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If Mrs. Roosevelt and Queen Elizabeth do meet, one will be looking at the world's most symbolically important lady, the other at the world's foremost female political force. Britain's Queen, whoever she may be, will remain superlative so long as the British Commonwealth retains throne & crown. The present First Lady of the U. S., on the other hand, is superlative in her own personal right. She is also a woman of unequaled influence in the world, but unlike Cleopatra, the great Elizabeth, Pompadour, or Catherine of Russia, her power is not that of a ruler. She is the wife of a ruler but her power comes from her influence not on him but on public opinion. It is a self-made influence, and save for a modest counterpart in modern China, unique for any woman to hold. Yet it rests upon thousands of small activities, none of which greatly exceeds in dramatic content Eleanor Roosevelt's dramatic swatch-fingering of last week.
Six years ago the tall, restless character who moved into the White House with Franklin Roosevelt was viewed by large portions of the U. S. public with some some degree of derision if not alarm. They caricatured her, joked about her, called her "Eleanor Everywhere." They couldn't believe that any one woman could sincerely embrace the multiplicity of interests which she added to being a wife, mother and White House hostess.
Today enough people have met Mrs. Roosevelt, talked with her at close range, checked up on her, to accept her for what she is: the prodigious niece of prodigious, ubiquitous, omnivorous Roosevelt I. Everything she says, everything she does, is genuinely and transparently motivated. Sophisticates who used to scoff, now listen to her her. They read with measurable respect her books, magazine articles, daily column. And as her hold on her audience has grown, so have her skill and temerity in touching subjects on which six, even three, years ago she would have ventured only polite platitudes. In three years the distribution of her column "My Day" has increased from 20 newspapers to 68, with 4,500,000 total circulation.
She used to write in safe, rounded phrases, using plenty of "howevers," noting exceptions, admitting alternatives, offering consolations. She was gracious but wary in expressing her urge to get-something-done-about everything from social justice to the rape of Ethiopia. She made sallies like, "It's a great life if you never get tired," and described her family's Sunday evening scrambled egg feasts.
Today she still gives her readers a candid, cheery running account of her life's incredibly varied minutiae. She reports plays, pictures, people seen, babies patted, books read, weather experienced, letters received, etc. But in the past six months she has also "come out" unqualifiedly on a wide variety of controversial issues. As the ruling topic of her thoughts, the scrambled world has succeeded her family's Sunday evening scrambled egg feasts. She has plumped for:
> Soil erosion control as an "investment."
> An end to "this rift in Labor."
> Wages & Hours for farm labor and domestic servants.
> Tom Mooney's freedom.
> Negro Marian Anderson against the D. A. R.