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Who Was Eleanor Roosevelt? · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Hey Alex, what is up?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's another episode of Dirtnap City.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very excited that we're both here.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: How are you doing?
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'm so happy to be with you today, Kelly.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, the Thanksgiving episode was amazing.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I hope everybody learned a lot about uh John Howland and the pilgrims.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: And today's episode is going to be just as amazing.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: I have somebody that is gonna really break the trend.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't I start with a few clues?
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: And as everybody knows, if you're a regular listener to the show, uh Alex does not know who the person is that we'll be talking about.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: One of us doesn't, and in this case, it's Alex.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: I've selected the person, done the research, and Alex is gonna learn about this person.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and you already know because you clicked on the button to download the podcast.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: We appreciate that.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: But let's see if we can give Alex some clues.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, honestly, I feel better when he does guess it than when he doesn't.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like that's more of an accomplishment.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, Alex, first of all, she was born in 1884 and died in 1962.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Hmm.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I'm happy to hear that we've broken the mold.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we've broken the uh gender barrier here.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, at Dart Knapp City.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, died in 1962.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, born in 1884 in New York and lived there most of her life.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking Marilyn Monroe.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: No, I don't think she was born in the 1800s, was she?
• 1:34
  unknown: I don't know.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: No, I don't think she was quite that old.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe, maybe, but no, she probably wasn't.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: You're right.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's a stupid guess.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: She went by her middle name.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't help me.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: She was involved in U.S.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: politics and later the United Nations.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Barbara Jordan?
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: You know what?
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Funny you should say that.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: That was somebody I considered and still might do someday, but it's not Barbara Jordan in this case.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, she was the longest serving first lady in U.S.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: history.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Eleanor Roosevelt?
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well done.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I I'm looking forward to this.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know a lot about Eleanor Roosevelt.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: She was the wife of one president and the niece of another.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: She was Teddy Roosevelt's niece and uh Franklin Delano's Roosevelt's wife.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and her first name was actually Anna.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, born October 11th, 1884, died November 7th, 1962.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, before we were born, but not that not that long before we were born, still sort of sort of contemporary.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: I had heard somewhere that Teddy Roosevelt pronounced his name Roosevelt, and that FDR pronounced his name Roosevelt.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know which one that would she changed it from Roosevelt to Roosevelt then when she got married.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's interesting, they were all related, and she actually uh uh Franklin Delano Delano Roosevelt was her fifth cousin once removed.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: So so she I think we've we went over this on the last podcast, what that meant, and neither one of us knew.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think I think I know now.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: I basically she was the um daughter of a man named Elliot Roosevelt and a woman named Anna Rebecca Hall, and Elliot Roosevelt was the younger brother of Teddy Roosevelt, which made El Eleanor his niece.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now Elliot Roosevelt had a cousin, um, a fifth cousin, and that was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but um she was the daughter, so she was once removed.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Fifth cousin once removed.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: The daughter means you're once removed?
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: The child.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: The child, yes.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: So for example, my mom's my mom's cousin, I'm uh I'm a first cousin once removed.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: Hmm, okay.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's odd.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: The removed part always throws me, as opposed to the second cousin.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm from a small family, so I don't know this.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder if people from large families know this.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you're you're actually from a very large family, uh, all descended from John Howland, right?
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: So uh Right.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: You're you're you're like your 14th cousin's three times removed to you know Alec Baldwin.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Alec Baldwin, yeah.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of lots of famous people.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: So um anyway, she preferred to be called by her middle name, Eleanor, instead of Anna.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: On her mother's side of the family, um, there were tennis champions, Valentine Gill Hall, the third, and Edward Ludlow Hall were both tennis champions.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if they were like um played doubles together or something, but Valentine Gill Hall, who was known as Valley.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, you know, her father's side of the family related to the president, the brother of the president.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: But unfortunately, she had a very, very traumatic and difficult childhood.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Her mother actually was very detached, uh, emotionally rejected Eleanor, and was ashamed of Eleanor's uh plainness.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: She didn't think Eleanor was very pretty, and she called Eleanor Granny because Eleanor was such a serious child.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Her mother called her granny.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, what an insult is that.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Talk about some trauma.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: And and who gets mad at their kid for being serious?
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh well, serious and plain.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Those were those are the two awful, dude.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Two things, yeah.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: So apparently, apparently her mother, uh, Anna Rebecca Hall, was not a very nice lady.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then her father, Elliot Roosevelt, was uh also sort of a problematic guy.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: He was an alcoholic, and he had an affair with um a woman who was a servant in the family, and so she had a half-brother through that, through the f father's affair.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm still kind of stuck on the idea of getting mad at your kid for uh the way they look.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: Because literally that's that's genetics.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, that's true.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's well, and could have been from could have been directly from the mother, or maybe it was from the father's side, but regardless, um, probably married an ugly guy, and she took it took it out on her uh her daughter and then called her granny.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: Not cool.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it was also because of her seriousness, so it was it was a combination, it wasn't just her looks, but um, but the mother got her just desserts because she died from diphtheria in 1892, and then her her brother, uh Elliot Jr.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: died in May of the same year.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, no, the following May, sorry, in 1893.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then her father was an alcoholic and confined to a sanitarium.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: He died in 1894 after jumping out of a window during a fit of delirium.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: He survived the jump.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: I guess it was a drunken fit of delirium, alcoholic-induced sanitarium jump, you know, to use all the adjectives.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, he actually died from um a seizure after the jump.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, needless to say, Eleanor Roosevelt was subject to a lot of depression throughout her life because of all this as a child.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: Man, the days of diphtheria and delirium.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Good old days.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: And sanitariums, even.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, that's a lot of old, old timey language there.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that was old timey times.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then um, after her parents died, she was raised by her maternal grandmother, Mary Livingston Ludlow, and she was part of the Livingston family in Tivoli, New York.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: And she ended up going to boarding school, Allenswood Boarding School Academy in London, and she was deeply influenced by the headmistress Marie Salvestra, who was um French and taught her to speak.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: I guess the school taught her to speak fluent French.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: So she could, uh Eleanor Roosevelt did speak French from boarding school.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: Upper class, though.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: These are upper class people.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Very wealthy, very, very wealthy uh across the board, you know, both both sides of the family.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: So in 1902, she met uh her father's fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and she met him on a train on the way to New York.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: I guess she was traveling home from school.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm glad you didn't say at a family reunion.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: Because even if their fifth cousins twice removed or whatever you said, that's still not the place to partner up.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: To hook up, yeah.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Very, very true, very true.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: No, she met him on a train and they uh began a secret correspondence via letter because they didn't live in the same town.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and they became engaged on November 22nd, 1903.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, once they were engaged, um, apparently Franklin, Franklin, FDR, I'll call I'll call him FDR going forward.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: His mother, Sarah, was quite a pill.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: And she did not approve.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: She did not approve because they were related.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: They were both last name Roosevelt.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think that's the sticking point.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Kind of kind of is.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I guess, you know, there are really common last names like Smith.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: If if you were marrying another Smith, that might be okay because there's so many Smiths, but Roosevelt was not a common last name, right?
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a well-known last name.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: So FDR's mother, Sarah, did not approve, but Teddy Roosevelt approved.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Theodore Roosevelt approved and actually gave Eleanor away at the wedding.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: So he's he president yet?
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Theodore Roosevelt, who was president at the time, was scheduled to be in New York for St.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Patrick's Day uh on March 17th, 1905.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: He agreed to give the um bride away because her, of course, her father and mother were dead.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: It made front page news across, you know, across the New York Times, other newspapers.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: And when they asked his thoughts about a Roosevelt-Rosevelt union, President Theodore Roosevelt said, I think it's a good thing to keep the name in the family.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's my guy there.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: So make light of it.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he probably could have shut that down if he if really.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you said that you said that he approved.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure that getting his approval was something that had to happen.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: And if he thought that that was going to be too scandalous, he probably could have shut it down.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh, he didn't.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: He thought it was good to keep the name of the family.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: And while uh FDR's mother, Sarah, um, and by the way, her last name was uh Delano, so that's uh Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: I always thought it was um Delanor.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: I used to always say Delanor, like rhyming with Eleanor, but I realize it's Delano now.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um she opposed it, and not only did she oppose the wedding, she was just a really persnickety mother-in-law to the point where um at some point during their marriage, after their six children were born, she would tell those children um that this was actually a quote from James, one of um FDR and Eleanor's kids, said that, yeah, Grandma Sarah used to say, Your mother only bore you.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: I am more your mother than your mother is.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: What a woman.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: She was she was apparently pretty terrible, according to this article I read.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, they had six children.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Anna Eleanor Roosevelt uh died in 1975.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: James Roosevelt II died in 1991, you know, the year we graduated college.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh another Franklin Roosevelt, I guess he died uh at birth because it says 1909 to 1909.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Elliot Roosevelt lived to 1990.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um FDR Roosevelt Jr.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: lived to 1988.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: And John Roosevelt lived until 1981.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: So they were actually, you know, they were around when we were around.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we could have met, you know, uh, 91.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: We could have met James Roosevelt II.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: I never did, though.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: No, I never did either, but that would have been pretty cool.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, now apparently she once told her daughter Anna that she disliked having sex with her husband, and she said that it was an ordeal to be born.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: Eleanor also considered herself ill-suited for motherhood, uh, writing later in life that it did not come naturally to me to understand little children or even to enjoy them.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, she wasn't, she wasn't she by admission, she wasn't the greatest mother, but she also didn't have the greatest mother.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: And and uh her parents died early, so you know, somewhat understandable.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: It just goes to show you that money, uh money can't uh money doesn't make you uh good at anything necessarily, right?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, especially being a parent.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's probably too much of it's probably a little bit of a hindrance in that in that regard.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: You might even say mo money, mo problems.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: Or I don't care too much for money because money can't buy me love.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: All those cliches are true, though.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: Being upper crust um doesn't necessarily make you uh uh suited for parenthood, for sure.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Not in this case.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and then more tragedy struck because in 1918, when uh Eleanor was unpacking one of Franklin's suitcases after a trip he had been on, she discovered a bundle of letters to him from her social secretary, Lucy Mercer.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he had been contemplating leaving his wife, according to these letters.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: However, he had pressure politically not to leave his wife, and his mother, that awful woman, Sarah, stepped in and actually said, You can't leave your wife either.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: So she threatened to disinherit Franklin if he filed a divorce, and so for therefore the couple remained married.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: And Eleanor learned all this by leading reading letters that he had saved.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Why he saved those letters, who knows, but he saved them.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a rookie mistake.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Is that what you're saying?
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yes, of course.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Of course.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and you know, once the letters are read and you know, she knew he had had an affair, um, it actually said the article said that their marriage got better because they at that point decided it was more a union of political partnership than you know a marriage of love.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so um, because of that, Eleanor actually poured herself into public life and became increasingly involved in social work that she cared about and uh kind of stepped away from her role as a wife and more as a political partner to FDR during his political career.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, they they sort of understood each other on a level, it was like, okay, you know, we're not really in love, but we're gonna make the best of this and be a power couple.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: So that was it from then on?
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: There was no uh love between the two of them, and there were no love letters between they just decided that that was the way it was gonna be.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I guess their their youngest ch child was born in 1916, and the letter was discovered in 1918.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: So they had, you know, they had had six children, and no more were born after that.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, that might have been a little bit of an indication.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, we, the general public, probably didn't know anything about this until both of them had died.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so what happened though, that actually kind of turned the tide, made things a little different in 1921.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: FDR became paralyzed from polio.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: And uh his mother urged him to step away, Sarah, here she goes again, urged him to step away from politics, retire from politics, but Eleanor actually rose up and according to many witnesses and doctors, took amazing care of him for the fact that you know they weren't really in love, but she she did take good care of him, like saved his life in some by some accounts, uh, by the way she took care of him, and encouraged him to stay in politics, which eventually led him to the presidency.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, that's a different kind of love, probably.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's not romantic love, but definitely in order to take care of somebody, and uh you have to have some sort of love for them, um, like that.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure that she did.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure it wasn't all in self-interest, but on the other hand, that's pretty much all he had going for him as far as she was concerned.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: The politics, his political potential.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: Why stay together at all?
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: That was if that was the end game.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting relationship, but I'll bet there was love there.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: It it ended up working out that she became the longest sitting first lady of the United States, inaugurated on March 4th, 1933.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: And she was um, she actually, because of her social standing, she knew a lot of the other first ladies from that time period, from the you know, the early 1900s.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: She had she had been around them, right?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: Her her her family, she was, you know, family to the president.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: She was given away by Theodore at her wedding.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: So she had been around other first ladies, and she decided that she would redefine the role of the first lady.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: That was kind of once she was once he was inaugurated, she decided to make it something more important.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: And she really didn't like what other first ladies had done.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, um Her Hoover's wife, who was first lady prior, Herbert Hoover's wife, prior to FDR becoming president, um, she, her name was Lou, and she actually was a bit of a prior to him becoming president, she was a bit of a social person, um, like having causes and doing things that were important.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: She stopped doing that when she became first lady.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: She felt like it wasn't her duty to do social causes anymore and fundraising and charities and all the stuff she had done before.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas um Eleanor Roosevelt said, No, I'm gonna do more of that.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I have a I have a big platform.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: So she was the first presidential spouse to hold regular press conferences, and she was the first um first lady to become uh a speaker at the National Party Convention.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: She wrote uh daily in a widely syndicated newspaper column called My Day, and that was also a first, nobody had done that before, so she was a writer in a daily newspaper column, and she was the first lady to write a monthly magazine column and host a radio show.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, she became this um force of nature because she had a platform and she realized it was important for her to be on there and to and to really kind of bring out the things she believed in.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: So by 1941, she was regular receiving lecture fees of a thousand dollars and was made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa um because of her speaking achievements.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: So she was a pretty good public speaker.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the thing that strikes me is the you you said the the use of radio, because I know FDR had the fireside chats, and he was really using this relatively new medium um to get his message out.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: And it's I didn't know she uh she kind of followed suit.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's really cool.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess the technology was becoming more common at that time.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's always easier to adopt something once a lot of people are used to it and using it.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um she she traveled extensively during her 12 years in the White House.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: She made personal appearances at labor meetings to assure depression-era workers that the White House was mindful of their plight.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: She was definitely the uh first lady that promoted her husband's ideals.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: They were Democrats, by the way.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um she was a big force in the Democratic Party, and she showed that uh first ladies could play an active role in the executive branch of government.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of secrets here going on, right?
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we didn't know about FDR's uh polio.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't know they were in a loveless marriage.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: Wait, wait, we did know about the polio.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: He was in a wheelchair.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, they kept that from the public.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I I didn't realize that.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: They uh the public did not know while he was president that he was in a uh in a wheelchair, to my understanding.
• 20:39
  unknown: Oh.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: He would always be standing, they would like prop him up.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: And the press back then had a thing where they just, you know, they'd consider that a private matter.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: At the time that she was um first lady, she was not she she definitely was controversial.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: She was controversial for a lot of reasons, and and she did take a lot of um guff from the from the press and from the country.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't it wasn't all smiles and chocolate.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: She became, of course, you know, after you go to Dirt Knap City, people think of you in a different way.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: But it's ironic because she was really known for speaking up for the little guy.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, she was uh huge in civil rights.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: So she was one of the first voices in the administration to insist that benefits be equally extended to Americans of all races, right?
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because this was during the New Deal.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: This was after the Great Depression.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: So she also broke tradition by inviting hundreds of African American guests to the White House that had never been done before, you know, guests to be there.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, she also was uh very big into supporting Asian Americans and people who had fought in World War II to make sure they got enough compensation.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: So she was a big advocate for traditionally underserved people.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: She was um actually unprecedented in the number of press conferences she had.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: She had 350.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: 48 press conferences while she was in office during her 12 years as first lady.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: And she actually put a ban on male reporters during those press conferences.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: It had to be female female reporters.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it said that because of that, um every newspaper that wanted to cover it had to have at least one female reporter on staff.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: I bet they thought she was such a pain in the ass for that.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: She so part of that came down to um a relationship she had with a certain female reporter, which we'll talk about in a second.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: Here we go.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is what I was waiting for.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: But before that, I just want to mention um that she actually, again, used radio extensively, um, more so than uh Mrs.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: Hoover, the previous First Lady.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: And she first broadcast her own programs and radio commentary beginning in 1934.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: And on her very first broadcast, she talked about the effect of movies on children and that uh we needed to censor movies to make sure they didn't glorify crime or violence.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: And her she also talked about the All-Star Baseball game that had just happened.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: It was in July.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, she read a commercial for a mattress company, which sponsored the broadcast.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: She was the original mattress Mac.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: And she said that she would not accept a salary for being on the air, and she donated it, which was$3,000.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: She donated that$3,000 to charity, the salary she would have received.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: The uh censoring of movies that reminds me of um lady that we had.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: When FDR died in 1945, Harry Truman appointed her to be the first delegate to the newly created United Nations, and she became the chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights, where she worked to help Holocaust survivors and spearhead the Declaration of Human Rights, which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which I guess is something the UN did.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: And she was um quoted in a speech in 1948 saying, all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: And she basically was considered one of the founders of the international human rights laws.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I wonder if people back then, I I'm sure it was split.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure some people just couldn't get enough Roosevelt.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: And other people were probably thought, oh man, they're just in everything.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: This guy's been president forever, and now she's kind of taken over.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like Chip and Joanna Gaines.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, oh my God, if I see another billboard.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: But she was great friends with Amelia Earhart.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: She became great friends with Lorena Hickcock, who was a female reporter in the AP, Associated Press, who covered her during the presidential campaign and fell in love with her.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: So during that time, they wrote each other 10 to 15 page letters, and uh Eleanor called her Hick, and they were very, very graphic letters that said things like, I want to put my arms around you and kiss you at the corner of your mouth.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the other one said, I can't kiss you, but I'll kiss your picture instead.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: And um, actually, at Franklin Roosevelt's 1933 inauguration, um, Eleanor wore a sapphire ring that Hickok had given her.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: And apparently this caught the eye of uh the FBI director at the time, J.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Edgar Hoover, who really despised Roosevelt's uh Eleanor's liberalism, her despised her civil rights stance and uh her criticism of the FBI at the time, and so he actually gathered evidence about Hickok being a lesbian and collected evidence that he used to uh or was going to use to blackmail um Hickok and Roosevelt, but that never really happened.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so glad those days are over where you could blackmail somebody for for yes, I agree with you, but but um you know apparently they they did seem to have some sort of a relationship.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: And FDR couldn't say anything about it, he had letters of his own.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then she also apparently had a very close relationship with the New York State police sergeant, Earl Miller, who was her bodyguard.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so she was 44 years old when she met Miller, he was 32, and sh he was around her all the time because he was assigned to be your bodyguard.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: We ended up teaching her a whole bunch of things like scuba diving, uh, horseback riding, coached her in tennis, and they became more than friends, apparently.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder if her mother would be proud of that.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: Her whole thing was she was plain and serious.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: The implication is she'd never get anybody to be interested in her, and here she is playing around all over the place.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: But she found out around the time in the 30s when she was um involved with Miller that uh that her husband was having another affair with Marguerite Missy LaHand, who was his secretary.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: And at some point they both realized that that that was going on, that they were both having affairs, and they recognized, accepted, and encouraged the arrangement.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: They both realized that it was something that was going to happen, and apparently Roosevelt and um uh Miller, the the police officer, um Earl Miller, they were um they were friends until her death in 1962.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: This is the lifestyles of the rich and famous, man.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: Out of the scandals, she served on the UN Commission of Human Rights, as I said.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: She helped draft the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: She later chaired the Kennedy administration's presidential commission on the status of women.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I mean, she just was very much involved in helping people who were traditionally underserved.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: That was kind of her mission in life.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's great.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, what an interesting life.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: And the part, of course, that interests me is all the secrets and the press kind of being okay with keeping some of those secrets.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you could be a lot more careless back then.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because everything wasn't getting tweeted or or Instagrammed immediately, right?
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm sure they were careless, and I'm sure the press, especially if one of the reporters is your girlfriend, um, you could get away with probably a lot more than you could get away with now.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, apparently she said, you know, I want to I want to put my arms around you and kiss you at the corner of your mouth.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: No, I like the next one better.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: I you can't kiss my mouth.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: I I can't I I can't kiss you, so I'll kiss your picture instead.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, it was steamy.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was definitely steamy stuff for the 1930s and 40s.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I don't know.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'll bet you I bet you FDR's letters were a lot worse than that.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well otherwise, why would he keep them?
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: So are those letters, do you think, are do you think they're at FDR's library?
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them were destroyed.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's what I found out is that some letters were actually bought by a private collector and destroyed or just hidden from public, like as part of their part of their wanting to leave a good legacy, I guess.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: There's something that um love letters are something that people used to really, you know, historians can really get a lot out of love letters.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_01: Future historians.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we have texts, um we have uh salacious emails.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, um, but no love letters.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I don't even I'm trying to remember the if I've written any.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: If if you're out there and I've written you a salacious uh love letter, um give a give give us a contact throw it up on throw it up on Instagram.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: Run it by me first, but I'd love to see uh my handiwork.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: I can't say I never have, I just can't I'd say I don't remember.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: After all of that, she died um, of course, in 1962.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but she before that, she actually was diagnosed before she died with a aplastic A-P-L-A-S-T-I-C, aplastic anemia.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: I've never heard of that, but um, she had been hit by a car, then she was given steroids, and those steroids apparently activated a dormant case of tuberculosis, which was in her bone marrow.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: I don't exactly understand what that means, but she ended up dying in 78 or at the age of 78.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: She ended up dying of cardiac failure, probably a result of all those other things.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: And what year was that?
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: 19 uh she died in 62, yeah.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: And what year did FDR die?
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, he died way before that.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: He died uh that's a that's a great question.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: He likes died in like 48 or 49 or something.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, she she lived, I think she lived 17 years longer than him.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: So whatever 62 minus 17, 45.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um and of course he had polio, so that was that was part of the part of the problem for him.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: But um, after her death, uh she was regarded as one of the most esteemed women in the world.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: The New York Times called her the object of universal respect in her obituary.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: And in 1999, not that long ago, she was ranked in the top ten most admired people of the 20th century.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think for sure when you think 20th century, um, she's definitely, especially women, um, she's got to be up there, number one, probably.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I in doing my research, I saw a lot of pictures of her, and she she wasn't bad looking.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, she wasn't she wasn't as homely as uh as her mother calling her granny made her out to be.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: She definitely had some admirers though.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, she did.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: She did.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, let's just hope she's turning some heads uh where she is now in Dirtnap City, and that uh, you know, Mr.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: Rogers and Evil Knievel and you know everybody else there is uh enjoying her company.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: One of these days we're gonna come up, we're gonna sell a uh map to the uh map to the graves.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to follow, if you want to follow um our tours, you can start North Carolina with uh Andre the Giant.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna team up with uh Rick Steves to do tours of Dirtnap City.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, I think that's an excellent idea.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: He's mostly in Europe though, isn't he?
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, but he'll he'll go anywhere.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: So what kind of legacy do you think?
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, outside of being one of the most admired women in the 20th century, what today, what do you what do you think that she brings?
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think civil rights were were a big part of it.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't, you know, I didn't talk as much about that as I probably should have, but that's really kind of the essence.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: She was she was uh promoting civil rights long before anybody else was, and even more so, they said that her um take on civil rights was more advanced and more progressive and modern than her husband's.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, he was president, right?
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: So he sort of had his hands tied a little bit in what he could actually get done and what would get him re-elected because he was president for 12 years.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's that's uh that's longer than anybody can be president these days, right?
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think two two-term limit.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: So uh civil rights and uh women's rights.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think those two things were probably two of her strongest things.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then again, the fact that she worked with Holocaust uh, you know, people from World War II to ensure that they were taken care of.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have many details on that, but that's another thing.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, the fact that she did have a um an alleged affair with another woman, I think that's also pretty interesting in trailblazing.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: Although she did probably didn't mean it to be, but sure.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that we know that and yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: No, I don't think it I don't think it was intentional.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think it just uh it just happened, but you know, it just shows that uh love is love, right?
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: What's interesting is today, same set of circumstances come along, and she probably would have left FDR after the letters, and then we'd never hear from her again.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: It would be FDR's first wife that we don't know anything about.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: But but she but she was wise, and I think he was wise to understand that their relationship was uh beneficial to not only them but the country.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think FDR was considered a uh a good president, and I think she was considered actually um considered one of the best first ladies we've ever had, you know, and and the fact that she redefined, I think if there was one sentence that would kind of sum her up for this, is she redefined what it meant to be first lady.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody before that thought of it as a an important job.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: They thought of it more as a um symbolic job, you know, as more of a sort of um, you know, have teas and make dinners and and support your husband.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: She did support her husband, she did travel extensively to promote his policies, and I think for the most part they agreed on policies.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: She just maybe wanted to take them a little bit further, especially around civil rights.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: And the last first lady that we had was a nude model.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: So redefining it again.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, they're breaking all kinds of ground there.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh, yeah, I hope you enjoyed this episode.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I definitely uh feel like I feel like uh we needed to we needed to get a woman into the mix, and I feel like the first one we did was a pretty pretty good one.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I certainly didn't know much about her.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: I honestly just googled uh 100 most interesting women in in the world, and she her name came up, and I was like, hey, that's pretty cool.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: But thank you for doing that.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: Barbara Jordan was was uh was on my list, uh, but I started reading about Eleanor Roosevelt and was like, oh, I gotta talk about her because she's yeah, she's all kinds of interesting.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thanks for doing that, Kelly.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: Sure thing.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this has been another episode.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: Be sure to check out our previous episodes on all kinds of interesting people who happen to be dead.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you next time in Dirt Nap City.