Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Many Firsts (The Literary Digest, 1937)

This magazine article explains what a unique force in presidential history Eleanor Roosevelt was. She defied convention in so many ways and to illustrate this point, this anonymous journalist went to some length listing fifteen firsts that this most tireless of all First Ladies had racked-up through the years.


Those councilors who advised FDR and the First Lady on all matters African-American were popularly known as the Black Brain Trust…

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Eleanor Roosevelt on Japanese-American Internment (Collier’s, 1943)

In this article, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 – 1962) attempted (very politically) to play both sides of the street, implying on the one hand that the creation of the Japanese-American internment camps seemed a reasonable measure in wartime; but the reader doesn’t have to have a degree in psychology to recognize that she believed otherwise:

‘A Japanese is always a Japanese’ is an easily accepted phrase and it has taken hold quite naturally on the West Coast because of some reasonable or unreasonable fear back of it, but it leads nowhere and solves nothing…

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Her Life Since Leaving the White House (’47 Magazine, 1947)

Attached is a 1947 article that reported on the post-FDR life of The Widow Roosevelt since assuming the position of the United States delegate to the newly established United Nations:

Mrs Roosevelt’s performance during the first session of the U.N. General Assembly in London during the winter of 1946 surprised and pleased even those who had once been her husband’s most bitter foes.

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Bad Press Day for Eleanor Roosevelt (Ken Magazine, 1938)

During a 1936 visit to a research facility devoted to finding a cure for children’s lung ailments, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was remembered by a reporter for having blurted out a highly insensitive question:

What is the use of saving babies, if they can’t earn a decent living when they grow up?

With two years to think about her impulsive inquiry, the reporter responded with outrage in formulating an answer.

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Eleanor Roosevelt Was a Very Different First Lady (The Literary Digest, 1933)

Written not too long after she assumed the title First Lady; Eleanor Roosevelt (1906 – 1975) was causing a dust-up in Washington:

With the Constitution making no provision whatever for the duties of President’s wives, they have heretofore confined their activities largely to the social side of the white House.

Mrs. Roosevelt’s governmental activities are approved by those who see in them altruism, sympathy for the downtrodden, and a great desire to serve others. Her activities are opposed by those who feel that she is not properly a public servant because she is not responsible to the American electorate or directly accountable to it at election time.

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The ”Chief Woman-Elect” (New Outlook Magazine, 1932)

Half a dozen women who have known Eleanor Roosevelt in the past twenty years all agree that this is the first president’s wife in not a few presidential terms who might have achieved election to something in her own right; who might give ear to the women of the country. And although just listening to other people’s troubles isn’t enough, it is conceivably something.

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‘The Prospective First Lady” (Pathfinder Magazine, 1932)

Besides teaching American history and English literature three days a week as vice principal in the Todhunter School in New York (having to commute from Albany), Mrs Roosevelt runs the Val Kill furniture factory where reproductions of early American furniture are made to give work to the unemployed on the environs of the big Roosevelt estate at Hyde Park, N.Y. She belongs to several women’s clubs but never neglects her duties as mistress of a governor’s mansion…

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Eleanor Roosevelt on the Death of FDR (Yank Magazine, 1945)

This column, by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, was an articulate effort at make some sense of her husband’s death, which took place during one of the most critical periods in world history:

Perhaps in His wisdom, the Almighty is trying to show us that a leader may chart a way, may point out the road to lasting peace, but that many leaders and many peoples must do the building. It cannot be the work of one man, nor can the responsibility be laid upon his shoulders, and so when the time comes for peoples to assume the burden more fully, he is given rest.

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