FLOTUS: Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Part III

 

Norvelt

On May 21, 1937, Roosevelt visited Westmoreland Homesteads to mark the arrival of the community's final homesteader. Accompanying her on the trip was Elinor Morgenthau, the wife of Henry Morgenthau Jr., the president's Secretary of the Treasury. "I am no believer in paternalism. I do not like charities," Eleanor Roosevelt had said earlier. But cooperative communities such as Westmoreland Homesteads, she went on, offered an alternative to "our rather settled ideas" that could "provide equality of opportunity for all and prevent the recurrence of a similar disaster [depression] in the future." Residents were so taken by her personal expression of interest in the program that they promptly agreed to rename the community in her honor. (The new town name, Norvelt, was a combination of the last syllables in her names: EleaNOR RooseVELT.) The Norvelt firefighter's hall is named Roosevelt Hall in her honor.

Use of media

Roosevelt was an unprecedentedly outspoken First Lady who made far more use of the media than her predecessors; she held 348 press conferences over the span of her husband's 12-year presidency. Inspired by her relationship with Hickok, Roosevelt placed a ban on male reporters attending press conferences, effectively forcing newspapers to keep female reporters on staff in order to cover them. She relaxed the rule only once, on her return from her 1943 Pacific trip. Because the Gridiron Club banned women from its annual Gridiron Dinner for journalists, Roosevelt hosted a competing event for female reporters at the White House, which she called "Gridiron Widows". She was interviewed by many newspapers; the New Orleans journalist Iris Kelso described Roosevelt as her most interesting interviewee ever. In the early days of her all-female press conferences, she said they would not address "politics, legislation, or executive decision", since the role of the First Lady was expected to be non-political at that time. She also agreed at first that she would avoid discussing her views on pending congressional measures. Still, the press conferences provided a welcome opportunity for the women reporters to speak directly with the first lady, access that had been unavailable in previous administrations.

Just before Franklin assumed the presidency in February 1933, Roosevelt published an editorial in the Women's Daily News that conflicted so sharply with his intended public spending policies that he published a rejoinder in the following issue. On entering the White House, she signed a contract with the magazine Woman's Home Companion to provide a monthly column, in which she answered mail sent to her by readers; the feature was canceled in 1936 as another presidential election approached. She continued her articles in other venues, publishing more than sixty articles in national magazines during her tenure as first lady. Roosevelt also began a syndicated newspaper column, titled "My Day", which appeared six days a week from 1936 to her death in 1962. In the column, she wrote about her daily activities but also her humanitarian concerns. Hickok and George T. Bye, Roosevelt's literary agent, encouraged her to write the column. From 1941 to her death in 1962, she also wrote an advice column, If You Ask Me, first published in Ladies Home Journal and then later in McCall's. A selection of her columns was compiled in the book If You Ask Me: Essential Advice from Eleanor Roosevelt in 2018.

Beasley has argued that Roosevelt's publications, which often dealt with women's issues and invited reader responses, represented a conscious attempt to use journalism "to overcome social isolation" for women by making "public communication a two-way channel".

Roosevelt also made extensive use of radio. She was not the first First lady to broadcast—her predecessor, Lou Henry Hoover, had done that already. But Hoover did not have a regular radio program, whereas Roosevelt did. She first broadcast her own programs of radio commentary beginning on July 9, 1934. On that first show, she talked about the effect of movies on children, the need for a censor who could make sure movies did not glorify crime and violence, and her opinion about the recent All-Star baseball game. She also read a commercial from a mattress company, which sponsored the broadcast. She said she would not accept any salary for being on the air, and that she would donate the amount ($3,000) to charity. Later that year, in November 1934, she broadcast a series of programs about children's education; it was heard on the CBS Radio Network. Sponsored by a typewriter company, Roosevelt once again donated the money, giving it to the American Friends Service Committee, to help with a school it operated. During 1934, Roosevelt set a record for the most times a first lady had spoken on radio: she spoke as a guest on other people's programs, as well as the host of her own, for a total of 28 times that year. In 1935, Roosevelt continued to host programs aimed at the female audience, including one called "It's A Woman's World." Each time, she donated the money she earned to charity. The association of a sponsor with the popular first lady resulted in increases in sales for that company: when the Selby Shoe Company sponsored a series of Roosevelt's programs, sales increased by 200%. The fact that her programs were sponsored created controversy, with her husband's political enemies expressing skepticism about whether she really did donate her salary to charity; they accused her of "profiteering." But her radio programs proved to be so popular with listeners that the criticisms had little effect. She continued to broadcast throughout the 1930s, sometimes on CBS and sometimes on NBC.

World War II

On May 10, 1940, Germany invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, marking the end of the relatively conflict-free "Phoney War" phase of World War II. As the U.S. began to move toward war footing, Roosevelt found herself again depressed, fearing that her role in fighting for domestic justice would become extraneous in a nation focused on foreign affairs. She briefly considered traveling to Europe to work with the Red Cross, but was dissuaded by presidential advisers who pointed out the consequences should the president's wife be captured as a prisoner of war. She soon found other wartime causes to work on, however, beginning with a popular movement to allow the immigration of European refugee children. She also lobbied her husband to allow greater immigration of groups persecuted by the Nazis, including Jews, but fears of fifth columnists caused Franklin to restrict immigration rather than expanding it. Roosevelt successfully secured political refugee status for eighty-three Jewish refugees from the S.S. Quanza in August 1940, but was refused on many other occasions. Her son James later 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.

Roosevelt visiting troops

Roosevelt was also active on the home front. Beginning in 1941, she co-chaired the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD) with New York City Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, working to give civilian volunteers expanded roles in war preparations. She soon found herself in a power struggle with LaGuardia, who preferred to focus on narrower aspects of defense, while she saw solutions to broader social problems as equally important to the war effort. Though LaGuardia resigned from the OCD in December 1941, Roosevelt was forced to resign following anger in the House of Representatives over high salaries for several OCD appointments, including two of her close friends.

Also in 1941, the short film Women in Defense, written by Roosevelt, was released. It was produced by the Office of Emergency Management and briefly outlines the way in which women could help prepare the country for the possibility of war. There is also a segment on the types of costumes women would wear while engaged in war work. At the end of the film, the narrator explains women are vital to securing a healthy American home life and raising children "which has always been the first line of defense".

In October 1942, Roosevelt toured England, visiting with American troops and inspecting British forces. Her visits drew enormous crowds and received almost unanimously favorable press in both England and America. In August 1943, she visited American troops in the South Pacific on a morale-building tour, of which Admiral William Halsey Jr. later said, "She alone accomplished more good than any other person, or any groups of civilians, who had passed through my area." For her part, Roosevelt was left shaken and deeply depressed by seeing the war's carnage. A number of Congressional Republicans criticized her for using scarce wartime resources for her trip, prompting Franklin to suggest that she take a break from traveling.

Roosevelt supported increased roles for women and African-Americans in the war effort, and began to advocate for women to be given factory jobs a year before it became a widespread practice. In 1942, she urged women of all social backgrounds to learn trades, saying: "if I were of a debutante age I would go into a factory–any factory where I could learn a skill and be useful." Roosevelt learned of the high rate of absenteeism among working mothers, and she campaigned for government-sponsored day care. She notably supported the Tuskegee Airmen in their successful effort to become the first black combat pilots, visiting the Tuskegee Air Corps Advanced Flying School in Alabama. She also flew with African-American chief civilian instructor C. Alfred "Chief" Anderson. Anderson had been flying since 1929 and was responsible for training thousands of rookie pilots; he took her on a half-hour flight in a Piper J-3 Cub. After landing, she cheerfully announced, "Well, you can fly all right." The subsequent brouhaha over the first lady's flight had such an impact it is often mistakenly cited as the start of the Civilian Pilot Training Program at Tuskegee, even though the program was already five months old. Roosevelt did use her position as a trustee of the Julius Rosenwald Fund to arrange a loan of $175,000 to help finance the building of Moton Field.

After the war, Roosevelt was a strong proponent of the Morgenthau Plan to de-industrialize Germany in the postwar period. In 1947 she attended the National Conference on the German Problem in New York, which she had helped organize. It issued a statement that "any plans to resurrect the economic and political power of Germany" would be dangerous to international security.

Years after the White House

Franklin died on April 12, 1945, after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia. Roosevelt later learned that her husband's mistress Lucy Mercer (now named Rutherfurd) had been with him when he died, a discovery made more bitter by learning that her daughter Anna had also been aware of the ongoing relationship between the President and Rutherfurd. It was Anna who told her that Franklin had been with Rutherfurd when he died; in addition, she told her that Franklin had continued the relationship for decades, and people surrounding him had hidden the information from his wife. After the funeral, Roosevelt temporarily returned to Val-Kill. Franklin left instructions for her in the event of his death; he proposed turning over Hyde Park to the federal government as a museum, and she spent the following months cataloging the estate and arranging for the transfer. After Franklin's death, she moved into an apartment at 29 Washington Square West in Greenwich Village. In 1950, she rented suites at the Park Sheraton Hotel (202 West 56th Street). She lived here until 1953 when she moved to 211 East 62nd Street. When that lease expired in 1958, she returned to the Park Sheraton as she waited for the house she purchased with Edna and David Gurewitsch at 55 East 74th Street to be renovated. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum opened on April 12, 1946, setting a precedent for future presidential libraries.

United Nations

State of the Union (Four Freedoms) (January 6, 1941)

In December 1945, President Harry S. Truman appointed Roosevelt as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly. In April 1946, she became the first chairperson of the preliminary United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Roosevelt remained chairperson when the commission was established on a permanent basis in January 1947. Along with René Cassin, John Peters Humphrey and others, she played an instrumental role in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

 

In a speech on the night of September 28, 1948, Roosevelt spoke in favor of the Declaration, calling it "the international Magna Carta of all men everywhere". The Declaration was adopted by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948. The vote was unanimous, with eight abstentions: six Soviet Bloc countries as well as South Africa and Saudi Arabia. Roosevelt attributed the abstention of the Soviet bloc nations to Article 13, which provided the right of citizens to leave their countries.

Roosevelt also served as the first United States Representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and stayed on at that position until 1953, even after stepping down as chair of the commission in 1951. The UN posthumously awarded her one of its first Human Rights Prizes in 1968 in recognition of her work.

In the 1940s, Roosevelt was among the first people to support the creation of a UN agency specialized in the issues of food and nutrition.

At that time, Frederick L. McDougall, an Australian nutritionist, wrote the “Draft memorandum on a United Nations Programme for Freedom from Want of Food”. McDougall strongly believed that international cooperation was key to address the issue of hunger in the world.

Roosevelt learned about the memorandum and arranged a meeting between McDougall and her husband, the president of the United States of America. Following the discussion, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) was created on October 16, 1945.

In 1955, Eleanor Roosevelt and McDougall visited the new FAO headquarters in Rome and pushed the United Nations Programme into creating the Food from Hunger campaign, which ultimately saw the light in 1960 after a series of negotiations.

The Campaign was created to mobilize non-governmental organizations against hunger and malnutrition in the world and help find solutions.

Other postwar activities and honors

In the late 1940s, Democrats in New York and throughout the country courted Roosevelt for political office.

Despite her reservations, Roosevelt supported Kennedy's campaign.

Catholics comprised a major element of the Democratic Party in New York City. Roosevelt supported reformers trying to overthrow the Irish machine Tammany Hall, and some Catholics called her anti-Catholic. In July 1949, Roosevelt had a bitter public disagreement with Cardinal Francis Spellman, the Archbishop of New York, over federal funding for parochial schools. Spellman said she was anti-Catholic, and supporters of both took sides in a battle that drew national attention and is "still remembered for its vehemence and hostility."

In 1949, she was made an honorary member of the historically black organization Alpha Kappa Alpha.

In 1950, she co-wrote, alongside Helen Ferris, editor in chief of the Junior Literary Guild, Partners: The United Nations and Youth, a look at the nascent organization's work with children of the world. It won the Child Study Association of America's Children's Book Award (now Bank Street Children's Book Committee's Josette Frank Award).

She was an early supporter of the Encampment for Citizenship, a non-profit organization that conducts residential summer programs with year-round follow-up for young people of widely diverse backgrounds and nations. She routinely hosted encampment workshops at her Hyde Park estate, and when the program was attacked as "socialistic" by McCarthyite forces in the early 1950s, she vigorously defended it.

In 1954, Tammany Hall boss Carmine DeSapio led the effort to defeat Roosevelt's son, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., in the election for New York Attorney General. Roosevelt grew increasingly disgusted with DeSapio's political conduct through the rest of the 1950s. Eventually, she would join with her old friends Herbert Lehman and Thomas Finletter to form the New York Committee for Democratic Voters, a group dedicated to opposing DeSapio's reincarnated Tammany Hall. Their efforts were eventually successful, and DeSapio was forced to relinquish power in 1961.

Roosevelt was disappointed when President Truman backed New York Governor W. Averell Harriman—a close associate of DeSapio—for the 1952 Democratic presidential nomination. She supported Adlai Stevenson for president in 1952 and 1956, and urged his renomination in 1960. She resigned from her UN post in 1953, when Dwight D. Eisenhower became president. She addressed the Democratic National Convention in 1952 and 1956. Although she had reservations about John F. Kennedy for his failure to condemn McCarthyism, she supported him for president against Richard Nixon. Kennedy later reappointed her to the United Nations, where she served again from 1961 to 1962, and to the National Advisory Committee of the Peace Corps.

By the 1950s, Roosevelt's international role as spokesperson for women led her to stop publicly criticizing the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), although she never supported it. In the early 1960s, she announced that, due to unionization, she believed the ERA was no longer a threat to women as it once may have been and told supporters that they could have the amendment if they wanted it. In 1961, President Kennedy's undersecretary of labor, Esther Peterson, proposed a new Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. Kennedy appointed Roosevelt to chair the commission, with Peterson as director. This was Roosevelt's last public position. She died just before the commission issued its report. It concluded that female equality was best achieved by recognition of gender differences and needs, and not by an Equal Rights Amendment.

Throughout the 1950s, Roosevelt embarked on countless national and international speaking engagements. She continued to pen her newspaper column and made appearances on television and radio broadcasts. She averaged one hundred fifty lectures a year throughout the 1950s, many devoted to her activism on behalf of the United Nations. She was widely known for her anti-colonial stance. She supported Moroccan independence through both personal intervention with the US authorities and addressing the Moroccan question in her column My Day.

Roosevelt received the first annual Franklin Delano Roosevelt Brotherhood Award in 1946. Other notable awards she received during her life postwar included the Award of Merit of the New York City Federation of Women's Clubs in 1948, the Four Freedoms Award in 1950, the Irving Geist Foundation Award in 1950, and the Prince Carl Medal (from Sweden) in 1950. She was the most admired living woman, according to Gallup's most admired man and woman poll of Americans, every year between 1948 (the poll's inception) to 1961 (the last poll before her death) except 1951.

Following the Bay of Pigs in 1961, President Kennedy asked Roosevelt, labor leader Walter Reuther, and Milton S. Eisenhower, brother of President Eisenhower, to negotiate the release of captured Americans with Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Death

In April 1960, Roosevelt was diagnosed with aplastic anemia soon after being struck by a car in New York City. In 1962, she was given steroids, which activated a dormant case of tuberculosis in her bone marrow, and she died aged 78, of resulting cardiac failure at her Manhattan home at 55 East 74th Street on the Upper East Side on November 7, 1962, cared for by her daughter, Anna. President John F. Kennedy ordered all United States flags lowered to half-staff throughout the world on November 8 in tribute to Roosevelt.

Funeral services were held two days later in Hyde Park, where she was interred next to her husband in the Rose Garden at Springwood Estate, the Roosevelt family home. Attendees included President Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and former presidents Truman and Eisenhower, who honored Roosevelt.

After her death, Eleanor's retreat at Val-Kill near Hyde Park was eventually preserved as the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site. Her family deeded the family vacation home on Campobello Island to the governments of the U.S. and Canada, and in 1964 they created the 2,800-acre (1,100 ha) Roosevelt Campobello International Park. The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial on the National Mall is the only United States presidential memorial to depict a First Lady; the statue of Eleanor is displayed with a likeness of United Nations seal.

Published books

Hunting Big Game in the Eighties: The Letters of Elliott Roosevelt, Sportsman. New York: Scribners, 1932.

When You Grow Up to Vote. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932.

It's Up to the Women. New York: Stokes, 1933.

A Trip to Washington with Bobby and Betty. New York: Dodge, 1935.

This Is My Story. New York: Harper, 1937.

My Days. New York: Dodge, 1938.

This Troubled World. New York: Kinsey, 1938.

Christmas: A Story. New York: Knopf, 1940.

Christmas, 1940. New York: St. Martin's. 1940.

The Moral Basis of Democracy. New York: Howell, Soskin, 1940.

This is America, a 1942 book with text by Eleanor Roosevelt and photographs by Frances Cooke Macgregor.

If You Ask Me. New York: Appleton-Century, 1946.

This I Remember. New York: Harper, 1949.

Partners: The United Nations and Youth. Garden City: Doubleday, 1950 (with Helen Ferris).

India and the Awakening East. New York: Harper, 1953.

UN: Today and Tomorrow. New York: Harper, 1953 (with William DeWitt).

It Seems to Me. New York: Norton, 1954.

Ladies of Courage. New York: Putnam's, 1954 (with Lorena Hickok).

United Nations: What You Should Know about It. New London: Croft, 1955.

On My Own. New York: Harper, 1958.

Growing Toward Peace. New York: Random House, 1960 (with Regina Tor).

You Learn By Living. New York: Harper, 1960.

The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt. New York: Harper, 1961.

Your Teens and Mine. New York: Da Capo, 1961.

Eleanor Roosevelt's Book of Common Sense Etiquette. New York: Macmillan, 1962 (with the assistance of Robert O. Ballou).

Eleanor Roosevelt's Christmas Book. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1963.

Tomorrow Is Now. New York: Harper, 1963.

Posthumous recognition

Recognition and awards

In 1966, the White House Historical Association purchased Douglas Chandor's portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt; the portrait had been commissioned by the Roosevelt family in 1949. The painting was presented at a White House reception on February 4, 1966, that was hosted by Lady Bird Johnson and attended by more than 250 invited guests. The portrait hangs in the Vermeil Room.

Roosevelt was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973.

In 1989, the Eleanor Roosevelt Fund Award was founded; it "honors an individual, project, organization, or institution for outstanding contributions to equality and education for women and girls."

The Eleanor Roosevelt Monument in New York's Riverside Park was dedicated in 1996, with First Lady Hillary Clinton serving as the keynote speaker. It was the first monument to an American woman in a New York City park. The centerpiece is a statue of Roosevelt sculpted by Penelope Jencks. The surrounding granite pavement contains inscriptions designed by the architect Michael Middleton Dwyer, including summaries of her achievements, and a quote from her 1958 speech at the United Nations advocating universal human rights.

In 1997, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington D.C. was dedicated; it includes a bronze statue of Eleanor Roosevelt standing before the United Nations emblem, which honors her dedication to the United Nations. It is the only presidential memorial to depict a first lady.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton established the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights to honor outstanding American promoters of rights in the United States. The award was first awarded on the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, honoring Eleanor Roosevelt's role as the "driving force" in the development of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The award was originally presented from 1998 to the end of the Clinton Administration in 2001. In 2010, then-Secretary of State of the United States Hillary Clinton revived the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights and presented the award on behalf of the then-President of the United States Barack Obama.

The Gallup Organization published the poll Gallup's List of Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century, to determine which people around the world Americans most admired for what they did in the 20th century in 1999. Eleanor Roosevelt came in ninth.

In 2001, the Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Committee (Eleanor's Legacy) was founded by Judith Hollensworth Hope, who was its president until April 2008. It inspires and supports pro-choice Democratic women to run for local and state offices in New York. The Legacy sponsors campaign training schools, links candidates with volunteers and experts, collaborates with like-minded organizations and provides campaign grants to endorsed candidates.

In 2007, Eleanor Roosevelt was named a hero by The My Hero Project.

On April 20, 2016, United States Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew announced that Eleanor Roosevelt would appear with Marian Anderson and noted suffragettes on the redesigned US$5 bill scheduled to be unveiled in 2020, the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed women the right to vote.

In 2020, Time magazine included Eleanor Roosevelt on its list of 100 Women of the Year. She was retroactively named Woman of the Year 1948 for her efforts on tackling issues surrounding human rights.

Roosevelt will be honored on an American Women quarter in 2023.

Places named for Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt School, also known as the Eleanor Roosevelt Vocational School for Colored Youth, Warm Springs Negro School, and the Eleanor Roosevelt Rosenwald School, which operated as a school from March 18, 1937, until 1972, was a historical Black community school located at 350 Parham Street at Leverette Hill Road in Warm Springs, Georgia. As of May 3, 2010, the school is listed on the National Register of Historic Places listings in Meriwether County, Georgia.

The town Norvelt was renamed as such in 1937 as a combination of the last syllables in Eleanor Roosevelt's names: EleaNOR RooseVELT. The Norvelt firefighter's hall is named Roosevelt Hall in her honor.

In 1972, the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute was founded; it merged with the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Foundation in 1987 to become the Roosevelt Institute. The Roosevelt Institute is a liberal American think tank. The organization, based in New York City, states that it exists "to carry forward the legacy and values of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt by developing progressive ideas and bold leadership in the service of restoring America's promise of opportunity for all."

Eleanor Roosevelt High School, a public magnet high school specializing in science, mathematics, technology, and engineering, was established in 1976 at its current location in Greenbelt, Maryland. It was the first high school named for Eleanor Roosevelt, and is part of the Prince George's County Public Schools system.

Val-Kill Historic Site, Hyde Park, New York

Roosevelt lived in a stone cottage at Val-Kill, which was two miles east of the Springwood Estate. The cottage had been her home after the death of her husband and was the only residence she had ever personally owned. In 1977, the home was formally designated by an act of Congress as the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site, "to commemorate for the education, inspiration, and benefit of present and future generations the life and work of an outstanding woman in American history." In 1998, Save America's Treasures (SAT) announced Val-Kill cottage as a new official project. SAT's involvement led to the Honoring Eleanor Roosevelt (HER) project, initially run by private volunteers and now a part of SAT. The HER project has since raised almost $1 million, which has gone toward restoration and development efforts at Val-Kill and the production of Eleanor Roosevelt: Close to Home, a documentary about Roosevelt at Val-Kill. Due in part to the success of these programs, Val-Kill was given a $75,000 grant and named one of 12 sites showcased in Restore America: A Salute to Preservation, a partnership between SAT, the National Trust and HGTV. The Roosevelt Study Center, a research institute, conference center, and library on twentieth-century American history located in the twelfth-century Abbey of Middelburg, the Netherlands, opened in 1986. It is named after Eleanor Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt, all of whose ancestors emigrated from Zeeland, the Netherlands, to the United States in the seventeenth century.

In 1988, Eleanor Roosevelt College, one of six undergraduate residential colleges at the University of California, San Diego, was founded. ERC emphasizes international understanding, including proficiency in a foreign language and a regional specialization. Eleanor Roosevelt High School, a small public high school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, was founded in 2002. Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Eastvale, California, opened in 2006.

Cultural references

In the 1940s and 1950s, female impersonator Arthur Blake drew acclaim for his impersonations of Eleanor Roosevelt in his nightclub act. At the invitation of the Roosevelts, he performed his impersonation of Eleanor at the White House. He also impersonated F.D.R. in the 1952 film Diplomatic Courier.

Sunrise at Campobello, a 1958 Broadway play by Dore Schary, dramatized Franklin's attack of and eventual recovery from polio, in which Mary Fickett starred as Eleanor. The 1960 film of the same name, which was based on the play, starred Greer Garson as Eleanor.

The Eleanor Roosevelt Story, a 1965 American biographical documentary film directed by Richard Kaplan, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The Academy Film Archive preserved it in 2006.

Roosevelt was the subject of the 1976 Arlene Stadd historical play Eleanor.

In 1976, Talent Associates released the American television miniseries Eleanor and Franklin, starring Edward Herrmann as Franklin Roosevelt and Jane Alexander as Eleanor Roosevelt; it was broadcast on ABC on January 11 and 12, 1976 and was based on Joseph P. Lash's biography from 1971, Eleanor and Franklin, based on their correspondence and recently opened archives. The film won numerous awards, including 11 Primetime Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and the Peabody Award. The director Daniel Petrie won a Primetime Emmy for Director of the Year – Special. In 1977 they released a sequel entitled Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years, with the same stars. It won 7 Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Special of the Year. Daniel Petrie again won a Primetime Emmy for Director of the Year – Special for the second film. Both films were acclaimed and noted for historical accuracy.

In 1979, NBC televised the miniseries Backstairs at the White House based on the 1961 book My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House by Lillian Rogers Parks.  The series portrayed the lives of the Presidents, their families, and the White House staff who served them from the administrations of William Howard Taft (1909–1913) through Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–1961).  Much of the book was based on notes by her mother, Maggie Rogers, a White House maid.  Parks credits Eleanor Roosevelt for encouraging her mother to start a diary about her service on the White House staff.  The series won the

Writers Guild of America award for Long Form Television Series, received a Golden Globe nomination for Dramatic Television Series, and won an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Makeup.  Among the 10 additional Emmy nominations was Eileen Heckart for her portrayal of Eleanor Roosevelt.  She received an Emmy nomination again the following year for her performance as Eleanor Roosevelt in the NBC television movie F.D.R.: The Last Year.

In 1996, Washington Post writer Bob Woodward reported that Hillary Clinton had been having "imaginary discussions" with Eleanor Roosevelt from the start of Clinton's time as first lady. Following the Democrats' loss of congressional control in the 1994 elections, Clinton had engaged the services of Human Potential Movement proponent Jean Houston. Houston encouraged Clinton to pursue the Roosevelt connection, and while no psychic techniques were used with Clinton, critics and comics immediately suggested that Clinton was holding séances with Roosevelt. The White House stated that this was merely a brainstorming exercise, and a private poll later indicated that most of the public believed these were indeed just imaginary conversations, with the remainder believing that communication with the dead was actually possible. In her 2003 autobiography Living History, Clinton titled an entire chapter "Conversations with Eleanor", and stated that holding "imaginary conversations [is] actually a useful mental exercise to help analyze problems, provided you choose the right person to visualize. Eleanor Roosevelt was ideal."

In 1996, the children's picture book Eleanor by Barbara Cooney, about Eleanor Roosevelt, was published. It describes her as a shy girl who goes on to do great things.

In 2014, the American documentary series The Roosevelts: An Intimate History was released. Produced and directed by Ken Burns, the series focuses on the lives of Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt. The series premiered to positive reviews and was nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards, winning the Emmy Award for Outstanding Narrator for Peter Coyote's narration of the first episode. In September 2014, The Roosevelts became the most streamed documentary on the PBS website to date.

Dear Eleanor is a 2016 American film about two best friends traveling across the U.S. in 1962 to meet their childhood hero, Eleanor Roosevelt.

Eleanor Roosevelt's life and time as First Lady are featured in the 2022 television series The First Lady. She is played by Gillian Anderson, and by Eliza Scanlen as young Eleanor.