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Summary
Summary
The second volume plunges into the White House years and the Great Depression, the time when Eleanor exerted enormous influence over the course of the country. In the thirties, Eleanor becomes even more surprising and multifaceted. A loyal wife, a devoted mother, a woman who courted romance and adventure, Eleanor Roosevelt was America's most compelling, charismatic, and visionary First Lady. She ran a virtual parallel administration that championed civil rights, affordable housing, and a New Deal for women. She took unpopular stands and often countered her husband's policies, particularly a concerning racial justice, women's rights, the plight of refugees, and approaches to Fascism and the Spanish Civil War. The book closes in 1938, as Europe moves toward war.This is an unparalleled presentation of a woman whose life was filled with passionate commitment and who struggled for personal fulfillment. It is a book for all readers of American history and politics, and as the New Deal comes underassault today, a book for readers who care about a decent future for all people.
Author Notes
Blanche Wiesen Cook is Professor of History and Women's Studies at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books include Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume I, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and numerous other awards.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This highly readable, well-researched work of feminist scholarship erases the image of the young Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) as a long suffering, repressed wife and presents her as a strong, ever-evolving individual who overcame an emotionally impoverished childhood to become a champion of social justice and a woman deeply involved in enduring love relationships. Cook ( Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution ) notes that although her subject felt compelled by the tenor of the times to act the role of dutiful wife, daughter-in-law and mother, she early on transformed herself from a dependent female into a social activist, writer and teacher. Her work with feminist friends during the 1920s on the League of Nations and the World Court is fully covered, as is her involvement in FDR's political campaigns. The author is forthright about her subject's private life. As much anguish as her husband's affair with Lucy Mercer caused her, it also liberated her to forge her own erotic relationships. For the first time adequate coverage is given of Eleanor Roosevelt's possible affair with Earl Miller, a New York state trooper who became her bodyguard, and her enduring passionate relationship with reporter Lorena Hickok. An outstanding first installment of a projected two-volume study of a major 20th-century figure. Photos not seen by PW. First serial to Mirabella; author tour. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Readers who enjoyed the award-winning first volume of Cook's biography of Eleanor Roosevelt may have expected just one other volume after all these years (the first published in 1992); if so, they underestimated both Cook, a City University of New York history professor, and her remarkable subject. Volume 2 covers just six years: the first years of FDR's presidency. At this rate, one can easily imagine at least two more volumes: one on the war years, ending with Franklin's death in 1945, and a second on Eleanor's very active life after the White House. ER went to Washington with doubts and concerns: Would she be able to play a role in the critical issues that had given her life meaning, or would she be forced to serve simply as hostess and housekeeper? Cook traces the ways Roosevelt continued to exercise influence: on housing, race, and women's issues, for example. A major concern here is why both Roosevelts were largely silent about Germany's treatment of its Jewish citizens; Cook examines what the Roosevelts knew and when, and she notes that FDR and his staff did not object to Eleanor expressing her views on domestic matters that conflicted with administration policy, but they severely restricted her speeches and articles on foreign policy subjects. Full of fascinating details; expect requests. (Reviewed May 1, 1999)0670844985Mary Carroll
New York Review of Books Review
THREE-VOLUME BIOGRAPHIES of women are extremely rare, so the completion of Blanche Wiesen Cook's monumental and inspirational life of Eleanor Roosevelt is a notable event. And if any American woman deserves such sustained attention, it's surely "the first lady of the world." A professor of history at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of CUNY, Cook has been working on Roosevelt's biography for well over 25 years. Her previous volumes, published in 1992 and 1999, showed Roosevelt (she calls her E.R.) overcoming her childhood shyness and insecurity to create the "radiant sovereign self" Margaret Fuller identified as the essence of female maturity. After 1918, when Eleanor discovered her husband's affair with her friend Lucy Mercer, she decided not to divorce him, but to create a new marital partnership that allowed both of them freedom and gave her the space to forge her own career while forming a female support network, including what may have been a passionate affair with the journalist Lorena Hickok. By 1938, she was an active and confident first lady. Volume 3 continues the story of Eleanor's "journey to greatness." Keeping the focus on her actions and reactions, Cook skillfully narrates the epic history of the war years. In October 1939, Eleanor Roosevelt was 55 years old. She had learned to balance political confrontation and compromise in her marriage, acting as Franklin's ambassador and surrogate, but also pushing him toward action in private and criticizing him in her writings. As he contended with fascism in Europe and reactionaries at home, she often had to mute her own strong liberal views and radical sympathies in deference to his agendas. In 1940, she longed to go to Europe as part of an aid operation for refugees, but Franklin vetoed it as too dangerous. "I'm not going abroad," she wrote bitterly to friends. "Nor am I going to do anything else except to hold people's hands now and then. Well, I'm probably good at that!" Quickly, however, Eleanor found her own mission in the struggles over "race and rescue" - racial discrimination at home, and the effort to save European refugees. Behind the scenes, she was constantly protesting the treatment of European Jews, and trying to find sanctuaries for some of the most famous artists, intellectuals and writers. Yet Franklin resisted, and at times she too was disturbingly silent; while the Roosevelts were entertaining King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, for example, the ocean liner St. Louis, with more than 900 Jewish refugee passengers aboard, was refused entry to American ports and had to return to Europe. "To date, not one word about the St. Louis has been found in E.R.'s writings," Cook records. Eleanor's efforts to fight racism, white supremacy and Jim Crow in the United States were more successful. Insisting that the country could not effectively champion democracy in the world when it practiced racial discrimination at home, she declared that because black Americans were "our largest minority, our attitude toward them will have to be faced first of all." Her efforts to fight lynching and end segregation in the military for men and women were backed up by her support for the N.A.A.C.P., her friendships with black activists and artists including Mary McLeod Bethune, Pauli Murray and Harry Belafonte, and her championing of Marian Anderson's concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Eleanor's prodigious activity served as her antidote to loneliness, anxiety and the periods of depression she called "Griselda moods." Cook weaves in a detailed account of her astonishing schedule; she spoke on the radio, gave lectures and talks and consulted speech specialists to help her lower and steady her voice. She traveled often, to meet people from migrant workers in California to wounded soldiers in Bora Bora. She kept up with art and music, and read "The Grapes of Wrath" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Six days a week, from 1935 to 1962, she wrote a syndicated newspaper column called "My Day," often composing it after midnight, in bed, in cars, on planes, or dictating to her secretary from the bathtub. By 1939, these columns, which covered her travels, her home life, her views on human rights and her bracing, comforting words on courage in frightening times, reached more than four million readers. In December 1944, Cook suggests, Eleanor was the first American journalist to discuss Auschwitz. BUT IN THESE tumultuous decades, which gave Eleanor the opportunity to play a major role on the national stage, her private life receded, submerged in the torrent of history. In 1940, Hickok wrote to her about the growing conflict between the real woman and the public image: "I...fought for years an anguished and losing fight against the development of the person into the personage," she lamented. "I still think the personage is an accident," Eleanor replied, "and I only like the part of life in which I am a person!" Yet there are only a few places in the biography when she is introspective. In a 1943 letter to her old friend Esther Lape, she described the consequences of perpetually playing a role: "I find it hard to know sometimes whether I am being honest with myself. So much of life is play acting, it becomes too natural!" On her life with Franklin, she concluded in the same letter, "there is no fundamental love to draw on, just respect and affection....On my part there is often a great weariness and a sense of futility in life but a lifelong discipline in a sense of obligation and a healthy interest in people keeps me going. I guess that is plenty to go on for one's aging years!" Cook shows Eleanor Roosevelt's final years as triumphant. After her husband's death in 1945, Truman appointed her to the United States delegation for the first United Nations assembly in London, where she helped write the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet the last part of the biography emphasizes the personage rather than the person. No longer part of a loving community of women, Eleanor found her most intimate emotional relationships with younger men - the writer Joseph Lash, and her personal physician, David Gurewitsch - leading to complex triangular bonds with their wives that deserve deeper and fuller analysis. Winding up Eleanor's majestic story in less than two pages, Cook doesn't describe her death from tuberculosis on Nov. 7, 1962. It was not an easy death; neither she nor her family was able to prevent painful, protracted and futile treatments her doctors hoped might save her. She had wanted a quiet private funeral, but got a spectacular state occasion. It's a tribute to Cook's rich portrait that after three enormous volumes, I still wanted to know more. The ironies of Eleanor's death make her life even more poignant and moving; their omission leaves her as a timeless and legendary figure, whose disembodied "glow," according to Adlai Stevenson's eulogy, "continues to warm the world." Eleanor Roosevelt was indeed a luminous beacon of courage and hope; yet the heroine of Cook's grand biography is not the remote icon, but the full-bodied, indomitable woman who welcomed life, as she put it, with "an unquenchable spirit of adventure." Her prodigious activity served as an antidote to loneliness, anxiety and depression. ELAINE SHOWALTER is a professor emerita of English at Princeton. Her latest book is "The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe."
Choice Review
Eleanor Roosevelt is best known as Franklin D. Roosevelt's helpmate. In this first volume of a projected two-volume biography, Cook confirms and amplifies the conventional widsom concerning Roosevelt's life. The book's value and strength, however, lie in its attention to the extraordinary journey of a woman caught between the Victorian conventions with which she grew up and the realities of 20th-century America. Cook's Roosevelt was no plaster saint, but a person who struggled to balance her family obligations with her deep concern for improving life for her fellow Americans, most especially women and children. Readers familiar with the Roosevelts will expect and find new insights on Eleanor's complicated partnership with FDR and her difficult relations with mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt. Even more impressive are Cook's narrative accounts of Eleanor's surprisingly rich if periodically troubled childhood and adolescence, her impressive range of political and journalistic activity in the 1920s, and her intimate relationships with Earl Miller and Lorena Hickock, which friends, family and many writers have chosen to ignore or dismiss. In its depth of research, deft prose, and empathy for its subject, this biography is a model. Cook has produced a classic. All levels. M. J. Birkner; Gettysburg College
Kirkus Review
From Cook (History/John Jay; The Declassified Eisenhower, 1981, etc.)--the first volume of a massive biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, which, in seeking redress for its subject, is flawed by its own (feminist) biases. Long overshadowed by the achievements of FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt's own extraordinary life deserves wider attention. The poor little rich girl who was born into one of New York's wealthiest and most distinguished families was unkindly called ``Granny'' by her beautiful but cold mother; lost both her parents before she was 12; was taken in by relatives who made her always feel an outsider; and, once married, had to contend with a tyrannical mother-in-law and a philandering husband. And yet, Cook tells us, there were triumphs and periods of fulfillment-- schooldays in London; ventures into politics and civic activities; and the golden interlude of the 1920's, when ER led her own life independent of FDR, becoming a sought-after speaker, activist, and commentator. Cook conscientiously records the achievements and the many unhappinesses--not just the discovery of FDR's affair with Lucy Rutherford--as well as the consolation of friends, mostly women (though Cook believes that ER had an affair with Earl Miller, one of the Roosevelts' security guards). The volume ends with FDR's election to the presidency, an achievement about which, for FDR's sake, ER was ``sincerely glad''--but which also led her to comment, ``Now I shall start to work out my own salvation.'' In less-than-luminous prose, ER gets her uncritical due while FDR becomes the typical male villain--duplicitous, weak, and owing everything to a good woman. Informative but not definitive. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs--not seen.)
Library Journal Review
Continuing a major biography. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Preface and Acknowledgments | p. xi |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| 1 Becoming First Lady | p. 9 |
| 2 Public and Private Domains | p. 31 |
| 3 ER's Revenge: Henrietta Nesbitt, Head Housekeeper | p. 52 |
| 4 Mobilizing the Women's Network: Friendships, Press Conferences, Patronage | p. 60 |
| 5 ER's New Deal for Women | p. 70 |
| 6 Family Discord and the London Economic Conference | p. 92 |
| 7 Private Times and Reports from Germany | p. 115 |
| 8 Creating a New Community | p. 130 |
| 9 The Quest for Racial Justice | p. 153 |
| 10 The Crusade to End Lynching | p. 177 |
| 11 Private Friendship, Public Time | p. 190 |
| 12 Negotiating the Political Rapids | p. 214 |
| 13 1935: Promises and Compromises | p. 233 |
| 14 The Victories of Summer, 1935 | p. 264 |
| 15 Mobilizing for New Action | p. 283 |
| 16 A Silence Beyond Repair | p. 304 |
| 17 Red Scare and Campaign Strategies, 1936 | p. 335 |
| 18 The Roosevelt Hearth, After Howe | p. 353 |
| 19 The Election of 1936 | p. 363 |
| 20 Postelection Missions | p. 389 |
| 21 Second Chance for the New Deal | p. 407 |
| 22 1937: To Build a New Movement | p. 420 |
| 23 A First Lady's Survival: Work and Run | p. 435 |
| 24 This Is My Story | p. 452 |
| 25 This Troubled World, 1938 | p. 484 |
| 26 Race Radicals, Youth and Hope | p. 509 |
| 27 Storms on Every Front | p. 538 |
| Notes | p. 577 |
| Notes on Sources and Selected Bibliography | p. 652 |
| Index | p. 667 |
