In this 1940 article, Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 – 1962) argues for a benevolent government that would see to the prenatal needs of expectant mothers and their growing children:
“But all children, it seems to me, have a right to food, shelter, an equal opportunity for education and an equal chance to come into the world healthy and get the care they need through their early years to keep them well and happy.”
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…
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…
A very self-conscious column regarding the American class structure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
In 1947 former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt penned this nifty essay about her least favorite word:
I do not like the word tolerance.
If you tolerate something, you do not like it very much.
