This is a somewhat longer talk I first gave as the keynote address for a conference at The University of California at Berkeley on the subject of Women and The New Deal, and then, in a somewhat revised form, at The Redwoods in Mill Valley, California. Readers will see a little repetition of phrases and anecdotes included in the already posted talk on Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That was shortform, if you will. This is longform.
The Spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt
John Roosevelt Boettiger
Thursday, January 3, 2019
I’m inclined to identify my grandmother as among those William James called the “twice-born,” those who have experienced a renewal—a personal transformation, after enduring trauma and loss that could have buried the gift of a loving life but decidedly did not. In fact, the rebirthing that followed her trauma and loss drew her into an adulthood that nourished us all and led her to be one of the most well-known women of the 20th century. She was a great gift to me, and to so many others.
Like her other grandchildren, I knew my grandmother as Grandmère. (Thanks to her early caretakers, she was bilingual since childhood.) In my teens and 20s I often lived and traveled with her. We said goodbye the day before she died in November 1962. Eleanor Roosevelt was not only my beloved grandmother, but my first and best mentor. Her values did more to shape my own than those of any other person. I’m deeply grateful for her, for our time together.
She was a loving grandmother in my early years. She held my mother Anna’s hand when I was born. She 
joined us for many visits to our home on Mercer Island in Lake Washington, near Seattle. When my father—also John Boettiger—left for combat in World War II, I knew her when my mother and I—responding to my grandfather’s call—came east to live in the White House for the duration of the war.
When I think of the essence of Eleanor Roosevelt’s spirit, the word that first comes to mind is a plain one. Its value is that it’s the word she used most commonly to describe herself and her care for others’ lives. Most of all she wanted to be useful.
When using that simple word to assess herself and her service on others’ behalf, she held herself to a high bar, and served those she loved, those for whom she worked untiringly in the wider world—the poor, those (in her husband’s words) “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” those who suffered from racism and imprisonment, even death by lynching, as well as ordinary folks in search of a viable, meaningful life—she worked for all of those, with an energy that exhausted and inspired others of us who were a lot younger than she.
I remember words spoken in eulogy about her by one of those she knew and admired as he knew and admired her: Adlai Stevenson. As our ambassador to the United Nations he spoke to the General Assembly two days after she died and a few days later at a memorial service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. “Yesterday,” Stevenson told the General Assembly, “I said that I had lost more than a friend —I had lost an inspiration: for she would rather light candles than curse the darkness and her glow has warmed the world. My country mourns; and I know that all in this Assembly mourn with us.”
The United Nations itself, Stevenson added, “is in no small way a memorial to her and her aspirations. To it, she gave the last 15 years of her restless spirit…,” her labors, her love, her ideals—as he said, “ideals that made her, only weeks after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, put aside all thoughts of peace and quiet after the tumult of their lives to serve as one of this nation’s delegates [to the UN]…Her duty then as always, was to the living, the world, to peace.” It was her leadership, Stevenson said, that helped give the world “after years of painstaking and patient travail one of the most noble documents of humankind, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
I remember, too, a serendipitous occasion in 1958, when I was living with her at Val-Kill, her home in Hyde Park, browsing in her library. I came across a biography entitled Adlai Stevenson: Conscience in Politics. Opening it, I found an inscription: “To Eleanor Roosevelt, my conscience,” (signed ) Adlai Stevenson.
One of a few aspects of my grandmother’s character inadequately recognized by her biographers was her sense of humor. She comes across in too many accounts as knowing and wise but sober. No one who heard her wonderful narration of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” would believe that. Nor anyone who sat around the table at a rambunctious family dinner at her home. She always led the toasts, the first being “To the president of the United States” to which she often enough added, “It’s to the office we raise our glasses, not necessarily to the present incumbent.”
In order to deepen my account of Grandmère’s spirit, I need to share with you a particular story that cuts close to home for me. My father returned from the war with battle fatigue, what we now know as PTSD, compounding a lifetime of susceptibility to depression. Despite my mother’s entreaties, he would not seek treatment. (In those days there was little effective treatment to be had). We had moved to the desert outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona, where my parents were determined to sink all their resources into a brave but ill-starred effort to establish a liberal Democratic daily newspaper, The Arizona Times, which came, alas all too briefly, to be.
In all senses of the term—financial, marital, psychological—the costs were too high. My parents’ marriage broke under the stress. My mother Anna’s greater resilience served her well, literally re-grounding us in Los Angeles. My father hadn’t her inner resourcefulness. He struggled with his pain for two years without finding a way through it, and in despair he took his own life. He was fifty. I was eleven.
That is background. Now the foreground. I lived with my grandmother on vacations during my undergraduate years at Amherst College. One day I’d drafted a paper about the United Nations. Knowing her deep knowledge of the UN, before departing for work that morning I gave her the draft, asking her, if she had time, to take a look at it and let me know her thoughts when I returned home that evening.
It wasn’t until 1 or 2 in the morning that I returned home. I expected to find her asleep. But she was in her study, lit only by a gooseneck lamp over her desk and a low fire in the grate. She was signing and adding brief handwritten notes to letters she had dictated earlier in the day, and listening to Gregorian chants on the phonograph. I asked her if she’d had time to read my draft, and her reply touched a deep and tender place in me that she had the remarkable insight and love to understand. She said, “I did, and what struck me most was how your writing is like that of your father.” I didn’t know how to reply. No one had spoken to me about him in the eight years since his death.
How could she possibly know—I hardly did myself—how my hunger for him remained. So she filled my silence. “Come sit by the fire with me and I’ll tell you about him”: how much she had loved him, admired his writing, how deeply she wished she could have done more to save my parents’ marriage and prevent his suicide.
I realized later that Grandmère and I had experienced, at the same age—she just before she was ten, I at eleven—the loss of a treasured, anguished,
self-destructive father.
Her mother, though, was something else, if hardly more accessible. She remembered Anna Hall Roosevelt as extraordinarily beautiful, but reserved,
stern, lacking empathy and understanding, minimal in performing the tasks of mothering, disappointed in her daughter’s shyness and solemnity. “I can remember standing in the door,” Grandmère wrote, “very often with my finger in my mouth—which was, of course, forbidden—and I can see the look in [my mother’s] eyes and hear the tone of her voice as she said: ‘Come in Granny.’ If a visitor was there she might turn and say: ‘She is such a funny child, so old-fashioned, that we always call her Granny. I wanted to sink through the floor in shame…” Anna Hall died of diphtheria at age 29 when her daughter Eleanor was eight.
Given her childhood—her father Elliott’s alcoholism, his addiction to opium, many long absences from home in fruitless searches for cure, and his own semi-suicidal death at age 34; given her mother’s disregard; and the strictures imposed by her stern grandmother Hall, to whom she was entrusted after her mother’s death, it’s not surprising that mothering did not come easily to Eleanor Roosevelt, especially when her children were young. She felt anxious responsibility: helplessness, dependency. She wrote later, “I do not think that I am a natural born mother… If I ever wanted to mother anyone, it was my father.”
I think the point I want most to convey is that given those emotional absences and losses of Grandmère’s childhood, it’s all the more remarkable that she developed such a vivid capacity for sustained, close love and friendship as she grew through her adult life. I think of her deep friendships with Lorena Hickock, whom we all knew as “Hick”; with Joe Lash, who would become her first biographer; and later with her physician and confidant David Gurewitsch, as well as her many longtime friends like Esther Lape, Molly Dewson, Isabella Greenway, Justine Wise Polier, Lady Reading in England.
I won’t try to summarize this evening the most important and complex relationship in her adult life, with her husband Franklin, but there’s no doubt 
that it was a profound and knowing if sometimes stressful alliance.
Why stressful? Well, she was a compassionate and canny political and social activist. She understood him, supported him, sought his support, and knew she wasn’t burdened with the responsibilities and limits of the presidency. They shared the same humane liberal vision for the country and the world. If she sometimes provoked impatience (“Dear God,” [my grandfather is said to have said] “make Eleanor slow down.”), she always consulted him, and often enough responded to his requests and needs in ways he could not or would not. I think of her brilliant address to the 1940 Democratic party convention in Chicago, and her strong support for the nascent civil rights movement. There was a basket in his bedroom reserved for appeals and information from her, a basket that was seldom empty. On balance, I’d say that she, more than any other of his close advisors, enriched his conduct of the presidency.
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Having spoken of the absences of her childhood, I want to circle back for a moment to the gifts of those early years that nourished her growth into the woman she became. However frequent and long her father’s absences, their love for each other was real, and fueled by her imagination. His presences, however infrequent and undependable, stayed in her heart.
On another occasion, reflecting upon her childhood, she offered a revealing comment about what she felt a strength of her adult years:
“Thanks to my childhood, I was very disciplined by the time I grew up. I remember the method by which a nurse taught me to sew, when I was only six. After I had darned a sock, she would take the scissors and cut out all I had done, telling me to try again. This was very discouraging, but it was good training…. When people have asked how I was able to get through some of the very bad periods in my later life, I have been able to tell them honestly that because of all this early discipline I inevitably grew into a really tough person.”
“A really tough person.” It was true in the sense that she intended: able to withstand suffering, hardship or difficulty; strong, tenacious, responding vigorously to challenges. Jean Bethke Elshtain wrote of it truly, “For Roosevelt, being a lady and being tough was no contradiction in terms, and her explicit fusing of the two turned older understandings inside out.”
Then, for three years, there was Allenswood, probably the greatest early gift to her growth into the woman she became. When she was turning fifteen, Grandmother Hall sent her to an English boarding school headed by a remarkable Frenchwoman, Marie Souvestre. Her time at Allenswood, and particularly her vivid relationship with Marie Souvestre, nourished a vitality and independence of mind, an inclination to know and speak the truth, and a new confidence in relationships with her peers. Most notably, Souvestre also stimulated her social and political consciousness, reinforcing the central guiding principle with which I began: to be useful to others.
I think that’s the best way to understand the thoughtful recollection of her friend Isabella Greenway, who wrote: “Even at that age life had, through her orphanage, touched her and made its mark in a certain aloofness from the careless ways of youth. The world had come to her as a field of responsibility rather than as a playground.”
Finally, there is a second important element in Eleanor Roosevelt’s life and spirit that has too often been overlooked by her biographers. I mean her Christian faith and her Christian practice. It may have been the only subject on which she and Mlle. Souvestre disagreed. In a conversation with her friend William Turner Levy about Souvestre, my grandmother said, “She simply refused to acknowledge that she was following standards she hadn’t invented. She was following love, as we all must, and that is to follow God.”
She abandoned the severe religiosity of her grandmother Hall, but throughout her whole life she kept her habits of regular evening prayer at her bedside, and of church attendance. In one of her books, The Moral Basis of Democracy, she wrote, “We do not begin to approach a solution of our problems until we acknowledge the fact that they are spiritual. Even more than other forms of government, she added, democracy requires “a spiritual, moral awakening…We may belong to any religion or none, but we must acknowledge that the life of Christ was based on principles which are necessary to the development of a democratic state.”
She was distressed that many Americans [these are her words] “who call themselves Catholic, Protestant or Jew, behave as though religion were something shut up in one compartment of their lives. It seems to have no effect on their relationship to their surroundings and activities.” When I was living with her in Hyde Park, I remember often driving her to St. James Episcopal Church, at first, I confess, because no one who was visiting her was interested in going, and she was sometimes, let’s say, an inattentive driver.
I was always moved that she kept by her bedside at Val-Kill a framed copy of a prayer attributed to St. Francis that says a great deal about her spirit. Listen to the choice in the pairs of words, for they describe the character and radiance of her spiritual practice and its centrality in her private and public life:
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is discord, union;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
Grant that I may not so much
seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Grandmère has been gone now for more than half a century. I’m more deeply 
knowing and grateful today than I was as a teenager for her presence in my life. I have in my home a small replica of a statue by the sculptor Penelope Jencks, a lovely statue and likeness whose life-size original stands on the southern tip of Riverside Park at 72nd Street in New York City. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll see it, linger with it a while. I have a photo of that statue that I trust fits the theme of this evening. A couple of years ago, some enterprising soul—a woman, I know—climbed the statue and added a pink knitted cap. She would have been very pleased and would have joined in your laughter.
Blueberry ledges, photo by John R. Boettiger (2001)