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ELEANOR ROOSEVELT - PART ONE
NARRATOR
Few people were neutral about Eleanor Roosevelt.
Nina Gibson
People were absolutely drawn to Eleanor Roosevelt. Her presence was felt the minute she came into the room. She sparkled.
William Rusher
She had an up-country aristocratic attitude that turned a lot of people off. She had buck teeth; her voice kind of quavered so that it was easy to imitate and to mock.
PICTURE : Eleanor shaking hands, with FDR, Eleanor at 1956 Convention
NARRATOR
For more than thirty years Eleanor Roosevelt was the most powerful woman in America. Niece of one president, and wife of another, Eleanor was shaped and driven by politics.
Eleanor Roosevelt synch
I'm very glad to tell you about the conditions.
Geoff Ward
One of the things people don’t understand about Eleanor Roosevelt, because she seemed so ladylike, and she has that aristocratic voice and that manner: she was tough as nails. In fact she was one of the best politicians of the twentieth century.
Eleanor Roosevelt v/o
We must have equal citizenship for everybody in our country.
NARRATOR
She was a voice for those who often had none. But her idealism cost those closest to her dearly.
Larry Fuchs
She was a loving person; she may not have been loving enough for her husband. And that was a tragedy. She was tender to her friends; she may not have been tender enough to her sons and her daughter.
Blanche Cook
There is a tremendous amount of conflict and hurt in her life and a great sense of loss and struggle. She was happiest in the public arena, she was least happy in her most intimate private life.
NARRATOR
Few people knew the real nature of her marriage to Franklin Roosevelt, or of the deep friendships she shared with others. Determined to live life on her own terms, Eleanor Roosevelt travelled far from her beginnings, to become the most admired - and the most controversial woman in America.
TITLE: Eleanor Roosevelt - Part One
NARRATOR
All her life Eleanor Roosevelt remembered an afternoon from her childhood. She was waiting for her father, the person she loved most in the world. When he arrived she rushed into the warmth of his arms. Eleanor delighted in her father's laughter and tenderness, and his stories of exotic travel, of hunting in India, of the beauty of the Taj Mahal. One day, he promised, he would take her there and they would see it together. Her father never kept his promise, but Eleanor treasured the memory of it for the rest of her life.
PICTURE : Still Eleanor Roosevelt as baby with her mother
NARRATOR
Eleanor Roosevelt was born on October 11, 1884 into one of the oldest and wealthiest families in New York. She was a sensitive, timid child, and from her earliest years Eleanor knew she was a disappointment to her mother, Anna Hall Roosevelt.
Trude Lash - friend of Eleanor Roosevelt
Anna would look at Eleanor sort of coolly and worry that she would never be a beauty, because she looked so homely. And she would even discuss it in front of Eleanor with her friends. Eleanor remembered that, that she had the feeling from the very beginning: "I’m ugly."
NARRATOR
Beauty was important in the world in which Eleanor was raised. In New York high society, girls were brought up to find husbands, have a family and preside over a household. Their chief asset was their looks. If they were beautiful, their lives would be made for them.
Eleanor Roosevelt - niece of Eleanor Roosevelt
Anna couldn’t imagine having a child that wasn’t as vivacious and beautiful as herself. She really couldn’t understand this shy, awkward little person whom she called 'Granny' to her face.
Geoffrey Ward - historian
Eleanor desperately tried to please her mother. And she did find one way to do it, 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.
NARRATOR
To Eleanor it seemed that Anna was happier with her two younger brothers - Elliott Jr and Gracie Hall.
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Everything was different with her father, Elliott, who doted on his daughter. Charming and popular, Elliott was the younger brother of Theodore Roosevelt. Like many men of his class, he had no real profession. He dabbled in real estate, played tennis, and rode to hounds.
Nina Gibson - Granddaughter
Her father made her feel special. He called her "his little Nell." And he made her feel loved. He didn’t make her feel unattractive or shy. She felt very secure in his presence.
NARRATOR
But Elliott was rarely at home. He was an alcoholic. Irresponsible, often erratic, he would disappear on drunken binges for days at a time. Anna tried to shelter Eleanor from his wild behavior. But by August 1892, the family was breaking apart.
New York Herald article: August 18, 1892
Elliott Roosevelt demented by excess... Wrecked by liquor and Folly he is now confined in an Asylum for the insane...
NARRATOR
The Roosevelts feared that Elliott was squandering his inheritance and ruining their reputation. They had him confined to a mental institution.
NARRATOR
Just four months later, when Eleanor was barely 8 years old, her mother died - suddenly - of diphtheria. Eleanor felt strangely unmoved. "One fact wiped out everything else" she later wrote. "My father was back, and I would see him soon."
Franklin D. Roosevelt 3rd (grandson of Eleanor Roosevelt )
Elliott reappeared briefly and swept Eleanor up in his arms, told her again how wonderful she was, and that everything was going to be all right, and they would go off, and they would take care of her little brothers, and they would have a family. And so that meant the world to her. And that really gave her the hook on which she could hang her life.
NARRATOR
Elliott was considered unfit to care for his children. Eleanor and her brothers were sent to live with Anna's mother. Grandmother Hall was a widow in her early fifties. She lived in New York city, and spent summers at Tivoli, in upstate New York.
Trude Lash
Her grandmother was very religious and took her responsibility towards the children very, very seriously. But she was stern; she was rigid.
Geoff Ward
Her grandmother spent most of her time in her room. There were these two drunken and really dangerous uncles, one of whom used to shoot at the neighbors and even at the children with a shotgun from the upstairs window.
Blanche Cook - Historian
Grandmother Hall really imagines that she can raise Eleanor and her two brothers differently if she is very strict and everything is regimented. But despite the order and the discipline, her grandmother did love her and gave her a sense of family love.
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Eleanor fought the discipline in small ways. She put hot water into her icy wash basin, stole candies from the kitchen, and read in secret on Sundays.
NARRATOR
She lived for her father's rare visits. Sometimes he would promise to come, but not appear. One day Elliott took her out and stopped at his club. Saying he would not be long, he left her outside waiting. And Eleanor waited, and waited, for hours on the steps.
Curtis Roosevelt - Grandson of Eleanor Roosevelt
Finally the doorman said, "Young lady, who are you waiting for?" And she said, "I’m waiting for my father, Mr. Roosevelt." And he raised his eyebrows probably, and he said, "Well, young lady, I think we’d best get you a taxi and send you home, because your father left quite a while ago." What he didn’t say is that Elliott Roosevelt had been put in a taxi, dead drunk, some time before.
Eleanor Roosevelt niece
She wrote to her father frequently. And she just wanted desperately to go and live with him, and told him in her letters, 'please, could she come and take care of him and keep house for him?' She was nine years old.
NARRATOR
Eleanor spent much of the summer of 1894 at her grandmother's home in Tivoli.
"August 13, 1894. Darling Little Nell, What must you think of your father who has not written for so long... I have after all been very busy, quite ill, at intervals not able to move from my bed for days... How is your pony and the dogs at Tivoli too? ....With tender affection, Ever devotedly, your father "
NARRATOR
Just hours after writing, this Elliott died. When she was told of his death, Eleanor's only words were, "I did want to see father once more."
NARRATOR
After her father's death Eleanor found comfort in romantic novels and in a dream world where her father was still alive. As she wandered the woods around Tivoli, she invented stories of a life together they never had, where he was the hero and she the heroine. The memory of her father's love - and of its loss - would haunt Eleanor for the rest of her life.
NARRATOR
In 1899 Eleanor turned 15.
Blanche Cook
Things really do get worse at Tivoli. Her uncles are more and more out of control. At some point, locks appear on her door, presumably to keep her uncle Vallie, who is an out-of-control alcoholic, out of her room.
Geoffery Ward
Her grandmother thought it would be dangerous to have her in a house she couldn’t control, where her own grown children were acting so bizarrely. She thought it was best to get Eleanor out of there.
NARRATOR
Grandmother Hall decided to send Eleanor to England, to a boarding school just outside of London called Allenswood. Allenswood was run by a charismatic Frenchwoman in her late sixties, Marie Souvestre. Souvestre was fiercely committed to social and political justice. Under her influence, girls received a progressive education and were taught to be independent and politically aware.
Nina Gibson
Suddenly the important things were not the social things. She was with people who valued her friendship, her loyalty, her intellect.
Trude Lash
Everybody liked her because there was not a mean streak about her. She was loyal. She always did what she said she would do.
NARRATOR
For the first time in her life, Eleanor belonged. Girls came to her for comfort when they were homesick or needed advice. On weekends they bought bunches of flowers for girls they had crushes on and Eleanor's room was filled with posies and gifts. Most important of all, she became the favorite of Mlle. Souvestre.
Trude Lash
Mlle. Souvestre saw immediately that here was a very special child, young woman; that she was in some ways mature beyond her years, but wasn’t very knowledgeable about a great many things, but there was this thirst for learning.
Nina Gibson
My grandmother was absolutely taken by Mlle. Souvestre, because she saw this elegant, brilliant woman who was interested in her and what she had to say. And she blossomed at Allenswood. She became the beginnings of the woman that she would become later in life.
NARRATOR
During school vacations Souvestre took Eleanor travelling on the continent. In Paris, she helped order her first fashionable clothes. Souvestre encouraged her to visit museums by herself and to adjust their itinerary to suit their whims. "Never again," Eleanor wrote, "would I be the rigid little person I had been."
NARRATOR
In 1902, after three years at Allenswood, Eleanor returned to New York. Theodore Roosevelt was now the president of the United States. Boisterous and energetic, "Uncle Ted" always called Eleanor his favorite niece. She recalled her childhood visits with him as terrifying.
NARRATOR
"He was horrified that I didn’t know how to swim." she said. "So he thought he’d teach me as he taught all his own children, and he threw me in. And I sank rapidly to the bottom. Then he fished me out and lectured me on being frightened."
PICTURE : Still Eleanor Roosevelt.
NARRATOR
Uncle Ted drove home the Roosevelt rule: never show fear. And like all Roosevelt children, Eleanor was taught a strong sense of social responsiblity.
Eleanor Roosevelt niece
They accepted the servants and the big house and their position in society. But part of that also was that you owed something back to people less fortunate than yourself.
NARRATOR
Eleanor took this sense of duty seriously. Twice a week she rode the public trolley downtown to the grimy, teeming slums of the Lower East Side. There, at the University Settlement House, she did volunteer work with young immigrants, helping them adapt to life in America. She taught dance and calisthenics. She thought of her work as the "highlight" of her week.
Trude Lash
It was not unusual that society people came from time to time and looked at what was going on. It was unusual that somebody came on a regular basis and really worked there and considered this a job for which she had taken responsibility. That was unusual.
NARRATOR
She joined the New York Consumers' League, an organization which exposed harsh working conditions for women and children. She saw things she would never forget -- sweat shops where women labored long hours for subsistence wages; tenement homes where children made artificial flowers for hours on end, until they dropped with exhaustion.
NARRATOR
Now 18, Eleanor was expected to make her formal debut into society and find a husband. Because she was the president's niece, her "coming out" in 1902 was closely watched.
Trude Lash
She hated coming out. She never knew how to do gossip. She just didn’t know how to do that. She liked to talk about things; she liked to talk about people; she liked to talk about what she had read. But just small talk didn’t interest her at all, ever.
NARRATOR
Eleanor remembered how awkward she felt.
Lower Third: Voice of Eleanor Roosevelt
Everything you did was so that you would grace society. If you were ugly you tried to make up for it by being well educated and having very good manners.
Eleanor Roosevelt niece
My aunt didn't think much of herself but she was slim and she was tall, and she had a lot of blonde hair, done very nicely. And she loved to dance. She danced very well. And she probably cut really quite a stunning figure on the ballroom.
NARRATOR
Several young men soon started to court her. One was her distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a 20-year-old student at Harvard. They had known each other as small children and had met again at a party when she was 14. "He was young and gay and goodlooking," she recalled, "and I was shy and awkward and thrilled when he asked me to dance."
NARRATOR
Unlike Eleanor, Franklin had a stable, loving childhood growing up on his parents' estate in Hyde Park, New York. He had little contact with other children until he was fourteen when he was sent to boarding school. There and at Harvard he had difficulty fitting in, but he learned to hide his feelings behind a charming exterior.
Edna Gurewitsch - friend of Eleanor Roosevelt
He was very attractive, very outgoing - a dashing personality, someone who laughed and who was easy with people. And she was flattered by the attention and she fell in love with him. It wasn't hard to do.
NARRATOR
Several times, Franklin met Eleanor after her classes at the settlement house, and she introduced him to a world he had never seen. Once they helped a girl who was sick back to her dark, crowded tenement home. Franklin was shocked by what he saw and afterwards kept repeating that he, "could not believe human beings lived that way."
Nina Gibson
He was fascinated that a young woman of his social class was the one who was showing him things that moved him. She wasn’t the light, funny, socialite that people expected he would be interested in. But I think there was a piece of FDR, a very large piece, that was far more interested in the realities of life.
NARRATOR
Franklin proposed in November 1903, and Eleanor immediately accepted. He declared himself the happiest man on earth. To Franklin: "Oh darling, I miss you so, and I long for the happy hours which we have together. I am so happy, so very happy in your love, dearest, and all the world has changed for me. If only I can bring to you all that you have brought to me, all my dearest wishes will be fulfilled. Goodbye, dearest boy. Your devoted little Nell."
NARRATOR
On March 17th, 1905, Eleanor and Franklin were married. President Theodore Roosevelt gave the bride away. "When the wedding was over," Eleanor recalled, "we suddenly discovered that the minute Uncle Ted left us everybody else left us too. It was really much more important that Uncle Ted was there than that we were being married."
NARRATOR
Eleanor and Franklin's early married life was dominated by another powerful Roosevelt - Franklin's mother, Sara.
Franklin D Roosevelt 3
Franklin was Sara’s only child and she was extremely possessive and did not want him to go off and marry somebody else and have some other life.
NARRATOR
Eleanor did everything she could to win Sara's affection. On their honeymoon, she wrote her mother-in-law almost daily. "Thank you so much, dear, for everything you did for us. You are always just the sweetest, dearest Mama to your children, and I shall look forward to our next long evening together, when I shall want to be kissed all the time!"
Eleanor Roosevelt niece
She hoped that her mother-in-law would replace her mother. She hoped her mother-in-law would love her with the unconditional love that she had wanted from her own mother but never received.
NARRATOR
But their relationship was often awkward. Sara tried to run the young couple's life as she had Franklin's, and she had the power to do it: she controlled her son's finances.
Franklin D Roosevelt 3
She bought them a townhouse and also bought the adjoining townhouse for herself, and had doors built on each floor connecting the two houses. So there was no privacy from the mother-in-law. And the mother-in-law hired the servants and furnished the house. She was a doer. She wanted Franklin to be part of her world and for the most part, she got her way.
NARRATOR
Sara insisted Eleanor give up her social work and stay at home. Eleanor reluctantly acquiesced. In 1906, the Roosevelts' first child, Anna, was born. James was born the next year. Eleanor was uneasy in her new role.
Trude Lash
She loved her children, and she wanted to do well, but she was not knowledgeable. And so she imposed rules on them which even then were not very usual. For instance, that she tied the thumbs down so that they couldn’t suck their thumbs; or she’d put a cradle out in front of a window like a window box, so that the child would get air, which is a scary idea.
NARRATOR
Her feelings of insecurity about motherhood only grew with the birth in 1909 of their third child, Franklin Jr. From the beginning he seemed delicate, to have one illness after another. When he was just seven months old, he died.
Eleanor Seagraves
It was a devastating thing. I mean because, she tended to blame herself for everything that went wrong in the household. So she thought there must have been something she could have done. She could have contacted this doctor or that doctor. She was really very depressed.
NARRATOR
Elliott was born a year later.
NARRATOR
Sara hired and fired the nannies. She spoiled the children with treats and comforted them when they were hurt. She even told them to think of her as their real mother; "your mother only bore you," she said.
Eleanor Roosevelt niece
They learned early that if their mother wouldn’t give them something, all they had to do was to go see Granny. And they could charm Granny out of anything they wanted. Granny wanted the children to love her, as though they were her children. And my aunt wanted them to grow into good people, and felt she had to be the disciplinarian, and that it wasn’t quite fair.
Edna Gurewitsch
That must have been very frustrating for a young married woman to express her difficulties with a mother-in-law to a man who would not confront his mother.
Eleanor Roosevelt v/o lower third
If something was unpleasant and he didn't want to know about it, he just ignored it. He always thought that if you ignored a thing long enough, it could settle itself.
Geoff Ward
Eleanor Roosevelt is often blamed for being a bad mother. Her husband was not a very good father, and expected her and his mother to do all the parenting, and he was supposed to come home and have fun with the kids. And he did. They adored him. But when that was over, he wasn’t really very interested in helping them much. And I think the children suffered from the problems both their parents had.
NARRATOR
FDR had trained as a lawyer, but his ambition was to be president. He began his political career serving a term in the New York State Senate. Then in 1913, he was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
NARRATOR
Eleanor moved the family to Washington, D.C.. She would have two more children, a second Franklin Jr in 1914, and John, two years later.
Franklin D Roosevelt 3
This was a young couple on the move. FDR’s career was really taking off. There were a lot of things expected of the wife of such an up-and-coming young government official that she had to do just out of duty.
NARRATOR
She hired a social secretary -- Lucy Mercer -- to help her. Charming, intelligent, warm and reliable, Lucy fit easily into the bustling Roosevelt household. Washington etiquette required Eleanor to make dozens of social visits, leaving calling cards at the homes of other officials' wives.
Eleanor Seagraves
That was the proper thing to do. If they had dropped them at your house, you had to return the compliment. You had to have an open house day when people came, dropped in for tea and that sort of thing. She really didn't appreciate it, she didn’t like it. She knew she had to do it, and she did it probably with a rather stiff grace.
NARRATOR
In the evenings there cocktails, dinners and dances. Franklin always enjoyed himself; Eleanor often did not.
Eleanor Roosevelt niece
My aunt Eleanor had a distinct aversion to alcohol because it had affected so many people in her family. Her father had died of alcoholism. Her brother Hall, my father, would die of alcoholism.
Geoff Ward
The whole idea of people being out of control terrified her and made her terribly uneasy. And so she found being at parties at which her husband and other people got pleasantly tipsy, it wasn’t pleasant to her.
Nina Gibson
He loved having fun. He enjoyed his cocktail hour. He enjoyed poker games. He loved good gossip.
Edna Gurewitsch
He liked to flirt with women. He was just amusing himself and others. And Mrs. Roosevelt got jealous. He, after all, was a man who never really confided, never confided in his mother with whom he was so close. And she craved intimacy. And that’s the one thing that her husband couldn’t give her.
NARRATOR
In the summer of 1917 Eleanor took the children north - to Campobello, the Roosevelts' sprawling summer home off the coast of Maine. Franklin stayed behind working in Washington. So did Lucy Mercer.
Trude Lash
Mrs. Roosevelt went away for the summer. There was Lucy in the house, and there was lonely Franklin, and I think this developed the way things do develop, with nobody planning them. They just happen.
NARRATOR
The next summer Franklin visited American troops in Europe.
Franklin D. Roosevelt 3rd
When he got home Eleanor was left with the job of unpacking his suitcase. But in the course of putting his clothes away and so on, she came across a little packet of letters. And without really wanting to be nosy, she couldn’t help but see that here was a whole bunch of letters between Franklin and Lucy, which upon closer examination revealed that there was something seriously going on here.
Eleanor Roosevelt niece
The way that my Aunt Eleanor felt about Franklin was the way she had felt about her father. It was the fantastic love that she felt would be total. When she discovered that Franklin had an affair, she was so stunned and didn’t know where to put this hurt.
Trude Lash
I think the greatest hurt was that Franklin had broken his word. It was like her father, who had made promises and not kept them.
Franklin D. Roosevelt 3rd
She confronted him and said, "You can have a divorce." But at the same time, Sara was informed, and she said, "No way. We don’t do divorce in this family. And Franklin you'd better straighten up and fly right."
NARRATOR
Franklin realized a divorced man could never be elected president. After he promised never to see Lucy again, Eleanor agreed to go on with the marriage. But they never lived together as husband and wife again. And never, in all her writings, all her memoirs, articles and interviews, did Eleanor ever mention Franklin's betrayal.
NARRATOR
A year later, Grandmother Hall died. Eleanor went to Tivoli for the funeral. Still devastated by Franklin's affair, she could not eat, she was lonely and exhausted.
Blanche Cook
Out of her grief she begins to compare her life to her grandmother’s life. Her grandmother could have been a painter. Her grandmother could have done so much more than she did. And it’s very clear to her that being a devoted wife and a devoted mother is not enough. And Eleanor Roosevelt decides she is going to do everything possible with her life. She’s going to live a full life.
NARRATOR
Eleanor and Franklin moved back to New York in 1920. Eleanor, now 36 years old, embarked on a new life. She took a secretarial course; she joined the League of Women Voters, and the Women's City Club.
Eleanor Seagraves
She went into this work doubting that she could be of much help and found that she had a quick mind. And people began to appreciate her. And when that happened, she began to appreciate herself a little, and it was kind of a snowballing thing.
Blanche Cook
She is a terrific fundraiser and organizer and very quickly she meets other women in New York: They remind her of the circle that she left at Allenswood: independent women. And it’s a world that she relishes and enjoys.
NARRATOR
But almost immediately, the Roosevelts were engulfed in another family crisis. In the summer of 1921 they vacationed at Campobello.
Eleanor Roosevelt v/o
It was getting near to supper time. Franklin started to go upstairs and said his back ached, and he didn't feel very well. And by the next morning, he could hardly stand, and by the next day, he could not stand at all.
Nina Gibson
My grandmother was terrified for him. She wasn’t really sure what it was. Would he live? Would he die? Would he ever walk again?
Franklin D. Roosevelt 3rd
She went into action and she just did everything she could to keep him alive, to bring his fever down, somehow try to make him comfortable, to change his bed clothes.
Nina Gibson
At the same time, she has five children who are saying, "What’s wrong? What’s wrong?" They knew something terrible was happening.
NARRATOR
Franklin's illness was diagnosed as polio. His legs were left withered and useless. He had to be carried off the island to return to New York .
Geoff Ward
There was a real battle in the Roosevelt family over Franklin’s future. His mother thought that he should come home to Hyde Park and become a country gentleman and be a happy invalid. He didn’t want to do that. He loved Hyde Park. But he didn’t want to be there forever. Eleanor Roosevelt backed him. She felt that if he wanted to try to get back into politics, he should be allowed to try.
Edna Gurewitsch
Eleanor didn’t want to go back to the country with an invalid after she had come that far to free herself. Bringing him back into functioning was part of bringing herself back into an independent, functioning person.
NARRATOR
Sara and Eleanor were each certain they were right and acting in Franklin's best interests. In her distress, Eleanor became cold and silent. In the spring of 1922 the atmosphere in the Roosevelt house was filled with tension.
NARRATOR
One day as Eleanor was reading to her younger sons, she broke down. The family was stunned. She fled to a quiet room. For the first time in her life, she could not stop crying.
Blanche Cook
She just breaks down. It’s a warning to her. She’s really exhausted and she’s going to have to get out there and heal herself as well.
NARRATOR
As the crisis of FDR's illness subsided, Eleanor and Franklin moved more and more in separate worlds. He spent most of his time in the south - first in Florida, and, later in Warm Springs, Georgia, trying to regain the use of his legs. He was still determined to run for president one day. His secretary, Missy LeHand, stayed with him, and was now his closest companion.
NARRATOR
Eleanor remained in New York. She did not share Franklin's belief that he would one day walk again, but she did not try to make him come home.
Geoff Ward
I think they found life apart easier than life together. Both of them had causes to which they could devote themselves. They would come together periodically and then float apart again. The Roosevelts remained very fond of one another. I think that’s the way that they made their marriage work.
NARRATOR
Eleanor tried to make up for Franklin's absence. She tried to be more open with her children, especially Anna. She even learned to swim, and to play with her younger boys. And she threw herself into politics.
NARRATOR
She was helped by FDR's closest advisor, Louis Howe. A former journalist, Howe was a chain smoker whose clothes were always covered in ash; he was untidy and dishevelled, and he had one of the shrewdest political minds in America.
Eleanor Roosevelt v/o
After the polio attack, Louis Howe was always convinced that Franklin's political career must be continued and he decided that I should work with the Democratic Party as a whole and keep the contacts alive for Franklin.
NARRATOR
In the spring of 1922 she was asked to address a Democratic Party fundraiser. She was terrified of speaking in public, but Louis Howe encouraged her to accept.
Blanche Cook
Eleanor Roosevelt really does not like at first to speak in public. And she has a very high, uncontrollable voice that goes up and down. And then, because she’s nervous, she laughs at the wrong times. And Louis Howe would sit in the back and make faces and gestures and, "Get that voice low, and get it under control." And he watches every word, and they write her speeches together.
NARRATOR
The early 1920's were a contradictory time for American women. They had won the battle for suffrage, but women who wanted social reforms still had trouble making their demands heard by the men who ran party politics.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
She got together with some other very capable women. And they insisted on a role for women in the Democratic Party. She was out there on the front lines of politics, helping women organizing labor unions, deal with abuses in the workplace, child labor.
NARRATOR
In 1924, as elections approached, Eleanor was determined that she and her colleagues would have more than a token presence at the convention.
Geoff Ward
Charles Murphy was the boss of the Democratic Party in New York. And he insisted that he be allowed to choose the women delegates to the coming convention. And Mrs. Roosevelt insisted that women would choose them. And in the most genteel and polite and ladylike way, she suggested that if he didn’t give in to her, she would have to go to the press.
NARRATOR
Charles Murphy held his ground, and Eleanor carried out her threat. "Women must gain the respect of men." she declared in a blunt speech. "We will be enormously strengthened if we can show that we are willing to fight to the very last ditch for what we believe in." The battle made front page news.
Geoff Ward
The boss caved. It was really her first taste of political blood. She had beaten a formidable foe, right out of the box. And she had enormous pleasure in reporting this to Franklin, that she’d beaten this man.
Franklin D. Roosevelt 3rd
The cover for it, the line which she herself put forth all the time was that she was only doing it for the sake of Franklin and Franklin’s career. But in fact, she was enjoying it.
NARRATOR
Through her work, Eleanor made a circle of close friends - politically sophisticated, independent women like Nancy Cook. Cook was a creative, energetic organizer in the state Democratic party. She lived in Greenwich Village with her partner Marian Dickerman. Dickerman was a teacher and the first woman to run for the New York State legislature.
NARRATOR
When Dickerman took over the private Todhunter School in New York, Eleanor joined her teaching literature and history three days a week.
Helen Offenhauser (student at Todhunter)
She was a fascinating teacher. I was not very good at math, and I was about to take college boards. So the school suggested that I drop Mrs. Roosevelt’s course, English, and take more math. I said, "No, I do not want to give up Mrs. Roosevelt’s class."
NARRATOR
Franklin supported Eleanor's independence and enjoyed her new friends. In 1925 he even built them a small stone house, called Val Kill, near his mother's Hyde Park estate.
Eleanor Roosevelt niece
My aunt Eleanor had never had a home of her own. She had always longed for one. I mean, here was a grownup woman with five children and a husband, and she never had lived in her own house. And this was her dream.
NARRATOR
It was an unusual arrangement. Sometimes Franklin joined them for meals and picnics. When occasion demanded Eleanor would entertain with Franklin at Sara's house nearby. But Val Kill was Eleanor's, and she would think of it as her real home for the rest of her life.
Geoff Ward
Within her private world at Val Kill, with very, very close friends, she was clearly having a wonderful time. And part of her joy is the fact that she’s having a good time. She is surprised and astonished and delighted to be having a wonderful time.
NARRATOR
By 1928 Eleanor was director of the Bureau of Women's Activities for the Democratic Party, and one of the most powerful and well known women in national politics. She published articles in major magazines - on everything from parenting to foreign policy, to the changing role of women in society. She was asked to endorse products and her first ads for the Simmons Mattress Company appeared in Vogue magazine.
NARRATOR
That same year FDR decided to reenter politics and run for Governor of New York. To dispel rumors that he was still sick, he ran an energetic campaign, and he won. For the first time in nearly a decade, Eleanor was a political wife again. She moved the family to Albany, and divided her time between her duties as the Governor's wife and her own activities.
Eleanor Roosevelt v/o
Franklin and I had a desire to see improvements for people. I knew about social conditions, perhaps more than he did. But he knew about government and how you could use government to improve certain things. And I think we began to get an understanding of teamwork.
NARRATOR
FDR could not walk and it was difficult for him to go inside the schools, hospitals, and state institutions he wanted to visit.
Eleanor Roosevelt v/o
Franklin started training me as an observer. He sent me in the first time. Afterwards, he began to ask me questions. 'What was the food like?' I said, 'Oh, I looked at the menus and they seemed very adequate.' And he said, 'I didn't ask you about the menus. I asked you what the food was like. You should have looked in the pots on the stove.' After that I was very much better as an inspector."
Nina Gibson
They were able to forge a partnership, and through that partnership they became closer. It took time, but I think they came to the realization that their love for each other truly hinged on values that were very deep.
Eleanor Roosevelt on camera synch /Subtitle - 1930
We older people must not try to make the younger generation do things the way we did them.
NARRATOR
Eleanor was 46 years old. Her poise in front of the cameras was new and striking.
NARRATOR
The change was partly due to the encouragement of Earl Miller, a New York State trooper whom Franklin assigned to be her bodyguard. Miller saw that she was sometimes still overcome by shyness. "Smile, just for one picture" he would coax her, often clowning behind the cameras to make her relax.
Miller was an amateur boxer and a talented athlete. He encouraged her to take up riding again. He helped her swim better, drive better. He even taught her to shoot. He boosted her confidence and made her laugh. People gossiped about Eleanor and Earl, as they did about FDR and Missy LeHand. Miller always dismissed the rumors: "You don't go to bed with someone you call Mrs Roosevelt" he said.
FDR synch
That's perfectly fine. On the condition that you'll come back and visit me in Albany and why where at least I can give you some very wonderful scenery
Governor
Either Albany or Washington.
FDR synch
Well, I think if it were Washington, we might almost toss a coin.
PICTURE : Louis Howe. FDR campaigning with Eleanor. Newsreel of Roosevelt family introduced to cameras.
NARRATOR
It was Louis Howe, not Franklin, who told Eleanor her husband was going to run for president in 1932. She had known for years this was his ambition, but the news threw her into a depression she could barely hide in public. The entire Roosevelt family was thrust into the national spotlight.
FDR newsreel synch
My granddaughter Anna Roosevelt Dall on her lap. What's our campaign slogan, Sissie?
Sissie (Eleanor Seagraves) synch
Happy days are here again.
FDR synch
Good. That's right.
NARRATOR
Eleanor dreaded the idea of being First lady, of a life defined by teas and receiving lines.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Even as the governor’s wife she had still quite an independent life. And she was a bit distraught about the idea of being totally immersed in this goldfish bowl of the White House. The day she realized that she was going to be the wife of the president was a traumatic day for her
NARRATOR
"I knew what traditionally would lie before me," Eleanor remembered, "and I cannot say I was pleased with the prospect. The turmoil in my heart and mind was rather great that night."
NARRATOR
In 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt became president, America was paralysed by the Great Depression. Millions had lost their jobs, their homes, and their trust in government.
NARRATOR
With his buoyant smile and boundless confidence, Roosevelt made Americans feel he understood them and that he would make their lives better. He would lead the country out of the crisis with an immediate, progressive plan of action.
NARRATOR
Eleanor was still struggling with her new role as First lady. Desperate for something useful to do, she even offered to help Franklin with his mail. He refused, saying it would undermine his secretary Missy Lehand. Worse, he asked her to resign from teaching and from the political activities she loved.
Newsreel Narration
Mrs Roosevelt is surprising Washington by taking her initial horseback ride as the First lady of the land.
NARRATOR
As she searched for a meaningful role newsreel crews seemed to follow her every move.
NARRATOR
The press described a White House that was full of energy, teeming with Roosevelt children and grandchildren. But to Eleanor it seemed her life and family were falling apart. Her daughter Anna, was in the midst of a divorce, and moved into the White House with her two children. Third son Elliott was leaving his wife Betty. Now, one of Eleanor's "Griselda moods" as she called them, threatened to overwhelm her.
NARRATOR
"If anyone looks at me," she wrote, "I want to weep. My mind goes round and round like a squirrel in a cage. I want to run and I can't, and I despise myself."
NARRATOR
She confided these feelings to the woman who had become her closest friend -- Lorena Hickock or "Hick," as Eleanor called her. Like Eleanor, Hick had a traumatic childhood. Her father beat her regularly. After her mother died, she ran away from home. She became a top reporter for the Associated Press. During the presidential campaign, she was assigned to cover the candidate's wife and she fell passionately in love with Eleanor.
Geoff Ward
Hickock is entirely and totally devoted to her. And that, Mrs Roosevelt really had never had in her life. No one else had been fully devoted to her. Not her parents, not her husband, not her children, not her grandmother. She had always been on her own.
Franklin D. Roosevelt 3rd
Hick was a single woman, she didn’t have her own attachments, and she needed Eleanor as much as Eleanor needed her. These were two needy people and they discovered that they could fulfill each other’s needs.
NARRATOR
Hick hated to be photographed and she tried to hide from the cameras that followed the First lady everywhere. She felt her love for Eleanor compromised her as a journalist and she gave up her job.
NARRATOR
Eleanor clearly loved Hick in return. "Hick darling, All day I've thought of you and another birthday I will be with you. Tonight you sounded so far away and formal. Oh, I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it and think, ‘She does love me,’ or I wouldn’t be wearing it."
FDR 3
It shows that she was certainly capable of a very intense emotional relationship, and expressing great love, and being there for someone else, and expecting someone else to be there for her. And so in that way, she developed emotional capacity which had not always been there.
Trude Lash
Hick was a lesbian, and Mrs. Roosevelt was very affectionate and quite demonstrative, not only to Hick, to other women, to men. She showed her warmth. But she was definitely not a lesbian.
Nina Gibson
I have no idea whether Lorena Hickock had a homosexual relationship with my grandmother or not. And my feeling about that is kind of: Who cares? They were very good friends. And if they could make each other happy in any way, then that's what's important.
NARRATOR
In February 1934 the two women went on a fact finding trip and holiday to the Caribbean. Several women journalists accompanied them, and filmed part of the trip. Eleanor had never looked happier.
NARRATOR
Hick helped Eleanor define her role as first lady. She taught her how to work with the press.
Off Camera Journalist
Mrs Roosevelt, would you give us just a little wave good bye?
Eleanor Roosevelt archive synch
Not again!
NARRATOR
Together they orchestrated one photo opportunity after another. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, when they toured the city's worst slums, Eleanor told the photographer to take her PICTURE : "I want the American people to see what it's really like here!"
NARRATOR
The trip was a public relations coup for Eleanor, and by extension, for Franklin. For two weeks solid the papers carried stories about her and the President's concern for the region. When Eleanor and Hick returned, Franklin met them at the station. It was, the press noted, the Roosevelts' 29th wedding anniversary.
NARRATOR
At Hick's suggestion Eleanor held press conferences for women only. She urged her husband to appoint women to government positions. She argued that everyone -- young people, women and African Americans -- should be included in FDR's programs putting people back to work. She was soon recognized as a new kind of first lady.
Eleanor Roosevelt Synch
This industry which we will be encouraging.... I'm sorry that I have to go ....
Geoff Ward
Eleanor Roosevelt had phenomenal, unprecedented energy. She was in action, in motion, it seems, 24 hours a day. That allowed her to do enormous amounts in her life. It was also probably evidence of someone who is terrified to sit still and be alone, for fear depression will just blanket them. She did have depressive bouts and I think she fended them off wonderfully by this ceaseless, ceaseless activity.
NARRATOR
In one three month period she logged 40,000 miles, giving lectures, visiting schools and factories, opening fairs. Six days a week, no matter where she was, she wrote a newspaper column called, "My Day." She talked to people from all walks of life. She saw first hand the new government programs at work, and reported back to FDR.
Mary Bain (National Youth Administration)
Every time we had meetings with Mrs. Roosevelt, we’d all sit back and think that we were going to get told how wonderful we were and what a great job we were doing. And that was just perfunctory. "That’s good. That’s fine, that’s fine. But now let’s see what else we can do." And she did prod us and push us, and she made us all reach for the stars. And after one of these meetings, we’d all think about how she would go back and say to the President, "Now Franklin, these people need more money, and you’ve got to be sure that they’re in the budget." And we all imagined that she was just giving him fits.
NARRATOR
In her travels, Eleanor saw how the Depression had devastated entire regions and industries - like Scott's Run, a mining community in West Virginia.
Fletcher Collins - Teacher
The miners were half starved for several years, living with their children who were half starved. And they had absolutely nowhere they could go, they had no way to get out of it.
Glenna Williams - Miner's Daughter
For to wash our clothes, we caught rainwater, if it rained. The barrel was outside. That’s how you washed dishes. That’s how you got water to take your bath. For to drink, there was a well up on the hill. It had sulfur water and it tasted like rotten eggs. It was like existence. You existed, yes. We existed. But it wasn’t a very pleasant one.
NARRATOR
Eleanor visited Scott's Run and was moved by the miners' plight. She thought they were perfect candidates for FDR's new Subsistence Homesteads Program. The program aimed to ease rural poverty by building planned communities where people would farm small plots, and work in factories nearby. The communities would provide health care and progressive schools.
NARRATOR
In 1933 families from Scott's Run began construction on the program's first community -- called Arthurdale. With Eleanor as their champion, they built dozens of clean modern homes, each with a garden large enough to grow vegetables. A year later, the first families moved in.
Glenna Williams
That day changed our life completely. There was our little white house set against this backdrop of green trees and green grass. And everything was nice and white and clean, and there was a bathroom! Of all things, a bathroom! And it was ours.
NARRATOR
Arthurdale, Eleanor hoped, would show that people could lift themselves out of poverty if given a chance.
Fletcher Collins
She came very often, I would say once a month. She knew them immensely well. Mrs. Degolier, would come up to her, one of the homesteaders, and say, "Hello, Mrs. Roosevelt." "Oh hello, Ms. Degolier. How are you doing? Your son, he had the measles when I was last here. She was on a one to one warm basis. She had no side. She was what I call "old shoe."
NARRATOR
Eleanor tried to use her connections to bring in industry. She even paid teachers' salaries herself. But the project had not been fully thought through. The homesteaders could not grow enough to feed themselves. Business failed to take root, and many residents remained on relief. By the early 1940's, Congress lost interest and federal aid to Arthurdale ended.
Blanche Cook
Eleanor Roosevelt learned that she could not, just because she was nominally in charge, she could not make some things happen. And it doesn't work. And she really learned about the limits of power and influence from Arthurdale.
NARRATOR
In 1936 FDR ran for a second term. His opponent, Republican candidate, Alf Landon attacked New Deal programs like Arthurdale.
Alf Landon synch
A lot of the money spent in the name of relief has nothing to do with relief. And a lot of the money has been wasted.
NARRATOR
Eleanor's activist role as first lady became a campaign issue. Newsreels contrasted her to Mrs Alf Landon. Mrs Landon, Republicans assured voters was a traditional wife and mother.
Helen Offenhauser
A lot of our friends were Republicans, and they would refer to him - "That man in the White House" was the least unflattering thing they said about him. And she, I think some people thought she was a busy-body and they thought of the Roosevelts as more or less traitors to their class.
William Rusher (Lower Third: Son of Landon supporters)
It has been said that Eleanor Roosevelt viewed the world as one vast slum project. She was always flitting around here and there, coming to some community whose condition she didn’t like, and tut-tutting about it and insisting that something must be done. She seemed to have a large political equivalent of the housewife’s desire to redecorate.
NARRATOR
Eleanor's visit to a mine was satirized in a famous cartoon. "It was indicated to me," she responded, "that there was certainly something the matter with a woman who wanted to see so much and know so much." Later she added, "Every woman in public life needs to develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide."
PICTURE : Still Eleanor Roosevelt and lyrics to last verse of "Anything Goes" in lower thirds:
"So Mrs R. with all her trimmin's/ can broadcast abed from Simmons/ 'cause Franklin knows/ anything goes."
Eleanor and FDR on back of campaign train. Time Square with neon election results
NARRATOR
But the controversies swirling around Eleanor's role as first lady did not damage FDR. He won by a landslide.
NARRATOR
The Roosevelts had become extraordinary political partners.
Geoff Ward
She kept at him on issues which he might have, in rush of business, wanted to overlook. She kept him to a high standard. Anybody who ever saw her lock eyes with him and say, 'Now Franklin, you should...' never forgot it. And even though he thought her unrealistic sometimes, he never lost his affection, or his wish to do what he should do because she wanted him to do it.
Eleanor Roosevelt v/o
Very often he would bait me into giving an opinion by stating as his own a point of view with which he knew I would disagree. I remember one occasion, I became extremely vehement and irritated. The next day to my complete surprise he calmly stated as his own the arguments that I had given him!
Henry Morgenthau, Jr.
I think they played a game on this thing, that she would state her own position, and if it got shot down and Roosevelt was criticized, he would just turn around and say, "Oh, you know my missus." In other words, FDR used Eleanor to test the limits. One instance, I think, where she was testing limits was in the Marian Anderson affair.
NARRATOR
In 1939 the African American singer Marian Anderson was denied permission to perform in Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Eleanor, whose family had fought in the revolution, belonged to the DAR. In protest, she resigned her membership.
Nina Gibson
By then, she had the self-confidence and the strength to stand alone because she knew, in the depths of her soul, that this was wrong.
NARRATOR
Eleanor worked quietly behind the scenes. She helped arrange for Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial.
Newsreel NARRATOR
75,000 mass before the Lincoln Memorial to hear Marian Anderson, colored contralto, make her capital debut at the great emancipator's shrine.
James Farmer
'My country ‘tis of thee,' her first song. She put such great emphasis upon "liberty!" The DAR’s refusal to allow her to sing was a breach of that liberty. "Sweet land of liberty." There were tears in my eyes. I think there were tears in the eyes of almost everyone in that huge crowd.
Vernon Jarrett
I am not too sure that America realized what that concert symbolized, because it struck at the very depths of racism in America. And everybody knew that Mrs. Roosevelt was behind this.
James Farmer
This was something unique having a first lady in the White House who was a good friend. She was much more of a friend than Franklin. Franklin was a politician and he weighed the political consequences of every answer and every step that he took. He was a good politician, too. But she spoke out of conscience. And acted as a conscientious person. That was different.
NARRATOR
That Easter Sunday in 1939, the world was just months away from the start of war in Europe. The New Deal programs that Eleanor Roosevelt had worked so hard to foster were already being cut back as her husband struggled to arm America. In the turbulent times ahead, Eleanor would be bitterly attacked for what she believed in, and once again, she would face loss and betrayal.
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