Books
America's queen mother. Franklin D Roosevelt's "missus" had a complicated and secretive private life. Jan Morris celebrates a feminist icon and tireless campaigner for good causes
Published 24 July 2000
Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume II 1933-1938
Blanche Wiesen Cook Bloomsbury, 686pp, £30
ISBN 074754980X
Eleanor Roosevelt was mythic in her own time, but it is only now that we are beginning to grasp her true status in history. She was the Washington, or perhaps the Lenin, of the most significant of all revolutions: the still unfinished assault by women on the immemorially entrenched positions of men. The suffragettes preceded her; the Friedens, the Greers and the bra-burners came after; but they were no more than activists in the cause - Eleanor Roosevelt will always be remembered, I believe, as its great iconic symbol.
She makes an unlikely icon, with her famously protruding teeth, but she established, more influentially than anyone else, a woman's right to be herself, and to express her own opinions, even if she happened to be the wife of the president of the United States. When Franklin D Roosevelt spoke, statesmen and nations concurred, but invariably his missus did not.
Yes, his "missus" is what he called her, and there is no denying that the presence of FDR in this volume, generally off-stage, provides a welcome leavening of earthiness - dear me, I almost said of masculinity. Eleanor was essentially politically correct, but Franklin could say of a particularly frightful Nicaraguan dictator that "he's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch".
This book is the second volume of a trilogy, covering only five years of Eleanor Roosevelt's life, and already I feel a little battered by the sheer weight and intensity of her good intentions. Her poetical tastes ran to Patience Strong, and she was always ready with an improving aphorism or elevating resolution. She was far more apt to criticise herself than to be unpleasant about others, but it does come as a relief when, just occasionally, she lets fly at somebody: 600 pages of worthiness can get tedious, and Blanche Wiesen Cook is no Lytton Strachey - hers is biography at its most comprehensively relentless.
What it does splendidly is to display, largely by quotation, an infinitely detailed panorama of American political and social life in the 1930s, the decade in which Eleanor Roosevelt became one of the best-known women in the world. They were fearful years. Economic depression had disturbed the American Dream with ironic savagery, and was translated by way of strikes, homelessness, erosion and communism into a brutal confrontation between labour and big business.
Eleanor Roosevelt was for the underdog every time, and she was often vilified as a traitor to her class, a pinko, or even an out and out commie. She threw herself behind the alphabetical maelstrom of organisations and legislations that added up to the New Deal - and she never spared herself in its causes. She visited housing schemes; she went down coal mines; she opened schools; she spoke at conferences; and she did it all with such unassuming kindness that, by the end of this volume, she has become a sort of American queen mother.
Interwoven with this inspiring saga, however, is the story of Eleanor Roosevelt's private life, and this could be private indeed. She seems to have been genuinely bisexual. She had five children by FDR, standing by him loyally for 40 years, and she had many male friends, but she experienced at least one lesbian infatuation. Her relationship with the journalist Lorena Hickok ("Hick"), a "star newshawk" in the jargon of the day, was maintained through hundreds of lovey-dovey letters and sublimated, it seems, by kisses at "that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth". (That Eleanor Roosevelt got away with this protracted liaison testifies to the canny good sense of her husband, often extra- maritally preoccupied himself, and to the restraint of the American press in the 1930s.)
It was Eleanor's relationship with FDR, not with Hick, that fascinated newspaper readers of the day, and made her a new kind of heroine. Her astonishingly insensitive mother had died when Eleanor was nine years old, but she had lasted long enough to make her daughter feel sadly inadequate for much of her life. But, by the time she became the First Lady in 1933, she was apparently a marvel of self-confidence. She became a famous journalist, symbolically graduating from the editorship of Babies - Just Babies to a daily column, "My Day", which was syndicated in hundreds of newspapers across the nation.
"My Day" was Eleanor Roosevelt's Mein Kampf. It told everyone not just what the First Lady's daily life was like, but what an independent middle-aged American woman, wife of the president or not, was thinking for herself. It was homely, but frank. She often disagreed with her husband's policies, and she was seldom afraid to say so. Sometimes FDR answered back in print. Sometimes he took notice of her criticisms. When she took to having her own press conferences, restricted to women newshawks, people realised that Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House amounted to a totally new political phenomenon. It aroused half America, white and black, to the possibilities of true sexual equality.
And Eleanor Roosevelt saw for women a particular political responsibility, an active dedication to fair play for all, and she practised what she preached. For example, brought up as she had been in the racist south, she matured into so determined an advocate of black rights that, even as the president's wife, she was ready to defy the laws of segregation: 20 years before Rosa Parks's bus ride, and despite police interference, she insisted on sitting in the wrong place at a conference in Alabama. She also became an ardent friend to the persecuted Jews of Europe, constantly pressing for relaxed immigration laws and American intervention on their behalf. She was a natural pacifist ("The war idea is obsolete"), but she was as opposed to isolation as she was to discrimination, or prejudice, or sickness, or slums, or cruel prisons, or Hitler, and she fought them all like a champion (only breaking off now and then to write a note of sweet affection, dearest, to Hick . . . ).
What a woman! Her troubles were many: her children's troubles, love troubles, in-law troubles, troubles with politicians and fractious colleagues, a crippled Titan of a husband and recurring self-doubts. But she rode them all, and pursued her ideals with an energy that is exhausting even to read about.
In this monumentally definitive biography, which contains hardly an interesting phrase of its own, we have so far followed Eleanor Roosevelt's career to the brink of the Second World War, when her husband is to fulfil his own "rendezvous with destiny". However, she has already established her iconic status. She has demonstrated, as FDR's aide Louis Howe wrote, "not only the probability, but the advisability, of electing a woman as president of the United States".
Jan Morris is completing a book about Trieste
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