Eleanor Roosevelt
First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945 (1884–1962) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (October 11, 1884 − November 7, 1962) was an American diplomat and political activist. She was the First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945 as the wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd U.S. president. She was also the First Lady of New York from 1929 to 1933, when her husband was Governor of New York. She was a member of the prominent and wealthy American Roosevelt and Livingston families and a niece of President Theodore Roosevelt.[5] Historians have consistently ranked Roosevelt as the greatest first lady in American history.[6]
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Biography
Early life
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born on October 11, 1884, in Manhattan, New York City,[7][8] to Anna Rebecca Hall and Elliott Roosevelt.[9] From an early age, she preferred to be called by her middle name, Eleanor. Through her father, she was a niece of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States.[10]
Roosevelt had two younger brothers: Elliott Jr. and Hall Roosevelt. She also had a half-brother, Elliott Roosevelt Mann. Her mother died from diphtheria on December 7, 1892, and Elliott Jr. died of the same disease the next year.[11] Her father died on August 14, 1894, after jumping from a window during a fit of delirium tremens. He survived the fall but died from a seizure.[12] Her brother Hall later suffered from alcoholism. After the deaths of her parents, Roosevelt was raised by her maternal grandmother, Mary Livingston Ludlow Hall, in Tivoli, New York.[13]
Education
Roosevelt was to Allenswood Boarding Academy at the age of 15, a private finishing school in Wimbledon, London, England,[14] where she was educated from 1899 to 1902. The headmistress, Marie Souvestre, took a special interest in Roosevelt, who learned to speak French fluently and gained self-confidence.[15]
Roosevelt was active with the New York Junior League, which taught dancing and calisthenics in the East Side slums.[16]
Marriage and family
In the summer of 1902, Roosevelt met her father's fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on a train to Tivoli, New York.[17] The two began a secret romance and got engaged on November 22, 1903.
The got were married on March 17, 1905, in New York City.[17][18] President Theodore Roosevelt's attendance at the ceremony was front-page news in The New York Times and other newspapers.
They had six children: Anna Roosevelt Halsted, James Roosevelt II, Franklin Roosevelt, Elliott Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., and John Roosevelt.
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First Lady of the United States
Roosevelt became the First Lady of the United States when her husband was sworn in as the 33rd president on March 4, 1933. As First Lady, Roosevelt was vocal in her support of the Civil Rights Movement. She became one of the only voices in her husband's administration to insist for benefits to be equally extended to Americans of all races.[19]
She was the first presidential spouse to hold regular press conferences and in 1940 became the first to speak at a national party convention.[20] She also wrote a daily newspaper column, "My Day," the first presidential spouse to do so.[21][22] She was also the fist presidential wife to write a monthly magazine column and to host a weekly radio show.[23]
In the first year of her husband's administration, Roosevelt earned $75,000 from her lectures and writing, most of which she gave to charity.[24] By 1941, she was receiving lecture fees of $1,000[25] and was made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa at one of her lectures to celebrate her achievements.[26][27]
Civil rights activism
Roosevelt also broke with tradition by inviting hundreds of African-American guests to the White House.[28] In 1936, she became aware of conditions at the National Training School for Girls, a predominantly-black reform school that once located in the Palisades neighborhood of Washington, D.C. She visited the school and wrote about it in "My Day" in which she asked for additional funding and pressed for changes in staffing and curriculum.[29]
Roosevelt later presented the African-American singer Marion Anderson to the King and the Queen of the United Kingdom after Anderson performed at a White House dinner.[30] She also arranged the appointment of the African-American educator Mary McLeod Bethune with whom she had struck up a friendship, as Director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration.[31][32]
Roosevelt lobbied behind the scenes for the 1934 Costigan-Wagner Bill to make lynching a federal crime, including arranging a meeting between Franklin and NAACP President Walter Francis White.[33]
Roosevelt's support of African-American rights made her an unpopular figure among whites in the South. At the same time, she grew so popular among African-Americans.
World War II
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Roosevelt spoke out on prejudice against Japanese Americans. She also privately opposed her husband's Executive Order 9066, which required Japanese-Americans in many areas of the U.S. to enter internment camps.
On May 10, 1940, Germany invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, As the U.S. began to move toward war, Roosevelt found herself again depressed and feared that her role in fighting for domestic justice would become fail and cause the nation to focused on foreign affairs.
She briefly considered traveling to Europe to work with the Red Cross but was warned by presidential advisers that the president's wife could be captured as a prisoner of war.[34] She soon found other wartime causes to work on, however, and started a popular movement to allow the immigration of refugee children from Europe.[35]
She also lobbied her husband to allow greater immigration of groups persecuted by the Nazis, including Jews, but fears of a fifth column of saboteurs caused Franklin to restrict immigration, rather than expand it.[36] Roosevelt successfully secured political refugee status for 83 Jewish refugees from the SS Quanza in August 1940.[37]
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Later activities
After her husband died on April 12, 1945, after he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage at the Little White House, in Warm Springs, Georgia, Roosevelt moved into an apartment in New York City at 29 Washington Square West, in Greenwich Village. In 1950, she rented suites at the Park Sheraton Hotel, at 202 West 56th Street, and lived there until 1953, when she moved to 211 East 62nd Street. When that lease expired in 1958, she returned to the Park Sheraton, as she waited for the house that she had bought with Edna and David Gurewitsch at 55 East 74th Street to be renovated.[38] The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum opened on April 12, 1946.[39]
United Nations
In December 1945, President Harry S. Truman appointed Roosevelt as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly.[40] In April 1946, she became the first chairperson of the preliminary United Nations Commission on Human Rights.[41] Roosevelt remained chairperson when the commission was established on a permanent basis in January 1947.[42] Along with René Cassin, John Peters Humphrey, and others, she played a key role in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Roosevelt also served as the first United States Representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights[43] and stayed on at that position until 1953, even after she had stepped down as chair of the commission in 1951.[44] The United Nations awarded her one of its first United Nations Prizes in the Field of Human Rights in 1968 in recognition of her work.[45]
In the 1940s, Roosevelt was among the first people to support the creation of a UN agency that would be specialized in the issues of food and nutrition.[46]
Other activities
In 1949, she was made an honorary member of the historically-black organization Alpha Kappa Alpha.[47][48]
She resigned from her UN post in 1953, when Dwight D. Eisenhower became president. She addressed the Democratic National Convention in 1952 and 1956. President John F. Kennedy later reappointed her to the United Nations, where she served again from 1961 to 1962, and to the National Advisory Committee of the Peace Corps.[49]
In 1961, Kennedy's Undersecretary of Labor, Esther Peterson, proposed a new Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. Kennedy appointed Roosevelt to chair the commission, with Peterson as director, which was Roosevelt's last public position.[50]
Throughout the 1950s, Roosevelt went on countless national and international speaking engagements. She continued to pen her newspaper column and made appearances on television and radio broadcasts. She averaged 150 lectures a year throughout the 1950s, many devoted to her activism on behalf of the United Nations.[51]
Roosevelt received the first annual Franklin Delano Roosevelt Brotherhood Award in 1946.[52] Other notable postwar awards that she received included the Award of Merit of the New York City Federation of Women's Clubs in 1948, the Four Freedoms Award in 1950, the Irving Geist Foundation Award in 1950, and the Prince Carl Medal from Sweden in 1950.[52]
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Death and funeral
In April 1960, Roosevelt was diagnosed with aplastic anemia soon after she was struck by a car in New York City. She died on November 7, 1962, aged 78, of resulting cardiac failure at her Manhattan home, at 55 East 74th Street on the Upper East Side.[53][54] President Kennedy ordered all United States flags lowered to half-staff throughout the world on November 8 in tribute to Roosevelt.[54]
Funeral services were held two days later in Hyde Park, New York, where she was buried next to her husband in the Rose Garden at Springwood Estate, the Roosevelt family home.[55]
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Historical reputation and legacy
In 1966, the White House Historical Association purchased Douglas Chandor's portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt; the portrait had been commissioned by the Roosevelt family in 1949. The painting was presented at a White House reception on February 4, 1966, which was hosted by First Lady Lady Bird Johnson and attended by more than 250 invited guests. The portrait hangs in the Vermeil Room.[56][57][58]
Roosevelt was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973.[59]
In 1989, the Eleanor Roosevelt Fund Award was founded.[60]
The Eleanor Roosevelt Monument in New York's Riverside Park was dedicated in 1996, with First Lady Hillary Clinton serving as the keynote speaker. It was the first monument to an American woman in a New York City park.[61] The centerpiece is a statue of Roosevelt that was sculpted by Penelope Jencks. The surrounding granite pavement contains inscriptions designed by the architect Michael Middleton Dwyer, including summaries of her achievements, and a quote from her 1958 speech at the United Nations advocating universal human rights.[62] In 1997, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, in Washington D.C., was dedicated and includes a bronze statue of Eleanor Roosevelt standing before the United Nations emblem, which honors her dedication to the United Nations. It is the only presidential memorial to depict a First Lady.[63]
In 1998, President Bill Clinton established the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights to honor outstanding American promoters of rights. The award was first awarded on the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, honoring Roosevelt's role as the "driving force" in the development of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The award was originally presented from 1998 to the end of the Clinton administration in 2001. In 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revived the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights and presented the award on behalf of the President Barack Obama.
The Gallup Organization published the poll Gallup's List of Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century, which determined the people around the world Americans who most admired for what they did in the 20th century in 1999. Roosevelt came in ninth.[64]
In 2001, the Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Committee was founded by Judith Hollensworth Hope, who was its president until April 2008. It inspires and supports pro-choice Democratic women to run for local and state offices in New York.[65] In 2007, Eleanor Roosevelt was named a hero by The My Hero Project.[66][67] In 2020, Time magazine included hr on its list of 100 Women of the Year. She was retroactively named Woman of the Year 1948 for her efforts on tackling issues surrounding human rights.[68]
Roosevelt was honored on an American Women quarter in 2023.[69]
Places named for Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt School, also known as the Eleanor Roosevelt Vocational School for Colored Youth, Warm Springs Negro School, and the Eleanor Roosevelt Rosenwald School, operated as a school from March 18, 1937 to 1972. It was a historically-black community school, located at 350 Parham Street at Leverette Hill Road in Warm Springs, Georgia. As of May 3, 2010, the school is listed on the National Register of Historic Places listings in Meriwether County, Georgia.[70][71]
In Norvelt, Pennsylvanoia, the firefighters' hall is named Roosevelt Hall in her honor.[72]
In 1972, the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute was founded. It merged with the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Foundation in 1987 to become the Roosevelt Institute, which is is a liberal American think tank.[73][74]
Eleanor Roosevelt High School, a public magnet high school specializing in science, mathematics, technology, and engineering, was established in 1976 at its current location in Greenbelt, Maryland.
In 1977, the home was formally designated by an Act of Congress as the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site. The Roosevelt Study Center, a research institute, conference center, and library opened in 1986. It is named after Eleanor, Theodore, and Franklin Roosevelt, all of whom had ancestors who had emigrated from Zeeland, the Netherland, to what is now the United States in the 17th century.
In 1988, Eleanor Roosevelt College, one of eight undergraduate residential colleges at the University of California, San Diego, was founded. Eleanor Roosevelt High School, a small public high school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan ,in New York City, was founded in 2002.[75] Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Eastvale, California, opened in 2006.[76]
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References
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