Blanche Wiesen Cook, who was a distinguished professor at John Jay College, is best known for her biography of Eleanor Roosevelt. It has come out in three volumes, the third volume being recently released. Though the context and the problems that she deals with are very much American where her subject was the First Lady for 12 long years, the issues are relevant to people all over the world and are of even greater interest in the face of the other brave woman who fought for Presidency in the recent elections in America.
FILE - In this Nov. 9, 2016 file photo, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks in New York, where she conceded her defeat to Republican Donald Trump after the hard-fought presidential election. A group of election lawyers and data experts have asked Clinton’s campaign to call for a recount of the vote totals in three battleground states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, in order to ensure that a cyberattack was not committed to manipulate the totals. There is no evidence that the results were hacked or that electronic voting machines were compromised. The Clinton campaign on Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2016, did not respond to a request for comment as to whether it would petition for a recount before the three states’ fast-approaching deadlines to ask for one.(AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)
The interviewer asks a question many of us have framed on our lips, “Do Americans like their First Lady to be a ‘wife’ and not be an activist or a thinking lady? Is that why Hillary Clinton is being reviled?” Blance Wiesen Cook, replies saying, “Eleanor Roosevelt was reviled by the Dixiecrats, by the Conservatives and by the members of the Congress and by the Press because she stood for justice and civil rights…even during World War II the military was segregated, blood plasma was segregated between black and white, Christian and Hebrew…this was the war for democracy, a war against white supremacy, against the Aryan Nazi… and the US army was entirely segregated… Eleanor Roosevelt travelled widely demanding racial justice and calling for integration and certainly integration in the military…she was totally reviled…Eleanor was so much more progressive that her husband…she is a heroine in retrospective, but during her time was much reviled.” So, suggests the biographer, that Hillary Clinton too has been reviled in her times, but stands all chance of going down in history as a woman America loved.
As the biographer speaks of Eleanor Roosevelt’s driving desire to ensure dignity and decency to all men and woman independent of the race and creed they belong to, “…her position is best illustrated by a sentence of her own, ‘…we should not have to tell the rich from the poor’,” says Cook and tracing this dominant desire for justice to Eleanor’s own life, adds, “Eleanor wanted to make it better for all people; people in want, people in need, people in trouble. She wanted to make it better for people like her father and her mother. Her father was a drop dead alcoholic who died at the age of 32, when Eleanor Roosevelt was but 10 years of age. Her mother, essentially faced the wall and died when Eleanor was eight. Her grandmother took care of her and sent her to Allenswood, England where she had this great teacher Marie Souvestre who said marvellous things and who really believed that justice was possible. She saw Eleanor was a leader and infused her with such ideas…so when Eleanor came back to the US, she engaged with all people who wanted to make it better…very early on she had this idea that we are all connected…”
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Cook says Eleanor Roosevelt had the freedom to be able to criticize her husband’s policies in public and when people asked her to run for one office or other, she is reported as having said, “I’d rather be chloroformed.” And yet, says Cook, once Roosevelt died, Eleanor Roosevelt became more of a politician, saying only those things that would enable her to achieve results. Eleanor Roosevelt was more upset by criticism that labelled her as a Communist and anti-American than personal criticisms like her voice which rose high despite the lessons she took in voice modulation!
Even though Cook says she is not writing a hagiography, she is totally overawed by the woman she is writing about. But on what makes good biography Cook says, “James MacGregor Burns told me one night while we were having dinner, “I have one word of advice to you, be bold.” He wasn’t bold, he said, in his first book and he regretted it. Write from your heart. Do the research. The answers are lurking in the documents, letters, diaries, newspapers and letters about…not just your subject but the circle your subject lives in…and then there are the secrets. What are the sources that lead you to the secrets?”
Of course some secrets are secrets only in the person’s lifetime, others are not ever known, through letters, diaries or other sources. Eleanor’s story seems to have no unknown secret…
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