Eleanor

I caught the two-hour biography of Eleanor Roosevelt on PBS yesterday, although I saw the second hour first, and the first hour several hours later. Did you need to know that? Probably not. Anyway, it made me wonder why this woman's achievements, even her presence in history, have all but disappeared from cultural memory.

But she chaired the early UN committee that fashioned and passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one of the 20th century's most important documents. She was a tireless and pretty lonely advocate for racial equality and civil rights beginning in the 1930s through the 1950s, which earned her the covetted continual survelliance of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, and an FBI file of some 3,000 pages.

She was an advocate for the American poor during the Depression, and later for poor and sick children especially in other parts of the world. She brought attention to fundraising efforts on behalf of health. She was also widely admired and very popular with the American public (though a lightning rod for criticism, like FDR) and was known in her post-White House years as First Lady of the World.

I remember her as a presence on TV and in newspapers from my childhood, though the memories are dim and tend to merge with Margaret Mead as the old lady oracular and combination kindly grandmother and motheringly hectoring figure, usually for the cause of good. However, my most specific memory of Eleanor is of less than her finest hour, when she actively if belatedly opposed JFK's nomination at the 1960 Democratic Convention, favoring Adlai Stevenson. Though the PBS show didn't even mention this, it did say that her support was instrumental in Stevenson getting the nomination in 1952 and 1956 (he lost to Eisenhower both times, in a landslide in '56), though by the second campaign she was having doubts that as brilliant as he was, that he had what it takes to be President.

The program discussed her support for a Depression program to rebuild small communities hard-hit by industrial decline, with new housing and subsistence gardens, as centers to attract new industries. Arthurdale in West Virginia got her most persistent attention, as the program illustrates, but there were others (not mentioned.) One of those was a project that was named after her, Norvelt, PA. (EleaNOR RooseVELT.) This was in the general place where my father's family lived, and where he grew up. I don't think they lived in the project itself; I was always led to believe their house had been part of the company town called United, for the United Coal Company. My paternal grandfather and his father before him were coal miners.

The mythology I received about this was that Eleanor Roosevelt had visited the coal mines there (and she often did visit mines---leading to the famous New Yorker cartoon of two coal miners deep underground with one saying, 'my God, here comes Mrs. Roosevelt.' ) and that led to renaming the town. I heard United, Norvelt and Calumet (an even older name) used more or less interchangeably, although they may be separate entities. Like Arthudale, the Norvelt experiment was not very successful, partly because the program was constantly being changed according to political necessities, and the controversy finally over whether any sort of "cooperative" venture was sufficiently capitalistic and hence "American." But I believe some of the houses still stand, and certainly did in my childhood.

In any case, Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the great figures of the American twentieth century, and perhaps this attention by PBS will help restore her to her rightful place in cultural memory. It has in mine.