Eleanor Roosevelt: Best First Lady

Eleanor Roosevelt was something else. We can't get into it here, but just wait until you listen to this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you
Should Know, the Great Women in History edition.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
That's right, one of the greatest.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Sure she's up there. Francis Perkins still gets my vote, though,
Oh yeah, yeah. Eleanor Roosevelt is amazing. It's just that
learning about her makes your head spin, like you could
do a ten part series on her.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
Easy.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
Yeah, at some point you just gotta, you know, do
the stuff you should know.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
Thn right, and condense ten parts into forty five minutes.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
So I think I just let the cat out of
the bag, Chuck. We're talking today about Eleanor Roosevelt, and
she is the longest serving first Lady. She was called
the first Lady of the world as a matter of
fact by Harry Truman. Mayor La Guardia in New York
called her America's number one volunteer. And she was almost

(01:12):
universally liked, even if you couldn't stand her politics. She
was just so eloquent and graceful and kind and generous
and all the great things that you like you couldn't help,
but like her pretty much. It seems like only a
few members of her family are the ones that she
ever had a real beef with.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
Yeah, for sure. And you know, family's got a family, right.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
Never trust family, that's right. So let's talk about her
family to start. She was born in eighteen eighty four.
I believe her full name was Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, but
everybody calls her Eleanor, and her father was Elliott Roosevelt,
who's Teddy Roosevelt's younger brother. And so, yes, she wasn't
just married as a Roosevelt. She was born a Roosevelt too.

Speaker 3 (01:57):
Isn't that surprising that she married her cousin? That is
surprising to probably a lot of people.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
Yeah, fifth cousin. Not a lot of genetic issues there,
But yeah, I mean I thought she became a Roosevelt
after Emerchan she was born of Roosevelt. Buddy, there's your
trivia question for this one.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
Yeah, for sure. She didn't have her parents around for long,
and while she did, it was not the best scene.
Apparently her mother was a pretty distant person, not the
greatest mom, and her dad was a pretty tough alcoholic.
But they died not too you know, they died when
she was a child. Basically, her mom Anna died in

(02:36):
eighteen ninety two of diphtheria, and her father, Eliot died
after he jumped out of a window because of alcoholic
trimmers basically delirium trim and so it was a pretty
rough go for her until she went to live with
her grandmother, where she had lived with her brothers Elliott Junior,

(02:59):
who actually he didn't live that long either, but her
brother Hall did and apparently she doted on him quite
a bit.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
Yeah, I mean, what a great sister.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
Like.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
They're both orphans, and so she's going to take on
the role of like being his mother figure essentially and
taking good care of him. So I think that's pretty
neat and that shows a lot about who she was,
because this is starting about age ten. And when she
went and lived with her grandmother, she was educated at home,
as very very wealthy people did at the time. And

(03:32):
when she was fifteen, she was sent to England and
that's where she her first brush, maybe even really her
only brush with education went. She was there for like
three years before her grandmother called her back and said
that's enough, let's do some debutante stuff, come back and
get fitted for a big frilly.

Speaker 3 (03:51):
Dress, that's right. And that was in nineteen oh two,
and she wasn't you know, she didn't take to even
though she was born into in wealth and kind of
into that scene obviously as a Roosevelt, she didn't feel
like she really fit in in that elite sort of
sort of scene there. So early on she started volunteering,
and she thought, well, a good way to sort of

(04:12):
rid myself, or at least distance myself a bit from
that life would be to kind of, you know, see
what the common folks are up to and help them out.
And she started out doing that at a pretty young age,
initially at the Rivington Street Settlement House there on the
Lower East Side, where she was a dance teacher and
she taught classes to young immigrants, and then also finally

(04:35):
joining the National Consumers League, which was basically an organization
that tried to improve, you know, down in the garment
district what the workers were dealing with.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
Right, trying to get worker's death from one hundred percent
down to something like eighty percent.

Speaker 1 (04:50):
You know.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
So she met her cousin, her fifth cousin, who she
married Franklin Delano Roosevelt when they were both very young.
I think they were at like a family gathering or
something like that, and he was giving her piggyback rides,
not teenage piggyback rides, like these were little kid piggyback rides.
And then they I guess, didn't keep in touch much.
But then when she was eighteen and got called back

(05:15):
for the whole debutante thing, they met again and they
were just like, I like you. I like you too.
Maybe we should get married, Maybe we should we're fifth cousins.
I think that's okay, let's do it. That was the conversation.

Speaker 3 (05:30):
Let's a teenage piggyback.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
It's a piggyback ride given by teenagers. It's much different
than like a little kid piggyback ride.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
Can you explain the difference. I've never heard of this.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
I think the guy giving the girl usually is how
it goes piggyback ride. The piggyback ride is hoping that
that will somehow turn into something much more than just
a piggyback ride, even if it's just someday.

Speaker 3 (05:57):
Oh wow, all right, I never heard of that's.

Speaker 2 (06:01):
A teenage piggyback ride.

Speaker 3 (06:02):
Wow, I missed out.

Speaker 1 (06:03):
I was.

Speaker 3 (06:03):
I grew up a Baptist kid though, so I wasn't anoyed.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
Well, I mean all of this was just completely me
making this up as I went along.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
I don't think it's an actual thing.

Speaker 3 (06:11):
I gotcha, all right. So they decided to get married.
That happened in nineteen oh five. They had kind of
a long, dish engagement for the time and apparently Sarah
Roosevelt Franklin's mom kind of didn't insist on that, but
she didn't love eleanor so I think it kind of
dragged out a bit. Yeah, but they did get married,

(06:32):
and boy was Sarah a part of their life. Like
talk about an intrusive mother in law, Sarah and her
son were very very tight. She did not want to
kind of completely give him up, so she accomplished this
by gifting them a brownstone that she had built for them,
and she had a matching brownstone built that were connected

(06:55):
by sliding doors, so essentially, you know, it was on
like one big place when she wanted it.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
To be right.

Speaker 2 (07:03):
And she kept this control not just by adoring her son,
which she genuinely did, or being adored by him, which
he genuinely did. She also kept everybody in the family
on a pretty short leash by controlling the family's finances.
She was the one who was in charge of the
family money, so she could threaten to cut you off
if you didn't do what she wanted, she could reward

(07:26):
you for doing what she wanted, and then she I
just can't really wrap my head around how overbearing Sarah
FDR's mom was. It's just mind boggling to me, because
not just controlling the finances and building a brownstone, it
gets worse as a matter of fact. And yet Eleanor

(07:47):
really wanted her approval. She loved FDR. She wanted FDR
to be happy, and at the same time, she was like,
you have to be kidding me about this. Still, she
managed to become pretty close with her mother in law.
Again all odds, yeah, for sure, Colin.

Speaker 3 (08:02):
Said, that's right. So there was another pretty rough situation
not too long into their marriage. About nine years in,
Eleanor found out that her husband had been having a
fair like a year's long affair with her secretary, Lucy Mercer,
And this all came out, and you know, there were
love letters found, and they thought about getting divorced, but

(08:26):
you know, depending on who you read, they stayed together,
probably because he wanted to continue his career in politics
and that would not look very good. Other people say
that his mom, Sarah, had a threat to stop the
plow of money, kind of Arthur's style, so that might
be a reason too, But at any rate, they decided

(08:48):
to stay together to fight despite this infidelity, which I'm
sure was a huge disappointment for.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
Sure, I think that hit her hard and if FDR
had any you know, second thoughts about staying together. Three
years later, he was stricken with polio which he probably
contracted as a younger child, but caught up with them
at age thirty nine, and he was partially paralyzed and
had had to recover and he never fully recovered full

(09:15):
range of motion and power. And he just happened to
be married to the perfect person to help him through that.
So I think that that really kind of helped reinforce
the bonds that they had and also helped reinforce the
character of the relationship. Where he had one mom, he
got another one. He also had a wife. He also

(09:36):
had a very smart, savvy adviser, so he had like
everything except maybe the love of his life in Eleanor,
and he was like, this is good, I can deal
with this.

Speaker 3 (09:48):
Yeah. I mean she definitely stepped in and not only
cared for him but acted almost as a co president
like certainly more so than any other first lady that
we had ever seen. And we're going to go through,
you know, a lot of her first Lady first but
you know, when he couldn't get out there for any reason,
she was out there for him and would report back
to him. And I think everyone kind of understood and

(10:12):
you know, viewed her with a lot of respect. It
seems like for the most part.

Speaker 2 (10:16):
Yeah, I think a lot of people were also like,
especially when she was first Lady, hey, overstep your bounds much,
but she just plugged on. One thing that you'll see
about her is that she was a very self conscious person.
She had kind of low self esteem in a lot
of ways, and yet she was willing to plow through it.

(10:37):
And she was also willing to plow through the disapproval
of her social peers, her friends sometimes the general public,
and just kind of follow her moral compass essentially, where
it led her to great effect. I mean, when you
put all of it together, she's one of the most
revered women in American history.

Speaker 3 (10:56):
Yeah, for sure, she had a lot of kids. She
gave her to six kids, but in a ten year
period between nineteen oh six and nineteen sixteen with Anna Eleanor,
James Frank Junior sadly passed away. But they would get
another shot at another Frank Junior, as we'll see, because
she'd then had Elliott, then another Frank Junior, and then John.

(11:19):
And you know, she was a mom who wasn't like
as close to her kids as she wanted to be
or thought she wanted to be. Sarah again, was sort
of always there and always stepping in as grandmother, plus
to the point where she would say things to the
kids like I'm your real mother. She just bore you

(11:40):
your mom Eleanor. So you know, again, Sarah's kind of there,
throwing a wrench into things, including like not separating, but
at least creating some sort of a divide between Eleanor
and her children.

Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah, and I think her children kind of didn't feel
very close to her and maybe even disliked her for
their childhood years. And it wasn't until they got older
before they started to get close with their mother. And
I'm imagining that that probably coincided with Sarah's death when
she was finally out of the picture.

Speaker 3 (12:14):
Yeah, that's a pretty good bed.

Speaker 1 (12:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (12:17):
But it was during I guess, sort of the beginning
of the child bearing decade when she became a political
wife for the first time, when Franklin was elected to
New York State Senate, and that's when she really kind of,
you know, jumped in there. She got really active and
acted as you know, a host, you know, to dinners

(12:38):
and of course stuff like that. She would sit in
on meetings when she was allowed to. When FDR when
they had to move to DC, when she was appointed
or I guess he was appointed Woodrow Wilson's Assistant Secretary
of the Navy. That's when she found herself in the
middle of the like sort of the DC politics for
the first time, and she really took to it. It seems
like she did.

Speaker 2 (12:59):
At first she was basically following like the traditional political
wife handbook, right, But then as FDR's political career kind
of rose and rose and rose, she started to become
more and more involved in a much less traditional sense,
like much more pioneering sense. For example, she helped him

(13:20):
write speeches, she helped him strategize, especially when he ran
for vice president in nineteen twenty and she became much
more of a collaborator than the average political wife at
the time. Like this is when it became clear to
FDR if it wasn't already that she was invaluable in

(13:42):
the same way that inflammable still means flammable, right, this
means that she was super valuable.

Speaker 3 (13:48):
Yeah, for sure. And they kind of lived all over
depending on what his job was politically, because he was
governor of New York for a while in nineteen twenty eight,
and so you know, they certainly their home was in
New York. When in New York, I think they lived
on the Upper East Side, and she also, as we'll see,
would later have a place in like near Washington Square Park.

(14:08):
But they also obviously lived in DC when they need
to and Hyde Park, New York. But you know, she
liked she liked New York City.

Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, I mean, who doesn't, especially now the next one. God,
we're gonna just dated this episode. Huh.

Speaker 3 (14:26):
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 (14:27):
So something I didn't know about Eleanor that is at
first tough to swallow until you stop and kind of
think about how much that means she changed her views
early on. Again, she was just kind of following the
standard handbook of her social class or social circle to
the people around her, including her mother in law. So

(14:48):
she from her early letter she was a prolific letter
writer throughout her life. From her early letters, like she
didn't know anything about politics. She wasn't paying attention to
that kind of stuff. She didn't care about it. She
was just doing the society thing. Apparently she adopted her
mother in law, her mother in law's anti semitism, She
didn't think very highly of her black servants, Like she

(15:14):
was not a great person at that point, and a
lot of it from everything I've seen, people are like
she was straight up a product of her culture, right.

Speaker 3 (15:26):
Seems to be.

Speaker 1 (15:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
And so the idea that she went from anti semitism
to lobbying for America opening its stors to Jewish people
who were fleeing the Holocaust, from disparaging her black servants
to tirelessly working for civil rights for Black Americans, and

(15:50):
also just kind of showing disdain for the suffrage movement
becoming a champion for women's rights, It really kind of
shows like she didn't go from a neutral place to
these amazing heights. She came from the bottom and then
got to neutral and then got to those heights. And
it's pretty impressive how much she changed, and I mean
just how willing she was to change her views because

(16:11):
a lot of people aren't.

Speaker 3 (16:13):
Oh for sure, absolutely. Is that a good time for
a break?

Speaker 1 (16:18):
I think so? Sure.

Speaker 3 (16:19):
All right, we're gonna come back and continue with I
bet you're never gonna guess eleanor Roosevelt learn and stuff
with Joshua John stuff. You shut up, all right, so

(16:56):
we're back. We talked a little bit about her early
volunteer that kind of stopped for a while when she
became a political wife, but she always had that volunteer Jones.
I guess, so once she had more opportunity, she turned
that into more volunteerism. She was a volunteer for the
Red Cross in DC during World War One. In nineteen eighteen,

(17:21):
when she went to Europe with her husband, she toured
war hospitals in the battlefield And it feels like all
this sort of inspired her to really kind of get
busy and put her her time where her heart was.
Because she volunteered as a translator, she spoke French as
well as English. So she was volunteered as a translator

(17:42):
at a lot of different events, one of which was
the International Conference of Working Women at the Paris Peace Conference.

Speaker 1 (17:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:50):
In addition to volunteering, she also became an activist. She
was very, very active with organizations that promoted women's right. Now,
she finally kind of got on board with the suffrage movement.
She became a part of the League of Women Voters.
And one of the things about her that you'll notice
is she'll join an organization and then you like blink

(18:13):
a couple times and now she's like vice president of
it or something like that. She was a really great
asset to your organization if she showed up, because that
meant she really believed in what you were doing and
she wanted to help.

Speaker 3 (18:24):
Yeah. Like if my read from all of this is like,
you know, certainly being a prominent political wife had something
to do with it, But it wasn't just that, because
that didn't happen to everybody's wife at the time in politics.
So she clearly just showed the stuff you know that
people you know had clear leadership qualities for sure.

Speaker 2 (18:47):
Definitely. Oh, she was also asked too by the DNC
the Democratic National Convention to basically chair a committee on
women's issues to help them come up with whatever plank
in their platform they were going to have for women's suffrage.
And they were like, great, thanks Dahl and took her
ideas and shut the door and the all male committee

(19:09):
deliberated on it without her in the room.

Speaker 3 (19:11):
Yeah. So she definitely faced stuff like that obviously at
the time, which really stinks because she had a lot
of great ideas for sure.

Speaker 2 (19:20):
Another great idea too, I thought this was super cool.
She co founded a furniture factory that was a nonprofit
furniture factory. I have the impression that was a collective
chuck which we've talked about before. They called vow Kill
Industries and they made colonial furniture reproductions impewter.

Speaker 3 (19:39):
Yeah, it's kind of nice.

Speaker 1 (19:41):
Sure, what else did she do?

Speaker 3 (19:44):
She joined the Women's Trade Union League. This is kind
of part of her advocating for labor. That's when that
came into the picture, you know, working conditions for women
and children at the time, of course, because kids were
working and you know capacity that they don't work now,
if at all. It's always fun to talk to kids
who have teenagers about you know, them getting jobs and stuff.

(20:07):
I feel like that's happening a lot here and there,
but not like when we were kids, which was basically
still child favor for sure.

Speaker 1 (20:14):
It really was.

Speaker 3 (20:15):
Whenever I tell like my teenage my friend's teenage kids
that I was like a bus boy when I was thirteen,
They're all just like, are you serious? Yeah, it's like, yeah,
like every one of my friends worked as well. It
was weird.

Speaker 2 (20:28):
Yeah, it kind of is weird in retrospect. I had
like a paper route when I was ten or something
like that.

Speaker 3 (20:33):
Never had a paper out. I was always jealous of
this man.

Speaker 2 (20:36):
The smell of a stack of newspapers at like four
in the morning.

Speaker 3 (20:41):
Yeah, it is.

Speaker 2 (20:43):
It's a specific experience, and it can be really great
or it can be like, what am I doing with
my life?

Speaker 3 (20:48):
What?

Speaker 1 (20:48):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (20:48):
Do you get paid per paper? Is that the deal?

Speaker 2 (20:51):
I don't remember I was ten. I'm not even sure
I was directly paid. I don't remember. I don't remember
being thirty something.

Speaker 3 (20:59):
With your dad just funneling, funneling money.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
I'm like, damn, when did you start smoking cigars?

Speaker 3 (21:06):
Exactly? These look like good ones too.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
So all the stuff we've been talking about this is
just the nineteen twenties. She hadn't even become first Lady yet.
And when FDR was elected in nineteen thirty two, like
we said, she became a first Lady of a lot
of different first some of which have never been replicated since.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
You know.

Speaker 3 (21:26):
Oh yeah, I mean she's definitely I think not many
people would argue that she wasn't the most active first
Lady of all time. Probably she was the first first
lady to hold a press conference or multiple press conferences
and apparently only allowed women reporters to attend her press conferences. Yeah,
it's kind of cool. She is the first to write

(21:47):
a daily newspaper column and a host a radio show.
She's the first lady to travel to an active war
zone and just really sort of open the door on
what the whole title of first Lady could be, not
necessarily had to be, because as we've seen over the years,
there's been just so say, lots of different kinds of

(22:08):
first ladies for sure.

Speaker 2 (22:11):
Yeah, some more active than others, having different interests when
they were active. She just basically did it all. And
again this was the kind of thing that made her
a target, like what are you doing? You're a first lady,
you're not supposed to be this active. I mean, one
of the things that she did that really made her
a target, Chuck, was she was she became assistant director

(22:32):
of Civilian Defense in World War Two.

Speaker 3 (22:36):
Yeah, and they later direct her even.

Speaker 2 (22:38):
Yeah, okay, and that's a public office, right, She's the
first first lady ever. She's the only first lady to
have held public office while her husband was in office
as president. Right, And people were like, what is this? Like,
I don't know how I feel about this, and some
people were like this is They accused her of cronyism,

(22:59):
they accused her of frivolous spending. And it actually was
so bad that she stepped down after a year because
she didn't want to keep drawing like negative attention to
the work the Civilian Defense Agency was doing.

Speaker 3 (23:11):
Totally, man, I mean, that's the worst. She's trying to
do good work. She's getting disparaged and she has to
quit making a difference in doing the thing she loves
to make that thing better.

Speaker 2 (23:22):
Yeah, I mean, just because her husband had political enemies,
you know, I mean, that's and that's just politics, I guess,
you know.

Speaker 3 (23:30):
Yeah, for sure, she her code name for secret service
was Rover and the you know, everyone's best guess is
because she was always all over the place she was traveling.
I think there was another nickname that she had, which
was eleanor Everywhere, because starting very early in her career,
she would hit the road. She was very famous for

(23:52):
driving a blue roadster saying secret Service, I'll smell you later,
and hit the road. And I think between nineteen twenty
three in nineteen forty she traveled over three hundred thousand
miles yeah, and visited in person every state except South Dakota.
Just traveling all over the place, like checking on projects
that were going on, talking to everyday Americans, just you know,

(24:16):
kind of hitting the beat as as someone checking on
the health of America.

Speaker 2 (24:21):
Yeah, and reporting back to FDR like you couldn't keep
it a secret. No, it wasn't like a media blitzer,
like a charm charm offensive. That's what I'm thinking of,
like shit, oh yeah, definitely taking this information back to
use for strategizing, for adjusting policy, all that stuff, like
it was really important. The first year she was First
Lady alone, she traveled forty thousand miles in her Buick.

(24:45):
And she also little known fact was the first person
to popularize those mudflaps with Yosemite Sam on them.

Speaker 3 (24:52):
That's back off, back off. Yeah, I think she created
Yosemite Sam.

Speaker 2 (24:56):
In fact, probably I hadn't read that, but you're probably right.

Speaker 3 (25:00):
It was also in one of these road trips that
she well, we can't say with absolute one percent certainty,
but it's pretty well known that she had a love
affair with a woman. It was a road trip in
nineteen thirty three to New England and Quebec, shortly after
FDR was inaugurated the first time. And there was an

(25:21):
AP journalist named Lorena Hiccock or Hicck, who was a
very you know, just sort of a woman doing her
own thing at the time. She would like chomp on cigars,
and she was kind of kind of tough talking, and
she wore bright scarves and loved like big dinners and
rich foods. And it was a very kind of well known,

(25:42):
high paid AP reporter. And they met when hick was
covering FDR's gubernatorial campaign in nineteen twenty eight, and then
she was assigned to cover Eleanor and it sounds like
she covered Eleanor for sure.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
They went everywhere together as a matter of fact, and
historians at first were like no, no, and then they're
now kind of like, well maybe, and most of them
are like, yes, they probably did become lovers. And that's
just kind of supported by some of the stuff that

(26:17):
they wrote to one another in letters. And again, like
you said, they were never caught in flagorante delecado, and
you know, Danny DeVito didn't snap a picture with one
of those big flash bulbs or anything like that. But
you know, if you interpret some of the stuff like
any sensible person, it definitely does seem like their letters

(26:39):
do suggest that, yes, they definitely had a romantic relationship.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
Yeah. And you know, I mean, should we read a selection.

Speaker 1 (26:49):
I think that that.

Speaker 2 (26:50):
Yes, I think that will help everybody make up their
own mind.

Speaker 3 (26:53):
Yeah. It's not salacious or anything.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
It's like, no, no, no, they were having an affair.

Speaker 3 (26:57):
Good for them, except for you know, the cheating part.
But you know FDR did the same thing, so we're
not going to hold her to a different standard than
her husband.

Speaker 2 (27:07):
Right, Yeah, well, put, I was gonna say, even Stephen.

Speaker 3 (27:12):
Here's the selection from Hick to Eleanor. I've been trying
today to bring back your face and the feeling of
that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your
mouth against my lips. So, I mean, come on, they
were having an affair right exactly.

Speaker 2 (27:27):
Even if they discovered or Hick discovered that that soft
spot on the northeast corner, well they were both eating
a shared piece of spaghetti, that still suggests that they
had a romantic relationship.

Speaker 3 (27:39):
Yeah, I mean, we know it was going on the
lady in the tramp right.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
Right, So none of this matters, if anything, to me,
This says like, oh, she's kind of open minded because
she does not seem to have been a straight up lesbian.
She is, we'll see, considered to have probably had an
affair with a very close male companion too at some point.
So I think she was just like, I'm into you,

(28:03):
I love you, I don't care who you are. Let's
get it on.

Speaker 3 (28:08):
Yeah, like Marvin Kay said, Yeah, I mean, you know
her husband had an affair kind of what seven eight
years after they got married, for at least four years,
and the only reason it stopped is because he got caught.

Speaker 1 (28:24):
So it seem his mother told him to study.

Speaker 3 (28:26):
Yes, my im told him to stop. So it seems
like it may have been one of those marriages where
they had a lot of love for each other but
probably stayed together because of his role and all the
good that she was able to do. So, you know,
it was at a time where people just didn't get
divorced over that stuff. They had affairs, you know.

Speaker 2 (28:44):
Right, right, So back to those road trips, right, Remember
she's like doing recon as well as having trysts with Hick.

Speaker 3 (28:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:55):
One of the places that she went was through Scott's Run,
West Virginia on one of these trips, I think it
was actually that New England trip, which it's news to
me that West Virginia's New England, but hey, who's to judge.
And she came across the basically these coal miners. The
whole town of Scott's Run, West Virginia was coal miners,
and they were all out of work. This is the Depression.

(29:17):
And she was so moved by just how impoverished and
how hard their life was that she came up with
this idea to basically have the federal government foot the
bill for building towns that were out of the box great,
and you would move imps, impoverished coal miners into them
and basically give them a head start at a really

(29:38):
great good life that they could take over and make
for themselves in a close knit community that they built together.

Speaker 3 (29:44):
Yeah, there was supposed to be like a hundred of
these planned communities all across the United States, but the
first one was that one in West Virginia, arthur Dale,
about twenty five miles south of Scott's Run. It was
called Eleanor's Little Villa times. But she was really active
in this building of the first one, Like every home

(30:05):
had to have which was a big luxury at the time,
like modern appliances and electricity, especially in rural West Virginia
at the time. Yeah, and the rent was based on
what people could afford, which was about twenty bucks a month.
And like people made fun of these projects sometimes that
she was involved in this one in particular, but you know,
it worked out pretty well. Like arthur Dale became a

(30:29):
very kind of thriving community and there are still people
like from that first community that live there today.

Speaker 1 (30:36):
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
And the US government was like, Okay, we're not going
to oversee arthur Dale anymore in nineteen forty seven, but
Eleanor kept visiting until nineteen sixty. I think was her
last visit two years before her death, and all told,
she visited arthur Dale thirty three different times, long after
she was no longer First Lady. From nineteen thirty five

(30:57):
to nineteen forty four, she attended every single high school
graduation of arthur Dale's well high school.

Speaker 3 (31:04):
Yeah, and I think FDR went to one and is
still the only president to actually give actually give a
commencement speech at a high school graduation.

Speaker 1 (31:13):
Yeah, pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (31:14):
Yeah, she helped those graduates like find jobs, like she
really took an interest. She apparently used to buy Christmas
presents and bring them to the kids at arthur Dale
like it was a she was really involved in this.
It wasn't like a good idea. She helped to get
going and then forgot about it and moved on to
something else, Like she really cared.

Speaker 3 (31:33):
Yeah for sure.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
Uh what do you say about a break?

Speaker 1 (31:37):
All right?

Speaker 3 (31:37):
I mean we never need them, We just have to
do it. But we're going to do it now because
we're supposed to.

Speaker 1 (31:42):
They make us.

Speaker 2 (31:42):
Yeah, okay, well we're going to do that then with
Josh job stuff.

Speaker 1 (32:01):
Should okay, Chuck, we're back.

Speaker 2 (32:19):
And one of the things that you may know about
Eleanor Roosevelt if you're you know, somewhat familiar with her.
In her life's work, she became virulantly anti racist. She
was a champion of the civil rights movement long before
there was a civil rights movement, decades before it. She

(32:42):
helped kind of get civil rights recognized, I think among
white America and in a lot of quarters.

Speaker 1 (32:51):
That meant that.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
People started to hate her, especially in the South. And
like I said before, like she didn't let that slow
her down. She just kind of kept at it.

Speaker 3 (32:59):
Yeah, she joined THEACP in nineteen thirty four. She was
very much a lobbyist for anti lynching legislation. She was
a very early proponent kind of sounding the horn against segregation.
She quit in nineteen thirty nine and the Daughters of
the American Revolution because they said, We're not going to

(33:21):
let this black performer or Marian Anderson perform at Constitution
Hall in Washington, DC. So she was like, all right,
so longsuckers, I'm out of here. And then later helped
organize a concert for her on the steps of the
Lincoln Memorial.

Speaker 2 (33:36):
Yeah, it was a free public concert on Easter Sunday
of nineteen thirty nine and seventy five thousand people showed up.
It's considered one of the key moments in the early
civil rights struggle.

Speaker 3 (33:48):
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 (33:50):
She also this is such a great anecdote about her.
She attended a meeting, this Southern Conference for Human Welfare
in Birmingham, Alabama, with Mary McLeod Batun, who was a
famous black educator, And because this was in Birmingham, they
weren't allowed to sit together. It was like local law
that black people had to sit on one side of

(34:12):
the main aisle, white people had to sit on the
other side of the main aisle. This does not sit
very well with missus Roosevelt.

Speaker 3 (34:18):
No, so she as very much like like she probably
could have insisted she sit on the other side, but
I think it made even more of a statement that
she said, you know what, then put my chair right
in the middle of the aisle and that's where I'm
going to sit.

Speaker 1 (34:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
Pretty cool. Oh and then one other thing that she
did in World War Two, too, Chuck, was that she
visited a Japanese American internment camp. Remember I think we
did an episode on that alone.

Speaker 3 (34:44):
Yeah, and a long time ago.

Speaker 2 (34:46):
Yeah, And she came out of this internment camp and
was like, we should not be doing this. We need
to shut these down, which is ironic or heurageous something,
because the internment camps existed by executive order that her
husband had issued.

Speaker 1 (35:02):
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 2 (35:04):
Yeah, and we did shut him down, And some people
credit her lobbying for it for helping get that started
sooner than later.

Speaker 3 (35:11):
Yeah, she was like, but you know what, he cheated
on me early on in our marriage, so I don't
owe him anything, right, I don't have to do anything,
he said me. Right. She was a prolific writer, you said,
A prolific letter writer, but kind of just write a writer.
She was writing a newspaper column beginning in nineteen thirty
five called My Day, and she did that five days

(35:32):
a week. In nineteen forty one, she did a monthly
advice column for Ladies Home Journal called If You Ask Me.
And then she also just wrote all kinds of op eds.
And she wrote memoirs, She wrote an autobiography, she wrote
nonfiction books. Like she just wrote and wrote and wrote.
It was one of her great passions and she was

(35:54):
good at Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:55):
She also wrote a treatment for what eventually became the
script for Pulp Fiction that Tarantino made in nineteen ninety four.

Speaker 3 (36:02):
It's fantastic, isn't that something? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (36:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:05):
She was also not shy of going on to TV
appearing on the radio. I think, like you said, she
hosted radio programs with one with her one of her daughters,
one with a son.

Speaker 3 (36:17):
Yeah, so cute.

Speaker 2 (36:18):
Yeah, it is super cute, especially considering that they weren't
close when those the kids were younger. I think that's
just heartwarming. She had a couple of shows on NBC.
These are like public information or public what's the word
I'm looking for, for.

Speaker 3 (36:35):
The good of the public, that kind of Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:36):
We'll just call it that.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
Yes, she had a couple of those shows on NBC.
She had another one I think it was on PBS
Prospects of Mankind, where she interviewed like activists, intellectuals. She
basically shone a light on these, you know, things that
were going on in the US and around the world
that people weren't really paying attention to. And again, just
remind yourself when she's doing all this stuff, she she

(37:00):
is pretty self conscious. She didn't consider herself photogenic, she
didn't like her own voice, and yet she'll go on
any media op that you can offer her with a
big enough audience to basically tell people about the stuff
that she feels passionate about. That's really that's dedication.

Speaker 3 (37:21):
Boy, could you imagine if she was around during the
podcast era, she would have been on everything for sure.

Speaker 2 (37:29):
Look Out who's number one right now? Look out Kelsey Brothers,
eleanor Roosevelt.

Speaker 3 (37:34):
Here the Travis kelcey. Okay, good for those guys. Sure,
I don't even know. I don't. I used to look
at the podcast rankings a lot early on, and then
I stopped at a certain point, many many many years ago,
and I don't think I've looked one time since then.
So I have no idea who's out there in crushing it.

Speaker 2 (37:55):
I used to look at them so much, Chuck, that
I would go change countries for the iTunes things and
see where we were in other countries as well.

Speaker 3 (38:04):
Ay, Australia has always been our guys. We were number
one in Australia for a while.

Speaker 1 (38:10):
And Canada has always loved us.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
Yeah, that's why we toured Australia in Canada.

Speaker 2 (38:15):
Yeah, step it up. Rest of the world.

Speaker 3 (38:17):
We don't go to where people don't like us. Why
would you do that?

Speaker 1 (38:20):
Why would everybody come just to boo.

Speaker 3 (38:24):
So while she was doing all this you know, volunteerism
and like lending her time to every body under the sun,
she also made some very good friends with women who
were probably in the gay community, would be my guest,
and I think this is where her sort of her
advocacy for gender rights and stuff like that would come

(38:46):
into play, is just her exposure to these people. So
through the League of Women Voters, she met a co founder,
a woman named Esther Everett late and her partner Elizabeth
Fisher Reid, who would be her financial adviser later on.
But they were like a great trio and they were
really really close, really good friends. Eventually they would rent

(39:10):
that when I said she lived near Washington Square Park,
they would rent apartments right on top of one another,
and you know a lot of other women. She became
partners with Mary and Dickerman and Nancy Cook, and that's
who she founded that vow Kill Industries with the furniture business.

Speaker 2 (39:27):
She became friends with them and they were partners. Yeah,
oh yeah, I guess she became partners with them too. Yeah,
she became partners with those partners.

Speaker 3 (39:35):
That's right. And I think like after like one of
the cottages that val Kill built that she I think
she ended up even moving into one of those as
a residence.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
Eventually she did, but first Maryan Dickerman and Nancy Cook did.
I think they lived there for like three decades too. Yeah,
and then finally she was like, I need.

Speaker 3 (39:54):
The place, beat it right, yeah, scram so.

Speaker 2 (39:59):
Yeah, these, I mean, it's just a plain fact that.
Another expression of how open her mind was is that
a lot of her friends were gay women. Again, this
is the thirties, forties families at most the early sixties
people did not talk about this kind of stuff, and

(40:19):
I'm sure a lot of people avoided gay people and
she just was it was Again, I think she judged
people on generally a case by case basis.

Speaker 3 (40:27):
Yeah, for sure. You know you mentioned early on she
probably had other affairs. I know that her bodyguard, Earl Miller,
is someone that they everyone is a historians kind of
suspect that she had an affair with, including her son.
One of her sons. Was pretty much like, yeah, I
think Earl Miller had an affair with her. They were
super tight, and I think he was the one that

(40:48):
gave her the I don't think we mentioned insisted that
she carry a pistol with her on these car road
trips since she issued secret service.

Speaker 1 (40:57):
Yeah, and she used.

Speaker 2 (40:58):
It's a great effect too, Like if you were doing
what she wanted you to, you know, like passing an
anti lynching law, she would just pull her gun out
and just set it on the desk, just let it
sit there and make its own statement.

Speaker 3 (41:11):
Well, she was not popular with racist because she received
death threats a lot because of her promotion of racial
equality in the nineteen fifties. Apparently the Klan had a
twenty five thousand dollars bounty on her head for sure.

Speaker 2 (41:25):
One other thing too about Earl Miller is that he
was actually credited as the one who gave her her
self esteem and her courage to face the media and
just basically be a public figure despite how you know,
debilitating her fear of that.

Speaker 3 (41:42):
Stuff was Yeah, pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (41:44):
Yeah, So FDR passed away, let's see, seventeen years before
she did. He died in nineteen forty five. This is
when she moved to Valkill call Cottage. Yeah, and she
was like, I'm done with politics. And everybody's like, no,
come back being politics. She said, no, I'm done. I'm

(42:05):
just going to go be a private citizen. And it
turns out that President Harry Truman, a few months after
FDR died and Eleanor said she was just becoming a
civilian again, said no, I need you to go to
the UN. They're doing some pretty neat stuff there. Go
see what's going on and just become part of the
American delegation to the United Nations.

Speaker 3 (42:27):
Yeah. So she answered the call, and from nineteen forty
five to nineteen fifty two she held that position at
the UN. All of her colleagues were men, obviously at
the time, and they were dismissive of her, and they said,
you know, let's put her on Committee three, like they
don't do much, it's like humanitarian issues. But how wrong

(42:48):
they were, because Committee three turned out to be pretty
important and somewhat controversial when they were tasked with determining
whether post war refugees had to go back home they
had to be like made to be go back home,
And she said no, She was like, I'm going to
take this up with the General Assembly, and she convinced

(43:09):
them to vote against forced repatriation.

Speaker 2 (43:13):
Yeah. Those male colleagues who forced her onto Committee three
because they thought it wasn't going to amount too much.
They kept the Committee for Planning the Future for men
wearing hats everywhere for themselves.

Speaker 1 (43:26):
That's right, Like this this has got legs. Yeah, even more.

Speaker 2 (43:29):
To the point, aside from getting repatriation off the table,
she helped author the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Yeah,
one of the most important documents, even though toothless, but
still one of the most important documents humanity has ever
come together and created, which is pretty great.

Speaker 3 (43:47):
Yeah, And you know, you said toothless. That was the
one things that really upset her was that they did
this great thing, and then she was upset that there
was there were no teeth, and that they didn't do
anything to really make sure it was enforced.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
Right, And I'm not sure what they could do. I
think now the International Criminal Court is capable of doing stuff,
but I think even their STEMI toothless, depending on how
big and tough the country is, you.

Speaker 3 (44:14):
Know, Yeah, good point.

Speaker 2 (44:17):
So, Yes, she passed away in nineteen sixty two. She
was in the hospital. She was not feeling very well,
and she checked herself out and said, I want to
dine at home, and she went and died in I
think Greenwich village, is that correct?

Speaker 3 (44:31):
Upper East side by that point, same thing. She was
seventy eight, she had you know, it was heart failure,
it was tuberculosis, it was a plastic innemia. She was
in rough shape at that point. But you know she
got to dining her home like she wished, and she
left a legacy behind that. I mean, good luck who

(44:51):
came right after her, like good luck filling those shoes
as a first lady.

Speaker 2 (44:55):
Mamie Truman, Yeah, I know, Mamie Eisenhower.

Speaker 3 (45:00):
Maybe as an hour I think some maymi.

Speaker 1 (45:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:05):
One other thing, chuck that she was the first at
and technically she made FDR the first. She lobbied for
him to include a woman in his cabinet, specifically our
beloved Francis Perkins, who was made Secretary of Labor under FDR,
the first woman cabinet member ever.

Speaker 3 (45:24):
That's right, and we talked about that in our Francis
Perkins episode and I highly recommend that, And that was
a good one. That's Josh's I think favorite modern woman.

Speaker 2 (45:34):
Well, I mean you mean's my favorite modern woman, but
you I get your point. Yeah, and Mary Tyler Moore
don't forget her.

Speaker 3 (45:41):
Oh sure, we need to do an episode on her.
And let's do one on you me too.

Speaker 2 (45:45):
Not all right, I'm sure you We would love that.
We'll sit down an interviewer for twenty thirty hours.

Speaker 3 (45:50):
And so that'd be fun.

Speaker 1 (45:52):
Okay, Well, while we.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
Go interview you me for twenty to thirty hours, I
think we should insert listener mail here first.

Speaker 3 (46:02):
That's right. This is from Alex. Hey, guys, this is
from a Selects episode about the fairness doctrine. During the episode,
you mentioned that the owner of WJIMTV built a TV
studio with a pool in case he needed to convert
it to a motel as a fallback business. And guys,
that building is still a TV studio under the call
signs WNS, a local CBS affiliate, and they kept that pool.

(46:26):
He sent a video in fact, of meteorologists Katie Nikolau
giving a weather report from the pool. I guess semi recently,
and he said, I passed this TV station countless times,
always wonder why it looks so swanky, and now it
makes total sense that I know it was built like
a nineteen fifties motel. Thanks for the show, guys. Always
fun when an episode hits close to home.

Speaker 1 (46:46):
Yeah, who is that?

Speaker 3 (46:47):
That's Alex?

Speaker 1 (46:48):
Thanks a lot, Alex, that was a great one.

Speaker 2 (46:50):
I've always been fascinated by that TV station with the
pool too, So yep, thanks for calling it out. If
you want to be like Alex and say, hey, I
know just what you guys are talking about because I
live by this thing, let me tell you about it. Well,
you can tell us about it via email. Send it
off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 3 (47:12):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.