As First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was an advocate for the poor, civil rights, labor, and other unpopular causes. She lectured and traveled widely, published a daily newspaper column, books, magazine articles and had her own radio program. Remembered today as a humanitarian activist, in her day she was reviled by many. This talk will examine some of the criticism against Eleanor Roosevelt and reflect upon Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for president, asking if women who assert power elicit a special kind of invective. Join Adams House Resident Historian and Former Director of the FDR Presidential Library & Museum Dr. Cynthia Koch for this fascinating look at the 2016 election through the lens of one of the most famous women of the 20th century.
Wednesday, September 28 at 7PM in the FDR Suite. Limited to 12
During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program, aimed at reducing unemployment as well as providing services, initiated a number of oganizations. Perhaps the most famous of these was the Civilian Conservation Corps.
Originally the CCC provided outdoor-based jobs such as soil conservation and firefighting for young men ages 18 to 21; later the age range would include 17- to 28-year-olds, as well as veterans.
On May 30, 1933, Company 545 became Orange County’s first CCC camp, headquartered in San Juan Capistrano. The following year, Company 545 was replaced by Company 912. In his 2014 book, “The New Deal in Orange County, California,” Charles Epting states that Company 912 worked with the local Works Progress Administration, another New Deal organization, to build San Juan Capistrano’s fire station. Company 912 also worked at Doheny and San Clemente state beaches, creating stone gutters, constructing campgrounds and building offices and other structures.
Querying friends and acquaintances about the 2016 presidential contest confirmed my conclusion that people are more interested in momentary circumstances than in historic context. My path to this notion went from John Galbraith’s recollection about Eleanor Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson’s wife, who essentially ran the United States during Wilson’s incapacitation after his disastrous stroke, and ended at Anne Firor Scott’s scholarly observations.
Anne Scott was Duke University’s W. K. Boyd professor of history and was awarded the Medal of Freedom during the Obama Administration. She knows women and history. She is herself a remarkable woman. I am familiar with people who know her but I cannot say if she has a favorite in the current race.
Disinterest in context is common in months just prior to a national election. Maybe it’s especially so during the current cat and dog fight. Indeed when I mentioned the comparison or contrast between prominent women such as Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt I was mostly met with blank looks as if their experiences weren’t important considerations.
Surprised by this I looked at some related literature such as the memoirs of John Galbraith and David Halberstam to see if I was mistaken in my recollections. I’m convinced that both women were similarly loved or hated because of their political leanings, their personalities and their relationships with powerful men. Obviously their separation by nearly three-fourths of a century complicates the pairing.
Book Review
By David M. Shribman Globe Correspondent September 02, 2016
We think of him as our longest-serving president, but oftentimes we forget that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was, at the moment the United States needed it most, also our most experienced president, the one most accustomed to the burdens and opportunities of the office, most aware of its limits, and most conscious of its broader role in American civic life.
Through four successful elections, a dozen years on the job, his political power and perspective grew amid the cauldron of worldwide depression and armed conflict, with civilization itself seeming in the balance. But over that period, too, FDR’S personal powers of physical vigor and mental clarity were diminishing.
When he died he was only in his early 60s, the second half of those three-score years full of physical discomfort from midlife polio, relentless political warfare from New Deal battles, and the grinding stress of global challenges. It took a great and grave toll. At the end he may have been the world’s best-known 63-year old, but he also was perhaps its weakest and weariest.
Those last months of FDR are the topic of “The Final Battle,” the gripping story masterfully told by Joseph Lelyveld, former executive editor of The New York Times and a Pulitzer Prize winning author (“Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White”).
Carl Sandburg memorably called his beloved Chicago, the “City of the Big Shoulders.” The America I grew up in, and that I covered for television news over four historic decades, once was, in truth, the land of the big shoulders. It thought big, did bigger. No more. There has been, I think, a failure of nerve.
These ideas began with a recent steamboat voyage up the lovely Columbia and Snake River systems, through Oregon to Idaho. Our replica stern-wheeler, “American Pride,” locked through eight dams, climbing almost 800 feet across waters once unnavigable. Those dams were part of a vast system, begun under Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, with no small goal: to light the entire Pacific Northwest. Inside the first dam, the Bonneville, 18 dynamos spin endlessly as Columbia races to the Pacific. The infrastructure is immense — two giant power blocks, a spillway damming the entire river, locks, fish ladders. Fourteen great dams in all.
In those same years, in America’s opposite corner, another gargantuan New Deal project — the Tennessee Valley Authority. It may be a polluting nuisance today, but it dragged the rural southeastern United States out of the 19th century and into the 20th within a decade. And all of this was done by us — by government. FDR’s motivation was straightforward: To create jobs, salaries, in the midst of a devastating Depression. Folks who earned those wages would spend them — first, perhaps, on food and medicine, but then on cars, homes — all the time creating new jobs, creating, in fact, a new middle class.
It is another presidential Roosevelt, the aggressively outdoorsy Theodore, who is most commonly associated with the establishment and promotion of America’s National Park System. It was Theodore’s 1903 camping trip with legendary conservationist John Muir, after all, that led to the long-term protection of the Yosemite Valley. And it was Theodore who created five national parks during his presidency.
The younger Roosevelt, however, also had a deep understanding of what the parks meant to the American psyche. Franklin Roosevelt’s administration used the Civilian Conservation Corps to better the national park system even as the country was mired in the Great Depression. As president, FDR made frequent public trips to the national parks. So did Americans. Even as the country grappled with economic crisis, park attendance skyrocketed.
The elder Roosevelt was a Republican, his younger cousin a Democrat. Both, however, understood how important creating and preserving the park system was to the American experience.
