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..."
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"...
"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."
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.
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."
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."
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."
A very self-conscious column regarding the American class structure.
A column from a 1937 issue of
PATHFINDER MAGAZINE included these two seemingly random tales from the life of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The brief remembrance on the second page is a bitter-sweet story about young Eleanor and her mother's vision of her as a hopelessly plain-looking girl.
Read a 1951 profile of a future First Lady: the young Nancy Reagan.
"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..."
"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."
