleanor as a representative to the U.N. General Assembly. Subsequently, both Truman and John F. Kennedy appointed her as a U.N. delegate. Representatives of other nations would rise in respect when she entered the hall. World leaders – including subsequent U.S. presidents – might have done themselves and their nations proud by following her advice.
Mrs. Roosevelt was an early supporter – even earlier than Truman – of Israel, breaking publicly with the State Department over the U.S. arms embargo to the Israelis. Yet, she also came out in the 1940s for partitioning the region into Palestinian Jewish and Palestinian Arab nations – foreshadowing the elusive "two-state" solution in the Middle East first embraced by Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Many years before Richard Nixon took his historic trip to Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai, Eleanor urged recognition of what was then called "Red China." Long before Nancy Reagan urged her husband to negotiate directly with the Soviet Union on nuclear arms reductions, Eleanor warned that the Cold War could never be won on a battlefield.
Mrs. Roosevelt often maintained that the Constitution protected an American's right to be a Communist, but she shared with Ronald Reagan a conviction borne of experience: that it was not possible to work constructively with Communist-dominated organizations.
She was ahead of her time in questioning the use of federal funds in parochial schools. For her troubles, she was denounced by Cardinal Francis Spellman, the archbishop of New York, as advocating "discrimination unworthy of an American mother." In the end, the Catholic prelate stood down; he paid a call on Mrs. Roosevelt at Hyde Park and issued a public statement seeking to clarify the "misunderstanding."
When she died in 1962, the New York Times pronounced Mrs. Roosevelt "as indigenous to America as palms to a Florida coastline."
"She brought her warmth, sincerity, zeal and patience to every corner of the land and to much of the world," the Times obituary continued. "Her seemingly ceaseless activity and energy provoked both a kind of dazzled admiration and numberless ‘Eleanor' jokes, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s. The derision fell away at the end; the admiration deepened."
In that spirit, I'll end this morning by quoting Eleanor Roosevelt herself. The words first appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in February 1940. A presidential election was beginning – FDR was running for an unprecedented third term – and war was again raging in Europe. That was the context of the quote that follows, although I believe it applies to contentious elections and calamities ranging from hurricanes to pandemics as well as war:
"All of us in this country give lip service to the ideals set forth in the Bill of Rights and emphasized by every amendment, and yet when war is stirring in the world, many of us are ready to curtail our civil liberties," Eleanor Roosevelt declared. "We do not stop to think that curtailing these liberties may in the end bring a greater danger than the danger we are trying to avert."
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on X @CarlCannon.
