Holly Shulman
Studies in Women and Gender
and Carl Bob Tempo
University of Virginia
With Maureen Beasley
University of Maryland
"The Encyclopedia of Eleanor Roosevelt"
March 22, 2001

Holly Shulman: Now I am going to start his morning by saying a little bit about what I’ve learned about Eleanor Roosevelt in the process of editing this encyclopedia. Editing an encyclopedia is a daunting but wonderful experience, but one of the things it taught me is something about the serendipitous nature of biology, and also about the way in which Eleanor Roosevelt wove her life, her friends, her family, and political causes together. In a traditional biography, a form of the book requires a narrative exploration. So you have one damn thing after the other, so to speak. You pretty much stick to a chronological flow. We think of this book as really a kind of a multi-voiced biography. But instead of being chronological, it’s actually alphabetical. And one of our Amazon.com reviewers put it, and we’re very grateful to have two lovely reviews on Amazon.com, "You can read successive entries learning serially and serendipitously about Lucy Mercer, Rutherford E. R. Socials, secretary who became romantically involved with FDR; ER’s friend Rose Schneiderman; a Polish immigrant who became one of the most important labor leaders of the 20th century; the scholarly debate over ER’s sexuality; and Alfred Smith, democratic nominee of 1928 just by following in alphabetical order."

As an editor, however, the experience was neither chronological nor was it alphabetical. The Beasleys and Carl and I sort of divided the entries up by topic, although that also was not a hard and fast rule. Much of our job was fact-checking and simple editing, but there were some entries where we couldn’t find someone or we thought of it at the last moment and we didn’t have time to find someone to write the essay. So there are some entries that we actually did ourselves, and I want to say a words about a couple of the essays that I really did feel proud of and worked on myself.

One is about Justine Wise Pollier who was a political activist, lawyer, family court judge. Some of you may remember her. And the other is Sumner Wells, diplomat, state department leader, and writer. And some of you as well may remember him.

ER worked with Justine Wise Pollier on a number of issues, all of which related to the welfare of children, both at home and abroad. Pollier’s parents had both devoted their life to fighting social injustice, and in particular she was the daughter of Steven Wise. Again, some of you may remember, an extremely important and well-known rabbi of his time. He was a founder of the American Jewish Congress and he was an advisor to Franklin Roosevelt. Justine Pollier was very well educated in her own right and had gone to law school. I believe she went to Yale. So although she was a generation younger than Mrs. Roosevelt, she was a very early entrant into the legal profession as a woman. She was also the first woman appointed to the court and she shaped the domestic relations court, the family court, in New York City. She actually deserves a biography of her own, and I would love to encourage someone to write one about her. As I say, some of you may remember her. I don’t remember her but I did go to school with one of her children and my parents knew her. So I felt a particular intimate connection with her.

Pollier first met Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1920s, when they were both working in the Women’s Trade Union League. In the 1930s Pollier enlisted ER to work on refugee issues and to try and rescue children who were victims of Nazi persecution. When Eleanor Roosevelt went to work at the Office of Civilian Defense Pollier became her counsel there. Then Pollier persuaded Eleanor Roosevelt to support the Wiltworth School, the first racially integrated residential school for disturbed boys in New York City. There is an entry on that as well separately in the encyclopedia. At Pollier’s request, and this Mrs. Roosevelt did exceed to, she wrote a letter in the 1950s after the Suez crisis to the King of Morocco pleading that he let the Jewish population there go, who wanted at that point to leave Morocco and go to Israel. And, in fact, it did happen subsequent to Mrs. Roosevelt’s efforts.

What’s interesting in a personal way is that as time developed the two became very close, and this is very symptomatic of the way in which Eleanor Roosevelt did business. If she liked someone, she wanted to work with them, she drew them into her social circle. When the Polliers, who lived in New York, and Chad Pollier was at the American Jewish Congress himself…when the Polliers would visit Washington D.C. they would stay in the White House. And when Mrs. Roosevelt eventually moved back to New York City she would spend evenings with the Polliers. So she pulled them into her circle. They couldn’t have pulled her into theirs. But she could and did pull them into her’s and they remained good friends as well as colleagues until Eleanor Roosevelt died.

Sumner Wells, as you here probably all know, was an American diplomat of considerable importance. And Sumner Wells knew Eleanor Roosevelt. They knew each other throughout their whole lives. In this case Sumner Wells was a bit younger. Not a generation younger, however. About six or seven years younger. He attended boarding school. He went to Groughton with her younger brother, Haul. Then, in turn, when it was time for the Roosevelts and the Wells to send their boys off to school, they went to Groughton together. Wells was a page boy at the Roosevelt’s wedding and in 1933 FDR appointed Wells Assistance Secretary of State for Latin America. And this was important in terms of the relationship, not only Franklin Roosevelt to Sumner Wells, which was a separate and very important relationship, but also to Eleanor Roosevelt and Sumner Wells.

The two were committed to many of the same issues and they worked well together. Wells in particular was profoundly committed to improving relations between the United States and Latin America, which he labeled the Good Neighbor Policy. And Eleanor Roosevelt supported that and concurred with that. She also then brought him in to work with the refugee issue as the war came about. And both of them later on came to support Zionism. They really held much of the same order of the world order and it was based on their view of the nation, the world, and themselves as people and what was good personal conduct, what was the obligation of the individual citizenship. They were instrumental in the creation and implementation of the United Nations. Wells drafted the institutional structure and in doing so he combined FDR’s idea of a world power elite and his idea and Mrs. Roosevelt’s idea of a more democratic body which would have a general counsel open to the nations of the world. ER of course was the leading spirit behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ER once wrote to Wells, and this was indicative of their relationship, "You were one of the grandest people in government," and she signed the note, "With affection, Eleanor."

Now as I say they often mixed…she often brought the people who she cared about and wanted to work with into her personal life, and she certainly did that with Pollier. One of the interesting things about her relationship with Pollier is that Pollier was considerably younger, a good generation younger, and this is also very typical of Eleanor Roosevelt. It was particularly typical of Eleanor Roosevelt for friends who came from a different part of America, a different social class, a different ethnic group, a different racial group. It was harder for Mrs. Roosevelt to become friends, for example, with Mary McCloud Bethune than with Dorothy Hight, who was the second head of the National Council of Negro Women and who was another generation. In the same way it was easy for Eleanor Roosevelt to become friends with Justine Pollier. Eleanor Roosevelt had been around her instinctive gut reaction anti-semite in her youth, and yet later on she developed a number of friendships, some of which you know about, Joe Lash, David Garivich, and Al Lowenstein, all of which were younger than she was, and I think that this was part of the way that she could cross this barrier.

Her friendship with Sumner Wells is distinctively different. It really went back into their childhood. It’s striking when you think how few people actually refer to Mrs. Roosevelt as Eleanor. In that sense she was also a woman deeply rooted in the 19^th century, for whom formal modes of introduction of conversation were part of the way in which you talked to people and she expected people to address her. In the United States it’s as if we had a vuvoilette and a two toilette and decided a two toilette just had to go. But if we think about in the United States, there is a sense in which if she allows herself to be called Eleanor, that’s a two toilette. And again something that today we have lost but was very much a part of her.

They worked together with a kind of mutual trust and as early as the 1920s she was reading his drafts of papers on Latin America. When…at FDR’s first inaugural she invited the Welles to share her box. I have a sense that their relationship was so close and so instinctive that there were many things they never needed to articulate. They really did know each other. Well’s son once decided their shared social vision as "wiseable Christianity". But I want to leave the last word to Justine Wise Pollier. She was asked in an oral history interview to describe Eleanor Roosevelt and Pollier recalled how Eleanor Roosevelt received individual requests, evaluated, and then acted. Let me quote here from Justine Wise Pollier: "They were like small mosaics that helped build a larger picture of the needs of all children," Pollier responded. "Indeed, ER exemplified how the attention to detail and the commitment to the individual could translate itself into a vision for the world and for humanity."

Maureen.

Maureen Beasley: First, Hank and I would like to thank Holly Schulman and the Miller Center for the opportunity to be here today to talk about our favorite topic, Eleanor Roosevelt. I would also like to thank all of you for coming. I am really overwhelmed by the size of the audience. I am used to talking to a captive audience of students, and to think that all of you came, I guess voluntarily, is very pleasing to me. I have a hunch that many of us were brought here by the same thing that prompted me to do this encyclopedia and to dragoon in my invaluable comrades for it, and that is the feeling of some personal attachment to Eleanor Roosevelt. As a journalism professor I found our encyclopedia of particular interest because a large number of the entries, probably one-fourth of the 250 some entries we have in the book, deal with Eleanor Roosevelt and her relationship to the media.

Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the foremost media celebrities of the 20^th century. She truly had a sensational career in the media. Just let’s look at some of the things she did. I’ll have to add, though, I was talking about this to one of my masculine colleagues at the University of Maryland and he said, "Well it’s a good thing she did it back then when she did because today she would never be on television…she wasn’t pretty enough." I thought, "Oh, well maybe there are other things besides being pretty." But at any rate, she did have a sensational career in the media in her day. Let’s look at just a bit of this career. She wrote a daily newspaper column, "My Day," that ran from 1935 up until almost the day she died in 1962. Do any of you remember that column? Oh good, there’s that personal relationship. She wrote magazine articles and columns that numbered in the hundreds, especially for the Ladies Home Journal and McCalls magazine. Could I see again, do people remember those columns?

At the same time she certainly was the object herself of much press attention. Her travels, often to promote New Deal social programs and the World War II war effort blended with her frequent speeches around the country, some paid lectures, many others not paid, kept her continuously in the public eye. How many ever heard her speak? Oh, that’s quite a number. And how many ever met her? Yeah, she was great at going to places like colleges and women’s gatherings of various kinds. Well I would like to talk for a few minutes this afternoon about a unique type of mass communication activity that Eleanor Roosevelt engaged in, her women-only White House press conferences. Now other First Ladies have had press conferences but none has come anywhere near having the number she had. She had 348 during her 12 years as First Lady from 1933 to 1945, and none of the other First Ladies has ever barred men. Now I have long been interested in these conferences, again personally. When I was a girl in high school in Sedelia, Missouri I found a book in the Carnegie public library by Bess Furman, a journalist who described attending Mrs. Roosevelt’s press conferences. I read that book and I just soaked up every word. I thought being a woman reporter would be the most wonderful thing in the world if you could actually get out of Sedalia and go to Washington and even get into the White House. And I really think I probably went to journalism school mainly inspired by Furman’s memoir. And, of course, Furman was inspired by Eleanor Roosevelt because Furman says in her book, "I hitch my wagon to Mrs. Roosevelt’s star."

Well I share these little anecdotes because in doing the research for the Eleanor Roosevelt encyclopedia we found that many of the women who covered Eleanor Roosevelt’s press conferences, and there were over 100 women who covered these press conferences before World War II security measures curtailed attendance to about half that number, many of these women thought these press conferences were pretty wonderful too. Ann Cottrell Free, who wrote our encyclopedia entry on the press conferences and was the first president of Mrs. Roosevelt’s press conference association, the organization of reporters attending the gatherings, tells a delightful tale of the press women. She says they would wait impatiently for the White House usher to lift the velvet rope and let them race up the stairs to the Monroe Room on the second floor to see who could grab the good seats first. Free, then in her 20s and the youngest of the reporters, said she was always elbowed aside by older women who were eager to get as close as possible to the first lady.

Mrs. Roosevelt started these conferences in an attempt to force male-only news organizations to hire women, and as she put it, "give the women news men could not get." This was so women would have jobs. In those days, news organizations were most reluctant to hire women. Now the conferences did produce some front page news in the early years at least. Mrs. Roosevelt used the conferences to announce, in 1933 and 1934, that beer and then wine would again be served in the White House with the end of prohibition. Her announcement was somewhat similar to her advice on smoking. She said she personally didn’t drink, but that she would make alcoholic beverages available to those who did.

Of course, we also found out in doing the encyclopedia that she did drink. And she even tried a cigarette or two. We find out that there is always a difference between the public and the private persona, which is one of the areas that we tried to handle in different ways in the encyclopedia. It’s one thing that makes editing a book of this type an interesting task. We also learned that the conferences were, as I wrote in a recent article in a Social Science Journal, "..a manifestation of class, gender, and racial orientation that were acceptable to journalists and the public of that era. They represented Eleanor Roosevelt’s understanding of political boundaries even though she worked at the same time to minimize those boundaries." So let me just take a minute or two more to talk about what I mean here about these boundaries of gender, class, and race.

First, gender. By limiting attendance to women the First Lady positioned herself the center of a group grateful for her help. One devotee was Ruby Black who was hired by the United Press, then the rival to Associated Press. UP had for years refused to employ women, but it needed a representative at the conference, so Ruby Black got the job. Black became Roosevelt’s first biographer. She pictured her as Franklin D. Rooselvelt’s admirable, political partner and please note, that is still the theme used by biographers of Mrs. Roosevelt today.

Black also was a leading member of the so-called inner circle of these press conferences. A group of women, including Furman who I also mentioned previously, Mae Craig (Anybody remember her? She was on Meet The Press for years. Yeah, a representative from Mae newspapers who wore those funny hats.)…Mae Craig, Martha Strayer, of the old Washington Daily News. Any of you from Washington remember that newspaper…Geneva Fortperry from the Chicago Tribune and Emma Bugby of the New York Herald Tribune, a republican newspaper. How did she get in there? Well, she too was someone so grateful to Mrs. Roosevelt that she wrote extremely flattering stories about Mrs. Roosevelt, so flattering that her editors, who were Republicans, weren’t too pleased with all of them. Anyway, these women steered Eleanor Roosevelt away from making embarrassing remarks at her press conferences if she ventured into controversial terrain. For example, Furman reported in her diary that the women did not report three subjects they discussed at the conferences prior to the election of 1936 because these topics might be embarrassing to Franklin’s political campaign. The topics were: Eleanor Roosevelt’s position on birth control; her response to a magazine article attacking her role in the Arthur Dale Project (Anybody remember that? It got a tremendous amount of press. It was a controversial redevelopment community for unemployed West Virginia miners.); and her reaction to comments by historian Mary Beard, who had charged that men had robbed women of their history. That was pretty strong stuff for those days.

As a contemporary woman journalist wrote, "The moment Mrs. Roosevelt rose spontaneous, a vigilant newspaper woman was sure to interrupt and say, ‘this is off the record isn’t it?’ and Mrs. Roosevelt, who allowed direct quotations only by permission, would readily agree." Therefore the gendered aspect of these gatherings enabled Eleanor Roosevelt to keep some control over the way she presented herself to the public, whether or not she had intended these gatherings to have that result.

Second, let’s look briefly at issues of social class. There was an obvious gap between Mrs. Roosevelt, First Lady, and the women reporters. Many of them worked for women’s and society pages and were not well paid, nor well-regarded by their male colleagues. In fact, men make all kinds of fun of them. None of the women approached the social standing of Mrs. Roosevelt, who after all was the niece of one president, Teddy Roosevelt, and the wife of another. In terms of her own experiences, Eleanor Roosevelt would attempt to redefine the role of the lady for the group, telling the group that a modern lady has inner assurance. "You’re doing what you consider is the right and kind thing." One reporter saw this as a self-definition as Mrs. Roosevelt tried to instruct the press women in New Deal programs, and as she brought in notable women for them to meet, ranging from Frances Pukis, to Madame Shanghai Sheck, and even the Queen of England. So she acted sort of like head teacher for this group. Also it was heady stuff for these press girls to occasionally have lunch at the White House and to receive invitations for their children to play with the Roosevelt grandchildren.

Third, racial issues. All of the journalists admitted were white. Although a few African American reporters made tentative inquiries about attending, they were not allowed in due to the objections of Steven Early, Franklin Roosevelt’s press secretary. An intolerant Southerner, Early also kept African American reporters out of Franklin Roosevelt’s press conferences on grounds that they did not represent daily newspapers.

Although Eleanor Roosevelt was personally willing to accept African American women reporters, she exceeded to Early and did not allow any to attend her press conferences. By excluding those of a different race, she kept the conferences a fairly homogenous group. The conferences endured because they utilized aspects of race, class, and gender acceptable in that era. And they are studied today because they show us what those aspects of race, class, and gender were in that period, and how they were received by the majority of the population. Would women-only press conferences work now for a first lady? No, of course not. But for their times, they were a step, although a small one, forward for women. I see them somewhat in line with Mrs. Roosevelt’s advice on smoking. It wouldn’t do today to tell people you have no objections to them doing something you wouldn’t do yourself, particularly on health grounds. But for the times, speaking out at all was pretty significant for a first lady.

Therefore, Eleanor Roosevelt has left us a legacy that makes it possible, I think, for women like Holly and me to play a part in a university atmosphere and to speak out. So thank you very much.

Carl Bon Tempo: I would also like to thank Holly and Maureen for inviting me here and the Miller Center for hosting this event. I served as an editorial assistant and contributor to the encyclopedia, spending most of my time working on entries related to American foreign policy. So I thought I would share with you then a few thoughts about ER and her role as an observer, a shaper, and also an instrument of American foreign policy. I would also like to say that the essays in the book on this topic, especially the overview of ER’s foreign policy by Joan Hauff, whose name some of you may recognize from her appearances on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, are very thoughtful and rewarding. And they provide an in-depth look at ER, as well as an overview of the major events in world affairs during the first 60 of the 20^th century.

I think in looking back on ER’s life we often forget the many ways in which she was a player in American foreign policy. As First Lady, she served as an unofficial ambassador, greeting important foreign diplomats and heads of state. In the Truman administration she was a participant in the first United Nations Conference, she served as the American representative to the United Nations, and she helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Throughout her entire life, she urged Americans, both in and out of government to take a more active role in solving the world refugee problems. And she herself did so by supporting and sometimes joining refugee relief organizations. And then finally, as Maureen has alluded to, during her long stint as an author and media personality she commented on numerous aspects of America’s engagements with the world.

All of these activities then amounted to a remarkably varied career and the portfolio of one of the most influential women of the 20th century. But to me the most fascinating and human thing about ER’s views on foreign policy was the degree to which her influence was muted or limited. When looking back on her career as First Lady we can see time after time how she curtailed or even silenced her opinions. Perhaps the best example of this, and there are many, was ER’s reaction to the Roosevelt administration’s decision in February 1942 to inter Japanese Americans in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor. But three months before the White House announced this interment policy, anti-Japanese sentiment ran rampant, especially on the West Coast. ER sought to quell the xenophobia. She toured the West Coast and posed for photos with Japanese Americans. She wrote in her newspaper columns about the importance of protecting civil liberties, and she reminded FDR that Japanese Americans "are good people and have the right to live as anyone else." But, as well all know in February 1942, FDR signed an executive order mandating the interment policy. The change in ER’s public comments was unmistakable. "It is obvious," she said in a radio broadcast, "that many people who are friendly aliens have to suffer temporarily in order to ensure the safety of the vital interests of this country while at war."

ER did continue, however, to work behind the scenes to ensure the most humane treatment of the interns, in one instance asking the Justice Department to oppose the disfranchisement of Japanese Americans. Her public silence on the issue moreover clearly troubled her. She wrote in 1942 to a friend, "This is just one more reason for hating war. Innocent people suffer for a few guilty ones."

Why this sudden change in public comment? ER felt that during a time of national crisis when her husband’s leadership was being put to the test, when America’s political, religious, and moral leaders placed a premium on national unity, that she had to stand behind official American policy no matter how disagreeable.

So what does this episode tell us about ER and her life? A few things, I think, come out of this. First, ER commanded public attention, and her comments were newsworthy and were noteworthy, as Maureen has showed us. Second, ER had access to decision-makers at the highest levels of the American government. In short, she was a force to be reckoned with, both in the administration and in American public life. No wonder any number of organizations, from the NAACP, to the American Red Cross, to the American Friends Service Committee, as well as numerous average American citizens, tried to win her attention, and tried to enlist her as an ally in their causes. But the story of ER’s reaction to the administration’s interment policy just as clearly shows us her power was limited. She held a quasi-official non-elected position but was still accountable to the public, just like an elected official. More important, she was accountable to her husband. No doubt a great deal of her power and influence flowed from her forcive personality and her boundless energy, but her power also flowed from the fact that she was the president’s wife. Because of this, her comments had to be judicious and guarded so as not to flagrantly offend FDR’s many enemies, or to appear to contradict Roosevelt administration policies. For if she overstepped these boundaries, she would not only harm her husband’s political standing, but would also harm a key source of her own prestige.

It was this balancing act that ER lived with for much of her life, even after FDR’s passing when she worked for the Truman administration and worked in a number of positions within the Democratic party. And from it I think that we can come to a fuller realization that ER was just as much a politician as her husband was. Her politics was about making choices and hard choices at that. We can see from the controversy over Japanese American interment in particular and from ER’s involvement in foreign policy generally, that ER faced choices every day about which issues to support or even comment upon, and the nature of that support and or those comments.

We can and should debate the merits of the choices that she made, but first we need to understand the context in which these choices and decisions occurred. And in this way I think that we gain a fuller and more complex understanding of ER’s life.

Thanks.