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We should rejoice in the accomplishments of those before us,
Be proud of the heritage that we inherit,
But be always vigilant that the future is ours alone to make.
I dedicate this book to my children Matthew and Chandler, to my wife Michele, to my sister and brothers, cousins, and to those generations before who provided the legacy we pass along. And for those generations yet to come, may the expectations of your inheritance never become a burden of life.
Foreword by Allida M. Black, Ph.D.
EARLY IN SEPTERMBER, THE PHONE ON MY DESK rang. The semester had just started at George Washington University and all of us at The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers were eager to get to work, to introduce yet another generation to ER’s power, vision, and grace. Students (enthusiastic, sweet, and noisy) huddled around the worktable outside my office door carefully reading letters Eleanor Roosevelt sent to Harry Truman, while I rushed to get one more report in the mail. As soon as it was completed, I could go back to what I love; reading, researching, and teaching Eleanor Roosevelt. The insistent ringing was a rude intrusion into this work plan. Swamped, I brushed papers aside to answer it, trying to keep from sounding testy over the line. After all, I told myself, ER would answer it too.
A voice boomed, “Allida, this is David Roosevelt. I have just written a book on my grandmother and I want you to read it. I admit I’m nervous. I’m no scholar. But I want it to be good, to be worthy of her and honest to me.” Well, in about three nanoseconds, David talked me into reading the manuscript. His commitment to and love for ER was so strong I just couldn’t say no. But I was still worried. I am a political historian rather than a biographer. My Eleanor Roosevelt is a political warhorse, a woman of courage and grace and fierce tenacity. I wanted people to see her strength, sense her determination, and appreciate her contributions. In particular, I wanted people to see her as someone more than “FDR’s eyes and ears.” I worried that a book entitled Grandmère might make her seem weak. Three days later the manuscript arrived and my doubts faded.
David Roosevelt has shared his grandmother with us and given us a glimpse of what it was like to love her, lose her, and find her again. The woman he presents is as complex as her times and as loving as a grandparent can be. As a leader, ER juggled many often-conflicting responsibilities: journalist, first lady, diplomat, and humanitarian, social activist, party leader. As a woman, she tried to balance the expectations of family, friends, and colleagues against her own needs for love, security, and respect. ER led a full but difficult life, defined by conflict and disappointment while empowered by duty and vision.
Grandmère is an honest depiction of the greatest woman of the twentieth century. David’s Eleanor Roosevelt was not perfect. She struggled as a parent; battled mood swings; and often doubted her own abilities. A woman of great resilience, she refused to succumb to long periods of self-pity or inaction. Rebounding from her father’s alcoholism, her husband’s infidelity, and the cruel epithets her political opponents dispensed, ER displayed an uncanny ability to reinvent her life, to adjust in ways that allowed her to feel safe, honorable and productive. In the process, as David shows us, she built a family defined by a tremendous sense of kinship and love, and a breadth of friendships that gave her the reservoir of strength she needed to become Eleanor Roosevelt.
This is the story David Roosevelt tells. Grandmère is as much about ER’s relationship with the grandson she called “Little Texas” as it is about her relationship with FDR, her commitment to humanity and her work on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is the tale of a woman who, despite daily painful evidence of humanity’s shortcomings, refused to let it run amok. It is the story of a woman who gave her life so that we might live in a world more just, more tolerant and more understanding. And finally it is the story of her grandson, who had courage enough to say he loved her and to acknowledge that there was so much more to know about her, his Grandmère.
David Roosevelt has given all of us who read this book a gift, a glimpse of what it was like to be loved by Eleanor Roosevelt and to struggle with the legacy she left. But to me, he has given something else; he has shown me in loving prose that sweetness is also strength. For that, I will always be grateful.
Introduction by Mike Wallace
GRANDMÈRE? THE TITLE OF A BOOK ABOUT THE most unaffectedly American of my heroes? It struck a false chord until I found the reason for it in this engrossing account of the life and times of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Its author, her grandson David Roosevelt and I have been friends for 20 years, but I was surprised when he asked me to write this introduction. Not that his grandmother and I weren’t friends; we were professional acquaintances who saw each other from time to time as I covered her along with the horde of reporters who shadowed her wherever she went. The better acquainted I became the more my admiration for Eleanor Roosevelt grew.
I was given the privilege of a few special hours with her in January of 1957, when she agreed to sit down on ABC television for a “Mike Wallace Interview.” Back then it was not always easy to persuade the mighty to endure the abrasions my inquisitorial role-playing required, but she knew she could handle anything difficult I might throw her way.
And I made plain to her, ahead of time, how much I along with tens of millions of Americans, admired her gently phrased but nonetheless steely determination to oppose the politics of fear, to fight for civil liberties and civil rights, to bridge opposites by forging partnerships. She was within everyone’s grasp yet remained always slightly detached, in the battle surely, but appealing always to our better natures.
Nonetheless, her activism angered hotheaded American conservatives so intensely that the Ku Klux Klan placed a bounty on her head; she refused the protection of the Secret Service she was entitled to, insisting she be able to move as freely as possible, and the agents finally consented when she proved that she carried a pistol in her purse and knew how to shoot.
But, enough from me about her now. Instead, a few of her own still relevant words from our interview 45 years ago, in which she proved herself a gentle but effective political combatant, and a committed Democrat.
MIKE WALLACE: “If we are to believe a good deal of what we read, what seem to be the main preoccupations of the American people today? Bigger and better tail fins on automobiles? Westerns on television? Sex drenched movies? Fur coats? Push buttons? Alcoholism continues to increase, our mental institutions are full. Perhaps it’s too grim a picture, but nonetheless reasonably accurate. When we talked with architect Frank Lloyd Wright a few weeks back, he told us that because of all this, the United States is in grave danger of declining as a world power. Do you think that Mr. Wright is completely wrong Mrs. Roosevelt?”
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: “I think that estimate of the American people is completely wrong. I feel quite sure that what the American people lack is knowledge. I feel quite sure that the American people, if they have knowledge and leadership, can meet any crisis just as well as they have met it over and over again in the past. I can remember the cries of horror when my husband said we have to have 50,000 airplanes in a given period. But we had them; and the difference was that the people were told
what the reason was and why. And I have complete faith in the American people’s ability if they know and if they have leadership. No one can move without some leadership.”
MW: “During the Depression your husband said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Don’t you think, or let me put it this way, do you think that it’s that simple today? Do we have anything concrete to fear from the Russians?”
ER: “Yes. We have to fear the fact that they have a definite objective around which they have built their whole policy. We have met crises as we came to them, but I would find it hard to answer the question of what our future objective was for the world and how we were building our policy to achieve it and that’s what I think we need in order to meet the communist objective. I think that is something we have to fear. They have a distinct objective, and they have patience in planning, and they plan a long time ahead.”
MW: “Is it possible, Mrs. Roosevelt, that communism, state socialism anyway, is the wave of the future, and that capitalism is on its way out?”
ER: “Well that is what Khrushchev says. I don’t know much about capitalism, but I do know about democracy and freedom, and capitalism may change in many, many ways. I’m not really very much interested in capitalism. I’m enormously interested in freedom and retaining the right to have whatever economy we want, and to shape it as we want, and having sufficient democracy so that the people actually hold their government in their own hands.”
MW: “Mrs. Roosevelt, I’m sure that you understand the sense in which I put this question to you, but I think that you would agree that a good many people hated your husband. They even hated you.”
ER: “Oh, yes. A great many do still.”
MW: “Why? Why?”
ER: “Well, if you take stands, in any way, and people feel that you have success in a following, why, those who disagree with you are going to feel very strongly about it.”
MW: “There’s more than just disagreement involved. There are people who disagree with President Eisenhower, and yet they do not hate him. I lived in the Middle West for a good many years while your husband was President and there was a real core of more than just disagreement.”
ER: “There was a real core of hatred. The people would call him ‘that man,’ I remember one man who rejoiced, actually, when he died. But I suppose that that is just a feeling that certain people had that he was destroying the thing that they held dear and touched them. And naturally you react to that with hatred. And I suppose that’s what brought it about. They still fight him. I mean I sometimes think that campaigns are still largely fought on my husband rather than on the actual person who is running. And as far as I was concerned, I was touching something which to some people seems a sacred thing they had to keep hold of. A major part of my criticism has been on the Negro question, of course, and I’ve had many others, but that is the major part and I think that that is quite natural because to some people, that seems to be destroying something that to them is very dear.”
MW: “In your column in January of 1956, you wrote about Republican leaders, and about Richard Nixon you said: ‘Richard Nixon would be the least attractive. I know that given great responsibility, men sometimes change’—which in a sense is what you are just saying—you say that, ‘I know that given great responsibility, men sometimes change. But Mr. Nixon’s presidency would worry me,’ you said. Why do you reserve this special criticism for Mr. Nixon?”
ER: “I think that in great crisis, you need to have deep rooted convictions, and I have a feeling from the kind of campaigns that I have watched Mr. Nixon in, in the past, that his convictions are not very strong.”
MW: “But you do admit that over the past year in particular Mr. Nixon seems to have changed, possibly to have grown with the times?”
ER: “I have no idea whether he has grown. I would say that he is a very intelligent person and that he had a very clear idea of what he wanted and had conducted himself wisely to achieve the ends he desired.”
MW: “Well, by the same token, would you have said Harry Truman had shown great conviction prior to his being thrown into the presidency?”
ER: “No. I would not have. Again, I did not know him very well before. I would say of Mr. Truman that he rose to the responsibilities thrust upon him in a manner which was very remarkable, really. And that his big decisions very likely are going to mean he will go down in history as one of our very good presidents.”
MW: “With really insufficient background to expect he would act that way.”
ER: “Yes, quite certainly.”
MW: “Mrs. Roosevelt, perhaps your most severe critic is Westbrook Pegler. He once wrote this about you. He said, ‘This woman is a political force of enormous ambitions. I believe she is a menace, unscrupulous as to truth, vain and cynical, all with a pretense of exaggerated kindness and human feeling which deceives millions of gullible persons.’ ”
ER: “Well, it seems to me a little exaggerated, let us say. No one could be quite as bad as all that. And as far as political ambition goes, well I think that rather answered itself because I have never run for office and I’ve never asked for an office of any kind, so I can’t have much political ambition. But I can see that Mr. Pegler probably believes all these things, and I suppose one does things unconsciously that make you seem like that, and perhaps I do seem like that to him. I think it must be terrible to hate as many things as Mr. Pegler hates, and I would be unhappy I think, and therefore I think that he is unhappy, and I’m sorry for him because, after all we all grow older, and we all have to live with ourselves, and I think that must sometimes be difficult for Mr. Pegler.”
“A soft answer turneth away wrath,” they say. Her deft answer humbled Mr. Pegler. Now, readers, on to Grandmère!
Preface
JUST A FEW SHORT YEARS AGO I THOUGHT I KNEW and understood a good deal about my family, particularly about my grandmother’s life. I was raised in a fairly sophisticated and relatively political yet warm and definitely idiosyncratic family, whose three luminaries were Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Of course, growing up I took for granted most everything that surrounded my childhood, with the exception of my grandmother. She, perhaps more than any other person, influenced me as a teacher, as a molder of much of my life philosophies, and certainly as a role model, long ago planting seeds of wisdom that formed a legacy for me and I feel certain also for my siblings and cousins, our children and grandchildren.
For many years I have had the pleasure of speaking with high school and middle school classes about my grandparents, and perhaps the one thing that has struck me is how impersonal and scant most history classes are about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Oh, it’s certainly true that the historical facts of his presidency will be a part of national and world history curriculum throughout time and that the details of her extensive accomplishments have been well chronicled. But the more intimate memories of their incredible partnership are quickly fading. As I talk with young people, even in elementary grades, I find that there is real curiosity about my grandmother in particular when their lives are put in a human context. Something about Eleanor makes her story “real,” whereas his story seems to them almost beyond reality. But of greater immediate concern to me was how I might provide my children, who never had the opportunity of knowing her, and my grandchildren with a more personal and informal chronicle of her life. No one knew Eleanor in quite the way my generation did. We called her Grandmère, from the French she had spoken since she was a child. Grandmère stood at the center of my childhood, and many of my fondest memories return to that idyllic time, a time that was private and intimate and in which she was simply my grandmother.
My original intention when beginning this project was to present Grandmère’s life story mostly from recollections and anecdotes provided by her family members and close friends. I knew the project would be challenging since, as I realized, my generation of Roosevelts is really quite private, mostly shying away from sharing our intimate times
with Grandmère with anyone beyond our close family circle. I also discovered that many of her friends and colleagues, people whose memories I had hoped to tap, were no longer with us, a truth that served to confirm my own fears that I too was rapidly forgetting details of years gone by. This alone made my quest all the more urgent. I knew, however, that a treasure trove of memorabilia—all sorts of personal letters, oral histories, and photographs—resided in the archives at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park. Over the years friends, the government, and family members had donated these important documents, which now form a vast collection that includes many of my grandmother’s personal papers. These papers and my own memories of Grandmère have provided much of the basis for this book.
My work began in earnest in February 2000, when I made the first research visit to the library, accompanied by my wife, Michele, and my colleagues Manuela and Philip Dunn of Book Laboratory. After that visit I began reviewing and copying volumes—literally thousands of pages of letters and oral histories—and undertook to see what unique photographs might be available. But as much time as I have spent browsing through all of that fascinating material, there was no way I could have been prepared for the seemingly insurmountable task of sorting through it for just the right elements. I was caught between a panicked feeling of frustration and excitement at finding so much. It was then that I knew this project was much larger than I had initially imagined and would require far more effort to accomplish.
As I began my review of the some three thousand pages of oral histories, I realized that I needed the help of someone capable of seeing the more personal nuances—an extraordinarily difficult task if you’re not familiar with the interviewees and their relationships to Grandmère—and so called upon my son, Matthew. In addition to the oral histories, literally thousands of photographs had to be culled, reviewed, and initial selections made on the basis of the book’s content, all before the first draft was completed. For this I enlisted the photo-editing skills of the talented Melissa Shaw, who made a preliminary selection of more than six hundred photographs (which would eventually be reduced to the two hundred or so included in this book), many of which have seldom if ever been published before.
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