Born October 11: Eleanor Roosevelt

In addition to being one of the most energetic humanitarians of the 20th century, requiring mind-warping amounts of travel -- 40,000 miles in three months, for example -- Eleanor Roosevelt was also an inexhaustible writer. She wrote her syndicated column My Day six times a week for twenty-seven years, missing only four days when her husband died. Always insightful, she was usually decades ahead of her time and frequently funny. Read her column from October 1947 about Hollywood and HUAC by clicking here. Detractors obfuscate ad nauseum but there is no question that she and Lorena Hickok, her closest friend for thirty years, were lovers. Read excerpts from their correspondence below, remembering that their most intimate letters were destroyed, many by Hickok herself, after Eleanor’s death in 1962.

Hick darling,

All day I've thought of you & another birthday I will be with you, & yet tonight you sounded so far away & formal. Oh! I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort to me. I look at it and think she does love me, or I wouldn't be wearing it.
_________________________________________

[Eleanor to Hickok]

I wish I could lie down beside you tonight & take you in my arms.

_________________________________________

[Hickok writing to Eleanor after a long separation...]

Only eight more days . . . Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips. . . .

Brainyquote.com lists seventy-four of her most memorable sayings. Three are:

"Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something, or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe, and which mean very little."

"Women are like teabags. We don't know our true strength until we're in hot water!"

"I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalog: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall."

Obviously, the place to start is Blanche Weisen Cook's Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1: 1884-1933, then Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume 2 , The Defining Years, 1933-1938. When she won Publishing Triangle's lifetime achievement award in 2010, she promised she was about to finish volume 3.

Comments

[clt]

Thanks for your thoughtful coverage of this unique woman. Her photo is beautiful, and the clip is funny, two qualities too often overlooked.