Ace History Desk – Today in History – Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City on October 11, 1884. Orphaned by the time she was ten, the young niece of President Theodore Roosevelt was raised by her grandmother. After attending finishing school in England, she returned to America. She became involved in various social service activities and teaching at the Rivington Street Settlement House in New York City, initiating lifelong work on behalf of the underprivileged.

Eleanor Roosevelt

In 1905, Roosevelt married her distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Over the next ten years, she had six children, one of whom died in infancy. Although her duties as mother and wife took most of her time, Eleanor Roosevelt continued to volunteer for good causes. While her husband served in Washington as assistant secretary of the navy during World War I, she worked with the Red Cross and visited wounded troops in the Naval Hospital. Upon returning to New York City in 1920, Mrs. Roosevelt involved herself more actively with women’s organizations, particularly those that dealt with political and labor issues.

In 1921, Franklin Roosevelt contracted poliomyelitis (polio) and was permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Eleanor Roosevelt significantly increased her political involvement to maintain her husband’s political career and assert her own personality and interests. She participated in the League of Women Voters, joined the Women’s Trade Union League, and worked for the Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Committee. In addition, she helped found Val-Kill Industries, a non-profit furniture factory in Hyde Park, New York. During this period she, bega,n to act as her husband’s “eyes and ears” tra,veli, ng to places and talking to people her husband found challenging to reach.

When Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated as the thirty-second president in 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt continued to serve as a liaison between the president and the people. Beginning in 1936, her daily syndicated newspaper column, “My Day,” provided a constant communication with the American public.

The First Lady sometimes surpassed the president in her commitment to the disadvantaged. She championed anti-lynching laws, for example, but President Roosevelt did not share her enthusiasm. He believed acceding to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) demands for federal anti-lynching laws would endanger congressional support for his New Deal programs. In March 1936, Eleanor wrote a “personal and confidential” letter to NAACP Executive Secretary Walter Francis White expressing dismay that the Congress or the president would not address the atrocity of lynching:

Before I received your letter today, I had been into the President, talking to him about your letter…I told him that it seemed rather terrible that one could get nothing done…and asked him if there were any possibility of getting even one step taken, and he said the difficulty is that it is apparently unconstitutional for the Federal Government to step in in the lynching situation I will talk to him again about the Van Nuys resolution and will try to talk also to Senator Byrnes and get his point of view. I am distraught about the whole situation, as it seems to be a terrible thing to stand by and let it continue

After Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945, President Harry Trumanappointed the former First Lady as a delegate to the United Nations. She chaired the Human Rights Commission during drathe fting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948.

In 1953, Mrs. Roosevelt resigned her position, but maintained involvement with the United Nations and other humanitarian causes. The former First Lady spent most of her later years at Val-Kill Cottage, her home in Hyde Park, New York. Eleanor Roosevelt died on November 7, 1962, in New York City.

Learn More

• Visit the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site to learn more about her life and the modest house she preferred to her husband’s grand Hyde Park estate.
• Photos documenting Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt’s activities on the campaign trail and during the Roosevelt administrations can be found in the digital collections, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives and Denver Public Library Digital Collections.
• Eleanor Roosevelt strongly supported federal funding of the arts, publicly voicing praise of the arts projects created under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Several digital collections provide materials from these projects including Federal Theatre Project, 1935 to 1939 and Posters: WPA Posters
• As an advocate for the arts, Eleanor was also sought out to bring various projects to the attention of the President. The Librarian of Congress during the Depression era, Archibald MacLeish, sought her assistance with regard to the Library’s incomparable collection of American folk materials. Correspondence found in the digital collection, Freedom’s Fortress: The Library of Congress, 1939 to 1953shows the Librarian’s interest in finding ways to share these materials with the American public, resulting in an invitation to the White House.
• Search the image list, Chronological List of Presidents, First Spouses, and Vice Presidents of the United States on the names of First Ladies to find additional images of these prominent Americans.
• Search Today in History on Roosevelt for more about Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. See features on First Ladies Abigail Adams, Helen Taft, Florence Harding, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
• Explore the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project which includes access to her My Day columns.

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