Roosevelt Deeds Speak Louder Than Her Ghost
It took me a few days to make contact but I, too, have been talking to Eleanor Roosevelt. I didn’t contact her through my imagination, I found her words on the pages of books.
These are the “liberal” causes she worked for 60 years ago. Mrs. Roosevelt suggested a 48-hour week for factory girls who were required to work 50- to 54-hour weeks. The manufacturers suggested she disregard the “sob stuff.” When she fought to stop child labor in factories, she was accused of being “dangerously idealistic.” She also championed education and asked for more money for teachers’ salaries. She drove her roadster, alone, in 1932, through the disease- and crimeridden slums of Washington, D.C., to focus attention on the terrible conditions. Mrs. Roosevelt fought for better housing and against malnutrition throughout the country. She argued with the AMA for the inclusion of health insurance in the Social Security system and for the maintenance of medical standards.
In 1941 she insisted on fair hiring in the defense industries and for the integration of the armed services. She worked for the protection of small businesses, refugees, labor and tolerance for Japanese-Americans. She encouraged and supported the employment of women journalists. She resigned from the DAR in 1939 when they refused to allow Marian Anderson to sing at Constitution Hall, and she invited her to sing at the White House.
Eleanor Roosevelt worried most about the jobless and alienated generation of young people between 15 and 24 in the early 1930s. “I have moments of 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 they are necessary.”
She argued with the president over many pieces of social legislation but none more ardently than the federal anti-lynching bill. His answer to her arguments in 1934, “Southerners, by reason of seniority, rule in Congress, are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take the risk.”
These are some of the accusations and insults she endured: When she edited a magazine on babies, there was widespread ridicule and disapproval. There were always rumors about her relationships with African Americans, male and female. The behavior of her children was the subject of cruel gossip and her parenting was condemned. Columnists called her “Madam President,” “Empress Eleanor,” “The Meddler,” “Lady Bountiful” and “The Gab”; political advisers said in 1934, “Let’s get the pants off Eleanor and onto Franklin.”
Her appearance was criticized, her ability to think was questioned, she was too earnest, too moral, too much of an agitator. She was frequently asked, “Why can’t you stay home with your husband, tend to your knitting and set an example for women?” One comment in 1940 summed up the feeling: “I think you should stay home and personally see that the White House is clean. I soiled my white gloves yesterday morning on the stair railing. It is disgraceful.” A campaign slogan that year was, “We don’t want Eleanor either.”
She received the most abuse because she was spontaneous, sensible and direct and the result was a shattering of precedents, especially because of her beliefs in the rights of women and minorities. She said, many times, “I want to liberate human potential.” Mrs. Roosevelt believed deeply in “The Lord,” but as she put it in 1940, “I have a religion but it does not depend especially upon any creed or church.”
About her marriage to a man who became president she said, in 1934, “I never wanted it, even though some people have said that my ambition for myself drove him on. They’ve even said that I had some such idea in the back of my mind when I married him (she was 19). I never wanted to be a president’s wife, and I don’t want to be one now.”
Both Roosevelts recognized that the nation’s crisis, at the time of his first election in 1932, was primarily one of the spirit. Fear, they believed, was the worse thing that resulted from the Depression. Had Mrs. Clinton been able to make direct contact with Eleanor, this is the advice she might have been given after receiving a scolding for all her problems. It was advice Eleanor Roosevelt offered to women in 1960. “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.”’
Talking to Eleanor has reminded me why she’s one of my heroes and one of Hillary Clinton’s. I wish we could get the current set of politicos to sit in a room with her, a seance would be fine, and hear her ask them, in her earnest way, to set a better model for the children.
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jennifer James The Spokesman-Review