October 11 – Happy Birthday, Eleanor Roosevelt!

nPosted October 11, 2019

Key Points

nFirst Lady Of The United States!

nIn the U.S., we now do a lot of “US” anagrams, and the anagram that fits Eleanor Roosevelt’s “job title” is FLOTUS, wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

n(FDR was POTUS – President Of The United States – of course!)

nEven better, maybe, would be the anagram FFLOTUS. That’s because:

Eleanor Roosevelt was the FIRST First Lady to hold regular press conferences.

She was the FIRST First Lady to speak at a national party convention.

She was the FIRST First Lady to write a monthly magazine column.

She was the FIRST First Lady to host a weekly radio show.

She was the FIRST First Lady to write a daily newspaper column!

nEleanor Roosevelt was controversial during her lifetime – although she was highly regarded in her later years – because she pushed for human rights for marginalized groups and because she sometimes publicly disagreed with her husband’s policies. Here are some of the issues she tackled:

nCivil rights for African Americans and Asian Americans.

nFairness towards women in the workplace.

nWarning against prejudice against Japanese Americans, after Pearl Harbor, and opposing the Japanese American internment camps.

nIncreased roles for women and minorities in the armed forces.

nHuman rights for refugees.

nParticipation in the United Nations.

nSome of the ways she worked on these things included:

nOver the course of more than three presidential terms, she invited hundreds of black people, individually or in small groups, as guests to the White House. She lobbied for funding for a predominantly black school for girls, and she tried to win hearts and minds in making lynching a federal crime. (She failed to win enough hearts and minds to accomplish that last item.) She launched an experimental community for unemployed miners and their families (this was another failure), became the first U.S. delegate to the U.N., and chaired Kennedy’s Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. She helped to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She did a LOT more stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. Amazing!

n
n

nI mentioned that Eleanor Roosevelt was well respected in her later years. It turns out that Gallup took polls of Americans to find out who they most admired, and Roosevelt polled #1 for women 13 out of her last 14 years! And in 1999, the last year of the 20th Century (by some counts, at least), Eleanor Roosevelt polled at #9 out of ALL people, men and women, in Gallup’s List of Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century!