Eleanor and Franklin Redux

Historians assessing Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency have never known what to make of Eleanor and Doris Kearns Goodwin is no exception. Treating ER’s public life only as an extension of FDR’s political aspirations, historians of the New Deal and the American homefront during World War II depict the Roosevelt White House as the perfect political paradigm, where FDR is the quintessential pragmatist and ER the idealistic neophyte. Struggling to explain the role she held within her husband’s administration, they rely on convenient images promoted by the members of FDR’s inner circle. Against the dramatic backdrop of marital infidelity and the Great Depression, ER’s strong sense of noblesse oblige compels her to become the “conscience” of the New Deal and speak up for those left outside reform. She is depicted as either the perfect political wife who serves as her invalid husband’s “eyes and ears” or the New Deal’s “good fairy” who turns to politics only after her husband turns to another woman for comfort. ¹

Even those biographers and scholars who depict ER as a successful politician argue that she did so only to help her husband or to compensate for the disappointments of a loveless marriage. They treat ER’s activism superficially, refusing to examine why she developed such finely honed skills and chose politics for the arena in which to utilize them. In these accounts, ER’s heroic acceptance of martyrdom justified her venture into politics. Focusing on her determination to help her husband cope with his paralysis, what Frank Freidel labeled her “remarkable reserve,” Arthur Schlesinger and James Macgregor Burns see ER’s major accomplishment as her victory over her mother-in-law in the duel for her husband’s future. Concentrating on the disappointments and betrayals she encountered throughout her childhood and her early marriage, later biographers and historians alike agree with Joseph Lash that ER was “a woman of sorrow who had surmounted her own unhappiness and managed to carry on, stoical toward herself, understanding and tender toward others.” Thus William Chafe could declare in Without Precedent: The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt that “if Eleanor had achieved an unparalleled amount of political influence, it was in place of, rather than because of, an intimate personal relationship with Franklin” (p. 11). ²

Nor is the fascination with Eleanor Roosevelt’s emotional development limited to FDR’s infidelity. All Roosevelt biographers also accentuate the fragility of her early family life. Again the portrait of ER as unfulfilled and scarred emerges. “She went out into the social world with a morbid sense of personal ugliness,” writes J. William Y. Youngs. Lois Scharf, relying on evidence initially presented by Lash in his discussion of ER’s childhood, seconds his analysis and takes it one step further. “So many emotional earthquakes so early in life,” she writes, “made it impossible for Eleanor Roosevelt ever to feel that secure or certain again.” ³

Until Blanche Wiesen Cook’s Eleanor Roosevelt appeared in 1992 and resurrected the complex totality of ER’s life, historians remained content to focus on this stoic yet tender depiction. To have done otherwise would have required extensive and inventive research. ER’s personal papers were not ever opened to the public until Lash published Eleanor and Franklin and Eleanor: The Years Alone in the mid-seventies; hence scholars interested in Eleanor Roosevelt had limited primary source material with which to work. In addition, ER carefully constructed an image of her activities in four autobiographies, thousands of newspaper columns, and over four hundred articles that would complement, rather than detract from, FDR’s legacy. Moreover, ER was extremely reluctant to have her papers opened to the public and only agreed to donate them to the Roosevelt Library after she and close friends removed any material she did not want scholars to see from her collection.

Goodwin tries to amend this historiography with her...