journalism, that is one of the top two i would say at least schools of journalism in the united states. and she also worked as education editor for the kansas city star. i am or originally from missouri. i mentioned that and she said where are you from? i -- my family or originated in sedalia. that is her home town. i am very pleased to introduce a fellow missouri and. her bio is very impressive and i wish i had time to read the entire bio but in addition to being the education and editor at kansas city star she also was a staff writer for the washington post. she has taught journalism and is a journalism historian. her particular focus is on washington women journalists including eleanor roosevelt who

considered herself a journalist and coverage of the first lady. her most recent book which she will be discussing with us today, eleanor roosevelt:transforming the first lady. .. >> i do want to thank dr. cannon, vice president for scholarship and education of the united states capitol historical society for, um, asking me to be here today and to say i'm so happy i am a member of this

organization and have been for, um, many years. we're so fortunate to have a vital historical organization like the united states capitol historical society help us recognize the importance of our heritage as americans. isn't it study of the past that gives us the strength and vision to press onward into the future? every time i get into the eleanor roosevelt material, and i must say that i and my husband, hank beasley, who has joined me in researching eleanor for many years, have been into roosevelt literature for a long, long time. every time that we get into it we're struck by how much the high of this woman can speak to us today. i hope i'll be able to share a bit of that with you today. i also want to introduce another

person who we will hear more from later, and that's cornelia jane strausser. would you wave? she knew eleanor roosevelt personally, she visited in the white house as a small child, and her mother, ruby black whose picture you will see as i show my slides, was eleanor roosevelt's first biographer and a person who had an impact on eleanor roosevelt's career in the white house. i'm so pleased that cornelia is with us, and she has brought a couple of prize items from her personal collection which are back there on the table. and she'll tell you about those, that they relate to the visit of the king and queen of england to the roosevelts in 1939. she'll share her experiences during the question and answer period that will follow my remarks.

i wonder if there are others in the audience who also have personal recollections of eleanor roosevelt? okay, great. well, during the question and answer period i hope you'll share those too. eleanor is still being written about, you know. she lived from 1884 to 1962, but here we have at least three books that i know of and perhaps there are more on her that have come out within the last five or six months. and people are still writing about her, they're still exploring facets of her career that have been unexplored. she is still speaking to us. of course, today what i'm going to talk about is the way she spoke to us as first lady. so let me put on my eleanor roosevelt outfit. [laughter] the neck piece. now, that was favored by her and

many other ladies of the day. any of you remember when these were ubiquitous wardrobe items? [laughter] upper-class families, everybody had up with of these. well, i -- everybody had one of these. well, i wear this because i like to transport us for a moment or two back to eleanor's era. and, of course, here i have my prop. here's eleanor, you see? and i would say one of her many traveling outfits. she's carrying her big purse. and here is franklin with his jaunty look. you would never know that he could not walk when he was in the white house. actually, he never could walk again after he developed paralysis in 1921. and you can -- i saw this in a supermarket, this is an eleanor roosevelt refrigerator magnet.

[laughter] you see, she's got her fur on. and then, of course, there was fallow, their little dog. it was an era dominated by these folks here. um, so, please, join me in now in picturing a scene that will take us back to the past. this is a drafty old house, and i usually just say a small town in missouri, but this time i'm going to say in she -- sedalia, missouri. here we have an exhausted housewife trying to keep warm at the end of a dull day of housekeeping while reading her favorite columnist in the kansas city star. suddenly, she looks up at her little tower, and she looks up and says, i am sure she is better than he is. well, who do you think the she was? eleanor roosevelt. and who is the he? franklin. my family was rock-rib

republican, believe me. they would sit pretty well with the tea party crowd we have now. but my mother loved reading eleanor roosevelt's "my day" column. do any of you remember "my day"? i see a few heads nod, yeah. why did my mother like it? well, this is a column about a woman who was doing something. she was going places. um, she was doing things, she was making history in washington d.c. and, actually, i think my mother's interest in that stimulated me in part to get an education and, eventually, move to washington myself. years later when i was asked by lou ghoul who's editor of the modern first lady series that has been featured this month during these noontime meetings to write a biography

concentrating on how eleanor roosevelt had changed the role of the first lady. first ladies before eleanor had been hostesses, they'd been help mates to their husbands in various degrees, and some of them had been unofficial advisers. but eleanor changed all that. she made the role of first lady much more important one. and i'm going to be talking about that. um, eleanor, historians will tell us, did not want to be first lad although she certainly campaigned for franklin, the first of the four elections in which he was chosen president. why didn't she want to be first lady? most of us would think that was pretty nice, i think. well, because you have to remember that eleanor was a roosevelt before she became a roosevelt. she was eleanor roosevelt roosevelt.

her uncle was teddy roosevelt who was president of the united states, of course, at the turn of the century. and some say franklin just followed teddy's career. and she had seen teddy's wife preside in the white house mainly as a hostess, and she just didn't want to do that. she said i just don't want to sit in the white house and pour tea. um, now, she would have perhaps liked to have been a closer adviser to her husband than she was. although she certainly gave him the benefit of her ideas. she never hesitated to offer opinions, but he might or might not accept them. so when franklin was elected, she went to franklin, and she said i'm not going to have very much to do as first lady, could i take care of your mail for

you? actually, that was rather commonly done by political wives in those days. harry truman's wife had worked in his office and taken care of his mail, and the vice president, vice president garner's wife also had been in his office and helped take care of the mail. so that wasn't a truly unusual request. what do you think franklin said? no. of course not. that's missy's job. and he was referring to his personal secretary, missy lehan. in fact, history is dubious on this, but it is in the biographies, there is even speculation that eleanor was so upset by thinking of having to be first lady which she saw as an empty, ceremonial role she didn't want to participate in that she wrote a letter.

and in that letter threatened to leave franklin and run away with earl miller who i'll show you a picture of in a minute. so you've got to remember, you know, we think of these people as saints now, they're flesh and blood folks just like us. well, we don't know for sure if there was such a letter although there were people who supposedly saw the letter, and the letter was supposedly destroyed by louis howe who was eleanor's great friend and confidant. of course, he was also franklin's political genius. at any rate, um, how does it happen then that this unwilling woman who really didn't want to be first lady rewrote the script for a first lady from 1933 until 1945? and made the job of first lady part of the white house political communications process as it is today?

it's a script that all of her successors have had to take note of, whether they followed it or not. but most of them have followed it, at least in part, by finding appropriate causes to interest themselves in and to publicize. now, i argue in the book that as eleanor became accustomed to being first lady, she saw great possibilities in this role. she saw the possibility of making it a platform, a bully pulpit as her uncle, teddy roosevelt, had said of the presidency. what a bully pulpit. i can speak to people, i can get attention. well, she saw the job, envisioned the first lady as a same way, the bully pulpit. she saw the possibilities for communicating with the american people, particularly women. and we have to remember that eleanor was part of the women

reformer element of the democratic party in the 1920s and 1930s. she honestly believed in a lot of social causes which she wanted to promote especially to women. so as she became accustomed to being first lady, she realized she could use the white house to call attention to the causes in which she believed. now, one of those was the right of married women, including herself, to pursue a money-making career. and i will tell you, she made a lot of money in the white house too. we often don't think about that. first ladies since her have written book, but nobody's had the kind of money-making career that she had in the white house. now, how did she learn to do all this, or what inspired her to do it? who did she draw ideas from? because she didn't have any experts in public relations or

in spin devices or in focus group kinds of things. she did this herself. but i think she borrowed ideas from a rather small groupover personal friends. now, what made eleanor roosevelt an upper class patrician? the roosevelt family's one of the 400 families in new york society. what made her write a newspaper column that related to people like my mother? well, she had a lively intelligence, genuine interest in others, and i think she learned from some of her personal friends a lot about communicating with just average folks like us. let me read you just a little bit of this "my day" column so you get the idea. this is from a 1938 column, and it's headlined, "i felt very

guilty to have missed my hostess." wednesday. washington has bloomed considerably in the week that i've been away, and it seems much more like spring here than it did in new york state. at 10:30 this morning, i went out to the university of maryland to give a talk. because this is a land grant college, they have quite a large military force. i drew up to the front of the auditorium mainly because i was impressed by the number of boys in uniform standing outside the door. um, does that sound much like a political pundit today? no. what does can it sound like -- what does it sound like that we hear a lot about? i bet you can tell me from the internet. >> blog. >> blog, exactly. and it was written like that. it was a very perm kind of thick. -- personal kind of thing. so eleanor was communicating with people, she was making the job of the first lady a bully pulpit, and in my opinion, she

was -- and i have studied this -- she was drawing from to some degree, certainly, from the personal relationships that she had with some remarkable but not the kinds of folks you would expect an aristocratic lady to have. but in any event, let me move on and show you some slides that will help illustrate what i'm trying to say. now of course, eleanor roosevelt drew from franklin roosevelt. obviously, she built her whole career on being mrs. roosevelt. of course, she helped franklin, too, politically. but you notice in this slide which shows eleanor and franklin shortly after their marriage in 1905 there's somebody in the middle there. who is that? sarah, franklin's indomitable

mother. and look, franklin and sarah are looking at each other, and eleanor's kind of to the side, isn't she? and that started the way it was in their marriage. now, i think most of us know the story that sarah controlled the family pursestrings. and, actually, she tried to tell eleanor who was quite young, she was only 20 when she was married, what to do and even to the point of trying to sur plant her as a mother for eleanor's five children. of course, eleanor had a sixth child who died in infancy. but mama definitely was an influence there. now, we know eleanor and franklin lived increasingly separate lives after she discovered his romance with lucy

mercer after world war i, but they stayed together. one of the reasons they stayed together was sarah said, franklin, you leave that woman, and i'm going to cut off the money. louis garner said it would ruin his political career if he should leave his family. so at any rate, they decided to stay together. we know that eleanor nursed franklin devotedly when he was stricken with infantile paralysis in 1921. but then as franklin tried to recover from that and went off to warm springs and to the south to try to seek healing there which he never really succeeded in getting because he could never really walk again after infantile paralysis, eleanor starts her own career too. um, she begins to write magazine articles which she sold on such subjects as women in politics.

she begins to get active in the women's division of the new york state democratic party. remember, women had just gotten the vote in 1920, so this is a new field, and entering into it. she's, um, becoming part of a network of these new deal women reformers and intellectuals. and then she's teaching school at the exclusive todd hunter school in new york. she could not have taught in public school. she never, um, had an education past finishing school which she'd attended in england. so she bought a share of todd hunter, and that permitted her to teach there. and she went on record to say that there's nothing she'd ever done in her life that she liked as much as teaching. and, in fact, as first lady i think she saw herself as a teacher to the american public.

well, now, franklin in spite of not being able to walk is elected governor of new york in 1928 and population probably didn't know how incapacitated he was. historical evidence is sort of split on that. anyway, at that time eleanor accepted the role of his secretary, missy lehan, as a kind of surrogate wife who could fill in for her and provide franklin with the sort of fluttery, feminine attention that he liked and that eleanor really wasn't very good at giving. eleanor finds a companion of her own, and that is earl miller. let me show you this slide. now, here is the four of them, the four of them together here. earl miller is the athletic-looking man on the end there. next to him is missy lehan, then there's franklin and then eleanor on this side of the

picture. um, earl miller was a highway patrolman who was assigned to eleanor as her bodyguard when franklin was elected governor of new york. they became very close. he brought a sense of fun to the serious-minded eleanor. and here we see in this 1934 home movie taken at hyde park that the two of them are in a little play. and here's earl miller as a pirate, and he's about to kidnap eleanor, the first lady. they were quite close. they would go on walks together, she read poetry to him. she loved doing things for him, even cleaning up his house or his apartment, buying things for him. perhaps like an aunt looking after a favorite nephew. we don't know exactly their relationship either.

but we do know it was close. and we also know that franklin did not want earl to come to washington as parking -- as pare roosevelt entourage in 1933, so he found earl a good government job in new york state. but eleanor and franklin -- i'm sorry, but eleanor and earl continued to be in touch, and eleanor would visit earl while she was first lady. in fact, i really believe that miller helped her make that transition to first lady by giving her self-confidence. he encouraged her to ride horses. he bought dogs for her to play with. these were kind of obstreperous dogs, i guess they were sort of protection to her, and he also taught her how to shoot a gun. because as first lady eleanor refused secret service

protection. and so earl taught her how to shoot a gun so she could carry the gun in the glove compartment of her car. miller all during the period she was first lady even though he was married and divorced in there several times, he offered her relaxation from her high-profile life. now, once in the white house, of course, eleanor found that she had to play a ceremonial role, and here she is in what appears to be a heavily-reup toed photograph -- retouched photograph. [laughter] in an inaugural reception outfit. you can see that she's first lady. and i wonder how many of us are aware of this, she was actually on the best of-dressed list of women in 1934. she had arrangements with the new york department store, arnold constable, to wear their

attire, and then she'd have her picture taken like this one. that's an arnold constable gown, and then these pictures would be sent throughout the country of mrs. roosevelt in her outfit. now, i think this was a financially advantageous arrangement for both, the store and eleanor. ah, but now we get to the person who was much more of an influence on her as she transforms the role of first lady than earl miller. we can't see this person too well in this picture, but we get some idea perhaps of the way she kind of hid herself from public view when eleanor was in the white house. but she was definitely there assisting eleanor in transforming the role of first lady of the first roosevelt administration. okay. here we see eleanor, and then we see this woman sort of in the

background there. okay, that's lorena hickok. lorena hickok had been the top women's political writer for the associated press in new york, and she was assigned to the roosevelt campaign train in the election of 1932. and the campaign train went all over the united states, and eleanor was there, of course, to stand by franklin's side and smile when he gave speeches, you know, the role of the political wife. well, hickok realized that eleanor wasn't too happy in this role. in fact, hickok eventually years later wrote a book called "reluctant first lady," which is part of why we know how much eleanor did not want to be first lady. but anyway, the two of them found themselves soul mates. lorena hickok was a lesbian, there isn't any dispute on that point. she and eleanor became very attached. to what degree they had a physical relationship, nobody

knows for sure. but it's undisputable evidence that they were close emotional relationship and that hickok helped her in transforming the role of the first lady. now, hickok and eleanor drove together in that car. they took private vacations together, about six weeks in 1933 and 1934. and the press let 'em alone. can't imagine that happening today, but it did then. and here they are at a tourist home in lowell, massachusetts. um, now, hickok went with eleanor roosevelt on the first trip made by a first lady outside the continental united states while her husband was in office. this is a trip that eleanor made to puerto rico, and i want to

call your attention in the particular to the woman who is standing to eleanor's left, immediate left because that's ruby black. she has the dress on that has a pattern, definite pattern to it. ruby black, of course, is mother, and ruby black helped arrange this trip because ruby black was a correspondent for a newspaper in puerto rico. she spoke spanish, she was quite involve inside puerto rican politics, and she helped arrange for eleanor to make this trip. these other people with her are devoted admirers of eleanor, newspaper women who covered eleanor's press conferences for women only. lorena hickok, who had to leave the associated press because she was so close to eleanor she had no more journalistic integrity or objectivity, had given eleanor the idea of having press

conferences for women reporters only in the white house to give women something that the men couldn't get. ruby black was extremely involved in these press conferences, and it was because of this woman-only rule that ruby black was hired by the united press which in those days had a rule against hiring any woman. see, women weren't considered capable of being journalists. and if they worked for newspapers, they were usually consigned to society news and women's pages, that kind of thing. so, um, ruby black like these other women, very grateful to eleanor for having these press conferences. and eleanor had 347 of them while she was in the white house for women only. the other women represented, well, the woman on the end there, emma bugby, represented the new york herald tribune, an

important republican newspaper which objected to the roosevelt administration editorially, but she wrote the loveliest stories about eleanor. next to her was dorothy who worked for a hearst press syndicate. first hearst was for roosevelt, then he broke with roosevelt, but she's going ahead writing these nice articles about eleanor. i said there's ruby black, and then there's ruth who wrote first for the associated press and later for "the new york times." these women, actually, more or less turned into eleanor's public relations agents because they admire her so personally. um, hickok like louis howe also advised eleanor in the writing of magazine articles. does anybody remember reading eleanor's question and answer column in the lady' home journal

or in mccalls? good. good. i still remember her advice in smoking because i was quite interested, you know, should i smoke or not. and eleanor said, well, she didn't really do it herself, but she thought as a good hostess you should always provide cigarettes for others. and she talked -- but, you know, identify always been very glad that -- i've always been very glad that i listened to her advice on that point. i never had to stop because i never started. [laughter] anyway, eleanor was writing for these magazines, and both howe and hickok were helping her sort of furnish her articles, and howe was helping her sell them. and it's even believed that hickok gave eleanor the idea for the "my day" column. which was quite a popular column in it time. she had a good many more readers than some of the men political

pundits of the day. now, you want to see a picture of lorena hickok, a little bit better. here she and eleanor are going down a squall lid street in san juan in puerto rico to inspect conditions there. and hickok is the woman in the dress with the long tie there by eleanor's side. hickok, after leaving the associated press, then went to work directly for the roosevelt administration as an undercover investigator of poverty and relief conditions. the roosevelt administration, and franklin's behind this, didn't really believe that the newspapers, the media of the day was telling people the extent of poverty. he wanted independent investigations of how well welfare programs were working, independent investigations of how desperate people really were. he wanted a personal source of

information, and hickok was one of the investigators, there were others, who were hired to go out around the country and make these, um, reports that went to harry hopkins who was head of the new deal relief efforts and, also, to franklin himself. and, of course, eleanor saw these reports. so that's, that was part of their puerto rican tripment now, hickok like miller certainly wasn't a member of the upper crust. she was the daughter of a traveling butter maker in south dakota who had abused her as a child. as a reporter for the associated press, she had learned to write for average people, and she encouraged eleanor to write in that kind of style, and she also end couraged eleanor -- encouraged eleanor who she

admired tremendously to see herself as a role model for ordinary women. the "my day" column certainly had the air of one neighbor talking to another. this conversational style highlighted many of the communications activities. the advice column for women's magazines, the articles she wrote for women's magazines on such topics as a day in the life of the white house, the role of women in politics, the role of women in cleaning up conditions in their own communities, that kind of thing. eleanor's paid radio broadcasts, her paid lecture tours and, of course, when she got -- what she got from the column did give her an income. in fact, she earned an average of about $70,000 a year. an average of $70,000 a year. as my husband can testify because he's been through her

income tax returns which were fairly recently made available to the public at the roosevelt library. now, $70,000 a year in those days is a pretty good salary, especially for a woman. particularly it was a good salary when you figure that franklin as president of the united states was only making $75,000. um, in fact, one story, i don't think it's true, but you run into it that when eleanor sold the first installment of her biography -- this is "my story" -- to the ladies' home journal she ran through the white house waving a check saying, look, look, this is as much as franklin made, and i made it myself. [laughter] doubtful that this actually took place, but there is historical evidence that she really did

believe that a paycheck validated a woman's worth. um, she opposed legislation that had the effect of forcing women to give up their government jobs when they got married on grounds that it wasn't right to have two wage earners in the family. she publicly advocated and ruby black helped her with this, too, that married women had the right to hold paid employment. i'll just have to tell you this story since we started out talking about sedalia. my mother had to give up her job as a high school teacher when she married my father. and, of course, married women couldn't be school schoolteachers in those days. anyway, when she told the superintendent of schools that she was getting married, he said, oh, my, you see what i have left, only those wanted neither by god, nor man. [laughter]

an awful comment about unmarried women teachers, but that was sort of the way things were back in that era. well, now, of course, while eleanor is redoing the role of first lady, she's still carrying on these ceremonial activities. this ises the white house christmas card, 1933. see, she's sitting properly by franklin's side. but she's making history in other ways. here she is, um, showing an interest in african-americans. and she was really the ambassador of the roosevelt administration to african-americans who were unbelievably discriminated against. this is a picture, 1936, and she is visiting howard university. and the two students on either side are dressed in reserve officer uniforms.

now, this picture caused an outcry from segregationists who used it in the south to attack the racial policies of the roosevelt administration. but on the other hand, it made a great hit in the african-american press of the day which would take pictures like this and run them to show that here you had a first lady who really was sympathetic to the cause of african-americans. now, she travels all over the country giving speeches, and some of them definitely paid lectures and some were not. often she is accompanied only by one person, that's her trustworthy secretary, melvina thompson, who's the woman you see there with her. you see the kind of clothes they wore. you know, they sort of looked matronly. women weren't supposed to have to try to keep young the way they are today, no matter how old we actually are.

they were expected to dress like older ladies. here she is on airplane. of course, she loved to fly, she traveled about 300,000 miles during her first year, first eight years as first lady, and then during world war ii she was all over the globe visiting service personnel. now, here she is knit anything a plane. you know -- knitting in a plane. you know, eleanor was never quiet. if she was sitting down for a minute, she would pull out her knitting needles. this photograph was taken by her son in 1936 and used, um, by the airline industry to try to promote flying among, um, women. and i just have to read you this. it's my favorite part of this book. and it's short. but let me tell you, here's an usher at the white house, j.b.,

recalling eleanor racing through the white house, skirts flapping around her legs. see, they wore sort of long skirts. op her way to -- on her way to numerous appointments, west remembered, she would jump into her waiting car and call out to the driver, where am i going? the and on her way back she gathered up people to bring home to lunch. he said she sometimes invited so many she forgot who they were. [laughter] well, she was a very busy woman. um, of particular interest to this audience, i think, would be eleanor's interaction with capitol hill. now, of course, she operated behaind the scenes as -- behind the scenes as a conduit to place democratic women into positions in the roosevelt administration. she and molly duesen put pressure on jeams farley who handled patronage matters for franklin to try to find jobs for

these very well-qualified democratic women. um, but she was the first president's wife to testify before congress, addressing congressional committees on the plight of migrant labor and arguing for home rule for the district of columbia. still got that one going on. [laughter] she was the first to hold a government office. she was appointed assistant director of the office of civil defense, served for about five months in 1941 and '42. it was a bad, um, situation. she did not prove herself a good administrator. she put some people at jobs that seemed rather strange such as teaching dancing in air raid shelters. the press laughed her out of that job. but she never really took responsibility for the fact that she had made some mistakes.

in her "my day" column she said after she resigned, people can gradually be brought to understand that an individual -- even if she is a president's wife -- may have independent views and must be allowed the expression of opinion but actual participation in the work of the government we are not yet able to accept. and, in fact, several times she was asked particularly in if her later years if she was interested in if being president, and she said, no, she didn't think the country was ready for a woman president. well, it seems to have taken us a long time to get to the point where we might be. okay. well, i'm going to move carefully -- quickly here because we want time to talk, um, among ourselves. but i'll show you some of the other slides that show you transforming the role of first lady. here she is talking to the democratic national convention in 1940. the convention is about to rebel because it doesn't want

franklin's choice of henry wallace as vice president. and eleanor was called in to make a speech. and she made such a stirring speech, um, intimating that the country was about to go to war and that the person in charge, the commander in chief needed people he could believe in to help him, that the delegates went along with roosevelt's wish and nominated wallace. here she's accompanying fdr and, guess who? sarah. and her oldest son, jimmy roosevelt and his wife, betsy, on a tour of a battleship pre-world war i. on a more substantial note, here she is addressing a national conference on the problems of negro youth in 1939 with aubrey williams who was head of the national youth administration and mary mcleod bethune who was the highest-ranking african-american woman in the roosevelt administration.

official of the national youth administration. do any of you, by any chance, participate in programs of the national youth administration? sometimes i talk to people and they say, oh, yeah, that's how i got through high school. this was a program to offer work study opportunities to students and let them stay in school during the tail end of the depression and then the start of world war ii when it then changed into training people to work in defense industries. um, we know that eleanor was very instrumental in setting this national youth administration up and, in fact, fdr himself referred to it as the mrs. organization. and here she is at campo bellow at a summer leadership institute of the international student service. notice this is an integrated

group. that was very rare for the day. unfortunately, we do not see joel lash in this picture. he was the general secretary of the international student service. but joel lash was the third person who, i think, was very instrumental in the way she transformed the role of first lady. joel lash was a jewish man, graduate of columbia university, an intellectual who was very involved in leftist student movements of the late 1930s. um, somehow he became one of her closest confidants after her relationship with hickok waned in the late 1930s. now, as a representative of the press because of her "my day "column, she attended hearings of the house un-american activities committee at which lash, who played a leading and controversial role in his

leftist youth organizations, testified. lash first was a communist or communist sympathizer, but then he broke with the communists and became a very strong anti-communist. lash said the two of them had a moral affinity. he introduced her to the machinations of communists within social movements, and eleanor benefited from be his political savvy as he discussed the way in which communists operated within these movements. and years later at the united nations she said that she didn't have much trouble dealing with the russians because she had learned about the communists when she'd been first lady. well, she learned a lot, i think, from joel lash. by now accustomed to making the role of first lady one of real significance as a traveling ambassador for the first, for the roosevelt administration,

during world war ii she makes enormous number of visits. in fact, she's away from washington so much that a washington newspaper has a headline: mrs. roosevelt stays at white house overnight. [laughter] here she is visiting enlisted men at a base in the galapagos island off the coast of ecuador during a world war ii morale-building trip to latin america. here she is in england inspecting troops. why, she's certainly the first first lady to ever do this sort of thing. of course, she's traveling without franklin. and in washington here she and mary mcleod bethune are visiting a residence for african-american women war workers. once again eleanor's making history by showing that she and the roosevelt administration really care in the plight of people who are at the margins of

society. but she continues to play her official role as white house hostess too. here she is entertaining madam chiang kai-shek in 1943. we all know the story of eleanor as first lady. franklin dies in 1945 unexpectedly. guess who's with him when he dies? lucy mercer, the old girlfriend. um, eleanor is appointed u.s. delegate to -- by the -- i'm sorry, is appointed u.s. delegate to the united nations by president truman, and she is instrumental in the creation of this document, one of the most important documents of the 20th century, the universal declaration of human rights. we would not have that document if it had not been for eleanor's genius in dealing with the communists and with the other political players at the united

nations. so let me, um, just conclude by saying i personally think and try to make the case in the book that eleanor's ability to turn the relative passive role of first lady into a vibrant one of activism stems in part from the close relationships she has with people who are outside of the normal aristocratic circle of an upper-class woman. um, these people, well, earl miller, lorena hickok, joel lash in particular, other people too. there were other newspaper reporters that she knew, women like ruby black and, of course, louis howe who, unfortunately, dies in the 1936, they all help her um, transform a position she didn't really want, a job of first lady, and make it into a position of importance in the

american presidency. in that spirit, i think, she inspires us all to see the possibilities maybe within our own lives for doing what we can. um, i'd just like to end this with a quote from eleanor's book that she wrote in 1960, "you learn by living." um, you gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. you must do the thing you think you cannot do. here she didn't think she could be first lady, but she succeeded very well. thank you. [applause]

new, i'd like -- now, i'd like to call on mrs. strausser to tell us about her experiences with eleanor roosevelt. >> well, you know, they were kind of peripheral. there's a story in this book that my mother traded shamelessly on her relationship with mrs. roosevelt, and, you know, not only consented for me to go to these children's parties at the white house for birthdays, but then bragged about it in newspaper stories afterwards. [laughter] and it is somewhat embarrassing, i think. [laughter] and my, a lot of my acquaintance with mrs. roosevelt was just reading the "my day" columns which as a young person i tended to think were pretty boring, and

i often didn't notice that this troll -- [inaudible] like, for example, if she was discussing the subject of spelman. so, you know, there were things i didn't understand at the time, and it was just this boring, nice lady that takes up a lot of my mother's time. but, you know, i certainly admired the things she did, and at one point i actually, when i was in high school i actually got to spend a week with her. my mother somehow arranged that i should spend my spring break in new york, and i got on a train. i went up to new york. i guess i was met by some family retainer, spent a couple days in an apartment on washington square. i helped the butler walk fallow

around the block -- [laughter] visited the united nations when she was working on this declaration and observed, you know, the debates in which she held her own so confidently against the soviets. and then we went up to -- [inaudible] , and she just sort of swept me along in anything she was doing, including a visit to a school for boys which was one of her causes. this was a residential school for at-risk, urban boys, and they were all black, i think. and, you know, she visited the school, and i had never -- i was raised in alexandria, virginia, i had never been in a place -- [inaudible] but they, the thing i realized from that was the great amount of -- she had a lot of personal

charisma. she had more charm than you would think of from read what she wrote. um, if you read my mother's book, you will say ruby black had a crush on eleanor roosevelt, and i'll say, yes, yes, she did. and eleanor was the kind of person you get a crush on. she was, she was a kind of camp counselor that i developed a crush on, you know, when i was 12, and the camp counselor -- she had that kind of attractive personality, and i suspect they always have had and that was part of why she, why she caught franklin. you know, she was not quite the ugly duckling that she liked to portray herself as. so by the way, you know, something i just realized and i had not internalized it before about the press packages, all that she did for black people,

there were no negro women in the press conference. >> that's right. and there were efforts by black women reporters to get in, and eleanor would have accepted that, but steele early who was -- steve early who was, i think, a racist and he was franklin's press secretary said, no, because if you let them into your press conferences, we're going to have to let 'em into our press conferences, and they kept them out. they, you know, he spoke of people that way, "they," meaning african-americans. >> yeah. she sort of set up a completely different channel into the negro community. >> yes, she did. she was a great ambassador for the administration because franklin, um, can't want to pass or -- didn't want to pass or make an effort to pass anti-lynching legislation which was needed because he didn't want to antagonize the southern congressmen over here in the capitol. so franklin really didn't do all

that much for african-americans. but the fact that she was out there trying to do something spoke a lot to people. would you like to tell us about your experience? >> well, i didn't know eleanor, but when i was a teenager i played in a band in lancaster, pennsylvania. and i was totally apolitical. my parents would have been republican, and my father probably hated f, the r -- fdr because he came from the amish community, so he didn't believe in social services, and he probably didn't believe in the new deal and all that stuff. anyway, we played for, i assume, a political activity, and she was the star. and so she came up and shook hands with each of us. and now as i think back to that, i think how wonderful it was of her to take the time to do that. we weren't voters, we were just kids. and i'm sure she had be important people to talk to, and

we were not among them. but she took time to shake hands and talk to each of us. >> that's lovely. do we have questions or comments? yes. >> in relation to what was said about african-american relationships, in new york there was a newspaper, and i think it was the afro-american, but i'm not quite sure about that -- >> [inaudible] >> pardon me? the amsterdam news. langston hughes had a column in the newspaper, and he had a spokesman, a very simple kind of guy who he named simple, and the title of his column was "simple says." and one of the things that i remember reading and knowing about when i was young was simple says let's kill all the white folks except eleanor roosevelt. [laughter]

>> do we have other questions or comments? yes. >> [inaudible] >> okay. the question is she had five children, did she spend time with them? in common with the upper crust of that era, when the children were little she really turned over a lot of their care to nurses and governesses and the hired help. in the later years of her life, one of the reasons that she traveled so much was to go around and see a lot of her children. they were scattered all over the country, and they were always in some sort of trouble, made some sort of embarrassing headline in the newspaper. >> for example? what kind of -- >> well, elliott roosevelt never went to college, and he was kind of a bad boy. but he would get very good jobs, and then the republicans would

say, well, he's just trading on his father's name. well, he probably was. and some of the children would be hired by political opponents of the roosevelts sort of to embarrass the roosevelts, but also i guess to kind of keep a foot in the white house. hearst, for example, hired anna, the daughter, and her husband to run his newspaper. i think if their name had been smith, that this employment would not have taken place. so generally the headlines had to do with their jobs or, of course, theirsdivorces because they had a tremendous number of divorces. i think 19 divorces, is that -- >> [inaudible] >> well, we tallied them up for a book we did, the roosevelt encyclopedia. and, you know, divorce was a much bigger deal in those days than it is now, and the children

did have a fractured personal relationship, so that was embarrassing. other, other questions or comments? yes. >> sort of on that subject. the favorite letter that i have was my mother had written something and apologized for asking questions about whatever scrape franklin jr. had gotten in. and eleanor's letter back says, it's all right about franklin jr., i know you girls have to, have to write about those things. so, you know, she was always playing both the policy angle and, and the women's angle, you know? the sort of thing that would wind up on the women's pages, and she used both of those ways to get to the public and not