EXHIBITS

POLITICS

Unable to afford college, Amelia Earhart volunteered for the Red Cross during World War I. Sick with the flu in the 1918 epidemic, she went to Smith College, where her sister was a student, to recover. During this time she found her way to the auto repair shop of  John Charlebois in Northampton MA. Nine other women studied mechanics with her there that year.  A decade later, Earhart thanks Charlebois for the group picture and explains the importance of his instruction: “It has stood me in good stead since, for it was a stepping stone for more thorough investigation of motors … Government requirements for securing transport licenses are becoming more severe as time goes on, and mechanical knowledge of the power plant is essential to pass the examination.” She ends the letter, “I hope you have not discontinued your classes for I am sure there are more girls today than ten years ago who wish to investigate ‘what makes the wheels go round.’”  In the photo Charlebois is seated on a bumper and Earhart directly behind him. By the time Earhart wrote this letter she had become a licensed pilot and a celebrity and the first woman to be a passenger in a plane flight across the Atlantic. But that was not enough.  In May 1932, five years after Charles Lindbergh had flown solo across the Atlantic Ocean, Amelia flew from Newfoundland to Northern Ireland. She went on to fly over the Pacific from California to Hawaii and set other aviation records.

Amelia met Eleanor Roosevelt at a White House dinner on April 20, 1933 and they got along so well that Amelia suggested going for a flight. With the other guests, they flew from Arlington, Virginia, to Baltimore, Maryland, and back in an Eastern Air Transport twin-engine Curtis Condor. Earhart flew the plane with Eleanor by her side. Although Earhart promised to teach Eleanor to fly, the Secret Service would soon quash that activity.  “I’d love to do it myself. I make no bones about it,” Roosevelt told The Baltimore Sun. “It does mark an epoch, doesn’t it, when a girl in an evening dress and slippers can pilot a plane at night.”

On June 2^nd, 1937 Earhart embarked on her trip around the world and Eleanor, like millions of others, followed her progress.  On June 8^th she wrote in her column, “All day I have been thinking of Amelia Earhart somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean and hoping she will make her flight safely. She is one of the most fascinating people I know, … she never seems to think that any of the things she does require any courage.” But early in July she disappeared  during the last leg of her trip and Eleanor expressed the feelings of so many when she wrote “we are anxiously waiting in the hope that the Navy will be successful in its search for Amelia Earhart and her pilot.”   President Roosevelt had authorized air and sea searches but nothing was found. Finally on July 14, Eleanor conceded:  “I am afraid that there is no more encouraging news to be hoped for about Amelia Earhart, and much as I hate to acknowledge defeat, I think we will have to accept what seems now a certainty that she is added to the list of people who have lost their lives in the interest of adventure and science. She would have it so, I know, and would not regret going, but those of us who knew her and felt her value can not help but regret the loss to all of us. I only hope that it will spur us on to do something in her memory which will carry on the influence which her personality and spirit brought to everyone with whom she came in contact.”

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Clara Barton found her vocation during the Civil War organizing hospital care and services for Union soldiers. She extended her humanitarian concerns when she met Susan B. Anthony and became committed to suffrage and racial equality. In 1870-71 she assisted with hospital work in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. Persuading President Chester Arthur that an American Red Cross could help with natural disasters as well as wars, the American Association of the Red Cross was founded in May 1881 and Barton elected president.  A year later, the U.S. group joined the International Red Cross.  She was already in Cuba when the U.S.S Maine exploded on February 15, 1898 and helped organize care for the wounded sailors and then services for military hospitals as well as civilians and prisoners of war. She met Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and provided care for his wounded Rough Riders; he later donated part of the proceeds from his 1906 Nobel Prize for Peace to the Red Cross. The American Red Cross received its first charter from Congress as the official disaster response organization in 1900. In this 1905 letter, a year after she retired, Barton introduces a Belgium Red Cross official, General Van Schelle, whom she had met in Cuba and passes along his request for assistance with his business projects.

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Eleanor Roosevelt joined the Red Cross when the United States entered World War I and left behind the tedious round of social calls she had been required to make as the wife of a Cabinet member (FDR was Assistant Secretary of the Navy).  Before her   marriage, her sense of social responsibility led her to settlement house work in New York’s tenements but this impulse had been put aside with motherhood.  Now, she organized her family life so that she could work in the Red Cross canteen at Washington’s Union Station., putting in 12-hour days dispensing food and services to soldiers traveling through.  The Red Cross sent her to inspect St. Elizabeth’s Hospital where military suffering from “shell shock” were confined.  Appalled at the way the men were treated, she was able to effect change through public and private funds. Among her Red Cross duties was included distributing wool to women who knit warm garments for American soldiers.

Mabel T. Boardman’s letter discusses the rising cost of wool and the priorities for knitters. Boardman had joined Executive Board of the American Red Cross in 1901 and became its leader after Clara Barton retired in 1904. She greatly increased the number of its volunteers and chapters and improved its responsiveness. American women knit hundreds of thousands of items during the war for both the military and civilian refugees, and it became socially acceptable to knit anywhere. As Eleanor wrote, “no one moved without her knitting…. Even if your life seemed to call you away from where you could render some kind of direct service, you could be knitting all the time.”  Boardman asks for bed socks for hospital use but knitters also made gloves, hats, vests, and helmets.  Knit helmets (a.k.a. balaclavas) covered the head and neck for warmth and soldiers wore their metal helmets over them.  Patterns for all of these items were widely published.  Eleanor later said “The war was my emancipation and education.” She strengthened her organizational and management skills, and felt a much greater sense of independence. Once she returned to New York in 1921, she engaged with a number of political and civic groups.

Eleanor’s experience with the Red Cross, and her visits with FDR to European hospitals and battlefields in 1918, made her an ardent supporter after the war of the organizations that might help maintain peace, the League of Nations and the World Court. Thus, in 1923 she agreed to help jury plans for maintaining peace that were submitted for a competition funded by Edward Bok, the retired and philanthropic editor of the Ladies Home Journal.  He was the younger brother of William A. Bok, Belva Lockwood’s correspondent in the first section of this exhibition.

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With suffrage, both the Democrats and Republicans set up women’s divisions within their party structures. Eleanor became a leader of the New York State group and oversaw the writing and publication of campaign materials, spoke at events, and carried on a vast correspondence with party activists.  She is shown in the 1924 photo of the dining room at 65^th Street celebrating the election victory of Al Smith as governor over Republican candidate Theodore Roosevelt, Jr (Eleanor’s cousin) who had been tainted by the campaign with the Republican Teapot Dome scandal. Seated across from her is Louis Howe, FDR’s great political advisor and also political mentor  to Eleanor, who lived with them.   Four years later Eleanor  supported Gov. Al Smith as the Democratic candidate for president. He lost due to a combination of anti-Catholic sentiment and his “wet” (anti-Prohibition) stance.  At the same time, FDR was elected to his first term as Governor. The bigotry of the Fellowship Forum cartoons suggested that Rome would run the country if Smith was elected.

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When Eleanor returned to New York in 1921, she almost immediately joined a several organizations: the Women’s City Club, the League of Women Voters, the Women’s Division of the Democratic Party, and the New York branch of the WTUL.  It was led by Rose Schneiderman, who had been a garment worker, a suffragist, labor union leader, and one of the founders of the ILGWU and ACLU. A small person with a fiery spirit and vivid red hair, she would have an outsize role in campaigns to improve working conditions and wages for women. Her fame grew in April 1911 with her dramatic eulogy at a public memorial service for the 146 victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire on March 17, indicting all who stood in the way of safe workplaces and fair wages. Campaigning for women’s suffrage in 1912, she coined one of the labor movement’s most memorable phrases “Bread and roses” when she said: The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.  New York finally gave women the vote in 1917.

Schneiderman helped write this WTUL pamphlet in 1918. It called for many progressive measures to create a better standard of living for all men and women around the world, including more education, abolition of child labor, an 8-hour day, equal pay for equal work, social insurance, old age pensions, right to organize, suffrage for women, freedom of speech, press and assembly, and public ownership of natural resources.

By 1921, the New York WTUL needed its own headquarters. At a fundraising tea Rose met Eleanor for the first time. Then she was invited to the house for one of those scrambled-egg suppers that became famous after F.D.R. became President. It was the start of Eleanor’s-and FDR’s-real education about labor and unions.  Eleanor visited the new WTUL headquarters once a week to read to the young women gathered there. In 1925 she started an annual Christmas party for the children of workers and the first year they were accompanied by FDR, who read out loud Dickens’ A Christmas Carol,  as he did for his own   family.  Schneiderman recalled, He delighted them and everyone else. To this day I marvel at how he managed to get up the flight of stairs to the parlor floor.

As president, FDR appointed Schneiderman to the advisory board of the National Recovery Administration to represent the voice of labor and she continued to advise him in the following years. At the time of Rose’s retirement in 1949 Eleanor wrote: More than anyone I know in the labor movement, she has had the gift of translating the situations and the needs facing working women into understandable terms for women of leisure or women whose work lay in different fields. Never antagonistic in her approach, she has won many friends for the labor movement as a whole.

 

 

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It was in the 1920s that Eleanor Roosevelt’s ideas about race changed dramatically through her friendship with Mary McLeod Bethune. Eleanor left her class prejudice behind and gradually became a progressive, even a radical  campaigner for civil rights. Bethune came to the house in 1924 to attend a luncheon for women educators hosted by Sara and Eleanor. She was welcomed by both and from that day onward she was a friend to them and eventually an advisor to President Roosevelt with a position in the New Deal’s National Youth Administration as head of the Division of Negro Affairs overseeing vocational, work, and educational programs for African Americans, and a role in his unofficial “Black Cabinet.”  She had a remarkable life story. One of 17 children of former slaves, she had gained an education, and then founded, built up, and led Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Florida.  Sara and Eleanor helped fundraise for the school and Eleanor visited often. Bethune campaigned for FDR’s re-election in 1936 and helped move African American voters from the Republican Party to the Democrats. When Bethune died in May 1955, Eleanor eulogized her in a My Day column as … a really great American woman.  Dr. Bethune started life under conditions which must have made her education seem almost impossible, but both she and her parents had a great desire for her to gain knowledge and they seized on every opportunity. And the opportunities came, as they so often do, when people are ready to use them… Beginning with a dollar and a half she built a Negro college in Florida. She fought for the rights of her people but never with resentment or bitterness, and she taught both her own people and her white fellow Americans many a valuable lesson… I knew Dr. Bethune best, of course, in the years when she worked for the National Youth Administration and she did good and courageous work for the young people of her race in a difficult period. But I have kept in touch with her all through the years and I will miss her very much, for I valued her wisdom and her goodness…I will cherish the spirit she lived by and try to promote the causes that she believed in, in loving memory of a very wonderful life.

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Margaret Sanger trained as nurse in the early 1890s and after moving to New York City in 1911 was hired to work part-time at the Visiting Nurse Service settlement house founded by Lillian Wald.  It was through this experience that she saw the dire consequences of too many pregnancies – with poverty and poor health for the mother and family – and committed herself to provide information on contraception. This manuscript is the basis for her first publication on family planning in 1914.  It is straightforward, specific, and provides all the information needed to practice birth control or induce an abortion.  She was prosecuted for obscenity under the Comstock Act for providing such material through publications and at her first birth control clinic in 1916 in Brooklyn. Undeterred she opened additional clinics in New York and sought funding for research which eventually led to the birth control pill. Sanger published many editions of her book and soon eliminated information on abortion because it was too controversial. She founded  a number of organizations: the American Birth Control League later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Eleanor Roosevelt publically supported birth control in the 1920s but once FDR was elected president she no longer commented on the topic. In 1933 she and Sanger attended several events together. She heard Sanger speak and ask: Why not a new deal for the 43 million women of child-bearing age in this country whose future life, liberty and pursuit of happiness depend absolutely upon the knowledge of how to control the physiological function of motherhood?…  A new consideration for the women who appeal for contraceptive knowledge to hospitals, clinics, and social agencies, and are denied this by priest and politician alike.

After FDR died, Eleanor was free to speak more openly.  In her My Day column of April 25, 1955, she wrote about the importance of  Sanger’s work to the general area of healthy, normal and loved children … when you go to regions where food is scarce and populations teeming, you realize that she has tried to meet a very difficult situation. She has carried on her work in the belief that it was extremely valuable and important to mankind.

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PUBLIC LIFE

In her role as First Lady of New York State and of the Nation, Eleanor had the opportunity to meet and correspond with many prominent and successful women of the era, including Amelia Earhart, Pearl S. Buck, and Margaret Sanger.  Her newspaper column, “My Day,” was syndicated to hundreds of newspapers, making her views well known to the American people. In her daily essays she reported on her family, activities, travels, and concerns about the major issues facing the nation and the world.  She did not shy away from controversy. Her championship of civil rights for African Americans, which began evolving in the 1920s through her friendship with Mary McLeod Bethune,  grew stronger with each passing year and eventually included membership in the NAACP.  In 1939 Eleanor helped arrange the Easter Sunday concert, nationally broadcast from the Lincoln Memorial, of contralto Marian Anderson, who had been banned from performing at a local concert hall because of her race. During the New Deal, Eleanor traveled around the country representing the President and inspiring trust in his programs to repair the economy. She attended dedications of federally funded projects, met with the employees of  WPA projects, and enjoyed social events at newly built communities while also visiting mines and migrant worker settlements. She was famously described as “Eleanor Everywhere.” During World War II, she traveled abroad to boost the morale of US allies and soldiers. All of these experiences can be found in her columns and many other publications, including the first volume of her autobiography, This Is My Story (1937), one 27 books she wrote.

 

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Eleanor Roosevelt was a prodigious writer, publishing her first book When You Grow Up to Vote in 1932, and her last, Tomorrow Is Now, in 1963. She wrote four volumes of autobiography starting with This Is My Story (1937). She wrote magazine articles by the dozens. Her column, My Day, debuted on December 31, 1935 and the last on September 26, 1962, a little more than a month before her death, comprising about 7,500 columns in 26 years.  She wrote about her everyday life, meetings, family, friends, and travels, as well as reflecting on the great issues of the time, among them war, peace, internment, and civil rights. It is truly the first blog.

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Pearl Buck (1892-1973) was raised in China and spoke the language fluently. From this experience came the most famous of her early books, The Good Earth (1931) for which she won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize.  She was a great advocate for the Chinese people and raised funds to help refugees during the wars that ravaged the country from the 1930s inward. She was only the second American woman to win a Nobel Prize, Jane Addams being the first with the Peace Prize in 1931.   Buck was quite progressive and like Eleanor Roosevelt she supported civil rights and equal rights for women. Not surprisingly she endorsed Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique when it was published in 1963. In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech she accepts for the American people, still finding their voice, and concludes Freedom – it is today more than ever the most precious human possession. We – Sweden and the United States – we have it still. My country is young – but it greets you with a peculiar fellowship, you whose earth is ancient and free. Eleanor Roosevelt mentions Buck in her columns as they often attended events together where one or the other spoke.  On June 20, 1940, she told her readers, Yesterday morning, at the invitation of Mrs. Pearl Buck, I signed a book which is to be sent to the women of China as a tribute for the way in which they have carried on during these past years. Women in every country are being forced to show qualities of heroism and endurance which in recent years of civilization they have hardly been called upon to develop.

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The story of Marian Anderson’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial is part of the civil rights struggles that predated World War II.  Anderson, a contralto, was the most famous female African-American singer of her generation. She left the US to perform abroad, like Paul Robeson and Roland Hayes, and her career flourished in Europe.  Trying to book a performance space for her in Washington DC, a Jim Crow city, her management was caught up in the ongoing struggle to desegregate public facilities. To escape NAACP pickets and demands, Constitution Hall, opened by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1929 and the largest concert space in the city, put in a “white artists only” clause in their contracts. Large protests erupted when the DAR turned down a request for Anderson. As a result, Eleanor Roosevelt decided to resign from the DAR and discussed this in her My Day column of February 27, 1939:

The question is, if you belong to an organization and disapprove of an action which is typical of a policy, should you resign or is it better to work for a changed point of view within the organization? In the past, when I was able to work actively in any organization to which I belonged, I have usually stayed in until I had at least made a fight and had been defeated…I have often found that the thing in which I was interested was done some years later. But, in this case, I belong to an organization in which I can do no active work. They have taken an action which has been widely talked of in the press. To remain as a member implies approval of that action, and therefore I am resigning.

Soon after, Walter White, the NAACP Executive Secretary approached the Department of the Interior to allow the concert at the Lincoln Memorial.  Secretary Harold Ickes agreed as did the Roosevelts. Anderson’s concert on Easter Sunday was attended by 75,000 people and heard by millions more on the NBC radio broadcast.  She was introduced by Harold Ickes who said In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free. Genius, like justice, is blind. Genius draws no color lines. Anderson sang six songs: “America (My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”; “O Mio Fernando,” from the opera La Favorite by Gaetano Donizetti; “Ave Maria,” traditional, music by Franz Schubert; “Gospel Train,” traditional, arrangement by Henry Burleigh; “Trampin’,” gospel, by Edward Boatner ; and “My Soul is Anchored in the Lord,” gospel. How fitting that Anderson sang again at the Lincoln Memorial to 250,000 people attending the 1963 March on Washington.

The 1939 concert program had a long list of sponsors including Mrs. Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune. Doxey A. Wilkerson, to whom this program is dedicated, was a young Howard University professor, NAACP civil rights activist, union organizer, and specialized  in the field of early childhood education to seek funding equality for African-American schools. He also worked for President Roosevelt’s Advisory Committee on Education and for the Federal Office of Price Administration.

 

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Eleanor Roosevelt had a complicated time during World War II. Even before the US was engaged, she was attentive to larger forces at work. In her November 11, 1938 letter, to her son Elliott, she wrote, “I am afraid there is an anti-semitic wave sweeping over the country, and I do hate religious & racial prejudice with my whole heart.” Just after the US entered the war, she found herself in disagreement with FDR’s relocation policy (Executive Order 9066, February 19, 1942) that forced Japanese residents and Japanese-Americans from their homes on the west coast to interior internment camps in several states. Privately she assisted various groups that were trying to ameliorate conditions

Eleanor represented the president abroad with wartime travels. She went to Britain in late October 1942 and in London she saw the war damage and visited several Red Cross clubs. She also went to the South Pacific, still a war zone, from mid-August to mid-September 1943, to boost morale among troops and allies. In five weeks, she traveled 45,000 miles, spoke to 400,000 soldiers, and made 23 stops to visit 17 islands including Hawaii, Christmas Island, Bora Bora, Fiji, Efate, and Guadalcanal where she took shelter during an air raid. It was Eleanor’s idea to visit Red Cross facilities and she pragmatically chose to wear the Red Cross summer uniform to save time and luggage space. In her first column about the trip, she wrote: I am about to start on a long trip which I hope will bring to many women a feeling that they have visited the places where I go, and that they know more about the lives their boys are leading. I am going on this trip for the Red Cross, because I found in Great Britain that, if you wanted to talk with the boys, you had to catch them in their moments of ease. Many of those moments are spent in Red Cross Clubs. In addition, I want to visit as many of our hospitals as possible, and there, again, the Red Cross uniform is a familiar sight.

 

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In late 1944 FDR promoted Chester W. Nimitz to the top Navy rank of Fleet Admiral for having taken back control of the Pacific from the Japanese through a tough and bloody campaign from island to island. And so it was fitting that he was selected as the U. S. Representative to sign the “Instrument of Surrender” embodying the unconditional surrender of Imperial Japan. Standing behind him were (left-to-right): General of the Army Douglas MacArthur; Admiral William F. Halsey, USN, and Rear Admiral Forrest Sherman, USN. All the Allies signed as the brief ceremony was broadcast around the world.  Admiral Nimitz presented this photo:  To Eleanor Roosevelt – I do not know of any family in our nation that made heavier contributions to winning World War II than the Roosevelts. C.W. Nimitz, Fleet Admiral.  President Roosevelt had died on April 12, 1945, weakened by various maladies and worn out from the 12 years of lifting the nation through the Depression and war.  Eleanor Roosevelt had traveled to war-torn Great Britain in 1942 and the Pacific in 1943. The four Roosevelt sons, James, Elliott, Franklin and John, had all been in active military service in battle zones. Admiral Nimitz understood and honored the family’s sacrifices in this thoughtful gift.

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