The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt

This autobiography traces Eleanor Roosevelt's life from her birth in 1884 through the early 1960s, spanning the Gilded Age, two world wars, the New Deal, and the Cold War.

Eleanor was born into New York high society, the daughter of Elliott Roosevelt and Anna Hall Roosevelt. Her father struggled with alcohol addiction, and the family traveled to Italy in 1890 in a failed effort to aid his recovery. Eleanor's mother died of diphtheria in 1892, when Eleanor was eight; her brother Ellie died shortly after, and her father died in 1894. Eleanor and her surviving brother, Hall, moved in with their maternal grandmother in New York City. Shy and fearful, she retreated into fantasy, perpetually afraid of the dark, of failure, and of displeasing others. Relatives introduced her early to poverty through visits to hospitals and charitable institutions.

At 15, Eleanor sailed to England to attend Allenswood, a school near London run by Mlle. Souvestre, an intellectual who valued independent thinking and treated Eleanor with warmth. Eleanor gained confidence for the first time, earning a place of honor at the headmistress's table and traveling through France and Italy with Souvestre.

Eleanor returned to New York in 1902 for an agonizing social debut. She volunteered at a settlement house and investigated factory conditions for the Consumers League, deepening her awareness of poverty. In 1903, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, her fifth cousin once removed and a Harvard senior, proposed. They married on March 17, 1905, with President Theodore Roosevelt giving the bride away. Eleanor became deeply dependent on Franklin's mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, who furnished their homes and dominated household decisions. Between 1906 and 1916, Eleanor had six children, losing one in infancy. She describes herself as an insecure mother consumed by duty.

Franklin's political career transformed their lives. He won a seat in the New York State Senate in 1910 and was appointed assistant secretary of the navy in 1913. During World War I, Eleanor worked at Red Cross canteens and naval hospitals. When the household fell ill during the influenza epidemic of 1918, Eleanor nursed them all. After the Armistice, she accompanied Franklin to postwar Europe, where the devastation of the Western Front deepened her hatred of war. Franklin ran as the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 1920, and Louis McHenry Howe, his political adviser, began educating Eleanor about the press and politics. After the Democrats' defeat, Eleanor joined the League of Women Voters, where friendships with lawyer Elizabeth Read and Esther Lape marked the start of her intellectual independence.

In August 1921, Franklin contracted infantile paralysis (polio) at the family's summer home on Campobello Island. The winter that followed was the most trying of Eleanor's life: The New York house was overcrowded, her daughter Anna felt neglected, and Eleanor had no space of her own. One afternoon she broke down sobbing, prompting a reconciliation with Anna. At Howe's urging, Eleanor became active in Democratic politics and began making speeches. With close political friends Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, she established a furniture factory at Val-Kill on the Hyde Park property and began teaching at the Todhunter School.

In 1928, Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith persuaded Franklin to run for governor of New York. Franklin won narrowly and pushed old-age pensions, labor rights, and relief programs that foreshadowed the New Deal. Eleanor learned to inspect state institutions on his behalf. He won re-election in 1930 by a record margin and was nominated for president in 1932. Eleanor did not want him to run, fearing the loss of her personal independence, but she never voiced this concern.

Franklin was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, during a severe banking crisis. Eleanor established press conferences for women reporters, answered enormous volumes of mail, and traveled the country as Franklin's eyes and ears, inspecting government projects. She describes her role as a "sounding board": Franklin sometimes baited her into arguing positions he actually held, then adopted her arguments without acknowledgment. Major New Deal programs were launched, including the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Eleanor's visits to coal-mining areas of West Virginia, where families subsisted on scraps, led to homestead resettlement projects. Louis Howe died in April 1936, and Eleanor notes that Franklin afterward lacked an adviser willing to argue with him fearlessly.

During the second term, Eleanor advocated for civil rights, including anti-lynching laws and removal of the poll tax, but Franklin deferred, unwilling to alienate Southern votes needed for defense measures. She describes herself as "a hairshirt" to Franklin on such matters. After Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, Franklin took incremental steps toward military preparedness and was nominated for an unprecedented third term in 1940.

Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill arrived at the White House for the first of several wartime visits, and a deep friendship developed between the two leaders. In 1942, Eleanor visited wartime England in a Red Cross uniform, inspecting military units, factories, and bombed neighborhoods. In 1943, she made a five-week trip through the South Pacific, visiting 17 islands and bases and typing her own column each night.

Throughout 1944, Franklin's health visibly declined. He won a fourth term, then traveled to Yalta in February 1945 to meet with Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to plan the postwar world. He returned concerned that Stalin might not keep his promises. On April 12, 1945, Franklin died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia. Eleanor cabled her sons: "Father slept away. He would expect you to carry on and finish your jobs." She accompanied the funeral train, lying in her berth with the window shade up, watching mourners at every crossroad through the night.

After leaving the White House, Eleanor settled at Val-Kill and an apartment in New York. In December 1945, President Truman asked her to serve as a delegate to the first session of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in London. She was assigned to Committee Three, covering humanitarian, educational, and cultural questions, which the male delegates considered unimportant. She led the Western position defending refugees' right to choose their own fate, delivering a speech against the formidable Soviet delegate Andrei Vishinsky. Elected chairman of the Human Rights Commission, she spent two years guiding the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted on December 10, 1948, with no votes against but several abstentions. She considers this her most important accomplishment.

Eleanor subsequently traveled to Israel, Arab refugee camps, India, Pakistan, Japan, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, she was deeply unsettled by the conditioning of children from infancy into obedience and the government's total control of information. She interviewed Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at Yalta for two and a half hours and returned home frightened not by Soviet military power but by American complacency.

Eleanor re-entered domestic politics to campaign for Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in 1956. In 1960, she initially declined to support Senator John F. Kennedy over his reluctance to challenge Senator Joseph McCarthy but committed to Kennedy's campaign after watching the presidential debates. She advocated for convention reform, welcomed the Peace Corps as a program sending young Americans to serve abroad, and continued writing her daily column and lecturing widely. On her 75th birthday, she reflects on her transformation from a fearful child driven by duty into a woman devoted to international understanding and peace, closing with the conviction that the world remains "so challenging in its problems and so terribly interesting."