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Eleanor Roosevelt

Name: Eleanor Roosevelt
Author: Blanche Wiesen Cook
ISBN: 9780670844982

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

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Overview

Celebrated by feminists, historians, politicians, and reviewers everywhere. Blanche Wiesen Cook's Eleanor Roosevelt presents an unprecedented portrait of the towering female figure of the twentieth century.

The second volume plunges into the White House years and the Great Depression, the time when Eleanor exerted enormous influence over the course of the country. In the thirties, Eleanor becomes even more surprising and multifaceted. A loyal wife, a devoted mother, a woman who courted romance and adventure, Eleanor Roosevelt was America's most compelling, charismatic, and visionary First Lady. She ran a virtual parallel administration that championed civil rights, affordable housing, and a New Deal for women. She took unpopular stands and often countered her husband's policies, particularly concerning racial justice, women's rights, the plight of refugees, and approaches to Fascism and the Spanish Civil War. The book doses in 1938, as Europe moves toward war.

This is an unparalleled presentation of a woman whose life was filled with passionate commitment and who struggled for personal fulfillment. It is a book for all readers of American history and politics, and as the New Deal comes under assault today, a book for readers who care about a decent future for all people.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

Cook admits to "liking Eleanor better over time" -- the biography grapples with the distressing silence in the White House and among the first lady's powerful friends.

Maureen Dowd

Cook...[gets] at the tender, sprightly creature behind the starchy, strident image, chronicling how the timid housewife...turned into the New Deal's relentless ''Eleanor Everywhere"....[This volume] offers a litany of Eleanor's vigorous fights on discrimination, housing, health care, education and women's rights, and gives an exhaustive account of her romantic friendship with Lorena (Hick) Hickok....
— The New York Times Book Review

Merle Rubin

Crammed with fascinating details, anecdotes, and incidents, Cook's account...manages to be clear, forceful, and easy to follow....[Cook's] enthusiasm lights up the pages...
—Christian Science Monitor

The Advocate

Cook admits to "liking Eleanor better over time"--the biography grapples with the distressing silence in the White House and among the first lady's powerful friends.

From The Critics

Now that Elizabeth Dole is running for President and Hillary Clinton might run for the Senate, it is fitting that the second volume of Blanche Wiesen Cook's biography of Eleanor Roosevelt should appear. In examining and celebrating her subject's life, Cook never strays far from the topic of women in politics.

Cook devoted her first volume of Eleanor Roosevelt's life to the time before FDR was elected President. As has been well documented, ER (as Cook refers to her) grew up in a family plagued by privilege and power and witnessed abuse and alcoholism throughout her childhood. Cook examines how these experiences shaped ER into a woman who not only fought desperately for her own autonomy but who also relished in the struggle. Despite ER's record as a fierce advocate for liberalism and feminist causes, and despite the hints and rumors that she pursued at least two romantic affairs while married to FDR, there remains on her portrait a patina of demure martyrdom to the demands of a public life and to an unfaithful husband. In her own memoirs, ER maintains a self-effacing tone and refuses to elaborate about her own beliefs and ambitions.

In this volume, which covers the years from 1933-1938, Cook reveals not only how ER took control of her own destiny and identity, but also the destiny of the country. Before she came to the White House, ER had developed a clear political vision, shaped in part by her many friendships with politically minded women such as Elizabeth Read, an attorney, and Narcissa Cox, the chair of the New York State League of Women Voters. ER came to eschew the small aristocratic circle in which she had grown up in favor of political activism.Her work as a member of the League of Women Voters and the Women's City Club drew her into the progressive struggle, helping to shape her views as a social feminist.

While in her first volume, Cook focused on the development of ER's character and her views, in the second she analyzes how she pursued her political agenda. Before FDR's election, ER served primarily as a social reform advocate. But, once she took up residence in the White House, she tacitly assumed the role of policy adviser, not simply receding into the background like the First Ladies who preceded her. Instead, she took advantage of the inherent limitations of her position—because she didn't hold a formal title and was not directly responsible to the constituency, she could speak honestly about issues such as women's rights and racial justice. In effect, she ran an administration parallel to FDR's. And although much of her policy-making and political maneuvering necessarily took place behind the scenes, it nonetheless helped both to bring into being and to shape the New Deal era.

Though their intimate relationship had become increasingly passionless, ER and her husband worked together to bring about social reform. As FDR spent the first hundred days of his term working on legislation that would become the basis for the New Deal, ER drew on a tight network of social feminists to secure an improved life for women. Realizing that her only hope of achieving her goals was to broaden her audience, she changed her regular column of personal reflections in Woman's Home Companion into a "correspondence with the American people,' which served as a conduit between the public and the President. It was popular democracy in its purest sense and it was the technique ER used often to pursue her goals, from the "crusade to end lynching' to ending fascism abroad.

This second volume deals exclusively with the White House years, offering less of the glamour and tumult of ER's early life covered in the first volume. Romantic intrigue is less prominent in the narrative as Cook devotes herself to careful analysis of the genesis and development of ER's social and political consciousness. But what always remains clear is how ER acted on her personal convictions and turned them into political action. —Charles Davis

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

When it appeared in 1992, the first volume of Cook's exhaustive, provocative biography of Eleanor Roosevelt radically redefined popular and critical perceptions of her subject's private life and elucidated the enormous role she played in the nation's public life. In this second of three installments--which opens with the Roosevelts' move to Washington to begin FDR's first administration and ends with Kristalnacht and the inevitability of a European war--Cook again proves herself a masterful researcher, historian and writer. With a steely command of facts and a meticulous eye for detail, she demonstrates how the president and First Lady--despite profoundly differing visions that often broke into public disagreement--entered into a delicate, mutually beneficial relationship based on trust, advisement and political action. By explicitly placing ER's political concerns--about human rights, the role of women, racial justice and social welfare--at the center of the narrative, Cook gives us a new, revealing lens through which to view U.S. foreign, domestic and social policy. The book's power resides in its author's ability to synthesize massive amounts of personal and historical material and to present it in graceful prose conveying the import and magnitude of her primary topic: the role that gender, sexuality and personal relationships played in the unfolding of a new vision for the U.S. and the world. This alone would make an important addition to the historical record. But Cook's ability to tease out nuance and illuminate complex, often enigmatic relationships (primarily the Roosevelts' genuinely loving, yet nonsexual marriage and Eleanor's intensely committed, sexual relationship with Lorena Hickock), and to place them in the broader sphere of public policy raises the book to an extraordinarily high level of scholarship. Cook is unafraid to take on difficult issues--in particular ER's own "reverberating silence" on the situation of Jews under Hitler and the administration's sadly conflicted stand on such racial issues as lynching--thus rendering the biography not simply a riveting read but also a profoundly moving and wise account of how history has been shaped by the intricacies of the human heart, mind and spirit. Photos not seen by PW. Agent, Charlotte Sheedy. 10-city author tour. (July)

Biography

...[P]rovocative....Cook concentrates on darker aspects of the Roosevelt's old-money milieu, which she views as hopelessly stultifying and, most of all, bigoted.

Maureen Dowd

Merle Rubin

Kirkus Reviews

In this second volume of her outstanding biography, Cook (History and Women's Studies/CUNY) continues her feminist celebration of Eleanor Roosevelt as the woman who was the conscience of both her husband and country in these seminal years. These are the years that vindicate Mrs. Roosevelt's activism (by 1938 she was more popular than FDR) but also mark the further deterioration of their marriage as she became increasingly isolated from the president and his inner circle. Cook again details the remarkable energy and dedication Eleanor brought to fighting for her ideals, as well as the heartaches her family caused her. Her long and close relationship with journalist Lorena Hickok was also strained by her busy schedule and multiple commitments. Though much of her communication with FDR was via notes she dropped in the basket kept next to his bed, they were all thoughtful, researched, and, when he saw fit, used by him. She fought for Social Security, for the WPA programs, for women to play a greater role in government and in the Democratic Party, for racial integration, for peace, and then, as war seemed inevitable in Europe, for ways of resisting Hitler and helping the Jews. Cook is particularly devastating on FDR's long silence on the plight of European Jews: he actually sent a celebratory message to a 1934 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden at which swastikas flew alongside the Stars and Stripes. And right up to 1938 he remained silent about Hitler's human rights abuses and did not end trade with Germany. He was as reluctant to support an antilynching bill Eleanor supported. The volume ends as FDR begins re-arming, while Eleanor, working with youth and black organizations,accelerates the fight against fascism and racism. A masterful assemblage of facts and insights that illuminate a great woman's life but sometimes at the expense of the great man who was her husband and whose political instincts—despite his inherent caution—were sometimes more sure. (16 pages photos) (Book-of-the-Month Club and History Book Club selection)