Transcription
[Music] I think every first lady since Ellena Roosevelt is measured against Elanar Roosevelt because she did completely transform this role.
Anna Elanor Roosevelt was born in New York City on October 11th, 1884. She was born into a life of privilege, but it was a difficult childhood. When Elener was 8 years old, her mother died very suddenly, and 2 years later, her father died of alcoholism. So, she was an orphan by the time she was 10 years old.
At age 14, Eleanor was sent to a boarding school in London. The experience would be a major turning point in her life. The head Mistress of this school, a woman named Marie Sylvestra, was actually a radical, a feminist, and she wasn't educating these girls just to go off and get married. She was educating them to be leaders.
In 1902, Elanor met her father's fifth cousin, a young Harvard student named Franklin Roosevelt. He was dashing and handsome and was considered a very good catch for her. Franklin and Ellena Roosevelt fell in love, but Franklin's mother was not very happy about the relationship. She sent Franklin off on a trip to Europe to try and break them up, but of course, it didn't work. The couple married on March 17th, 1905, in New York City.
They had children right away, and six of them. While Franklin was serving as Assistant Navy Secretary during World War I, a rumor surfaced that he was having an affair with his secretary, Lucy Mercer. Elanar found love letters from Lucy. She did at one point consider leaving, but that would have ended his political aspirations.
In 1921, Franklin Roosevelt contracted infantile paralysis, losing mobility in his legs. Elanor cared for him and encouraged his return to politics. In an odd way, his inability to get around freed her. She started to get involved in political causes. She got involved with the League of Women Voters. She got involved with the Democratic Party.
The Great American public has its say at the polls, and the result is a Roosevelt victory of amazing proportion. When Franklin Roosevelt was elected President of the United States in 1933, Elanor saw the office of First Lady as a way to expand on her previous work. The first thing she did was create a way of having a constituency of her own. So, she created a role that simply hadn't existed before.
IA Roosevelt was criticized pretty heavily by some for her active role in public policy as First Lady. Elanor pioneered the use of mass media to communicate directly with the public. By having a women-only press corps, which she did, she was able to reach across the country. Elanar Roosevelt leveraged mass media as a way to connect with the people at a time when the nation was bleak, literally coming out of the Great Depression.
Elanor Roosevelt further strengthened her legacy in her fight for equal rights during World War II. During the war, she famously went to the Tuskegee Air Base because black officers, they weren't being deployed, and she insisted on going up with one of the African-American pilots, and that after that, they did get deployed.
On April 12th, 1945, Elanor Roosevelt's husband died after suffering a stroke early in his fourth term as President. She wasn't there, and she learned some time afterwards that Lucy Mercer was there. She told reporters after he died, when they said to her, "Mrs. Roosevelt, what are you going to do now?" she said, "The story is over." But of course, it wasn't.
In the years following the White House, Elanor Roosevelt remained an active political figure. In 1945, President Truman asked Elanor to be a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly. Elena Roosevelt was very active. She really tried to force the United Nations to take a very hard, strong, active role in combating abuses toward human rights.
Alen Roosevelt chaired the committee that drafted and passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She considered that her greatest achievement. Elanor Roosevelt died at her Manhattan home on November 7th, 1962. She was 78.
Mark Twain is now thought of as America's first celebrity because he was so good at capturing the public imagination, and it became important to him to have a public image.