Eleanor Roosevelt
Cook, Blanche Weisen
S harp-witted Frances Perkins, who got to know Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt more than twenty years before becoming FDR's Secretary of Labor, said of Eleanor that one of the great quarrels she had...
...Roosevelt's warped and stunted, inner life than do Cook's five hundred pages: ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: VOLUME ONE, 1884-1933 Blanche Weisen Cook Viking /587 pages/$27.50 reviewed by KENNETH S. LYNN 58 The American Spectator October 1992 Much of Eleanor Roosevelt's complex personality may be usefully seen in the context of having had to cope with her father's alcoholism...
...One of them was the assistant to the director of the Women's Division of the New York State Democratic Committee, Nancy Cook...
...The same consideration conceivably hobbled her intimacy with the most plausible of her sex partners, the well-known AP correspondent Lorena Hickok...
...In a sentence that calls to mind the outlook of the dread Hillary Clinton, she scornfully says that during E.R.'s first years of marriage she "buried herself' in childrearing and homemaking...
...The period of passion . . . did not last very long," Cook explains...
...that she suffered for years at the hands of a nurse who pulled her hair and cut large holes in her socks...
...Accordingly, she made a new life for herself in the 1920s among women friends in New York, the most important of whom were lesbians...
...A single footnote in Geoffrey Ward's A First-Class Temperament does more to aid our understanding of Mrs...
...David Gurewitsch, the physician who attended her in her last years...
...T he best part of Eleanor Roosevelt is its delineation of its heroine's childhood...
...Instead, she contends—without any citations, alas, of supporting evidence—that "[Eleanor] felt that [Franklin] admired her intelligence and relied on her advice...
...For the defiant proposition on which Eleanor Roosevelt builds is that "E.R...
...lived a life dedicated to passion and experience...
...But by her own admission, she was a woman who was predisposed to subjugate her desires...
...Unfortunately, excuses rather than probing reflections accompany these details...
...Yet when Mrs...
...Roosevelt may have been down in the depths"—and warned Lash never to trust anything that Marion Dickerman ever said...
...The subject is not one that has much interest for Cook, of course...
...Her other put-downs of Franklin attack him from so many directions that she finally seems to be arguing that he could not have got any further in politics than the state Senate in Albany had he not married Eleanor...
...that her mercurial, distracted, drunken father—whom she adored—was subject to fits of hysteria and madness...
...that she was orphaned before she was ten...
...As her book makes clear time and again, the key to the mind of Cook—a professor of history and women's studies at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and currently the vice president for research of the American Historical Association—is that she is much less interested in assembling reliable biographical testimony than in propagating feminist heroine-worship...
...1711...
...Roosevelt's friend and biographer Joseph P. Lash asked Miller about the accuracy of Dickerman's account of the letter, he dismissed it breezily?Mrs...
...What is most striking about these two notorious comments is that there are no others in the correspondence that match their suggestiveness...
...Cook's celebration of Mrs...
...Wherefore, Cook feels justified in saying that "whether or not the friendship that developed between them embraced amorosity, from their very first meeting their relationship was marked by an element of romance...
...Roosevelt's voluminous correspondence—but because it runs counter to Cook's ideological purposes, she has no interest in it...
...Thus we are told that Mrs...
...He never did rely on her...
...And as all the world knows by now, the Roosevelt-Hickok correspondence contains a letter from Lorena in which she recalls the feeling of "that soft spot, just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips," and a letter from Eleanor that wistfully admits that "I wish, I could lie down beside you tonight and take you in my arms...
...Roosevelt soon discovered that public life offered her a means of transcending her unhappy personal life...
...Franklin and Eleanor's oldest son, James, was of the opinion that "Mother may have had an affair with Earl Miller," and one of Eleanor's lesbian friends, Marion Dickerman, later claimed that in a letter that Eleanor allegedly sent to Nancy Cook in the wake of Franklin's successful bid for the presidency in 1932 she spoke of how much she hated the The American Spectator October 1992 59 prospect of being a prisoner in the White House, and wildly threatened to run away with Earl Miller, who loved her and respected her as Franklin never had...
...That estimate helps confirm the judgment that historian Geoffrey Ward offers us in the best of all the Roosevelt books, A First-Class Temperament (1989): that Eleanor was too little like her charming and breezily duplicitous husband, too humorless, too admonitory, too easily aggrieved, too unwilling to relax, for him to savor her company...
...More often than not, though, the anti-male animus in the book unmistakably derives from the author...
...At no point is it even suggested that the controls imposed upon Anna and her siblings were the projected images of a pathological self-control, or that Sara Delano Roosevelt was primarily thinking of her daughter-in-law's inability to love when she remarked to her grandchildren that "I was your real mother, Eleanor merely bore you...
...and Franklin's mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, "usurped" her authority...
...but] when most men would have asked their wives what they thought, he didn't...
...According to Judith S. Seixas and Geraldine Youcha's Children of Alcoholism: A Survivor's Manual, for example, the children of alcoholics, having been let down by their parents, often have difficulty ever fully trusting anyone...
...In the fullness of time, Eleanor would confess in a letter to her journalist friend, Lorena Hickok, that something had "locked me up" emotionally and had given her an "exaggerated idea of the necessity of keeping all one's desiresunder complete subjugation...
...As she tells the story of her heroine, Mrs...
...No more candid burst of self-understanding can be found anywhere in Mrs...
...had some "strange ideas" about how to be a modern mother, one of which entailed putting little Anna down for a nap in a wire box outside a window on the dark and cold side of the house and then ignoring her screaming (until, that is, neighbors threatened to call the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children), while another involved tying Anna's hands above her head to the bedposts so that she could not masturbate...
...That's her gripe...
...Photographs of them in bathing suits in which Miller's arm is around her waist or around her shoulders, or her hand is resting upon his knee, testify to the fact that they became personal friends and spent a considerable amount of time together...
...It was an assessment of Dickerman with which Lash agreed...
...I shouldn't say that, but it's true...
...That those years were a desperate time for her...
...Strong and athletic-looking," author Cook writes, "with penetrating brown eyes and short-bobbed curly hair, Nancy Cook looked boyish...
...her nursery staff "tyrannized" her...
...But the explanation to which foremother-enthusiasm doesn't permit the biographer to give its due is that the consummation for which Lorena probably yearned with all her heart was never achieved...
...Nobody cared to teach" poor Eleanor how to be a good mother...
...S harp-witted Frances Perkins, who got to know Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt more than twenty years before becoming FDR's Secretary of Labor, said of Eleanor that one of the great quarrels she had with her lot is that Franklin didn't listen to her...
...Roosevelt's behavior that Ward's footnote helps to illuminate is her performance as a mother...
...Roosevelt was "convinced that . . . men enter politics to pursue their own careers [whereas] women are motivated by a desire to change society, to improve the daily conditions of life...
...They idealize self-discipline and feel they must control every aspect of their lives for fear of ever again becoming the helpless victim of the unpredictability of other people...
...Upon arriving at the lunch at which Eleanor and Nancy first met, Eleanor presented her with a bouquet of violets, a most significant gesture, we are breathlessly informed, because violets "appear again and again in feminist literature as an international symbol of affection...
...that she was all, but suffocated by her screwed-up maternal grandmother who spent many hours alone in a darkened bedroom with the windows closed and the shades drawn and who made little Eleanor wear hideously unattractive black stockings and high-ankled shoes, are facts that for the most part have been made familiar to us by other biographers, but Cook deserves credit for an exceptionally vivid account of them...
...Among the aspects of Mrs...
...He liked her as a reporter...
...Lorena was almost certainly a sexually active lesbian...
...In any event, Mrs...
...At times her sexist prejudices emerge indirectly, via references to the opinions—the alleged opinions, that is, for substantiating footnotes are notably absent—of various women in the story...
...Roosevelt was not only badly hurt by her husband's World War I affair with Lucy Mercer, but hungry for love...
...Romantic involvement," in sum, is a much too certainly phrased summation of Mrs...
...that intimacy with her cold and standoffish mother was never possible...
...Roosevelt's association with Miller...
...rather than, a disinterested scholar is indicated in her preface and acknowledgments, where she characterizes herself as "embattled," extends thanks for their helpfulness to such symbolical figures as Alger Hiss and "the women of the Gay Women's Alternative," and finishes off with a salute to the members of her own "family"—only one of whom bears a name that resembles her own—for having rallied round her "when there are so many other battles to wage, so many waves to ride, so much else to do...
...Before dismissing the subject and moving on to matters more worthy of a feminist heroine, Cook does acknowledge that E.R...
...Implicit, however, in her chronicle of victimization are questions about long-term emotional disablement that as a feminist hagiographer she cannot bear to deal with...
...Roosevelt as one of the "foremothers" of feminists like herself also encompasses disparagements of men in general and of FDR in particular...
...That she may have felt the tug of physical desire when in his impressively muscled presence is not beyond belief...
...The well-known comment, for instance, of Franklin and Eleanor's daughter, Anna, that her mother regarded sex as "an ordeal to be borne" prompts the defensive-aggressive Cook to exclaim, quite gratuitously, that "such a remark raises the question of FDR as a lazy and selfish lover...
...That she is proud of being an ideological warrior Kenneth S. Lynn is the Arthur 0. Lovejoy Professor of History Emeritus at the Johns Hopkins University...
...Blanche Weisen Cook, however, has chosen not to recall Secretary Perkins' s words in her new biography of Mrs...
...For it was his "profoundly political wife," says Cook, who fed him "insights about his colleagues" in Albany, who was "largely responsible" for smoothing his path to better relations with Tammany reformers like Al Smith and Robert Wagner, who "built bridges, even over the most treacherous terrain," who made "what might have seemed impossible alliances...
...From the time she began writing "My Day" until the very end of her days, this emotionally locked-up woman preached a vaporous message to the world of universal love...
...S omewhat less outrageously, Cook proposes that Earl Miller, the 32year-old state trooper whom Franklin hadhired as a bodyguard for his 44-year-old wife after he assumed the governorship of New York in 1929, was the trim and handsome object of "the first romantic involvement of E.R.'s middle years...
...As for the passionate letters that Eleanor sent to Miller, they were no warmer than those she sent to Joe Lash, or to Dr...
Vol. 25 • October 1992 • No. 10
