介绍： Eleanor Roosevelt: Ahead of her time
Two biographers reassess a woman who towered over the 20th century
From The Economist 20161029

Audio:

0:00




Eleanor Roosevelt: The War Years and After, 1939-1962. By Blanche Wiesen Cook. Viking; 670 pages; $40.

Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First ...

介绍： Eleanor Roosevelt: Ahead of her time
Two biographers reassess a woman who towered over the 20th century
From The Economist 20161029

Audio:

0:00




Eleanor Roosevelt: The War Years and After, 1939-1962. By Blanche Wiesen Cook. Viking; 670 pages; $40.

Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady. By Susan Quinn. Penguin; 404 pages; $30.

IT IS tempting to think that in a different era, Eleanor Roosevelt could have become president of the United States. Widely loved, the longest-serving first lady was on the right side of history on virtually every subject, including civil rights, acceptance of European refugees and the need to end empires. She was fierce in support of her causes. Impatient as well as impassioned, she tirelessly lobbied her husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), to embrace her projects too. Theirs was “one of history’s most powerful and enduring partnerships”, her biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook explains. “She understood his needs, forgave his transgressions, buried her jealousies, and embarked on her own independent career…FDR encouraged her independence and when he silenced her did so for reasons of state.”

The third and final volume of Ms Cook’s life of Eleanor Roosevelt is concerned mainly with the second world war years. Eleanor, like her husband, was early to see the clouds forming in Europe, and together they tried to coax the American public to prepare for involvement. It was a difficult task. Isolationism had taken hold, and when the war in Europe began, some Americans viewed it, as one union official said, as being “between two thieves”.

Eleanor campaigned for economic and social equality. How, she questioned, could America promote democracy abroad while stifling minorities at home? As the Nazi horrors became clear, she worked in private on Franklin, and in public through her near-daily newspaper column, “My Day”, urging that refugees from abroad be let in to America. “People are not throwing Americans out of work to employ refugees, though isolated cases of this might be found,” she wrote in 1939, sounding a theme that resonates today.

As the war progressed, FDR sought Eleanor’s counsel less frequently; he didn’t want to be accused of running a “petticoat government”. More significantly, his ill health, especially his worsening heart problems, reduced his tolerance for argument. So as Eleanor pushed her causes—ending discrimination against black troops, for example, or promoting low-cost housing for workers in defence industries—he tried to dodge. Courting Winston Churchill, the president sought to contain Eleanor’s criticism of Churchill’s relentless imperialism. To her daughter Anna, Eleanor described Churchill as “lovable and emotional and very human, but I don’t want him to write the peace…”

Through decades of exhaustive research, Ms Cook, a history professor at John Jay College in New York, has emerged as the voice of authority on Eleanor Roosevelt. Yet in isolation, this final volume offers only occasional glimpses into the complex bond between the first couple. Both signed their letters with endearments like “much love” and depended on each other for counsel, yet romance seemed long gone. “There is no fundamental love to draw on, just respect and affection,” Eleanor wrote in one letter to a friend. Forthright about her loneliness, she turned to other deep friendships for sustenance.


In “Eleanor and Hick” Susan Quinn focuses on the first lady’s relationship with Lorena Hickok (known as Hick), a journalist with the Associated Press. Assigned to cover the first lady, Hick fell in love instead, and Eleanor seems to have reciprocated. They shared difficult childhoods. Eleanor’s emotionally distant mother had called her “Granny” as a child because she was so serious; Hick had been beaten by her father and the family moved constantly to try to escape poverty. Both craved love. Eleanor had been forced to turn outside her marriage in 1918 after uncovering an affair between her husband and her secretary.

Hard-charging yet fragile, Hick drew out the emotionally reserved Roosevelt. Together they worked to help those needing jobs and food as the Great Depression tightened its grip. Their letters, covered extensively as well in the earlier volumes of Ms Cook’s biography, are extraordinarily expressive: “Oh! How I wanted to put my arms around you in reality instead of in spirit,” Eleanor wrote to Hick in 1933, not long after FDR took office. “I went and kissed your photograph instead and the tears were in my eyes.” Hick’s letters contained equal passion. Once, after a long time apart, she wrote, “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.”

Ms Cook’s book essentially ends with FDR’s death in April 1945, with just 30 pages of “epilogue” devoted to the final 17 years of Eleanor’s life—years in which she became unshackled, so to speak, from her role as a politician’s wife. During that time, despite the low expectations of male delegates at the founding of the United Nations (UN), she was the driving force behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a UN document that endures to this day. Across 30 articles, it lays out fundamental principles, including that every human being deserves freedom and must not be tortured or arbitrarily arrested.

Eleanor’s increasingly busy life meant she had limited time. So Hick makes only brief appearances in Ms Cook’s final volume, despite living in the White House during much of the war. It is difficult to understand the full scope of the relationship; Hick burned some of the letters from the most intense period of their involvement, and as Ms Cook likes to say, “I do not know what two people do when they are alone together.” What is clear is that Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman who could never find the lifelong loving relationship to salve her inner loneliness, instead shared her love with those closest to her—and with the world at large—as she strove unceasingly to make it better.


Copyright © 2015-2016 Share2China.com | Powered by Flask and MongoDB