rethinking of what they should do, not necessarily an ideological wreathing but in part a rethinking of wine there is such a gap upon law firms and others who hire law graduates between what they have been trying to do and what it will actually wind up needing to know. and that serves as a very significant break against the pursuit of a completely fruitless. ..

>> more successful influence on how government operates than they did 15 years ago, and, of course, a lot of that is people like elizabeth warren and many of us in this room disagree with, but you have, you know, increasingly through blogging through real world-oriented scholarship, you have much more effective liberal forms of, you know, styles of being a law professor than you had back in the days of critical legal studies and critical rest area. there's the second end not that closely related a question of where should a student want to go for a less than lopsided type of faculty. and many people i know who are confident in their own ideas are happy to go to a place where there is relatively little support for them. there is now the george mason school of law in the d.c. suburbs here which, as a

brilliant market strategy, went out and scooped up a lot of conservative and libertarian faculty who were being undervalue inside the types of offers they were getting else where, has risen rapidly in the rankings. and yet by almost any standard, they've done brilliantly at acquiring, at battle beyond their weight. so even though it is easy to get discouraged about some of the trends, some of them are also self-correcting to some extent in that there is clubbism. i mean, alan dershowitz with whom i disagree on many other points put it this way, everyone sees diversity as getting more of themselves. and hiring is like a club in which you get hired by the people who are already in the club. that having been said, there is almost no comparison in the federallest fight -- federalist fight between the number of young faculty who would agree

with many of us in this room and the same sort of survey had you done it 15 years ago. no comparison there are so many more of them now. yes. >> my name's ian drake. following up on that response, you noted the federalist society. do you think then that one avenue for a counter to the dominance of the left is only going to come from the elites themselves in the elite schools? in other words, in order to get hired at any law school with the exception of some of the for-profit schools, you have to have clerked for a federal judge, and you have to come with a bram an degree. do you agree that that's, essentially, the only front that's open to countering this trend? >> i think that's very well put. and the, um, the problem of bad ideas at harvard or yale will be met by there being harvard and

yale scholars with other ideas as has indeed been happening. it, it isn't a matter where if you link ten more law schools together, you will somehow balance out one harvard or berkeley or other top ten school. and ideas have consequences. i mean, we always find different ways of getting back to that same point which is that one must have ideas that are qualified to best the other side's ideas in debate. spreading money here, having great organization there, you know, networking in the third place are all helpful, and they all may help people who deserve to succeed from falling by the wayside, but nothing will substitute for the raw talent. yes, christine from cei, in the front row. christine hall. >> hello. so i'm wondering what you think, what your thoughts might be on

whether some of these kooky and very wrong-headed ideas in liberal academia actually translate to lawmakers. you know, for example, state attorney general or members of congress or state legislators. do these ideas, in fact, have an influence and become bad law? >> yes, i think they do. and i give various examples in the book. i could easily have filled up several books with other examples. in areas that i know cei's interested in through its work on things like the tobacco settlement whether it be the proper role of state attorneys general, the proper role of statute of limitation which became relatively unpopular in the academic literature and without the overthrew of statutes and limitation, you would never have had most of the tobacco litigation or things like that. when it ceases to be respectable to defend notions like strict

application of statute of limitations, sovereign immunity, various other old limits on liability, when it stops being respectful in the law schools, there will still be some judges who resist because there are a lot of very strong-minded judges, especially these days on the supreme court. but most judges are somewhere in the middle, and if they've got, you know, plausible grounds for ruling either way, they don't want to be attacked in 30 law review articles over the next -- you know, it works this way on things like citizens united. at the moment we have this really strong-minded bunch of supreme court justices, replacing them with ones, they don't have top of opposite points of views, but just ones who are a little more susceptible to academic and editorial opinion, and you lose those decisions. another question. yes. >> david bernstein, george mason

law school. one thing, i mean, you pointed out that law schools have become at least somewhat more ideologically diverse which i agree with in the last 15 years or so that i've been teaching. that has not happened, from what i can tell, in history, political science, sociology, anthropology and so forth. and, um, my tentative theory is that this is, in part, because we have a supreme court and judges who are appointed by republicans, and they're taking these ideas seriously, then faculties can't just write you off as a nut. but if you have some other -- i'd be interested why law has actually had a little bit of the shift whereas at least other disciplines seem immune to any kind of ideological diversity. >> it's an interesting question, and on the tendency of law schools to not be as ideologically extreme as anthropology or sociology, that's pretty well borne out in the surveys that have been done. those two disciplines and some others are even more lopsided

than law which takes some doing. the law has been the most influential of them, and i think you propose a very interesting first cut at why professors who particularly if they spend to specialize as so many do in big national issues of constitutional law, if they can't predict what the u.s. supreme court will do because they can't make themselves think even in a hypothetical way as a scalia or an alito does, then they're not going to be terribly good at an nor tating the court's doings. so, indeed, it has tended to reward professors who may indeed be of liberal premises, but at least take the time to treat seriously the ideas that differ from their own. and, indeed, you have seen quite a substantial body of liberals who have made an effort to understand conservatives from elena kagan on to many other

institutions as well. and i'm not sure it's only thought, there may be some feeding in from the fact that lots of very bright people, um, go into law for many reasons other than changing the world through politics, and they need to be catered to. the views of lawyers generally in elite practice after they get out of law school are more democratic than the american average but are not nearly as left wing as the law schools. so, you know, there are a number of influences on them because law is, inevitably, going to be more real world constrained than sociology or anthropology. no offense to those, but it is. oh, um, yeah, in the back row, lee lieberman with the federalist society. >> hi. i was wondering what kind of reaction you've been getting from people in these law schools to the book. [laughter]

>> um, i just began touring on it a few weeks ago, and so i have been to, i believe, indiana, illinois and minnesota so far. and the response has been wonderful. now, maybe it's self-selecting. maybe the ones who hate my guts wouldn't be seen dead in the same room. but the faculty very often agrees with much more than we might expect of the both the critique and the possible ways of improving things. the students, maybe they're mistaking my talks for talks about the general law school crisis of why it's so hard for them to find jobs. but for whatever reason they've been showing up in larger numbers than what i expected. and the -- i mentioned that we're at a moment economically where people are ripe for rethinking things. there is a lot of doubt as to

exactly how they will be rethought, possibly the ranking system will get shaken up because of the sense by law firms that hire it that you sometimes do better hiring from a number 35 school than a higher up one. possibly it will be the fact that law schools are so darn expensive, and some law schools appear to be able to charge much less and offer just as good an education. one way or another, there are a lot of people who can gain in a tangible way by coming up with a better method. an issue that has particularly come up for debate is would it help to blow up the accreditation system. and i complain in the book that a lot of the trends that i dislike are, um, reinforced by the accreditation agencies, the aba and the aals which require a commitment to clinical education whether or not you think that it would work at your particular school. it requires certain types of research orientation and on down the line. it has been argued by people i

respect that blowing up accreditation will just present us with a completely different set of problems. at least they'll be different ones, and we can work through solving those ones. but one way or another they're not working well even from their own premises. more questions. there was another one in the back row, or has it been answered? okay. yes. >> brian loss from the heritage foundation. this week the weekly standard has an article about the principles of academic freedom. are you familiar with that item? is. >> not really, no. >> okay. what i'm wondering, it lays out standards and principles for what academic freedom looks like. it would actually give faculties, for example, a guidance on how they should be making decisions about tenure, about who to accept, what articles they should be promoting, those types of things or at least being open to. what do you think about some type of standards where the

academic community, actually, not that it's imposed from the outside, but it adopts those standards voluntarily, and can then it's used by other faculty members that point to and say i'm not being afforded the freedom i should be afforded whether it's in tenure or whatever else it might be. do you think that would be helpful to combat this problem? >> i have skepticism about efforts to promulgate general principles of that sort, and one of the earlier questions, by the way, was about what can outsiders do in order to change the ideological complexion. again, it quickly becomes at odds with the freedom that academics expect if it winds up being a state legislature, for example, putting pressure on a state law school. we know that that's happened in some instances, law school clinics. it, um, any general set of rules is going to be used both as a sword and a shield. it will be used by some people to say you see that principles allow may not to be interfered

with, it will also be used aggressively by, you know, people who want to, um, defend straying from the proper role a professor is in and so forth. i guess my general sense of the principles of academic freedom is that we're better off if they don't change very rapidly and if they remain decentralized enough so that you have a variety of different institutions in the which different kinds of academics can flourish. some of which are almost impossible to pressure from any direction, others of which are, um, more open to, you know, some signals from public opinion that they're often going off in the wrong direction. not a very useful answer, but i never claimed to have one. let me mention, by the way, being at heritage here that if you are interested in be my themes about international human rights law as a flavor of the decade in law schools, heritage has a tremendous program calling

attention to the latest developments in that. get on the mailing list, and you will learn a lot. yes. in the back row. >> thank you. my name is bill otis, i'm an adjunct professor of law at georgetown law center just down the street, the right-wing freak show. [laughter] my question is related to some that you've been asked earlier, and it's in three parts. have you noticed among the deans at any of the top law schools a recognition on their part that there is an imbalance or the extent of the imbalance? second, do they regard that as a problem if they recognize it? and thirdly, is there anything like a serious plan among any of them to redress the imbalance? >> i wish i could read their minds better than i could. i have noticed a few years ago when adam at "the new york

times" did a well-reported, good article on this general issue, this set of debates that he was not finding deans of law schools or highly-placed figures of other sorts who were actually defending the imbalance and saying, you know, darned if you're going to change what we do. we're going to keep filling up with people who think like me. um, there was some recognition and, certainly, there are individual deans that we all know that have, you know, done wonders to make their faculties more diverse often at the price, if it is a price, of wringing in people -- bringing in the people that they disagree with. but the way i think of deans is that they don't agonize about anything any more than they have to because their time is too spoken for by meetings and fund raising. and so unless there is discontent on the outside that they have to pay attention to, it's easy to move on to the ten things that they know they have

to worry about instead of adding an 11th one that no one has pestered them for months about. and i think that's probably how a plurality of the deans actually treat the intellectual diversity issue. fred, again. fred smith. >> a follow-up to dave's question. the anthropologists and sociologists, they're less connected to the world, less reality checks, but a lot of it's embed inside the economic world. yet it does appear you see a dramatic asymmetry in the way between the private law economics atmosphere and the heritages, catos, cei, others respond to the issue in the way public law, trial lawyers, human rights lawyers and so on and their intellectual allies. and what you've talked about one seems to be strategic, looking for precedents, the other seems

to be winning cases. is there some way of raising the strategic awareness of our side to recognize we're in a cultural war, and we are fighting it tactically and defense my? >> well, fred, where you get me going is talking about cultural wars metaphor. i prefer culture peace. but the question is why the asymmetry. and let me pursue that for a moment because i spent a fair bit of time in the book talking about how, um, if you move from groups like the american civil liberties union to law school clinics and programs in adjacent areas, you find a whole lot of overlap. you find cooperation, you find sometimes a revolving door of highly-qualified personnel, you find that the publications and the round tableses and so forth are constantly informing many be

of the key academics as to what the aclu has been thinking this week and vice versa. you have tremendous cooperation. would we actually want that cooperation between groups that are the ideological opposite numbers of the aclu, or would that just make law schools yet more polarized and yet more ideological? i have my doubts that they should jump headlong into an equally cozy relationship with conservative or libertarian think tanks or much less with groups that might have lobbying agendas which would really be potentially disastrous. and so the question is, therefore, should we tell them, you know, stop seeing the aclu, you know, stop dating the aclu four times a month and at least date around to a variety of groups. [laughter] i don't want them to feel married to any of them, though, if you see what i mean. yes. >> let me ask the concluding -- why don't you stand up here or

stay here -- the concluding question. since i didn't know why john who introduced me was, needed to mention my service on the u.s. commission on civil rights, but then you explained the answer. i see a few of my colleagues here. there have been several who have been agitating to abolish the u.s. commission on civil rights, apparently because we no longer -- american civil rights is passe, and they want to replace it with a human rights commission. so if you wouldn't mind explaining what is it that is so attractive to the so-called progressives about human rights? i'll suggest one or ask you one. you know, civil rights law actually has some limits, but there are no limits to what you can dream up in the human rights realm. >> yeah. and i'm also highly alarmed by the effort to rename and rebadge things from civil rights to human rights.

as you hint, civil rights we conceive of as a bunch of categories having to deal with minorities or others potentially in repressed groups. not a member of that group, it's probably not a civil rights issue. human rights is meant to encompass that plus rights of health care, labor, welfare and many others. once rebadged as huge rights, it is much easier to bring in the literature and the proannouncements of the various international groups that follow this. one thing that wouldn't change is the tremendous influence of legal academia because in both the civil rights and the human rights area, basically, every new idea that comes along has been vetted through a long literature in the law revies. civil rights is a classic area where the body of opinion represented so widely in the country and in this room which is that genuine, um, equality of

opportunity means not discriminating by race or gender. this is not -- this has not got its large body of academics behind it, they are almost unanimously, it's one of the reasons why civil rights law is so incredibly hard to reform. it becomes even worse if you rebadge it as human rights law. >> i'd like everyone to join me in thanking walter. [applause] >> for more information visit walter olson's web site, overlawyered.com. >> and the core issue, just to kind of pan out a little bit, is how do you get young people into the work force. and in this case, specifically, into the white collar work force. how do you move students especially from psych 101 classrooms to a building like this into the office jobs where

they will probably be in our service economy? what is that process, what's the best way to do that, what's the most humane way to do that, and what's the way that insures the sort of highest level of social justice that's possible in terms of making that an equitable process? and i, essentially, find this current very haphazard, unregulated free-for-all system of internships that's grown up to be inadequate, to sort of fail our tests of what would be a rational, humane and even efficient way of getting people from point a to point b. just to kind of see it on a very macro level. but anyway, a potted history. so internships originate, the term intern originally from french, probably for several hundred years used in kind of french hospitals as a term for

junior doctors, kind of apprenticing doctors. and is comes to the states probably sometime in the mid 19th century. the word itself at that time still spelled interne with an e at the end in a kind of french mode. and it, essentially, means a young doctor who has interned within the four walls of a hospital for a year or so, usually a couple of years, performing junior sort of tasks; blood letting, maybe applying leeches still at that point. some grisly things, possibly overworked, probably with some resemblance to today's interns. but, in any case, working within a hospital before they get to become a full-on medical practitioner. and i think this is, this is kind of more speculative, but i think, you know, there are probably a number of workplace practices that you can trace to

fields like medicine and law because these are prestigious fields that other fields want to copy. and that's certainly the case with salespersonships. internships. you see it become common practice in the medical profession in the early 20th century just at the time when medical profession is kind of rationalizing and modernizing itself, when they're shutting down. the country used to be full of kind of substandard medical schools, producing people of, doctorsover highly-varying quality, um, and the american medical association in particular kind of steps in and says we need to, you know, we need to get rid of the quacks. we need to have certification, accreditation, all of these things which are arrive anything the early 20th century in lots of different areas, but in medicine one of the results is the internship as a period of applied postgraduate, as it were, kind of learning, a transition period between your

school years as, in medical school essentially and your work as a medical practitioner. so those are the origins. and it takes, it takes a long time. it's, essentially, not until -- it takes several decades, not until the 1930s, 1940s that you see other fields, other industries kind of looking to this internship model and borrowing the word. um, and as far as i could tell, people may yet find other examples, in the 1930s you see the field of public administration going through the same sort of process. so the city governments of new york, los angeles, detroit, the state government of california establishing internship programs. essentially, just at the time when, no surprise, governments are vastly expanding because of the new deal and because of various social programs. um, and there's a push to kind of rationalize public administration. and one of the things you rationalized when you do your sort of standardization and

rationalization of a field is the process by which people enter. so internships fill that role. so it seems like public administration really. not politics so much. not what you might think of as capitol hill internships which is a species unto itself, but the field of public administration is the first place after medicine that you see adopting the internship model. and after world war world war ii, it begins to go much more general, and you see corporate america looking to the internship. you see the growth of human resources in firms, um, you know, such that it becomes -- any firm of any size is going to have a human resources department, and a human resources department is tasked with having a rational means of recruiting and bringing in new, bringing in new employees. and they establish internship programs. so you begin to see it in all kinds of fields; insurance companies and, you know, large companies like general electric,

you know, and a, the at&t, thess of companies. but at that time these are mostly paid situations. they're paid, they're training-based. it's seen to be about recruit m. it's about, you know, going to the local colleges and universities especially and bringing in the best and the brightest. and then, you know, paying them while you're training them and sort of drawing them in to the corporate culture, and then they will work for you. >> and it's, you know, we take a certain number of interns each year. these were sort of very structured programs based around ideas about structured training. so a new threat kind of enters in the 1960s and '70s. and as far as i can tell this is where the academy become more interested in internships as a kind of applied learning, learning beyond the classroom. it's not the first example of

experience cial education. there are ideas about applied learning and learning beyond the classroom going back 100 years, but the specific model of internships. for instance, sociology departments in the 1960s and '70s, they begin to contact, say, a city planning department. i know this happened in new york. and say can you take a few of our students, you know, each year, each semester to show them how a city planning office works? that sort of thing. and so it's, you know, you see the academy begin to be involved. this is, especially, at this time this is also a very american, american kind of phenomenon, i should note on the side although i want to mention the kind of international dimensions of the internship explosion in a little bit. um, and essentially, schools are saying that they're responding to student need. this is a generation of baby boomers and universities saying we want to apply our learning

and get academic credit for it. we want to, you know, go beyond the class room and be n a sense, active in the community. and that's seen as a kind of, um, you know, it's seen as an interest in the broader society, going beyond the ivory tower. so that's kind of another theme that enters the internship discourse. but what particularly interests me and what i particularly cover in the book is what i call the internship explosion. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> now on booktv, discussions about some of the first ladies of the united states. coming up, maureen beasley takes a look at eleanor roosevelt whose involvement transformed the office of the first lady to a more politically active position. and then barbara perry described the high level of celebrity jacqueline kennedy brought to the white house. and we wrap up our first lady programming with myra gooden who says that barbara bush was more

politically astute than her husband. but first, maureen beasley on eleanor roosevelt's years as first lady. >> our speaker today, maureen beasley, is professor emerita of journalism at the university of maryland. and as i was reading her bio, i noticed the connection with the state of missouri. she attended the university of missouri's journalism school which, if you know anything about journalism, that is one of the top two, i would say, at least schools of journalism in the united states. um, and she also was vacation editor for the kansas city missouri star. and i'm originally from missouri, so i mentioned that to her, and she said, oh, where are you from? i said, oh, i'm from ralla, but my family originated in she dale

ya. it turns out that's her hometown, too, so i'm very pleased. her bio is very impressive. i wish i had time to read the entire bio, but in addition to being the education editor at the kansas city star, she also was a staff writer for "the washington post". she's taught journalism, she's a journalism historian. her particular focus is upon washington women journalists including eleanor roosevelt who considered herself a journalist and coverage of the first ladies. her most recent book is what she will be discussing with us today, "eleanor roosevelt: transformative first lady." maureen. has. >> thank you so much, don. it was really wonderful to find out that we have a sedalia, missouri, connection. his grandfather was mayor of the town that i grew up in, and i

have a feeling that his father actually was a student of my mother at smith cotton high school in sedalia. and i'm going to tell you a little bit about that as i get into my speech on eleanor roosevelt. but i do want to thank dr. cannon, vice president for scholarship and education of the united states capital historical society for 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 studying the past that gives us the strength and vision to press onward into the future? the -- 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 life 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 who, 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's 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, but 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 sick months. -- five or six months. 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 lady of the day. do any of you remember when these were ubiquitous wardrobe items? [laughter] upper class families, everybody had one of these. well, i wear this because i like to transport us for a minute 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 or, actually, he never could walk again after he got infantile paralysis in 1921. i saw this in the supermarket, this is an eleanor roosevelt refrigerator magnet. [laughter] you see, she's got her fur on. and then, of course, there's fallow, their little dog. [laughter] so it was an era dominated by these folks here. um, so, please, join me now in if 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 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 girl, and she says, "i am sure that she is better than he is." [laughter] well, who do you think the she was? eleanor roosevelt. and who is the he? franklin. my family was rock-ribbed republican, believe me. they would have fit 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. 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 ladies 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 first lady. now, 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. and i'm going to be talking about that.

um, eleanor -- historians will tell us -- did not want to be first laid keyal -- lady although she certainly campaigned for franklin in the election of 1932, the first of the four elections in which he was chosen president. why department 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 don't 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. you've got to remember, you know, we think of these people like saints now, but they were flesh and blood folks just like us. well, we don't know if there were such a letter although there were people who supposedly saw the letter, and the letter

was supposedly destroyed by louie howe who was eleanor's great friend and confidant. but, of course, he was also franklin's political genius. at any rate, 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? t 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, um, 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 position of the first lady in this same way, as a bully pulpit. she saw 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 the 1930s. she honestly believe inside a lot of social causes -- 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 which we often don't think about that. first ladies since her have written books, 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 department have any, um, experts in public registrations or -- she didn't have any experts in if public relations or spin devices or in focus group kinds of things. she did this herself. but i think she borrowed ideas from a rather small group of personal friends. now, what made eleanor roosevelt an upper class patrician? um, 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. it's headlined, i felt very guilty to have missed my hostess. washington has bloomed in the week since 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 ises a land grant college, they have 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. does that sound much like a political pundit today? what does it sound like that we hear a lot about? i bet you can tell me from the internet. >> blogs. >> blog. exactly. and it was written like that. it was a very perm kind of thing. 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, in 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. 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 raz svelte. obviously, she -- 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, 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's sort of 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 supplant her as a mother for eleanor's five children. of course, eleanor had a sixth child who died in infancy. um, but mama definitely was an influence there. now, we know that eleanor and franklin lived increasingly separate lives after she discussed his -- she discovered his eau romance with lucy mercer during world war i. but they stayed together. why'd they stay together? well, one reason was mama said, franklin, you leave eleanor and those children, and i'm going to cut off the money. so that made franklin think about things. and then, of course, louis howe, his prosecute call genius said, franklin, it's going to ruin your political career if you should ruin your -- if you should leave your family. so at any point, they decided to stay together.

we know that eleanor nursed franklin devotedly when he was stricken with infantile paralysis in 19 21. 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. she begins to write magazine articles which she sold on such subjects as women in politics. she begins to get 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 she's entering into it. she's becoming part of the network of these, a 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 the public school. she never had an education past finishing school which she'd attended in the england. so she bought a share of todd hunter, and that permitted her to teach there. and she went on record as saying that there was 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 the 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 have this slide. now, here is the four of them together, 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 eleanor on this al side of the picture. 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 wal know that franklin did not want earl to come to washington as part of the roosevelt entourage in 1933, so he found earl a good government job in new york state. but eleanor and frank -- i'm sorry, but eleanor and earl cometted to be in touch.

and eleanor would visit earl while she was first lady. and, 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. i guess they were sort of protection to her. and he also a taught her how to shoot a gun. because as first lady eleanor refused secret service protectionment 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-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 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 ground, and these pictures would be circulated all through the country, mrs. roosevelt in her office from arnold constable. i think this was a financially advantageous arrangement for both the store and eleanor. 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 that person too well in thissic sure, but we -- in this picture. but we get some idea perhaps of the way she kind of hid herself from, um, public view when eleanor was in the white house. but she was definitely there assisting eleanor in transforming the role of first lady. the first road svelte administration. okay. here we see eleanor, and then we see this woman sort of in the background there? okay. that eat lorena hickok. lou rain that hickok had been the top woman political writer for the associated press in new york. and she was assigned to the roosevelt campaign train in the length of 1933 -- in the election of 1932, and 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 with a book called "reluctant first lady." what is part of how we know eleanor did not want to be first lady. 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 there's undisputable evidence that there was a 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 say cases together, about six weeks in the 1933 and 1934, and the press let

them 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 continue innocental united states whiler-- continenl united states while her husband was in office. this was a trip that eleanor made to puerto rico, and i want to call your attention in particular to the woman who is standing to eleanor's meet left because that's ruby black. she has the dress on that has a definite pattern to it. ruby black, of course, cornelia's 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 involved in puerto rican politics, and she repped arrange for -- helps arrange the trip. these other people are devoted admirers of eleanor, they covered eleanor's press concernses 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 the idea of having press conferences for women reporters only 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 agains