 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestor lands of the N'Koch tank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this forum examining the life and legacy of Eleanor Roosevelt. Few individuals had as dramatic effect on 20th century history both in this country and abroad than Mrs. Roosevelt. And we are proud to partner with the Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library and the Concord Museum on this evening's discussion. No scholar knows more about our subject tonight and has spent more time examining her papers than Elita Black, the editor emeritus of the Eleanor Roosevelt papers project and former research professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University. Professor Black is recognized as a leading expert on Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and has written and edited 10 books as well as a variety of articles on women, politics, and human rights policy. She has also curated exhibits on human rights for presidential libraries and other renowned repositories and has received awards from three universities for her commitment to students and her teaching. She currently also serves as a senior advisor to former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The spark for this evening's forum is a new biography by David Mikolas titled Simply Eleanor, which is now out in paperback. This is the perfect biography for our times writes Walter Isaacson, the story of a determined woman who willed herself to become the voice for the voiceless, a fighter for freedom and a tribute to the nobility of America's true values. This comprehensive biography of Eleanor Roosevelt filled with new information portrays her in all of her glorious complexity. It's a wonderful read with valuable lessons about leadership, partnership, and love. David Mikolas is the bestselling author of Schultz and Peanuts in NC Wyeth, which won the Ambassador Book Award for Biography. Since we are partnering with the Concord Museum, let me note that this is a bit of a homecoming of sort as David is a proud graduate of Concord Academy and has traversed the shores of Walden Pond and the trails on which British regulars marched on April 19th, 1775. It is a pleasure to welcome tonight's moderator back to the National Archives. Tom Putnam is the former director of the Kennedy Library and served as acting director of the Office of Presidential Libraries before he chose to abandon the 20th century having been wooed by the siren song of Concord's reformers, transcendentalists and revolutionaries. He's a close friend and we are pleased that he has spearheaded this partnership with the National Archives and the FDR Library. As you may know, the National Archives administers the network of presidential libraries from Herbert Hoover to Donald J. Trump. Frankly, the Roosevelt Library was our first. We now have 15 libraries in total, more than 660 million pages of textual records, 640,000 museum objects. I'd like to express my appreciation to our colleagues at FDR and throughout the presidential library system who work tirelessly to provide access to the documents that define us as a people. I was pleased that in David Miklis' acknowledgement, he calls out and I quote the Roosevelt Library supervisory archivist Kristen Carter and her superb team, including Matthew Hansen, Sarah Nevins and Patrick Fayy. He notes that in the stacks at Hyde Park, Mrs. Roosevelt's papers rise 889 cubic feet, more than a million documents, their content traversing no fewer than nine ages of world history, from the Victorian age to the space age. Let me close with these words from the new biography. Luckily, Eleanor Roosevelt believed in protecting and guaranteeing individual freedom. Nothing could have forged a greater trust with her future biographers, scholars and historians than the counter-intuitive measure of making her personal and professional papers available for all to study. I thank you all for joining us this evening as we explore the life and legacy of Eleanor Roosevelt with his story in Alita Black and biographer David Miklis. And I'm so pleased to be sharing this virtual space with an old friend Alita and a new acquaintance David, who until this moment I'd only know through written words first via our recent emails and more importantly this wonderful new biography which I really enjoyed reading over the past few days. I should note that it's just out in paperback and truly no guest would better say Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or New Year to your loved ones than this wonderful new biography. And meeting it, I realized I've actually organized a number of forums and attended them with Alita and others on Mrs. Roosevelt, but I had never had the time to read a cradle to grade biography, so I thank David for that opportunity. And I thought for the next 16 minutes we'd try to do the same, which of course means we're going to have to skip over a large swath of her life and parts of the book including some of the most really interesting personal stories, which I fear we couldn't do justice to in this short conversation, but I hope that it piques your interest and leaves you wanting more so you'll go out and buy the book. There's also a possibility that our discussion will be aired on C-SPAN and I'm hoping that we will appeal to both those of you who know a lot about Mrs. Roosevelt and to those of you who this may be your first introduction. So we'll promise to try not to assume too much information and I also hope to fill in some of the blanks here and there with direct quotes from the biography, which is superbly written. David is an artist who paints with words and I wanted to share a few of his turns of phrase this evening here and there as part of my question. And lastly, we've selected a few photos from our colleagues at the Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library in Museum, but since our conversation is going to be organic, forgive us if as we go through some of those images they don't always immediately match the moment to which we're talking but you'll see the span of Eleanor Roosevelt's life before you. So David, it's a cradle to grave biography. Let's begin talking about her childhood. I think we'll see a few images. You quote her in the book as saying, quote, I was brought up in a rather peculiar way and just in terms of your fun turns of phrases, I thought I would you describe her father as someone who lived in his brother Teddy Roosevelt's shadow and quote, took a connoisseur's pleasure and victimized unfulfillment and then Eleanor became her father's caregiver and quote, showed herself uncannily gifted at responding to each fresh hurt. So anyway, tell us a little bit about it briefly as you can about her childhood and your relationship to her mother and her father. Well, the childhood we know that Eleanor lived through is the childhood from hell that would be in a Victorian novel or in an adventurous story about a lost girl, the girl the limber lost. Eleanor was a oddly adult child because her parents were oddly childlike adults. One of the connoisseur of unfulfillment notion in Eliot Roosevelt is really that not just that he's failing to live up to his brother Theodore Roosevelt, but they both had a father who was a great philanthropist known as great heart to the family. He would be pretty hard to live up to by anybody, but Eliot was falling down very quickly having no real purpose in life. There was no place for him. He wasn't finding a way to prove himself. He didn't go into politics. There was no war. He was a very uncertain guy. I personally think he was suffering from all kinds of self-medication problems, but those turned into alcoholism quickly. When he married Anna Rebecca Hall, it was a pretty, it was a last ditch effort to get himself right. And he was determined when he married her to do right, but very quickly they both discovered, both of Eleanor's parents discovered that they weren't very good at being parents. And partly they didn't know anything about it. And they also were very concerned in their individual ways. Anna with the Hall family, her family, once powerful and rich in New York had fallen down. They were marginalized by the great new fortunes. She wanted to be a kind of intermediary between the Asters and between the old Nickerbocker families. And she was in some ways actually a kind of original model of a diplomat. She was a society lady who was bringing together the old 400 with the new 4000. And she was a smart but absolutely dysfunctional mother. And she put Eleanor under a severe pressure of never living up to her expectations. Her father on the other hand, Eleanor's father, adored her. However, he was falling down drunk almost from her earliest days. She never stopped trying to impress and fulfill his wishes for her as a horsewoman, as a hunter, as a woman who was in charge of herself. I think he gave her a sense of Roosevelt confidence that he himself was losing fast. It all fell apart very early in her life. She lost in 19 months her mother to Diphtheria, an older brother, an older younger brother, and then her father to alcoholism. She was there and all up begins the story of her life as a morphine. So let's turn to happier times. The leading and we have to do this so quickly. This is kind of a priceless moment where she becomes kind of perhaps, she attends the Allen's Wood School in London and comes under the influence of headmistress there, Marie Sauvestre, who, David, welcomed each new pupil of the question, why was your mind given to you, but to think things out for yourself? Tell us more about her time at Allen's Wood School. Allen's Wood School was outside of London. Oh, sorry, David, that's going to be for a lead-in. Oh, I'm sorry. That's okay. Wonderful, sorry. If there's one person in her life that I wish I could have met, it would be Marie Sauvestre. She was a force of nature, a Bolshevik, a self-proclaimed Bolshevik that Eleanor described as a Bolshevik. But she challenged Eleanor to do one thing, that as an historian and as a teacher, I've tried to emulate and which I think was the defining thing that Eleanor learned in her life. And that is you can never know what you think until you can argue the opinion of your fiercest critic with equal integrity. When Eleanor went to Allen's Wood, she was delighted to be out of a home that she found lonely and scary as our great friend Blanche Cook notes. She had locked, put on the inside of her bedroom doors. We know that her uncles also had alcoholism problems and loved to take pot shots out of the family home. And she only really felt safe when she crawled up in a cherry tree. So Allen's Wood to her was the place where she could be Eleanor. And she blossomed there in a way that was truly remarkable. I mean, she became the most popular girl in the school. She was elected captain of the field hockey team. And Eleanor says the happiest day of my life was when I was elected captain of that team. So she's finally seeing that she's got a brain, that she is free to move, that she can have friends in her own right. And Mademoiselle Schubert sees in Eleanor this spark of greatness, if you will. She moves Eleanor to her dining room table. They have dinner together every night. They argue the great issues of the war and the world. They argue the Boer War and Eleanor writes a friend one night. I finally learned that I have a brain. I have argued the Boer War with Mademoiselle and I have one each time. So how does this help Eleanor become Eleanor? Eleanor doesn't want to go home. I mean, she is elated to be at Allenswood. And so she asked to stay during the summers. And Mademoiselle says to her basically, of course you can stay, but you must learn to be independent. You must learn to live on a budget. You must learn to make your own reservations. You must learn to speak the language of the communities that you visit and most of all, you must remember that you are a guest in these communities. So while you go to the opera and the museums and the stores and the fine restaurants, you have a duty. You must volunteer in hospitals. You must volunteer in settlement communities. You must learn to see the cities in all of their complexity and wholeness. And Eleanor revels. I mean, she's there so much to cut the story short is that she wants to stay and teach there. She wants to teach history and civics and English literature at Allenswood. And Teddy becomes president. She's got to go home and make her debut, which she does not want to do. Mademoiselle says to her, of course she must go home. You are a Roosevelt. But she writes Eleanor a letter that Eleanor carries with her basically for the next 50 years. Which is why Mademoiselle's she best picture is in Eleanor's bedroom in every residence that she has. And the letter basically says, of course you must go home and be a Roosevelt. Your uncle's in the White House and you have family responsibilities. But also remember first and foremost you are my Eleanor. And you can make your own way in this world. David, you have this lovely image. When she's leaving New York, she's with her aunt, her aunt wants them to ship. The aunt wants to go to her birth. So Eleanor isn't able to see the Statue of Liberty when they leave New York Harbor and you have this lovely quote. Eleanor Roosevelt was soon to discover more of herself than she had ever known under the torch of a mighty French woman with radical visions of liberty and justice. So maybe you say a word, too, about Marie Souvest. And then finish Elida's point and bring her back to the United States and what happens when she comes back. I think Elida really did it beautifully. Did the whole of Marie Souvest. I would just add that I think Marie opened up a part of Eleanor that we have to remember women's education at the time was thought to be potentially hazardous to women's health. The idea that you must think for yourself, that you must figure out how to argue, even a contrapuntal point of view, all absolutely true. I think she also, there's a scene on a train where they are going on one of the holidays where Eleanor can't go home and Marie Souvest suddenly realizes that her great friend, a novelist, is living in that town, decides on the spur or has decided that they're going to get off the train, but Eleanor doesn't know this. She thinks that their bags are booked through to two stations down and suddenly Marie Souvest has things going out the window. She's, we're off the train. Eleanor's sense of spontaneity, which was so crushed by the expectations of Edwardian womanhood, was suddenly opened up. And I think that going home, she took home to America an odd thing that I noticed in her settlement work, which is Eleanor was so exposed by Madame Souvest, Marie Souvest to Italy, to seeing Italy with her own eyes. She was sent out by Madame Souvest into Florence, into towns, walking the streets alone. This was unheard of to be walking the streets alone at the age of 18, 19. Eleanor saw things with her own eyes, experiencing, she at one point was even living in the, they were living in the home of an artist. That was unheard of. She was talking with, with the artist about his representation of the Christ figure. She was, she was doing analysis. She was doing critical thinking. She was thinking for some, when she got back to the United States, one of the bonuses of being her age, doing what she was doing, which was this horrible process of coming out, the debut of a young woman into society. Fortunately, the junior league just then had begun its own participation in the settlement movement. This is a movement that had begun in England through Chicago, through the Hull House, through Jane Adams, coming to New York, in which the idea is essentially you make yourself a friend of the community. You are, you live in the community. It was essentially college kids really. Eleanor and the junior league girls were, were pretty advanced. These were college students who were, who were embedding themselves in communities. And in Eleanor's case, it was down to Rivington Street, down to Lower East Side Manhattan, twice a week on the subway, an unheard of liberty, an unheard of, it was scary. It was scary. It was bold. And one of the things she noticed as she, as I saw it in her own writing, was that as she taught young Italian children how to move in calisthenics class, how to be American citizens, she knew that what she had to do was get them away from their Italian mothers long enough to listen to another voice, to an American voice. Italian mothers were incredibly protective. She knew this from, from Italy. They were incredibly protective of their young daughters, especially Eleanor, walk children home. She brought Franklin Young, Franklin, cousin Franklin Roosevelt down to the Lower East Side to see what it looked like when you walk somebody back to their door, back into their, into their tenement building, what the conditions there were, how, and Franklin Roosevelt had never seen like it, how could people live like this, he said to her. She was absolutely crucial to his understanding that there was another world. This wasn't just club, you know, philanthropy or club, you know, activity. This was real stuff. This was the real thing. And she took to it in a way that you, you don't see among the others in her group, in her peer group at the time. But she had to come out, but she had to do these other things. This, however, was her first glimpse of what multiracial, pluralist democracy looked like in a world where only corrupt politicians of Tammany Hall and others like it were in charge. Alita, explain a little incongruity for me again. There was news to me in the biography that she wasn't a supporter of women's suffrage. We're doing this in connection with an exhibit that we have up on the 19th Amendment. Explain what was going on there. Well, I'd like to piggyback on what David said as a segue to answer that if I could, Tom. I mean, one of the things that Eleanor learns in the settlement world is to not act like her friends, who thought that if they put a picture on the wall, life would be better. And the reason that she learns this is she becomes involved with immigrant union organizers. And they take her under their wing, both covertly during this time and overtly later, to really show her the horrors of the Triangle Shirtways factory fire, the horrors of the tenements where there are feces on stairwells, where you have to step over buckets of urine in order to enter people's rooms, and whose rotted food and human waste were thrown outside their windows on the street. And so she sees disease. She sees famine. She sees women literally chained to sewing machines. And so her whole focus is on protective worker legislation. And so her energy will begin in Rivington Street for her lifelong commitment to the living wage, her lifelong commitment to what we will call the Fair Labor Standards Act, her lifelong commitment to welcoming immigrants in ways that value their own cultures while trying to expose them to democracy. Against that backdrop, suffrage is not a priority. Her priority is sanitation. Her priority is a living wage. Her priority is food. Her priority are clean places to live and public education. So she does not embrace the suffrage movement because she is committed to progressive reform. That does not mean that she was opposed to suffrage. It just means she didn't prioritize it. And then once FDR is campaigning to be vice president, and he thinks, oh my God, I got to come out for suffrage, then she will move in that direction to support him and then dedicate her enormous organizing talents to organizing New York State precinct by precinct in a way that had never been done before. So much so that when the ward boss of Chicago, Richard Daly, who would become mayor, he sent his staff to look at how Eleanor would organize the state. Well, again, I have to zip us through this history. So Alita's just brought up Franklin Roosevelt. So David, why don't we, you have a lovely line that she saw her marriage to Franklin as an opportunity to quote, banish forever the bad story of her parents by putting virtue and virtuous husband in her own. From now on, wrote Eleanor a certain kind of orthodox goodness was my ideal and ambition. So talk about her meeting Franklin Roosevelt and their marriage and what that marriage was like. Well, Franklin was her fifth cousin, and they met on a train one summer day on a train going upriver. Heed a hard park and she to her grandmother's house at Tivoli, where as Alita has already referenced, there were blocks on the inside of her door to protect her from her uncles, who had once been charming young men around town, tennis champions and so forth now, predatory alcoholics who were dangerous and scary, and Eleanor's life in her grandmother's house, both at Tivoli but in town as well, where she lived during her coming out period and just after. At the time she met Franklin was chaos. It was pure chaos. It was not knowing where she lived, not knowing what her future would be, where she was even going to go really. Franklin's life was settled and solid, and it was backed by a mother who with Franklin created a couple that Eleanor attached to in a sense. They were, I think of them as a compact of oddballs simply because Franklin was an oddball. Eleanor was odd in that she was left out. I think of her as being ghosted by the Roosevelt's. Her own family was discontinued as one of her cousins. Roosevelt's cousin said, there was no mother, there was no father. There was her younger brother, Hall, on whom she doted and whom she took a parental role, with whom she took a parental role to the point where she, when Hall went off to boarding school, she was the parent who went off and presented herself on parent's weekend. But other than that, Eleanor had no center in her life in terms of family. Franklin was not just a center, he was a sun god. Off of him came a kind of certainty, a confidence, a belief in himself that had been born out of a Hudson Valley childhood in which he was the sole child, the sole heir to James Roosevelt and Sarah Delano Roosevelt. He was as much in his mother's eyes a Delano or more than he was a Roosevelt, which meant that he had a certain, there was going to be always a Delano in her life and Franklin was always going to be in his mother's life. Eleanor had a place in it, but tangentially. And I think she understood Franklin as being an odd duck because he had not been popular among his peers. She saw him as something of an outsider. She also saw him as a little like her father and he was charming and he was lovely and he made the world a happy place for her when they were finally not secretly engaged, but truly engaged. They married on a St. Patrick's Day and Teddy Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Uncle Ted, the president of the United States came to New York on various missions to speak to hibernian societies and so forth and gave Eleanor to Franklin in a sort of preposterous old-fashioned tribal wedding as the Irish paraded outside and the old Nicarbaca families that the Roosevelt's were still very much a part of, all gathered under this sort of double-sided mention of one of Eleanor's cousins. And they were a power couple, seemingly. I think Franklin, it's really important to remember that Franklin's attraction to Eleanor had a great deal to do with the fact that she was the niece of the president of the United States, a president and a figure that he idolized as did so many men of his young men of his generation, Theodore Roosevelt was not just the president of the United States, he was something new in the world. He had a world view, a global view of America and its participation in the Far East, in South America, in so many ways that we're going to get us into terrible trouble as a country, Theodore Roosevelt was shaping a world that Franklin Roosevelt very much wanted to not just be part of but to emulate and to mimic. And I think marrying Eleanor was a fast ticket for a guy who when he at Eleanor's side appeared at one of Theodore Roosevelt's inaugurations, was marked down in the newspaper as Franklin B Roosevelt or no one really knew who this young cousin was from upriver, Eleanor was along with Alice Roosevelt her cousin Theodore's oldest daughter far better known at that moment when they got together. Their honeymoon, two longest story to go into but simply to say it was right out of a if discovering that he had married the niece of the president was a sort of citizen cane moment for Franklin, now my destiny will be fulfilled he in coming down with hives on their honeymoon in doing what he wanted to do not so much what they wanted to do in dominating her in a certain kind of way that was to say I'm going to do what I want to do and you'll follow me suggested that they were not as well matched as they might have seemed to people in fact it was going to be a marriage of unfulfillment and I think they discovered it to both of their shock on the honeymoon and pretty quickly as children began to appear it was clear that their marriage was going to be a complicated relationship that was dominated by his mother and by the old expectations of the old world that both of them didn't really have a place in and both wanted to emerge from quickly let me stick with you David I'll give you a couple of quotes and then maybe you could tell us we're going to really have to fast forward maybe quickly tell a Lucy Mercer story for those who might not know it similar to what you were just saying as a couple they were foils Eleanor an old young woman married to an eternally young man he endured her seriousness and intensity as she endured his franks and swordplay for Franklin the princely boyish world of his upbringing remained a source of entitlement his whole life he was not intentionally unkind but he could be cold his sense of thumbs was often cruel just one more quote she is addicted to frankness that would the headlines across the nation observed later a Washington columnist you wrote her husband's first instinct was to tell a partial truth he was a bender of facts and so wholly trusted his own trickiness that he believed no one would catch on maybe just briefly tell us that she does catch on and what does she discover about Lucy Mercer this is Lucy Mercer was a young woman in Washington from a similar background an alcoholic father and a very social mother they too had sort of fallen down and Lucy got a job with Eleanor as Eleanor's personal secretary when Eleanor had mastered the trade of political wife she was extremely good at sorting out all the different Washington games and functions that a politician's wife Franklin was about the fifth most powerful in the under cabinet she was in an important spot as assistant secretary of the Navy Eleanor as his wife was very much in charge of what she was doing and did it very well but it also was overwhelming and as another child was on the way in 1914 as she was pregnant in 1913 Lucy came into the household and almost immediately Franklin lost his heart to her it was a relationship that took place over a number of years and we can see it the United States is in the war and Franklin is consumed with war and the Navy Department and as Eleanor is herself now about to be consumed in her own contribution and education from the war in the Red Cross Army Quentin Lucy Mercer and Franklin had a relationship a love affair that Eleanor discovered by accident when Franklin returned from Europe from a Navy Department trip to the front he was suffering from the symptoms of a flu Spanish flu no doubt from the troop ship he was on and in his luggage was a packet of a parcel a number of we don't quite know how many or what it quite looks like but some number of letters she came across in his suitcase that was made quite clear that he had that is Lucy and Franklin had both lost their hearts to one another and that a new relationship was going to have to be forged if Eleanor and Franklin were going to move forward FDR could not have gotten divorced and kept his standing as the politician he was and that he wanted to be and Lucy Mercer was not the iron frame on which to stretch his life his mother made this very clear to him I think he knew this anyway Eleanor to stand up to my mom Lucy Mercer would have been a divorced it would have been marrying a divorce man would have been marrying a Catholic it was not something that was going to work in the politics of the Democratic Party at the time although when Franklin did run as Vice President as soon as 1920 he ran with a divorced candidate Mr. Cox but if FDR was to be who he was to be with Eleanor Eleanor had to be at the heart of his life and he knew that I think his mother knew this his mother was absolutely not in favor of a divorce and she was very much in favor of Eleanor and I think they both formed at the time Eleanor and her mother a bond that sorted out certain things about how the relationship was going to move forward and I don't think I don't think as significantly and I don't think I'm very curious about Alito's point of view but my sense is that polio itself and the rearrangement of their lives after polio is far more important than the rearrangement of their life post Lucy Mercer I may switch a slightly lovely quote in the book Alito David says marital resentment can have the effect of turning people inward and selfish Frank and Eleanor turned outward the more disappointed they were by each other the more readily they took on the problems of the world so if you want to respond to what David just said and then maybe you can talk your focus has been really on her focus of the problems of the world maybe you can comment on that well I think David is an extraordinary writer I think he's put his heart and soul into this book I think we should all read the book this is my third conversation with David where I have beat the desk saying go buy the book I have to say there's some major disagreements that I have with David and one of the major ones is that Franklin A was ready to do anything when he got married he was a dandy boy I mean this is a man who was mocked by politicians this was a man who couldn't even give a coherent political campaign speech and Eleanor had more of an engaged, active career than Franklin did and so Eleanor where I think what David and I totally agree on is that to define Eleanor Roosevelt by Lucy Mercer is to define I don't know Christmas Tree by the Grinch I mean it's just it's not there and what happened I think is that Eleanor loved being in Washington not because of the social duties she hated that that's why she hired Lucy what she liked about Washington was being able to work with the organizations not the junior league but the international working women's league the international committees and cause and cures of war and what she ended up doing was learning how to manage the household how to welcome politicians in Albany how to welcome wheelers and dealers in Washington but not leave the conversations other wives left Eleanor stayed so that by the time Lucy hits Eleanor feels betrayed not just because Franklin is her husband but that she has sacrificed so much of her independence to try to make this work so that when they come back together it's a remark I think it takes remarkable maturity to pull this off for parents and school age teachers I look at the Roosevelt marriage at this point as a Venn diagram they have their they have their separate lives and then they have the time they're in the middle and what's in the middle is bad Velcro was super grew on it the marriage disintegrates when that Velcro in the middle you know collapses and there are two things that do that I think first of all is when Louis Howe dies in 1935 Blanche Cook is absolutely correct and the second thing that really rips it apart is Harry Hopkins whom Eleanor brought into the White House who really supported when FDR turned on him and when Heck turns on him when the war comes and Hopkins says goodbye to the new deal and becomes the associate assistant president to FDR there is no center and they began to figure out how to live distinctly separate lives in the same institution and one point I think that that is very important and David makes this point Blanche makes this point Jeff Ward makes this point I make this point after polio the Roosevelt's never spend six months a year together they are always more apart than they are together she's traveling he's traveling and so they figure out how to coexist in a way that gives them the space to become the people they become and I think that is I don't know the word for it the most immense contribution to America in its most perilous time than I can think of imagine the Great Depression without Eleanor Roosevelt imagine World War II without Eleanor Roosevelt because without Eleanor there would not have been FDR in the White House we're running so short on time let's have David, why don't you talk about her years especially her public role and then I'm going to have Alita talk about the post presidential years but David give us a word or two about what she meant to the country during those years in the White House and how she communicated with the country I'm going to quote Alita because Alita said something quite wonderful about women in the White House which is that the White House eats women and Eleanor the White House was never the same for women women were a part of a Eleanor was a proxy she was a proxy for people where people came to the president Eleanor came to you I think one of the most important things she did right away was that she made the First Lady a mobile separate part of the institution her if you were in the middle of this country in June of 1933 and life seemed pretty bad and you heard overhead a plane and you looked up and you saw that in that little winged machine the First Lady of the United States was going to California that was a little glimmer of hope something was going right things might work out after all and who was she anyway Eleanor brought herself to people but she also brought out of people something that I think that you see in figures like Muhammad Ali you see in figures like perhaps Mahatma Gandhi but you see somebody who is bringing people wanted to be their best selves around her they wanted when she saw them connected with them they were on best behavior but also she brought out of them the feeling they could give something not just to her but to their communities to the country I think Eleanor also brought her size and in her easy way that she had finally with people having gotten out of her own shyness having brought her voice which we think of as being a high floating thing was actually quite modulated and wonderful when she was close up with people she brought people into a feeling of a closeness to something that was before that moment utterly foreign or something enormous she was as much of Main Street as she was of the White House and I think this is something that you don't see again for a long long time in First Ladydom she also made sure that people understood that they did have a voice in Washington and that she did bring I mean she literally was practical pragmatic her uncle Ted had given a sense I think of government as a pragmatic place she in Franklin she had a sense of preparedness could be disinterested they could be pragmatic they tried things they experimented they were willing to try again and again and again see if it worked oh it didn't fit that well there's an underlying problem let's look at the problem there was a continuousness in her that people often criticize Eleanor for not having follow through or not coming to conclusions I found it difficult myself thinking she did move on to the next thing and that motion that sense of forward motion of continuous optimism of hope pragmatism and challenging the slow walking of everything Washington made her when you see people's descriptions even of the way she walked in the White House the rapidity, the movement the continuousness you really get a sense of how fluid she made this previously her paralytic almost job this is an odd photograph we're looking at it for sitting down that's exactly what she wasn't doing most of the time so I think what Eleanor did was she created an entirely new version of a woman of a First Lady and of the President's wife there was we think now of the First Lady it's a sort of tradition now that she has one cause Michelle Obama has this Mrs. Bush has literacy Michelle Obama had nutrition Eleanor was not, she was holistic she was not a she was an equal opportunity First Lady she had many constituencies and causes above and beyond that she also had a voice that was a real voice with real opinions and her column my day was just extraordinary in that way syndicated newspaper column that appeared every morning No First Lady had ever done anything like that from 1935 until her death she connected to people as a neighbor, as a concerned citizen as a friend, as First Lady in a voice that was so familiar it would be a voice that you would want to respond to, want to do something want to contribute she had a continuousness in writing and in her voice and in her appearances in the newsreel you saw so much more of the First Lady you heard her, you felt her presence in ways that that didn't repeat itself for years in fact Ali, why don't you talk about the White House years too then just use a quote here from David's book Justice Douglas said FDR had few around him except Eleanor who told him he was wrong she was his antenna but he usually followed her advice and Jim Farley FDR had complete faith in her judgment and her ability to observe just maybe a few words about Eleanor in the White House years elated Well I think a lot of people talk about her observation they don't talk about her understanding of policy and how to get it through and if you look at some of the landmark pieces of legislation that came out of the White House especially in the well in the two sections of the New Deal you know in the first 100 days I mean FDR puts the economy act forward and it fires all the women who are married to federally employed men Eleanor leaps to her pen as Blanche would say and in the same paper side by side tells her husband he's wrong the women get their jobs back you know their problems with the Social Security Act Eleanor goes in behind the scenes and tag teams with Francis Perkins to get part of the Social Security Act through if you look at the National Youth Administration which is the first form of AmeriCorps this is totally Eleanor and Bethune if you look at women in the CCC camps that's Bethune if you look at the Federal Theatre Project the Federal Writers Project the Federal Dance Project the whole role of government in preserving people's voices and art combating fear that's totally Eleanor Roosevelt if you look behind the scenes to organize Democratic senators who were very leery the Fair Wage and Standard Act which gave us minimum hours and maximum hours Eleanor is inwardly involved in that when there is the major debate over the world court and should the United States be involved in the world court who does the White House send out to debate the two Republican senators against Eleanor Roosevelt and she had her own career and was such a successful journalist not just my day but monthly syndicated columns book contracts her first book is March 1933 you know it's up to the women she by the end her time in the White House her publications are paying her more money than FDR makes as president let me bring up the slide of FDR in his last days and David maybe you can just briefly tell the story of his death and her role in its aftermath FDR died in April 12th 1945 in warm springs of a cerebral hemorrhage while he was posing for a portrait that was being painted by a woman named Madame Schumann Toff with him was his cousin Laura Delano and Lucy Mercer had reappeared from Aiken, South Carolina where she had been reappearing in his later White House years as he grew sick and as he was his life was coming to a close as the war itself was was dragging on FDR found some solace or some enjoyment and pleasure in re-meeting Lucy facilitated by Anna Eleanor and Franklin's daughter I don't see an enormous myself I don't see an enormous significance in the fact that Lucy was there and Eleanor wasn't Eleanor was doing her own work she was part of an entire she's probably the most important of the Roosevelt administration at that moment in terms of recognizing how things were about to go with the creation of what FDR had named and dreamed of the United Nations that she had some thoughts of her own about that about almost everything at that point her main contribution I think to the country at this moment which was a moment of terrible trauma people losing their president of 12 years and in losing their president their war leader we're losing a figure a primitive primal sense of loss a father a chieftain people were rocked to their core and Eleanor stepped forward and made a very firm and clear statement about how the country was going to move forward and one of the first things she said when she saw Harry Truman who was summoned from she herself was brought back from a talk she was given and sensed what was happening she was told the president was dead she was in Washington at the Solgrave club she came back to the White House and Harry Truman was summoned from the Senate and he walked in and came upstairs and there was Mrs. Roosevelt and there was Anna Roosevelt and several of Roosevelt's you know assistants and so forth and she stepped forward and she said Harry the president is dead and Harry Truman looked at Eleanor Roosevelt and said Mrs. Roosevelt what can we do for you and she said Harry what can we do for you for you are the one who is now in trouble and I think that in the transfer from that moment forward for the next few days and she got out of the White House in record time everything she did was for Harry Truman as president of the United States one of the more unlikely presidents ever to step into the job he was sworn in that afternoon by the time by that time Eleanor was on her way to Warm Springs she had I wanted to say very quickly she had buried dozens of Roosevelt she was practically the family undertaker Eleanor had been called from her earliest days to bury her relatives she was constantly visiting funeral visiting cemeteries and making sure gravestones were properly properly placed and so forth she was as pragmatic and as realistic about the event of someone's death she also I think felt very strongly that what was most important now was carrying forward that she on her fell her husband's legacy but also on the transfer of power to Harry Truman which was as I said unlikely was as much was as important as anything to do with Frank the memory of Franklin Roosevelt himself and of a moralizing Frank she did an extraordinary job with his dignified job with his funeral which she saw through from Warm Springs back up to to Washington and into the White House and then on to Hyde Park and the Rose Garden she created a figure of dignity and a figure of lasting courage that people remembered and spoke about for years we really are getting into the last minute which is too bad Alita because I know there's so much to talk about in the post presidential period and post White House years and David I thought it was one of the most fascinating of the book but Alita tell us the role that she plays as kind of a world statesman world stateswoman briefly put the last letter that she writes when she's leaving the White House ends with this for those of us who've lived in Franklin's shadow moments come when we must wonder what we can achieve under our own momentum within a few weeks people have asked her to be secretary of labor run for the governor of New York be had of the most preeminent private college in the United States run what would be the first major liberal political pact and to be a political director of a union she says no that she wants to speak with her own voice in December Truman calls her to appoint her to the United Nations because she has become his major critic he appoints her to the UN to get her out of the country because he is not give him hell Harry yet he's basically clueless on wage and price and rent controls she turns him down her son and her secretary basically say are you flipping kidding me you've been in war zones twice you've spent five weeks in the pacific you flew on unpressurized aircraft and blew out your eardrum you have walked the corridors of hospitals you know all the major leaders of the world and you are not going to take this flipping job so she calls him back she takes it she goes over there Arthur Vandenberg and the boys as she calls them she's the only woman on the delegation appoint her to committee three the committee on social, humanitarian and cultural concerns thinking that she won't cause any trouble there because they're co-concerned with the bomb they've totally forgotten about refugees refugees becomes the major issue in the first session of the general assembly Eleanor becomes the point person on that out debates the great russian debater and then is unanimously appointed by the entire body of the UN all 51 nations to chair the nation what will become the human commission on human rights the united states opposed but had to be convinced to support her out of that comes with her negotiation the single most important political document of the post war era which is the universal declaration of human rights now why do I make that claim it is used as the model for more constitutions and more state governments than our own constitution and our own bill of rights it has been used in every single peace and reconciliation civil war negotiation of the past 40 years was used in Iraq it was used in Afghanistan it was used in Pakistan Liberia Brazil Peru and in it although it is the last article that is negotiated out of the 30 30 it is the article that has been adopted into international law even by the conservative united states supreme court and that is article 1 all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and in rights they are endowed with reason and should treat one another in the spirit of brotherhood ok as I look at my watch I have a minute so I will try to tell this story in a minute it takes her three years more than 300 meetings that last more than 30,000 hours she meets with every member every employee diplomat career service janitorial and food service to get their buy in to this document in order to negotiate it she had to work with members of 18 countries who don't agree on God government, marriage childhood private property the right to travel what the purpose of citizenship is they agree on nothing other than by God they beat the germans and so if the countries didn't like the delegates and somebody else it was like you know musical chairs who was going to negotiate this but at the 11th hour she gets this article 1 that is the first time in the history of the world that men women and children of all races all regions all ethnicities all religions are treated equally in a covenant she also makes a fateful decision because she wants this to be legally binding and for two years she works on a bill but she realizes that's not going to happen and she says the greatest thing she says lawyers will debate three years where to put a comma so what we have to have is we have to have a vision to hold to be a counter force to the holocaust the bomb 60 million refugees and Jim Crow in the United States and that decision worked because it takes more than 25 years to get the covenants on political and civil rights, social, economic and cultural rights but the declaration is there informing governments and building movements and David mentioned that she receives a standing ovation when she walks into the General Assembly on December 10th, 1940 it's the first standing ovation in the history of the United Nations and let me just say one thing about her ability to negotiate she treats the Soviets even though she is just pissed with them there is no word to describe it other than that I mean even in my day which is now syndicated throughout Europe she is taking on the Russians in her column as she is negotiating with them but they see who she is she understands how to negotiate with them and she convinces the Soviet block to abstain not to oppose but to abstain and that is a mark of fears negotiations forget diplomacy this is power politics to the nth degree so let's see the last slides I want to set you up David to tell a more personal story so first we just have a couple of slides this is Roosevelt in her later years she is the kind of titular head she endorses Adelaide Stevenson in the 50s begrudgingly endorses John F. Kennedy she is a little worried that he dodged a vote but here she is after JFK president on the set of a program called prospects of mankind a monthly TV program was taped at Brandeis University and was shown on WGBH and let's see the next slide and we'll have there's a slide interesting slide with a cartoon that David mentioned the book of the young boy saying of course I know who that is, this is Roosevelt pointing at the Statue of Liberty Tom can I say one thing about that cartoon first pops a little girl not a little boy and the second thing is this was released the day after Eleanor says to Joe McCarthy if you want to call me I'll come and that's why Herb Locke does this cartoon it's not a saccharine saint sweet Eleanor cartoon it is like you want me to go to congress and defend and stand up to Joe McCarthy when not one Democrat will when Jack Kennedy runs away call me I'll come that's what that cartoon is and that cartoon was at the top of her stairwell in her home Valkill and she saw it every night she understood exactly what that meant thank you Eleanor for explaining all right now let me go back to the JFK had been on the set I wrote about David you pick up what we're seeing in this picture well here I thought we were going to be in the White House with President Kennedy announcing the Peace Corps on prospects of mankind we're actually in London and Mrs. Roosevelt in the center on the right is Paul Noble one of the producers and on the left is my mother who is one of the producers of prospects of mankind and notably the only woman here there's Bertrand Russell behind and a group of men here this is a typical day on the set although they happen to be in England for this particular broadcast but my mother spoke frequently when I was a child about Eleanor and I think one of the reasons Eleanor Roosevelt was a enormous presence in my household I kind of thought actually she was related to her in some way although of course so did David Geffen and other people who had Mrs. Roosevelt icons on their kitchen hanging where their mothers and grandmothers had a hunt the thing that was important to me about writing about Eleanor Roosevelt and about looking at Eleanor Roosevelt and listening to Alita describe the true history of Eleanor Roosevelt and I commend everybody by the way to the works of Alita Black because you are missing something if you have not included those on your syllabus but the important thing here is that I thought I was born in 1957 we all thought we understood American history but we now know we didn't and we are now rewriting history and Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to expand democracy to include more people she wanted my mother on this program she wanted a woman on this program we did not have an inclusive multiracial democracy during Eleanor Roosevelt's 78 years of life from 1884 to 1962 and until she was 36 years old America's democratic institutions worked only for white males let's say and almost all the power was held by rich white men let's say Eleanor did not even live to see the Voting Rights Act of 1964 for what that's worth now she did not live to see the United States outlaw mob violence and lynching but what we are listening and hearing today and why Eleanor speaks to us today is about this fight we're now engaged in another fight for the survival of democracy and it's about not just that it's about the right to vote of course which is the central one I think about gender equity and about patriotism what that is and about America's place in the global and international world Eleanor still stands for what she stood for then fearlessness, compassion service, dedication, hard work I think what she stands for even more though is the idea of change and of accepting and reaching for change continuously and fearlessly and this is why I think we're going to keep hearing the story told again and again the suggestion that we could ever fit her even into an hour is insane there is so much more to Eleanor and I commend you back to the works of Alita Black and I also commend people to understanding Eleanor in and of herself really as a person not just simply as a political figure but also as a political figure she has so much to give us Can we end with an Eleanor quote? Yeah well let's go to the next slide Yes we can Oh my suitcase sorry We're going to give we'll just go for another two or three minutes I promise We're giving an endorsement to one of our co-sponsors which is the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum and there's this lovely picture of Mrs. Roosevelt that's well known but I remember turning the corner and then when you actually see the suitcase and actually how it's displayed at the FDR Library and Museum it's a wonderful institution where David and Alita have both spent hours doing research and our head is And I'm a trustee I just want to say it's holy ground just leave it with that but this picture was taken in 1960 on a tarmac in LaGuardia after Eleanor had basically browbeat John Kennedy into agreeing to come to a civil rights gathering at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem which is where he says that he will abolish federal discrimination and federally supported federal financial housing with one stroke of the pen she traveled without Secret Service she carried her own luggage okay that is her suitcase that she gave to Maureen Kaur her great secretary when Eleanor died Eleanor goes this case goes with her to Chicago where she spends almost six days in and out of black churches and labor halls Jack Kennedy becomes president because he wins Illinois by 220 something thousand votes he was behind until Eleanor went to Chicago because Nixon had the better civil rights record he wins Chicago by the black vote and the labor vote that Eleanor receives because Bobby went after Hoffa and Jack voted to weaken the Civil Rights Act so this suitcase encapsulates everything but what she would say to okay because this is what David is saying and its democracy is only as strong as its weakest link and the last sentence she ever wrote not for publication was this staying aloof is not a solution it is a cowardly evasion very nice David you have a final word and then I'll close this out I strongly recommend that everyone if they ever have the chance visit the Rose Garden where Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt lie in rest it is a shocker to find Eleanor Roosevelt there in her mother-in-law's garden and yet at the same time there's something quite lovely and wonderful about seeing them both together there forever I've never failed to walk into the Rose Garden without being terribly moved by these two purposeful lives that were joined I think in a sense unlike almost any other couple I can think of in a shared idea about the people and about doing things for the people and for the people and in a sense that a commonplace solution could be found or some kind of solution to help people build better lives in America and therefore build a better America but primarily to help people build better lives that's the exceptional I think what's exceptional about the Roosevelt's not American exceptionalism it's about their consideration of human individuals as individuals but also as the people and I'll end with a simpler quote a more personal quote from David's book you have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give David Alita you gave us the best you have to give tonight we thank you for sharing this hour with us we thank all of you who have been watching this virtual form and we wish you all good night