A first lady of many firsts
As a child, Eleanor Roosevelt suffered countless fears, including a dread of animals, of water, and of pain, all of which she learned to endure and even defy. In 1933, as the 48-year-old wife of the president-elect, she was told that her husband had just weathered an assassination attempt in Miami. "One cannot live in fear," she told reporters the next day. That morning, Franklin D. Roosevelt had phoned her and warned that she, too, might be in danger. He wanted to have the Secret Service assign an agent to protect her.
"Don't you dare do such a thing," she replied. "I'm not going to have any Secret Service man following me around. I simply will not have it."
And she didn't. Americans are "wonderful," she said after the inauguration, "and I simply can't imagine being afraid to go among them as I have always done, as I always shall." That week, the first lady toured the crime-ridden back alleys of Washington. The top was down on her Buick roadster, and she was at the wheel, accompanied only by an 81-year-old society matron.
Eyes and ears. Teddy Roosevelt's niece had gone among the people for decades. In her debutante days, she visited needy children and inspected working conditions in garment factories. Once polio disabled Franklin, she became his eyes and ears, a role she played the rest of his life. "You know," he often told cabinet members, "my missis gets around a lot, and she says . . . "
In Eleanor's first year as first lady, she drove her Buick 38,000 miles and flew twice to Los Angeles. Each flight required frequent refueling stops. Will Rogers, present at one, wrote: "No maid, no secretary, just the first lady of the land on a paid ticket on a regular passenger flight."
In West Virginia, she visited an out-of-work coal miner whose six children lived on scraps, "the kind that you or I," she said, "might give to a dog." As she left their rundown home, a little boy stood at the door holding a pet rabbit. His sister looked at him and then at Eleanor. "He thinks we are not going to eat it," the girl said, "but we are."
For 19 hours a day, Eleanor tended projects--her radio and newspaper commentaries, her conferences on women and the poor. She seemed to relish every moment.
November saw publication of It's Up to the Women, a book of her articles and speeches that mixed advice on menus and child rearing with appeals to fight war and poverty. On women's issues and civil rights, she took stands FDR could never copy. To cut federal spending, the president condoned the firing of women for merely being married--a policy Eleanor called "very bad and very foolish." Her protest was in vain, as were her pleas to make lynching a federal crime.
Much was written about the fact that FDR broke Herbert Hoover's written-questions-only rule for White House press conferences. He did that two days after Eleanor, in the first of a series of first-lady news conferences, fielded unwritten questions from female reporters. Her Green Room sessions championed "the forgotten woman," the female homeless, and told how to prepare lunch for 7 cents.
Skeptics predicted she would soon run out of issues and stop her press meetings. Wrong. Eleanor saw the "Green Room girls" for 12 years. Her final press conference as first lady was on the morning of April 12, 1945. Her husband died that afternoon.
This story appears in the December 8, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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