First Ladies: Eleanor Roosevelt (Part Two)

**Madigan** (0:01)
Hi, I'm Madigan, and you're listening to Your Angry Neighborhood Feminist, a podcast that explores the world through a personal feminist perspective.
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to part 2 of my coverage of The Wonderful Eleanor Roosevelt.
Last week, I left us off with Eleanor's tiptoeing into the civil rights movement and being more supportive of people of color. And I stopped right before World War II. So that is where we are going to be starting today, especially because FDR, of course, was the president for most of World War II. And Eleanor therefore had a very important role during that period in our history as well. So let's get into it. As the US began to slowly move toward war, hemming and hawing about whether or not to step up, Eleanor found herself in a depression again. She believed that many of her other projects would become less important when Americans joined the war. So she shifted her efforts that way as well, which is a good thing because many would consider Eleanor to be her husband Franklin's eyes, ears, and legs during those years of the war. As Eleanor refused to settle for the traditional role of a First Lady, and she decided to be boots on the ground for her husband. She began with a popular movement pushing for allowing European refugee children to come to the US, and lobbied her husband to allow greater immigration of groups persecuted by the Nazis, including Jews, which would end up falling on deaf ears.
Yeah, we Americans love to make it seem like we are the good guys of World War II, but we definitely made a lot of mistakes, and it took us a really long time to actually get into the war. It is very upsetting to me that our president was not more welcoming to the Jewish community that desperately needed saving during this time. Eleanor would, however, secure political refugee status for 83 Jewish refugees in August 1940, but was refused on many other occasions. Later, her son James wrote that her deepest regret at the end of her life was that she had not forced Franklin to accept more refugees from Nazism during the war. Eleanor had not always been so accepting of Jewish people though. In fact, she exhibited anti-Semitic tendencies until her middle age. So part of me thinks that this is her way of making up for her past prejudice. Back in 1918, she wrote a letter to her mother about how the, quote, Jew party was appalling. When she became the co-owner of the girls school, only a very limited number of Jewish girls were allowed admittance. As Eleanor said, the spirit of the school would be different if we had too large a proportion of Jewish children. She went further, saying the problem was that, quote, the country is still full of immigrant Jews, very unlike ourselves. These sentiments began to change around 1929, when her social circle began to include a number of Jews, including Eleanor and Henry Morgenthau, Franklin's US Treasury Secretary and his wife, Bernard Baruch, a financier, Edith and Herbert Lehman, who was the governor of New York at the time and his wife, and Rose Schneiderman, a feminist organizer and prominent feminist labor union leader. By the time Eleanor became the First Lady, she began speaking out against anti-Semitism in Europe and in the United States, advocating for more Jewish refugees to come to the country. While she definitely cared for their plight, historians point out that she didn't push for anti-Semitism as much as she could, with historian Michelle Mark noting, Although it is clear from all accounts that Roosevelt cared deeply about the plight of European Jews, her public actions remained limited, and she refrained from pressing for radical policies to rescue the Jews. Like I said, I think this is a massive shortcoming, not just from Eleanor, but from her husband as well. I'm going to talk about this a little bit more later when I discuss the establishments of the United Nations, but I'm guessing it's because Eleanor wanted to stay in line with her support of the Jewish community, that after the war, she would become a staunch supporter of the creation of the state of Israel as well, which she admired for its similarity to the values of the New Deal. But like I said, I will get there. The war officially began in the United States when Japanese forces launched a surprise attack on the American Pearl Harbor Naval Base, killing 2,403 Americans. Eleanor was the first public figure to address the nation after the attack, delivering a calm radio broadcast to the nation, urging everyone else to remain calm. She also encouraged her fellow Americans to face the crisis and support the war effort. She said in part, We the people are already prepared for action. For months now, the knowledge that something of this kind might happen has been hanging over our heads, and yet it seemed impossible to believe, impossible to drop the everyday things of life and feel that there was only one thing which was important, preparation to meet an enemy no matter where he struck. That is all over now, and there is no more uncertainty.