Dear Marjorie,
That Eleanor’s greatness was reactive strikes me as her saving grace. Eleanor could have been–at times was–a dangerous mix of patrician self-importance, self-delusion, and imperiousness. Your casting of her manipulation of Hick as “man-like,” for instance, was on the mark. Cook is persuasive that their love affair was rich and rewarding over the years. But at the outset, Eleanor took as her model not Bloomsbury (sexual partnership among equals, and blah-blah-blah) but FDR and her dissolute male relatives (having your way with the help).
Much of her do-goodery–e.g., her snotty refusal to let White House elevator operators practice their trade (“I know how to run an elevator!”), her firing of all the white kitchen help on the dubious belief that white people can always find work–had zero to do with the objects of her “solicitude” and everything to do with the greater glory of Eleanor Roosevelt. What makes Eleanor admirable, and lovable to some, is that her political ambitions did not arise purely from such a project of self-aggrandizement. They were at least in part the reaction of a decent and thwarted person tacking out in search of love and eminence. I can’t agree that she was a force for good, but she seems to have been a good person.
Most differences between Eleanor’s standing and Hillary Clinton’s arise from the origins of their respective social consciences. When Eleanor says, as she does at one point in Volume 2, “There is nothing more exciting than building a new social order,” why don’t we reply, as we have to Hillary: Who the hell elected you? And why does Christopher Lasch’s The New Radicalism in America–the classic indictment of the self-interest of the “concerned” classes, which excoriates progressive paternalism from Jane Addams to the Kennedy administration–leave a big hole where Eleanor should be, giving her a free pass? Because Eleanor, in her own patrician way, had behind her the authority of what our grandparents called the School of Hard Knocks. (And our grandparents had far more awareness than we grant them that such Knocks could be emotional ones.) Her ambitions are the product of difficult and humiliating intercourse with humanity. Hillary, by contrast, is a cosseted suburbanite with a project for getting famous. Her ambitions come undiluted from her own fantasy life.
Eleanor’s most visible outward advantages over Hillary are 1) a sense of humor and 2) a willingness to do hard, painful work. In my teens I ran across a great book of Peter Arno cartoons from The New Yorker of the 1930s that would make you laugh till you cried. Except for one. It showed two miners with their flashlight-helmets staring off into the distance, and one was saying, “Look! It’s Mrs. Roosevelt.” What’s so funny about that? I wondered. After all, Eleanor did go down in mines. I think what was funny to contemporary readers was a) the Santa-like ubiquity of Eleanor Roosevelt and b) the unthinkability of a wealthy lady getting her clothes dirty in a dangerous place. They’re stunts, but courageous and spirited enough ones to earn you the ear of the public. Hillary frightens us because she feels no need to do any of that earning.
As an account of the blossoming of Eleanor–emotional, sexual, intellectual, political, and otherwise–this is a splendid biography. But as a political history? Cook implies that–at the height of Stalin’s terror, and years after a planned Ukrainian famine that was arguably a genocide–those who disagreed with Eleanor and Esther Lape’s quest for diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union were rustic lunkheads to a man. And I have a favorite passage from Volume 2, concerning the difficulty in passing a constitutional amendment to ban child labor:
State ratification was blocked by shrieks of Bolshevism: Various church groups and opponents of public health, public education, and all public improvements protested the amendment as a government intrusion into the “freedom” of family life.
The equation of anti-communism and opposition to “all public improvements” is bad. But the sneer-quotes around freedom take the cake. None of this sinks the book. An author’s ideology is kind of like the weather in a foreign country: After a few days you learn to dress for it, and you can enjoy the sights without paying it much mind. Still, I’ll stick with my characterization of Cook as “irresponsible.”
Best,
Chris
