American Beauty

The years 1933 to 1938 witnessed the Depression, the New Deal, the threat of World War II, the Spanish Civil War, the awakening of the Civil Rights movement and the beginnings of the Red Scare. It was a remarkable time of change and challenge on both the international and domestic fronts. Yet the period is often called the Franklin Roosevelt era.

Perhaps it would be more wise and honest to credit the accomplishments achieved during these difficult times to both FDR and Eleanor, who formed a unique male-female partnership at a time when such partnerships were rare, especially in the political arena. Blanche Wiesen Cook’s scrupulously balanced and engaging biography forces us to rethink our earlier characterization.

I once had doubts about the authenticity of Eleanor Roosevelt: Were her good works from the heart or from matrimonial duty? Was she an agent of the presidency or her own woman? Did her legacy, so heartily praised by feminists decades later, have anything to do with feminism? I have come to realize that the pragmatic labors of Eleanor Roosevelt have had a lasting effect that no number of books can achieve.

These thoughts have been reinforced by Cook’s biography and coincidentally by an evocative photograph on the dust jacket of Vol. 2: Several women pose in summery white 1930s shirtwaist dresses and cloche hats on their way perhaps to a game of croquet. But with Eleanor Roosevelt in their midst, they are members of the Women’s Press Club or the International League for Peace, gathered on the lawn at Hyde Park to plot the betterment of womankind and the world at large.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt may have been a prime mover, but this work is startling in its affirmation of Eleanor Roosevelt’s impact on the domestic reforms of the nation. Even the New Deal, FDR’S most famous progeny, ancestor of today’s welfare state, was delivered with the help of the midwifery skills of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Vol. 1 of this two-part biography deals with Eleanor Roosevelt’s youth, a well-known tale, and her life during her husband’s rise from governor of New York to undersecretary of the Navy, to his first election to the presidency. During this stage of her life, the woman who would be a member of the first U.S. delegation to the United Nations believed that men were superior creatures who still knew more about politics than women.

Eleanor’s childhood had the extravagant pathos of David Copperfield, substituting the affluent, aristocratic ambience of an Edith Wharton novel for London slums and debtors’ jail. Her mother, Ann Livingston Hall, a renowned beauty of Southern antecedence, considered her daughter an “ugly duckling,” a future failure in the marriage market. Eleanor adored her father, a younger brother of Theodore Roosevelt. But Elliott had been an absentee parent because of his addiction to alcohol and drugs. At the age of 9, Eleanor was orphaned, left in the charge of her maternal grandmother, a captive in her guardian’s New York City brownstone and mansion on the Hudson.

Her brief parole from her grandmother’s corseted parlors was her time at an English boarding school, where she met Marie Souvestre, her teacher, a handsome, bold-minded unmarried woman. Souvestre would remain an icon, always, for Roosevelt. But on her return home, she submitted to a formal debut and, at 19, fell in love with and married her distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Children followed in rapid succession, but motherhood under the sway of professional nannies (her chief companions during that period) exacerbated Eleanor’s insecurity and her hunger to be needed.

How, then, did she cope with her low self-esteem, her sense of feminine inadequacy and her incarceration? Cook shows Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory over herself, without the aid of biographical psychobabble.

During the first presidency, Eleanor Roosevelt crusaded against lynching, and some Southern white women joined black women in the cause. Eleanor Roosevelt urged FDR to raise his voice in favor of a pending anti-lynching bill. His response was an eloquent rebuttal to her request: “I did not choose the tools with which I work. . . . The Southerners by reason of seniority rule . . . 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 [needed] to keep America from collapsing.”

But Mrs. Roosevelt never desisted from her efforts against racial hatred. Motivated always by her empathy for human suffering and despite her loathing of publicity, her appearance in person in all the most impoverished areas made possible the rise of integrated, upgraded communities. Arthursville in West Virginia was the first, the pilot success. Her progress through the country during the depths of the Depression was welcomed by FDR. And her reports, placed on the presidential night table, attested to her usefulness.

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Eleanor Roosevelt’s sex life has long been a matter of conjecture. There can be no doubt that she preferred generally the company of women. But her friendship with Louis Howe was profound--he crystallized her beliefs--and it was only after the death of this mentor that Eleanor Roosevelt learned to walk, truly, alone. Her discovery of her husband’s infidelity with Lucy Mercer dealt a heavy blow to her already damaged ego, and it altered, irrevocably, her marital expectations. It is supposed that Mrs. Roosevelt was a lesbian, and it is to her credit that she did not cringe from that rumor. Without the present day’s prurient, puritanical press, the matter remained a personal issue of little concern to the nation.

Her long relationship with Lorena Hickok, a journalist, is known through their exchange of passionate letters. Hickok sacrificed her good career to become a kind of checker for the first lady’s enterprises. But their intimate meetings grew rarer as Mrs. Roosevelt became more and more occupied with national matters.

The second volume ends in 1938, with a question unresolved: Was Eleanor Roosevelt an anti-Semite? She was silent too long on the subject of Hitler and the Jews. It is true that she had always been a pacifist and the country and the president were strongly isolationist. Did she refrain from interfering in European affairs? Or was some prejudice still lingering from her upbringing and her class? The fact remains that long after she and the president knew about Hitler’s atrocities, they remained mute on that subject, and the United States’ quota for refugees was shamefully small. Eleanor Roosevelt’s silence is curious, especially considering how easily and how forcefully she spoke out on issues affecting the downtrodden.

The strength of this charming biography is in Cook’s sober, unadorned approach to her subject. In a work that is neither hagiography nor a feminist call to arms, Cook allows the facts to speak for themselves. May the next volume answer the many questions that this one leaves unanswered.