Eleanor Roosevelt: Best First Lady

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

**Josh** (0:11)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know, the great women in history edition.

**Chuck** (0:21)
That's right. One of the greatest.

**Josh** (0:25)
Sure, she's up there. Frances Perkins still gets my vote, though.

**Chuck** (0:28)
Oh, yeah?

**Josh** (0:29)
Yeah, Eleanor Roosevelt is amazing.
It's just that learning about her makes your head spin. Like, you could do a 10-part series on her easy.

**Chuck** (0:40)
Yeah, at some point, you just got to, you know, do the Stuff You Should Know thing.

**Josh** (0:45)
Right, and condense 10 parts into 45 minutes.

**Chuck** (0:49)
That's right.

**Josh** (0:51)
So, I think I just let the cat out of the bag, Chuck. We're talking today about Eleanor Roosevelt, and she is the longest-serving First Lady. She was called the First Lady of the World, as a matter of fact, by Harry Truman.
Mayor LaGuardia in New York called her America's number one volunteer, and she was almost universally liked, even if you couldn't stand her politics. She was just so eloquent and graceful and kind and generous and all the great things that you couldn't help but like her pretty much. It seems like only a few members of her family are the ones that she ever had a real beef with.

**Chuck** (1:30)
Yeah, for sure. Family is going to family.

**Josh** (1:33)
Right. Never trust family.

**Chuck** (1:35)
That's right.

**Josh** (1:36)
So, let's talk about her family to start. She was born in 1884 I believe her full name was Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, but everybody calls her Eleanor. And her father was Elliot Roosevelt, who's Teddy Roosevelt's younger brother.
And so, yes, she wasn't just married as a Roosevelt. She was born a Roosevelt too. Isn't that surprising?

**Chuck** (1:59)
That she married her cousin? That is surprising to probably a lot of people.

**Josh** (2:03)
Yeah, fifth cousin, not a lot of genetic issues there. But yeah, I mean, I thought she was, she became a Roosevelt after her marriage. She was born a Roosevelt, buddy. There's your trivia question for this one.

**Chuck** (2:15)
Yeah, for sure. She didn't have her parents around for long. And while she did, it was not the best scene. Apparently, her mother was a pretty distant person. Not the greatest mom, and her dad was a pretty tough alcoholic.
But they died when she was a child, basically. Her mom, Anna, died in 1892 of diphtheria, and her father, Elliot, died after he jumped out of a window because of alcoholic trimmers, basically, delirium trimmin. So it was a pretty rough go for her until she went to live with her grandmother, where she had lived with her brothers, Elliot Jr., who, actually, he didn't live that long either. But her brother, Hall, did, and apparently she doted on him quite a bit.

**Josh** (3:07)
Yeah. I mean, what a great sister. They're both orphans, and so she's going to take on the role of being his mother figure, essentially, and taking good care of him. So I think that's pretty neat. That shows a lot about who she was, because this is starting about age 10
When she went and lived with her grandmother, she was educated at home, as very, very wealthy people did at the time.
When she was 15, she was sent to England. That's where her first brush, maybe even really her only brush with education went. She was there for three years before her grandmother called her back and said, that's enough, let's do some debutante stuff. Come back and get fitted for a big frilly dress.

**Chuck** (3:51)
That's right. That was in 1902, and she wasn't, she didn't take to, even though she was born into wealth and kind of into that scene, obviously, as a Roosevelt, she didn't feel like she really fit in in that elite sort of scene there. So early on, she started volunteering and she thought, well, a good way to sort of rid myself, or at least distance myself a bit from that life, would be to kind of see what the common folks are up to and help them out. And then she started out doing that at a pretty young age, initially at the Rivington Street Settlement House, there in the Lower East Side, where she's a dance teacher and she taught classes to young immigrants. And then also finally joining the National Consumers League, which was basically an organization that tried to improve down in the garment district what the workers were dealing with.

**Josh** (4:45)
Right. Trying to get workers' death from 100% down to something like 80%, you know?