Eleanor David Michaelis
Simon & Schuster/2020
I’ve always found that one the most fascinating aspects of biographies of “famous” people is how often their childhoods were marinated in unhappiness, loss or failure. The process of transcending these traumatic anchors and enjoying a productive adulthood usually reflects resilience, forbearance and serendipity. Eleanor Roosevelt was no exception. She emerged triumphantly singular from the insularity of Oyster Bay and Edith Wharton’s New York, two worlds guided by “ought to” rather than “want to”. Unless you were male, in which case you could usually do what you wanted to because it was quietly tolerated by a social code that protected its own from reputational damage and thrived on the permissive air of entitlement.
According to David Michaelis, Eleanor’s latest attentive biographer, the Oyster Bay Roosevelts had, above all other impulses, “the resolve to transform private misfortune into public well-being”. Throughout her life, both were her frequent companions. She adored her father, Elliott Roosevelt, brother of the intrepid Theodore, but despite the adoration he returned, he was intermittently present and when he was, often incapacitated by alcohol, or distracted by his financial and extra-marital missteps. Eventually his forays into disgrace could no longer be hidden, but no one shared them with Eleanor. With a mother who ignored or humiliated her relentlessly, he remained the man she lived to please until he died when she was ten.
She moved to her grandmother’s house, where she was further trained in the expectations for “wellborn” girls of her generation to be “mistress of a household”. She seemed to “need only to please, and to be good, strong and brave for others”, including for her younger brothers. Her nearest companions were books and some relatives who excelled at the lifestyle of the “idle rich”. Yet her heavy sense of duty remained sturdy, and she coped with her insecurities by making herself “more or less invisible”.
Two events transformed her. The first was Allenswood, a bilingual academy outside Paris run by a highly cultured and worldly woman, Marie Souvestre. Souvestre mentored Eleanor, nurtured her confidence, and planted the seeds that would grow her aspirations beyond the borders marked by her grandmother’s admonition that “All you need, child, are a few social graces to see you through life.”
The second transformative event was her marriage to her distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a merger of Hyde Park and Oyster Bay, one family but different worlds. Much has been written about Eleanor’s role in helping her resolutely ambitious husband when he became the navy’s youngest assistant secretary, then governor of New York, then president; about her challenging relationship with his ever-present mother; about her indispensable role in his rehabilitation after his shocking polio diagnosis; about her unquestioning acceptance of the bigotries of the day—antisemitism, (she described Felix Frankfurter as “an interesting little man, but very Jew”), racial segregation, and women’s roles (she was originally against women having the right to vote); and about her growing recognition and acceptance that their marriage was based more on mutual respect than on romantic love. But it remains riveting to read about her evolutionary shedding of the skin of Wharton’s Brownstone Society, and blossoming into a national and global leader who shattered stereotypes and delivered fairness for women, workers, immigrants, minorities, and children.
It started in earnest in 1917. In her words “The war was my emancipation and my education”. And what an emancipation it was! She became active in the American Red Cross, The New York League of Women Voters, and The Women’s City Club of New York as legislative director advocating for child labour laws, worker’s compensation, literacy, and legalized birth control for married couples. She got a voice of her own when she became chair of the Women’s Division of the Democratic Party, broadening her social and religious network. She supported the League of Nations and the World Court of Justice, and championed better housing for the poor and aging, help for Southern tenant farmers, and reforms to working hours and wages.
She took on Tammany Hall, Bull Connor and Father Coughlin. She joined the Washington, D.C. chapter of the NAACP, and opposed segre