 Okay, good evening everybody. We want to welcome you to another edition of virtual playhouse. I'm Dan I'm the director development programming and I want to thank you all for taking some time this evening out of your busy schedules, or what's going to be a really great and fascinating conversation. Before I introduce our moderator and special guest. I want to just remind everybody that please feel free at any point during the conversation. You can post your questions using the q amp a feature, which for those of you on a laptop or computer is at the bottom of your screen. And if you're on a phone or an iPad, I believe it's at the top of your screen. It's a little buttons as q amp a, please use that you can post your comments questions. Any thoughts you'd like to share. We will try to get to you all or as many of them as possible this evening. Please try to avoid using the chat feature. We just want to make sure that everything is is readable and in one location. So we appreciate your using the q amp a button. Our, of course, Bedford Playhouse still closed however we're we're very very optimistic that we will be able to at some point in the near future reopen and welcome you all back but in the meantime, we're very glad to be able to do this program this evening via zoom. With all of that, I would like to introduce tonight's moderator and the founder of the Bedford Playhouse, john far. And there I am. Hello everybody. Welcome. Thank you for coming. I am delighted to be doing this tonight. Some of you know this some of you don't but David Michaelis is actually a very old friend of mine. It so happens that many many moons ago we were in college together so we've known each other for over 40 years. And I love him. He's a wonderful man, wonderful human being and a terrific biographer. So now, without further ado, David, do you want to show yourself. There he is. Welcome David Michaela. The secret that everyone should know is that is that we're both English majors. That's true. That's true. So this is this is the English majors Eleanor Roosevelt. It is and David you've written several different books and biographies. I did control Schultz Schultz Schultz and peanuts biography and NC Wyeth biography. I did before we launched into to tonight's program. I took a moment to look at some of the reviews that this book has garnered. And I think it's, I think it's pretty astounding. But I don't think you just let me know why David I've known you for many years, but I mean, believe me. This is my praise. Here's Douglas Brinkley who's another fantastic historian who refers to your book is absolutely spellbinding people magazine says it reads like a can't put down novel. He's a great writer, he's a great writer, he's a great writer, he's a great writer, he writes in another incredible historian says it's a wonderful read with valuable lessons about leadership partnership and love. Gail Collins the New York Times says that it's a terrific resource and Michael Beschloss says it's a fresh, luminous gripping and beautifully written account of a great American life. What I see behind me is the room in which I sat well for 10 years but in which I worked imagining none of those reviews in fact imagining all of the opposite review and when some of those reviews appeared I thought, how it's sort of the ones that you on a good day maybe if, but never, never know and and there, there was nary a there was, there were they were they were all pretty unanimous and that never happened before so. Well, it's the other side of that so. I also remember very well, the process, and just how hard you worked, and for how long, and it wasn't easy, but you persevered, and, and we're, I'm tremendously proud of you for what that's worth. So, let's, let's jump in. You've written biographies on Charles Schultz and peanuts and I used to grow up with peanuts love peanuts and NC wise. Now, those are two very different people. And now we've got Eleanor Roosevelt. Another completely different person so what drew you to telling this particular story why Eleanor Roosevelt and why Eleanor Roosevelt now. The main, I think, thought that a person has when they see that there's a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt or documentary or something about Eleanor is to think a lesson is about to be given to me or I'm about to be told to eat my vegetables or some sense that we're about to do a lot of homework and it's going to get potentially very well, even dull in the sense that you're going to find yourself in the midst of a lot of information very quickly, you're going to maybe even be swamped by that information. And you're going to wonder when you get to the end did I really figure out who this person is, who is she really. That's what I set out to do I set out to write a book that would liberate Eleanor Roosevelt from the archives, which are massive in her case, from the multi volume biographies they can be they have been at Blanche reason cooks, multi volume biography was a wonderful, well researched, but long and complicated and I felt very strongly that the Eleanor Roosevelt that I had glimpsed in odd little ways along the way, which I can get back to you but all spelled somebody and something where the 21st century, absolutely needed a new version of Eleanor that would liberate her from the previous labeled heavily labeled Eleanor Roosevelt. We saw Eleanor as a feminist we saw Eleanor as Franklin's victim we saw Eleanor as a radical lesbian feminist we saw Eleanor constantly being labeled and put into into certain boxes that it seems to me, for a number of reasons, we're living in a time now where she needed to come out of all those boxes and off, take the labels off and present the woman present the person who would probably surprise most people in that they think they might know a great deal about Eleanor that you really get down into her life and personality and her traits and flaws and, and her, even her politics, you'd be surprised and that's so that's what I set out to do. And of course anybody will tell you who's ever researched or studied Eleanor Roosevelt or written about her, it's an insane impossible project putting her into one volume. There's just too much. But what you did, and I read it so I know. I mean before for me at least Eleanor Roosevelt someone I deeply admired, but more than anything else she was a symbol. And you, you made her you said I wanted to tell you about the woman and reading your book I find out who she was as a human being. So the other as you say multi volume biographies that you know, do that to a degree as well. But that was what one of the things that struck me is I really felt I started to understand this human being, not just the symbol of Eleanor Roosevelt that we all know. So, you know I think we're saying the same thing. So, having read it I'm going to probe some different areas. And the whole section her on her early life in particular with her with the tragedy of her father, and the love that she had for her father that could never be fully requited because of his own demons. How do you think, how do you, how would you discuss or describe how that changed her the loss of her father at that early age. Well, it went hand in hand with the tragedy of her, the long, the long lasting tragedy of her life which was the feeling of being unloved which started from her mother. And she was loved by her father her father adored her and she adored her father, very similar to the relationship in Dickens curiosity shop between little now and her grandfather, you know the sort of the child, the wise, caring child taking care of the careless and, and in so many ways Eleanor Roosevelt's relationship with her father informed and her responses to her father's struggles to his to his weaknesses to his disease to his way he responded to public shaming. So all of it carried over into a vision that she had of herself, which was as someone who could be loved and would, would be loved if she could serve if she could make someone feel that she was doing something for them that made her useful. The last role that she played, oddly when she, when she lost her father at the age of 10. She went on in her life for a number of years as she described it in her autobiography, creating what she called a dream story where she fantasize that her father was alive and that she and he were going on in life that they were going to go around the world together just as he had promised her that she was going to take care of him and represent him in the world that he, you know might be sick or that he might be not well that he had his weakness that she called his alcoholism, but that she would take over and that she would represent the native family in the world and that she would, they would together carry on. It was so similar to the relationship that she created with another Roosevelt, who had an illness that was polio and Franklin's case that was not visible to the world. It was so similar that it is a, it's almost chilling to see someone at the age of 10 or 11 in response to their life's tragedy, creating the vision of themselves in the future, and that she actually fulfilled. So, carrying on from that, from the start, Eleanor was surrounded by formidable women. Three in particular come to mind her mother, who called her granny, her teacher, Mademoiselle Sylvester, and her mother-in-law Sarah Delano Roosevelt. So picking up on the last question, what do you think Eleanor learned from these very strong women, each of them in turn. Well, I think that the main relationship of her life was with her. Well, main relationship of her life was with herself. Eleanor, everything Eleanor did in her life, you have to understand she did not do as a response to someone else. She was always herself and it's the one thing I discovered about her. I kept waiting for these women, her mother, Madame Sylveste or Sarah Delano Roosevelt, all extremely powerful forces in her life, to have shaped her in some way. Her responses to each is very telling. She learned that by trusting in herself, finding something in herself to trust, that she could strengthen herself by getting through the whatever experience, whatever challenge, whatever tragedy was facing her by absolutely locking in to what it was she had found out about herself and the experience. I think with Madame Sylveste, you have to sort of remember that it's a moment in the world where women being educated was seen as potentially risking their health. I mean their women's mental health might be might be harmed by three years in a boarding school outside of London with with with a group of other women from international backgrounds. Madame Sylveste was a large, extremely cultivated lesbian, theatrical, extremely self command commanding and self possessed human being who demanded of her young charges who are in the main from privileged families all over Europe and and a few from America that they use their minds that they become individuals that they trust their own thoughts long enough to find out who they were and to find out that they had something to say that they could respond to the world and that they could have opinions and that they must they must see the world as a place that they had a role to play in and instead of these instead of all the things that had been taught to them up to that point, which was exactly the opposite of all of that. She demanded that they that Eleanor in particular play a role and Eleanor played a role that was very typical of the roles that she played later and Albany in the state and the governor's mansion and the White House in her own career and as a humans activist, even she played the role of intermediary she went between people she went between worlds. She was a little like Gandhi that way she was the like Michael Corleone. She is the classic orphan, who is very comfortable in one world but can also go into the other and what she learned at Alanswood school was that she could go between the young women like herself but who all had different cultures and backgrounds, and listen, learn from them and take their issues and their requests and their needs to Madame Survest who she represented as a sort of, you know, sort of a junior counselor junior advisor junior and she was put in charge of the, of the girls medical needs, you know she would take care of girls through the winter time with different kinds of ailments and so forth. She went on trips with Madame Survest because she alone did not go home to the United States during summer vacations and so forth. She learned to travel she learned to be sophisticated and international. She learned that you could go somewhere on the spur of the moment, and suddenly throw your bags out the train window and stop because you had to see a famous novelist who was living in a small Italian village. You could suddenly talk to an artist about their conception of the Christ child in the painting or the idea of where God appeared in a, in a work of art. Things were radical, radically un, those were things that did not appear in her life in America and those did not appear in a young woman's life. She gained a lot of independence. She gained a lot of self confidence and it was all destroyed immediately on going home to a world where she was told now she would come out as a regular society debutante following in her mother's footsteps, but she entered rooms and places in her year as a debutante that were filled with extremely shaming older women her, her parents generation was out in her workforce and they all remembered Elliot Roosevelt's the headlines about Elliot Roosevelt's adultery his, his insanity his, his time in sanatoriums his alcoholism, his terrible, horrible tragic death on 103rd Street, jumping out a window living with a mistress. He had fathered a daughter, sorry, a son, illegitimately on a family made he, Elliot Roosevelt was the, the probably the most shamed man of his generation at the same time. As being Theodore Roosevelt's younger brother. And so, Eleanor had a lot to, to play down, and one of her initial motivations in life was to be good, you know, was to, was to prove to a world that thought of her mother and father certainly her father as bad that she was good and was good and so you hear a lot from out cousin Alice Roosevelt about Oh Eleanor you know she always tried to be good and she really wasn't well she had a real reason to want people to understand her as good and indeed she was I mean she, she went out of her way as a junior kid to go down to work in a settlement house there were only a few of these girls who would do this at the time. You know there, this was down in the Lower East side that there's there's prostitutes working the corners there's cops looking in the other way. There's no world of, of, you know, immigrants and, and, you know, street, what do you call them push carts and the whole, the whole crazy Lower East Side world, suddenly is place she's going two and three times a week to teach Italian children to use their bodies and how to be Americans and how do you do calisthenics and trust yourself long enough to, to say a few words and so forth and so on she brought Franklin Roosevelt down there. And so she made, she kept making these attempts at independence and, and self actualization and then thrust back through society and tribal rights into this world of stream restraint and and classiveness actually and where Sarah Delano Roosevelt comes in is is an important part of the story, but much more important is Franklin, as she met him as a young man with what he really changed her life. And they changed each other's lives of course, but he fell in love with the niece of the President of the United States, that's what Eleanor was and people looked upon her, you know it is a sort of he's the catch and she's the sort of slightly plain Jane, slightly buck to slightly no chinned. You know, fifth cousin well, oddly enough, she was very beautiful at the time because it's oddly enough I say that because you never people never seem to think of Franklin Roosevelt as an oddball. He was an extreme oddball. And in a way Eleanor was to and that was sort of the thing that really drew them together. It was sort of a compact of oddballs. He did not have an easy time at Groton school. No. And nor did he get into, you know, the club of his choice at Harvard. He was not accepted by his peers, and he was, he was looking for somebody to support the, the part of him that felt marked for greatness, and oddly enough he chose someone who felt marked. I mean, he, they were, they were a little doomed from the start in certain ways, and they found out on their honeymoon that their marriage was not going to support both of their hopes. It was sort of a complex already complex story by the time their honeymoon began. So this may be an unanswerable question, but it popped into my mind, which is, do you think they would their marriage would have lasted if Franklin had not contracted infantile paralysis polio. Yeah, you don't think they would have lasted. I don't think it would have lasted either. No, no, and everybody. For a time when Lucy Mercer, that is to say Eleanor social secretary in the 19 teens, early 19 teens when she was in now having five, six children in in 10 years and needed a social secretary finally to help her with all the Washington calling and so forth. Franklin fell in love with Lucy and when that became a story in the 60s 1960s that was known now and began to appear in various texts about the Roosevelt era. People began to think of that as the big story that had upset their marriage it did of course, and it changed the course of their marriage, but you're absolutely right to say the polio is the is the fulcrum on which all everything changed it changed it ensured, ultimately ensured that Franklin was by sheer fate, entering a campaign for presidency when he could actually win it, he would not have won, he would he was the vice presidential candidate in 1920 with James Cox and was thoroughly soundly beaten by the Republican, you know, landslide and and following a very conservative America that wanted normalcy after Wilson idealism and the First World War. So we had two Republicans, bang bang bang, all in a row and Franklin Roosevelt would, sorry, three including Coolidge and Hoover, and Franklin would not have done well in those elections number one number two, he would have been tarred with the Lucy Mercer brush, even if he had not married her Alice Roosevelt was already gunning for him. She made a remark typical Alice Roosevelt remarked, when Eleanor had in the 1924 governor's race created a car that had a large scale paper mache teapot on it to try to tie her cousin friend at TR junior who was running for governor to stop dome scandal, and Alice came back with, well I'd like to see Lucy Mercer on the on the on the hood of a car next time around. So you know that kind of thing would have come into play had Franklin not been pushed to the sidelines by polio. He, the sidelines kept him out of politics that would have not served him, but it also immunized him against it both exposed him to horrible net hateful rumors about his health and so forth and his in his ability to be president, he also immunized him against scandal and against, he had just actually been in the most horrible. One of the most horrible government scandals of the 20th century which was a Senate Republican committee had just been grilling Franklin Roosevelt the summer he got polio, summer of 1921. He is participation in his authorization as Secretary of the Navy of a dreadful scandal at the Newport Rhode Island naval facility, where they had gotten it in their heads, and Franklin was the was one of the key movers that that the sexual activity was affecting naval recruits, and should be rooted out of the surrounding the area surrounding the naval base. Franklin, okay to plan to have young naval recruits seduce local homosexual men, and it created just the most extraordinary. A committee that was inadmissible in court needless to say, etc, etc, horrible shameful acts on all sides, and Franklin was was grilled in front of a Senate subcommittee that, and the times because of the White Sox scandal the next day, a typical another typical break in his favor, Franklin Roosevelt's scandal broke the next day in the paper and became the front page story of corruption on the in the New York Times where Franklin's role in this was buried on page four by at off Oaks, Salzburger who had met Franklin and liked him I think and probably some of the reasons it was put on page four but it was a small headline but it did say, you know Franklin Roosevelt's guilty here and and he could have been all but finished. But finally, to your point, polio gave both Franklin and Eleanor after the storm of polio past and we know that from, you I mean, sunrise at Camp Bella is a is a sort of now somewhat creaky vehicle of the 50s, but it has some of the, some of the, some of it right some of its right in there and what's right is that Eleanor did pitch in with Louis how at that time to save her husband, and to ensure that his dream, which was his only dream in life his only goal his only motivation was to be president. And in a way he's a perfect president that way he to be president, or he saw the presidency as himself as president. And in a way that's what a president does have to have to do on one level. At any rate, the storm of polio enlisted the immediate drama on Camp Avello Franklin lost his faith he lost his belief in God he he lost his sense that he might even that he might. He really believed he would not survive that during that drama of two and three weeks, Eleanor and Louis how we're on the absolute front lines with him, and doing everything they could for good and for ill. In the, in the 10 years that then followed Eleanor Franklin were barely in the same house, Louis how was barely in the same place as Franklin Franklin went off on his own and had a second wife. In fact, in, in, in, in Florida on on his houseboat in warm springs, Missy Lehan became both with Eleanor's blessing and and to Sarah Delano Roosevelt's heart. And the hands on active woman in Franklin's life. And there was just no question that their marriage retained its structure as a, as the, as the, the housing for for their larger, both of their larger lives, which now took place in two separate colonies. And if they hadn't had that, they would have probably split apart, I would guess, because they're, there would have been very little to keep them together Franklin's Franklin's with the dream of becoming president kept them going until 1930, until the night of 19 November in 1932. And then the presidency itself, the longest serving president in US history, 12 years then and then right up to Franklin's death. So those two swings of everything up to the presidency and then the presidency itself created a partnership that as we all know now is one of the greats in American history. Did you ever find it challenging to, did you ever think to yourself as you were writing it Oh my God, I have to be careful not to write another biography on FDR. So many of the things that that you know Eleanor is reacting to world events that have to do with her husband they're driven by her husband. And yet you're trying to write a biography about Eleanor Roosevelt not Franklin Roosevelt I thought that that would be an interesting topic to explore. Well I had several horrors as did my wife, my wonderful wife Nancy Steiner. Some of the same horrors. I remember the day she walked into this room and said, wait, you're in the second world war right. And we both turned pale, white as I revealed that actually I really was still in 1924. And it was still a long way. He wasn't even governor yet and Eleanor had not yet even was just beginning to figure out politics. So there were moments like that. But to your point, one of the horrors for me was thinking I had thought to myself. I'm writing Eleanor, I'm not writing Eleanor and Franklin there's a lot of there's there's a book, a book came out while I was writing called Franklin and Eleanor. Yeah, that followed Eleanor and Franklin the famous portfolios winning history by by Eleanor's friend, Joe lash. Yeah, so I was just writing Eleanor and so that meant I could really just give Franklin kind of. I didn't. Well, the minute you get into the story of course you realize you, you, you not only have to understand Franklin and know him, but you also have to know a fair amount about his politics and about certainly about his life but his politics and so my idea when I first arrived at the FDR library in Hyde Park that I would be focusing on Eleanor's papers was soon, you know that that soon vanished I was suddenly, I was responsible for the things that I had to know about Franklin in response to Eleanor and through Eleanor but it's a it is you no matter what you do with it, no matter how you write it. It's a two, it's a two person. It's a, it's a, it's a multi, it's a multi task, because their partnership was inextricable. Inextricable and his influence on her as hers on he on Franklin is something that once you start to unwind it and parse it out, you see that is, you know, it's one goes without you can't have one without the other Franklin would not have been present with that Eleanor Eleanor would not have been Eleanor without Franklin and without Franklin becoming president. That's one of the things about the book David because to the on the one hand as you've just said, they had separate lives. I mean they were doing different things and she was, this is a cliche but she was his legs in a way. And he counted on her to be out there in the world in the country finding stuff out and coming back and reporting. At the same time, he respected her so deeply. And she knew how to talk to him didn't always get her way, but he listened to her he respected her. I mean, Franklin Eleanor and wasps of their generation were often stereotyped as being just sort of restrained and under restraint about things, you know they were portrayed often as being intolerant insert of certain things. And Eleanor Franklin struck me as and moved me a great deal actually about how much room there was in their marriage for differences, how much room there was in their marriage for for each respecting the other, allowing the other to be him or herself to her true or or his true self that they understood each other. I mean up to a point but they understood each other and knew when to press and when to leave well enough alone and and they always came back to a kind of. I mean, even when Franklin was president and Eleanor was writing her column and she would come to him with a with a column that was going to contain some fairly difficult issue. Maybe the lynching bill that was before Congress that Franklin was having a very difficult time with and she said I'm going to write this about about it. I mean, I hope it's going to be alright will it give you any trouble and he'd say no it's not going to give me you say what you have to say and if anyone objects I'll just say I can't control you and understanding between them they made he made a bit too much fun of her by today's standards. On the other hand, it was affectionate and it was loving. He could be a bit of a bully and there's always a bit of a sixth form groton inner grotonian in him who would come out and bully a little bit and especially at drinks time. There was a lot of issues with them with alcohol, their primary issue was about truth you know he was a, he was a sort of born deceiver. He knew how to get around and use people and use facts to manipulate things and to great effect by the way, at times and other times, she would very strongly object she was someone who could not stand to hear to hear lies she she had to hear the truth and you know in my sense of her being someone who felt marked and his being marked for greatness always made them both compatible with each other but at the same time they were really had different missions in life in terms of what they were looking for. So sometimes she wanted him to hear the truth, fully knowing that he might say to her, I can't do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. The one thing I always remember hearing about him is that you'd go in to plead your case with Franklin in the White House, and you'd leave thinking you'd, you'd won. You know, he had given you the impression that he was totally 100% with you, and it wouldn't happen. I mean, he wasn't. People would go in steaming mad and with a point to make and they would barely have started before he had just snowed them. He was very good Eleanor was very good at and she was sometimes the only one who could enter that situation with the president in charge and actually say, Franklin, you must see this. You must do this and there's that somebody you need that person. The person who's who's not going to be distracted. Now that's a huge point right there which is, I don't think that Roosevelt Franklin Roosevelt would have been anywhere near as successful without her. She was absolutely key. She's the iron frame on which you can stretch a great deal of your very limited ambition on certain things I mean he was very good on something. Franklin actually, we know now of course because of polio did care, he cared he cared to his essential mission as president was to make a better life for Americans he wanted that that was something he cared to do he cared about doing. Not unlike our current president in some ways I think it really a genuine had been a career politician really saw that helping people was what the job entailed and many different ways of doing it obviously and and and yet, I think this where they intersect she cared to. And this is not, there's not that many presidential couples where you really see that. And certainly not the scale that they were doing it and Eleanor changed the job. I mean, as, as no other first lady had done before, and some after but like a while it wasn't like you know it was steady practice after that I mean best true best Truman with all due respect wasn't going to be Eleanor Roosevelt. No, um, your, your book I think delves deeper into Eleanor same sex love affairs particularly with Lorena Hickok. And prior works on her did you was this something that you consciously set out to do. Well, I, I was aware when I began when you did the Google search and you write is George Washington and the next most asked word comes up and you know is George Washington alive or is your crazy questions that everybody asks, and at a given Eleanor's was is Eleanor Roosevelt gay and Blanche reason cook had done a great service to Eleanor to readers to us history by identifying as had been avoided by other historians Eleanor's passion and Eleanor's love life and that Eleanor could have a love life that included women. Now Blanche had her own version of this. And it was a strongly objected to by the older line. Roosevelt historians, various different reviews came out when Blanche's book came out outing Mrs Roosevelt everyone was upset that Blanche reason cook was calling Eleanor Roosevelt a lesbian. It, you know, this was something that I realized I was going to have to deal with in one sense which was. Why was it that, why was it that a lesbian would have a life in which if Eleanor Roosevelt was gay. Why does she have a life in which her later in her later life after her relationship with Lorena Hickock, why did she fall in love with men why was, why was there not another Lorena Hickock why was there not another. She had very close friendships with women, her friendships with women were inviolable in her life, but it didn't. None showed the same passion. None had the same history that she had with with Lorena Hickock. I felt that you had to read every single one of those letters and you had to read them with an open mind. Blanche reason cook set the set the stage for that and the and my ability to do that without making it be a scandal. I mean one of the hardest things in biography is to come across the truth of someone's life that doesn't really fit the story or doesn't fit the the history as we now know it and then reveal that it always tips everything into that one bucket. I mean that had been the Lucy Mercer problem everything got tipped into the Lucy Mercer bucket when that first came out. Everything was tipped into the Eleanor is gay bucket to the point where there was even you'll recall john, the, the somewhat imaginative story of J Edgar Hoover, and his relationship with Clyde Tolson, where Leonardo DiCaprio, and, and as as Hoover. The Eleanor Roosevelt's letters to Lorena Hickock appear in that movie as sort of the light motif of misunderstood people having non conformist relationships, really quite extraordinary that that kind of well that that reversal happened because Clyde Tolson and Eleanor and J Edgar Hoover would not have found anything in in so far as we know historically in Eleanor and Lorena my job to do what my job was was to let the reader come to Eleanor's discovery of her feelings for Lorena Hickock and for the eroticized and passionate and sexual parts of their relationship. Absolutely straightforwardly and allow the reader to figure out and understand it for him and him her or themselves to see this is an authentic relationship this is an authentic real relationship. This is an instruction of historians, saying, Oh, well we know this but we don't know that you couldn't, you can't read those letters without recognizing that this is a real love of relationship with with everything that entails. Yeah, it's that they are love letters. I mean, you know. Now were those letters in the public domain for decades. No, they had only been there for a short time I mean, not, I guess several decades by then yes, but they had been dismissed at first, and then they had been brought forward by Blanche reason cook in the 90s. By, you know, by the by the 21st century, they were sort of lying, you know, useful to people who came and wrote about for instance there were several books as I was researching about Eleanor and Lorena Hickock both fiction and nonfiction. It's, it is a very compelling relationship they're wonderful that together then they they create a wonderful sort of almost 30s sort of romcom like like narrative. And it has its serious sides to because Lorena Hickock gave up everything for Eleanor, and she plunged into the new deal and she taught Eleanor a great deal about how to be a reporter and how to become a columnist and how to how to go into a small village in, you know, in in West Virginia and begin to know people there and really care and understand and find in their voices. The issues that she could bring back and inform new deal administrators what was needed where and create creation of Arthurdale very much came the model homestead village came out of Eleanor's relationship with Lorena Hickock. So there was there was just there's a lot of dimension in that relationship that that is worth looking at and I think that people, when they begin to see Eleanor and Lorena doing all this together, you and then fighting and having their issues about Eleanor, suddenly not being able to spend time with her when when that's all they wanted in the beginning. It's, it's, it's story arc as a relationship is so familiar to all of us. It's a it's a relationship we've all had one way or another. And so it has a universality that's compelling. Did you was there is there a good feel like I can almost remember that there's a very good biography on learning to Hickock to. Is there something. Yeah, yeah, there's there's a there's the first biography of her is quite good and I actually thought the one done recently was Lorena and Eleanor was extremely good. Yeah, I think I might have read that was a while back wasn't it. Yes, might have been a while. Hang on. I think it was it was about 10 years ago yeah, or 20 years ago actually the first one yes. Yeah I think I might have read it when it came out. So, here's an interesting question, which is, talk about the contributions to society that were that that Charlie Carr got the credit for, but that Eleanor drove from behind the scenes. Well, I mean to me the most dramatic. It's not so much the credit for but when we think of December 7 a date that will live in infamy. We think of the President in the US House of Representatives in the joint session of Congress to clearing war. And you hear his voice and and it's the it's the it's the iconic moment of Pearl Harbor of our response to Pearl Harbor and our entry into World War two. That happened on December 8 at around 12 o'clock in the morning. The day before Sunday Pearl Harbor the day Pearl Harbor was attacked a Sunday. The day when America went into a panic unlike any scene in American history really with the possible exceptions I guess of periods during the Civil War there was some there were places where you see civilian panic. Eleanor Roosevelt was scheduled to go on the air on her normal radio program around six in the evening called over the cups a radio program sponsored by you know Maxwell house coffee and, and she sat down at the mic and very calmly. And therefore was the very first official voice to actually address the American people in the wake of the surprise attack of the Empire of Japan on our, on our naval fleet at Pearl Harbor, and let people know right away. What had happened, but more to the point and far scarier and far more starkly and candidly, then you can imagine certainly than would have happened in the last administration in our country. I'm very informed people that the attacks on American bases in Guam in the Philippines in Hawaii across across the Pacific that this was a much larger scale attack than we had even at very first reports heard that she focused on a small vessel that had a lumber on it that had been attacked by a Japanese plane or that was there were reports of such attack. She gave people a very clear picture without fear of the response and she then said look I trust. I trust that each of you has in you the strength to answer the call that's going to come now for all of us to pitch in together. It's really important that we keep our heads that we are in this together. I have sons who are in the in harms way in the she had, she had four sons who were to two of whom were in the three of whom actually were, were in the combat zone now, and she talked a little bit about that. And she wound up by essentially saying, I believe in you, you know, I we have the strength we are the free and unconquerable people of the United States. The message reach people just at the moment as you know as as night fell on on a nation that was terrified as troops suddenly surrounded the White House bayonets fixed, you know, overnight, everything changed and Eleanor was was right there. I never think of Eleanor in that moment but I truly believe that voice if you hear it. It's a wonderful YouTube. You can hear the sound of her voice. It's, it's Eleanor it's just pure Eleanor she was at that time the Office of Civilian Defense co director. She was therefore the first first lady to actually have a real job in the United States government. She was the director with New York Mayor LaGuardia and the very next day after going of course to Capitol Hill, and for the second time, hearing a US president with Franklin in the room is now he was the president. You know, a declaration they both attended Wilson's declaration of war where to sending us troops to make the world safe for democracy in the First World War. She was the second she was very freaked out she was actually sitting next to Mrs Wilson and just utterly awed by the, the parallels in her life is this was happening all over again and now she and Franklin were responsible they were in charge now. And off she went to write directly to the war zone she went to the West Coast she flew with LaGuardia. The plane, you know was, they had heard reports they were going to divert the plane, but no they drove they flew on directly to the, to to where the reports came from, and landed in Burbank and moved up the coast, you know, quelling rumors, visiting Japanese Americans. She did. Much more than LaGuardia who, who ran around looking for, you know, anywhere where a headline could be grabbed Eleanor quietly moved up the coast, meeting people, meeting a fit local officials, talking about blackout rules and and calming fears and, and making, making sense of what was just about to happen, and what people needed to do, and what the next thing to do was a sort of trope of, of the chaos of the last, you know, the five six years that I often heard was you know what would Eleanor Roosevelt do, it's sort of a, it's kind of a kind of a trope and I think that that's, she was proving in the moment of that crisis that you could trust what Eleanor Roosevelt would do and people listen to her and, and it's where her authority counted was when there was chaos, when there was, when there was no control, she brought a kind of authority that that came out of her own, her own experience. The only thing that she wasn't going to be happy about was the internment of Japanese Americans. And she was horrified as soon as that began to be a reality. And she joined Francis Biddle, FDRs Attorney General in warning him, Biddle very formally warned the president that that if he had 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans into concentration camps in Arizona, in deserts of California, across the country, 10 internment zones, 10 internment camps and all, that it was not just unjust and stripping Americans of their, their rights, not only was it inhumane, it was a horrible precedent to set. And indeed, of course, down to our own time, when, when children were separated from their parents at the borders and Attorney General Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions was, you know, looking for justifications and the last administration was looking at this was this, they pointed to Franklin Roosevelt. And it's a it's a it's a stain on Roosevelt's presidency is a stain on the United States. It's a stain in United States history. Eleanor saw it as such. You know, when you begin when you get into the deep underbrush of anti Japanese bigotry and racism and violence in California, leading up to the Second World War, growing out of the various anti immigration policies of the 1920s, especially the 1924 anti immigration act, when you begin to see the whole history of anti Japanese in racism and violence in California through the 1020 years leading up to Pearl Harbor. You really see it's a much bigger history, then then then is then just simply the Japanese sneak attack. So it's, in a way, it was inevitable I suppose, but Roosevelt could have and should have changed that course of that. And then and then more broadly on race David. Eleanor was so much more progressive and outspoken in terms of racial justice way ahead of her time versus her husband who simply wasn't. Can you talk a little bit about that more broadly. I mean, Eleanor and and and by the way on the Japanese internment, which was such a ridiculous word internment it's really the Japanese, you know, the concentration, the condemning of Japanese Americans, concentration camps Eleanor was sent by Franklin into one of the camps where where violence had broken out to to calm again and quell rumors, and there she went. So Franklin's history and Eleanor's history on racial justice was somewhat the same when they entered the White House, in that they were. It was not yet something they were at the vanguard of in any way at all up till 1934, really, as the New Deal got underway, there was a place for African Americans in the New Deal, but not a big one, and it only began to be as Eleanor, she expanded the role of first lady expanded her own role from a almost ceremonial visit to the slums of Washington the alleyway slums Washington DC of the District of Columbia. She began expanding her own consciousness and awareness to the degree that she was eventually a director on the NAACP board, but up until then from 3334 through 38 through 39. That was the person whom black leaders came to and brought their issues to, and she brought them into the White House she brought them. She was negotiating with the black cabinet she was negotiating with black leaders outside of the New Deal to bring issues in. So she was out conspicuously out front of Franklin on those things. She made bigger mistakes. She slow walked. He made bigger mistakes and he slow walked even more, his concerns come out of a complex, but very simple problem which is that a president interfering in a anti lynching bill supporting an anti lynching brought before the Congress in 1933 had to look at his own party which was dominated by Southern Democrats and say to himself if I want to get my program through. If he went against them. He was not just trespassing political in the politics of his own party. He was bringing back into the US into US politics the old canard about how racism in the south and how the Southern treatment of African Americans was a states rights issue. And so if Franklin Roosevelt or the president was going to do something that was going to change that that was the equivalent of a president in intruding in Southern politics on states rights on all the things that Southerners held dear. It was something he Franklin Roosevelt did not have the stamina for that it wasn't what he it wasn't how he was going to do his his agenda and it wasn't how he did his but it wasn't how he he solved or helped solve the depression it wasn't how he dealt with the second war. He had to leave it to Harry Truman to to segregate desegregate the army. Harry paid a price for that. Franklin didn't pay prices really often as president. He moved things around he he he he he manipulated and was a masterful politician packing in the Supreme Court that was that was another disaster. That was that was that was way too soon way too fast and couldn't possibly work. But I feel like with Eleanor what you see is somebody who who simulates what happened to a lot of people her age which was they they had to finally transcend their own selves, their own bigotry their own feelings, their own backgrounds in order to begin to come to awareness of the simple idea that whites could no longer go on treating blacks with complete impunity in the Jim Crow system, north and south, and that there was a new America that had to be born and Eleanor's direct leadership in certain things, the Marion Anderson concert were were the awareness of those things for white Americans, but it was it was a pervasively racist society was pervasively racist time. And she was, there was a moment actually the White House I always remember where the president CEO of American Airlines said to her something like a typical remark made by a white CEO to the first lady. Well, I see so many African Americans are blacks here tonight. You know, you would use the word at the time. Well, what are you trying to do have had get the entire have the White House be entirely all all all African American now is well known at the time that she had turned all the roles of servants into the White House staff. All of the White House staff all of the White House cooks, except for the head cook were all black this was something completely new. And was seen as a good thing at the time. So this guy was making a nasty remark about about the guests also and was sort of famous at the time that a famous apocryphal story that a Washington society that he was upset to find that her roommate was ahead of her on the line, going to shake the president's hand. In this case this guy's making this remark, and she turns to him and very, you know, crisply says, CJ. He has to be president for you, and for him, and for her and for them. He's all of our president. Franklin Roosevelt is everyone's president don't try to ever say that he's not going to be the president of African Americans. But people very would she put it very straight, but it was all part of a system that neither Roosevelt solved, and neither Roosevelt was in a position to ultimately do more than change as much as they possibly could. Not enough. But she was his conscience on a range of issues, including race. Yeah. Okay, now, David, I'm going to jump into some questions here. Here's one from Jen Hammerstein. What was the relationship between Eleanor and J Edgar Hoover. Well, Hoover despised Eleanor. And I think one of the measures of Eleanor's greatness or effectiveness is that Hoover's hatred of her was spectacular. This is the point where, if you look at Eleanor's FBI file, which is massive, you find in it every single thing that Eleanor any rumor every room every single tiny little shred of evidence was was stuck in the file, Hoover was so freaked out. And the reason she was so effective. And the reason he hated her so much was because she changed people. She got people to do things and one of the things she did was. She profoundly influenced the change in 1936 of African Americans from the Republican Party, where they had traditionally voted in the north. To join the Roosevelt coalition that put Franklin into the White House for a second time in a landslide, the famous landslide of 1936 Eleanor is partly responsible for. And more than that, a, and because of that, by 1938, a widespread belief very Q and on ish style belief had come into play that, of course, J Edgar Hoover was on the vanguard of investigating. And that was the idea that Eleanor clubs existed among African American household workers throughout the South, and that on a given command of Eleanor Roosevelt, all African American workers domestic workers would, and there be a list you know, would would create you desserts with their own excrement would would shove people into rooms and lock them, whatever the insane idea was, and these rumors were collected, rather lovingly by J Edgar Hoover, and kept because this is a man who hated for a living and hated and turned the United States into a place of hatred, suspicion and paranoia, and his, his, all of his efforts to discard Eleanor from, you know, a place of importance in people's lives and people's imagination went for not of course. And he also was quite nasty about her in in myriad ways as a woman as a woman. I began, you know, sort of making a file of them of my own, and it just got filled with some of the most ridiculous and nightmare stuff. The mark of Eleanor and the mark of her character always in these was that she never let any of it bother she just, she'd laugh sometimes, you know, or she become concerned if it was the Eleanor clubs were concerning, because it was, it was quite awful. And she widespread this notion and this belief that that Eleanor had some kind of control over the domestic workers on the south and she was worried for them that they would be, you know, people would be punished and hurt and there'd be counter strikes and counter violence and the as clan would take and you know, all of this is is to Eleanor's the part of Eleanor that that wanted things for people tried to get them and was desperately unhappy or afraid when when when people were threatened in in her name which happened a lot actually. Yeah. Okay, here's another one. Please comment on Eleanor's role in providing daycare for all the women working in factories during World War two women factories and World War two and Eleanor's initiative to provide daycare. Yeah, I'm afraid it's a subject that I don't have immediate. I don't have an immediate memory of exactly what she did, but I can imagine. So I'm not going to be able to answer that but I will say that a interesting thing to know about Eleanor's. Well, first of all her, her. She famously opposed the era. And people always wonder why is it. How is it that Eleanor Roosevelt did not want equal rights for women. And the reason is because she was part of a generation, especially before the first World War and into the decades where when a legislature decided that yes widows and widows should get a certain kind of benefits or women who are single should only have to work in factories this many hours. She, she was part of the generation Francis Perkins was another who fought hard to get women. There was no rights and labor to get women's rights in various things where, but it was, in a way, a kind of dependence. In other words, only if you were a widow would you get that benefit only if you were a single woman. You know in the factory, would you get this and what the era meant was that if women women were suddenly going to be equal in every way to men and all those benefits that they had worked so hard and and and rights and privileges and and safeguards were so I'm not sure exactly what the what the World War two daycare issue was but she often saw how if you get a specific thing for for women, it will be messed with if it's not guarded if it if that right itself isn't guarded and it was typical kind of the way she would get very granular on these things. Another question, David about FDR is anti semitism and how Eleanor dealt with it and Eleanor's own feelings. Well, I mean it's a complicated only complicated one sense which is that two of their two of their lifelong friends, the Morgan thoughts, Henry and Eleanor Morgan thought taught Franklin Eleanor Roosevelt, a great deal about secular Judaism about what a Jewish family in three generations in American public life goes through and is thinking about. But essentially Franklin Roosevelt and and Eleanor but Franklin in particular, I don't suspect had a strong in any sense strong sense of anti semitism I don't think there was a. There was not, there was no hatred of Jews in the life of Franklin Eleanor as adults, what they had as younger people was a class and systemic anti semitism that was coming out of a sense social sense that was culture had of superiority and a continual an ending sense of belief that their class was the ruling class. And yes the, the Jews of Fifth Avenue could become the our crowd Jews and run the banking world and so forth and so on, but they still would declare themselves somehow socially preeminent. And that's really the, the sadness that that you see in. Eleanor, I mean, Eleanor shed that, but she retained a great deal of feeling about what it felt like, I think, out of her own life and where she had been an outsider. And she had understood what it felt like to be an odd ball and what it felt like to be shamed and kept apart and so forth. It was something she replaced, I think, quickly, but it certainly exists in her writing in her in her early days, partly to please her mother in law, partly to go along. You see it in the theater Roosevelt family at the time as well, and their writings and letters, you see it in a lot of people's letters, and you see it in Franklin's. You see it in his attitudes, but you don't see it so much in his letters, although there is a sense I think I find much more I found in my own research in Franklin's life. He had a very peculiar idea about the Pacific and the Pacific Rim and about different sort of almost eugenicist wacky idea about about and nasty and racist idea about about Asian people and different kinds of, of nationalities and that's where I think Franklin had a peculiar coming out of his mother's life in the Far East in her childhood, but I don't find any semitism in their adult lives in any significant way. So, now the final question. Eleanor would outlive Franklin by over a quarter century, and do many amazing things after he after he died. Talk to us about the Eleanor of those years up to up to 1962 when we lost her and how she evolved after her husband died. Well she went over to London right away at Truman's behest as the first among on the first delegation of American delegation to the United Nations as it in its second meeting. And she very clearly took a lead role as a presence as a as a person who represented the best of America represented we were in a new position in the world. We were at our zenith in certain ways. She played a role in the in the United States relationship with Russia that only she could have played. It was very tough. She was very tough. She actually had more of her uncle in her in those years than you would have imagined. She said very clearly how good it felt to be free to speak her own mind and she did speak her own mind. She also was very diplomatic and very careful about shooting the line of the State Department not always to good effect, and sometimes in ways that compromise her larger goals. But what she kept the prize that she kept her eye on was a world in which the value of a single human being the value of you of me, our lives as individuals were undefined in the aftermath of World War two. The presence of an atomic weapon in our hands and then in the Soviets hands meant that we would all be annihilated at the stroke of a of the push of a button. But more than that the war had stripped away the idea that human beings that a human being might have rights if you could wipe out 6 million of Europe's Jews. But what couldn't happen now, it must never happen again, World War two must never happen again. In order for that to happen, we had to understand what what the value of a human being was. And she sat about with the United Nations defining that idea that a human being, each of us has value, and that we have rights and that the idea of human rights was born of the Second World War and born of the idea that we, we could never have another war that would do what the Second World War did. And in that sense, her legacy is a universal one. She took always the idea that the individual was the preeminent burden of government that that your government belongs to you that it owes you the your rights to pursue happiness to have a life to have liberty. And you must give back something for that. And I think that reciprocity that idea that the United States itself is a, not just the government is not just about institutions but is about as a community is about how we treat each other about the reciprocity of Americans for each other, in our own reciprocity in in a world community, all of those basic ideas coming out of the individual into the community, a community of local of state of national of, of international, all those ideas of community I think you hear all the time today in the way people describe and talk about community, and they come from a kind of place that Eleanor would approve of and I think was her legacy which is, which is of reciprocity and of understanding that we are in this together, we can't do it alone. Yeah. David, what a wonderful hour. Thank you so much and folks, if you haven't read Eleanor, read it, tell your friends about it. It's essential reading and I'm so proud of my old friend for writing it and your eloquence and your insight. We're outstanding David. Thank you. Not about it, not not to butter you up but you've made a community here and the Bedford Playhouse community is one I value enormously so this is really a joy for me to be doing this with you and for our community and for and for, you know, the, the thing that you've done here which is create a really wonderful place I mean we'd all be applauding you right now as well and so thank you. Well soon enough we'll be back in that place to be announcing that soon, but it'll be nice to be able to do this on that stage with you and we'll do it again. And I know I'll see you soon so thank you so much. Thank you all for coming and we'll do it again sometime soon. Take care everybody. Good night everybody. Bye.