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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Happy President's Day. Let's jump right back into our show, which is all about some very cool first ladies. This hour, we're bringing you excerpts from my Full Bio conversation about Eleanor Roosevelt with biographer David Michaelis. In this portion of our conversation, we'll look at Eleanor's first few years as first lady. As a result of her work with the Red Cross during World War I, and her time on the campaign trail during her husband's early political career, Eleanor developed strong opinions about the world, and also developed enough confidence in her own voice to lend it to those opinions.

With FDR's first presidential campaign, before his polio diagnosis, Eleanor's outspokenness had found a national platform. She was not shy about sharing her thoughts with the world, often through her daily column, My Day. It wasn't unusual for those opinions to diverge from the president's. There were also the years that Eleanor found love with AP reporter Lorena Hickok. It's the rare affair conducted inside the White House by a first lady and not the president. We pick up the story with FDR's polio diagnosis and Eleanor's role in his return to politics

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Alison Stewart: FDR contracted polio, and Eleanor was determined that it would not be the end of him, even though it might have seemed like his political career was over. Yet she didn't want him to become president. Why?

David Michaelis: I think she came to the conclusion that the only way for their lives as individuals, and their lives together, and for the life of their family to go on would be for Franklin to become the great man he had always planned to be. That there was no other version of Franklin other than the great Franklin Roosevelt that he had intended, and still intended. Polio is a virus. As the initial storm, a tempest, a huge thunderstorm lightning, and the biggest summer storm you can imagine literally zapping a single human being lying on a slab alone.

After all that has passed, the survivor is now left with the job of becoming a functioning human again. In Franklin's case, this meant being vertical. It meant being able to walk. It meant being able to shake hands, and go about the business of politics, which was all about pressing the flesh and standing up. You would never take an oath of office sitting down. At any rate, the point here being everything that Franklin determined, despite polio, Eleanor supported, because she knew very well that to be confined as invalid.

For her to be confined with Franklin is an invalid. For Franklin himself to be confined to invalid status as his father had been in earlier years, upriver at the Old Roosevelt Household, which is what his mother was proposing that he be. That he come home and write nice histories of John Paul Jones and his naval heroes, and sit among his stamps, and his books, and be a nice gentleman farmer.

Eleanor was, along with Louis Howe, very clear about how he had to-- they made actually a very telling decision, and it's back to New York City, which is the foremost polio doctor, and the doctor, indeed, who Franklin consulted with, and became his doctor were doctors who were working out of Boston. They were working out of Harvard. They were the leading doctor, Lahey, was attached to a clinic in Boston. Why didn't Franklin Roosevelt leave Campobello and go to Boston? Simple. He went back to New York because New York was his political future.

He went back to New York on a train that Louis Howe and Eleanor organized to make it look as if he was just coming home from a summer cold. It wasn't a full-scale deception of the press, but they certainly made it look as if he was going to be fully recovering all in good time, and this was nothing permanent, and on we go. He was by then a year away from having been a vice presidential candidate. He was still very much the next expected Democratic presidential nominee.

New York was his power base, and he came back to New York. He took leadership positions in local politics, and Louis Howe made it look as if all the letters were coming directly from a very active Franklin Roosevelt. He stayed on boards, he did this, he did that. All those things were all geared toward creating a version of Franklin Roosevelt that had nothing to do with invalidism, and nothing to do with being pitied as a cripple, which was the word then used.

Alison Stewart: How did Eleanor's husband's illness allow her to become a political force in her own right?

David Michaelis: Two things that are really weird to think about, and they repeat, so I'm going to tell them both at the same time. The first one is in 1921 when they returned to New York, and Franklin was beginning the process of the first physical therapy following the storm of polio. When his legs were in a position to suddenly jackknife, and atrophy, and you had to be very careful not to have his body be deformed by the very illness itself now gripping his body, and so careful physical therapy, careful day-to-day, hour-by-hour care and attention was needed.

Now, that's 1921. Flash forward to 1932, and Franklin Roosevelt has been elected president of the United States, and he's going to the White House. What's Eleanor going to do? Both times, she offered everything. She offered, "I'll do this, I'll do your mail. I will be there every minute with the bedpan." She was turned down flat both times. That's what's extraordinary, is it? Franklin-- and she both realized that she was not going to be the person who saved Franklin Roosevelt and brought him back from polio. That job actually was filled by others.

Then in 1932, she was not going to be taking care of his mail. Thank you very much. Missy LeHand was doing that. Others in the White House were going to be doing. In other words, she was left to her own devices, both of these crucial turning points, and both times made choices that turned herself into a practical politician. In 1921, really importantly, she went right out into the field with Franklin's purpose, and name, and with the idea that she wasn't doing this for herself. In fact, she was very shy at that point still and had not found her public voice. That's when she began to learn it.

Louis Howe would sit in the back and listen to her give a speech in which she would let her voice go way too high. It had a giggle glissando that would suddenly come into it nervous, and anxious. He taught her painstakingly, and over and over again, how to give a speech. She learned that. She threw a network of women. She began to meet through these speeches. She learned about Democratic politics, about the Women's Trade Union League, about women's city politics, about politics of New York State through the women's division.

An entirely new world had opened up a hundred years ago with the 19th Amendment, and women's suffrage and the biggest newest population of voters needed to be-- they needed to learn how to vote. They needed to learn how to get in the habit of voting. Eleanor was one of the first ones who would show up in tiny little communities way out in New York state that had never seen anyone show in a-- any woman show up in a car by herself, or with a couple of other women in knickerbockers, and men's clothes and ties, and suddenly talking about voting, and using your own thoughts, and your own opinions, and not relying on your husband, and not relying on other factors.

She began to learn how to be an organizer. All of that happened because she no longer was stuck with her own sense of duty, and began to accept what became the lesson of her whole life from then on, which is how do you adapt, and how do you learn your own limitations and accept them, and while accepting those limitations, find your greater potential.

Alison Stewart: My guest is David Michaelis. The name of the biography is Eleanor. It's part of our Full Bio series. One of the things I got from the book was the sense of loneliness that she carried through almost her whole life. She would find one or two people that she would become immediately quite close to. It seemed to give her some relief from her loneliness. Perhaps the most well-known is journalist Lorena Hickok, known as Hick.

She was covering Eleanor for the Associated Press. They developed a relationship. You stress in the book they were sexual intimates. Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok is not a story of unfulfilled sexuality, or of sexually unveiled, or a cheated woman's revenge on her husband, that they truly had a connection. They were deeply connected. They were perhaps even soulmates, to use a cheesy term. What do we know about how Eleanor felt about homosexuality, and how she grappled with her own sexuality?

David Michaelis: All her life, she longed for a deep intimate connection, but somehow her behavior and her own fear and frustration put distance between herself and others. Lorena Hickok was the first person whom she didn't feel. She felt she was being loved for herself alone. She felt she was being seen. She felt she was being heard. She felt she could serve Lorena Hickok as she had learned in her own self. She felt she would only be loved if she made herself useful, and that's what I mean by serve. If only she could serve her beloved or better still heal them or better still give them her constant help.

Alison Stewart: Eleanor Roosevelt is often credited with changing the role of the first lady. She was different in many ways. She didn't always agree with her husband, especially when it came to conviction on issues of racial justice, his failure to act on anti-lynching legislation. How was she able to separate herself from her husband's ideas and policies, and how did he react? How did FDR handle those instances when his wife publicly disagreed with him?

David Michaelis: This is one of the places where you love FDR, at least I did. When she was a columnist, she would sometimes say to him, "I'm going to write about the lynching bill tomorrow. Is that going to be a problem?" He would look up from his desk and say, "Ah, you go ahead and say exactly what you want to say on that. If I have any trouble with those Republicans or the Southern Democrats, actually in this case, if I have any problem with the Southern Delegation, I'll just tell them I can't handle you."

He was extremely shrewd and extremely smart. This is the greatest politician of the 20th century in so many ways. Building one of the greatest coalitions ever, and Eleanor helping build that coalition. He was very practical about her and knew exactly both how to use Eleanor to his effect, to his advantage, and also how to get the most from her energy in almost ju-jitsu-- throwing Eleanor's forward energy at things sometimes made those things work.

The reason in the broadest sense that the Southerners and the Midwestern Republicans hated her so much was that she wasn't just words in Kumbaya, she mobilized machine politics. She got people to the voting booths. She got whole pieces of the coalition that became the Roosevelt Coalition into the voting booth and voting Democratic. She had that influence. It is so much more vivid and so much more real when you look at it today given the things we've just come through, but to really understand that Eleanor Roosevelt reshaped the office of the first lady, the job of first lady by going out to the people.

People came to the president, but Mrs. Roosevelt came to you. That's the beginning of what Eleanor really did as first lady. Her innovation was movement. She moved out of the White House. The velocity and speed with which she traveled. The fact that she was the first first lady to cross the country by air. Somebody standing in some small town in America looking up one day in June of 1933, could suddenly think, "Wow, the president's wife is up there in that plane going to California. If that's possible, anything's possible. We can get out of this depression. We can make things work again."

There were so many things that she did like that that were about movement, about going to people, about becoming the intermediary between the government and the people, between you and your government. That made her vital in people's imaginations as well as in their actual lives. I think she was as much a figure for people of inspiration and excitement and imagination during this crushing depression, during the crushing years of American despondency and the loss of the dream and the loss of the idea that everything was possible. She could kindle this in people, and she made people feel that it was going to be all right and things were going to work again.

Alison Stewart: We will be back in a minute with more Eleanor. Next, I'll talk with biographer David Michaelis about her life after leaving the White House and returning to New York, where she served Harry Truman's administration as UN Ambassador. We'll hear about that. Plus some tape from the WNYC archives when Eleanor Roosevelt was a guest DJ, taking music requests from school kids recovering from polio. Stick around. This is All Of It.

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