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Few weeks ago, one of Mussolini's newspapers complained: "Mrs. Roosevelt writes too much . . . is a bad influence." From Italy's viewpoint, she surely is, for she cultivates vast areas of political soil plowed and sowed by her husband. Yet in saying, "I have taken no part in politics since Franklin's election" she is not wholly inaccurate. She operates quite apart from the President, behind and beneath what is commonly called "politics." Stories that she influences his policies and appointments are as untrue as stories that he tries to edit her conduct. She is a one-woman show in herself, requiring the full-time services of three able assistants to stage everything she feels she must.
Mrs. James M. Helm, an old friend who was with the first Mrs. Wilson at the White House, is her social secretary: arranges formal functions, seating lists, invitations, decorations. The King & Queen's visit will crown her career.
Mrs. Henry Nesbitt, a Hyde Park neighbor who became proficient at catering, is the White Housekeeper: orders meals for the President (he loves game, sea food), the boys (steaks, chops), exotic visitors (an Abyssinian Coptic who ate no flesh was a problem), hires & fires servants (for economy the Roosevelts cut the Hoovers' 32 down to 23). Already she has drafted tentative menus for Their Majesties: for lunch, sweetbreads; for dinner, capon.
Bearer of the lecturing, traveling, interviewing, letter-writing and literary brunt is Miss Malvina ("Tommy") Thompson. She has been Mrs. Roosevelt's private secretary for 17 years. A sagacious, worldly-wise grass widow (until her 1938 divorce, Mrs. Scheider), Miss Thompson declares that never has she known Mrs. Roosevelt to do or say anything insincere. She thinks her ability to do and say so much results from Eleanor Roosevelt's being what is really meant by the word Christian.
Untrammeled life-long health (except for six babies and an attack of typhoid) is superadded to Eleanor Roosevelt's other capacities. She is out of bed at dawn's crack, doing setting-up exercises, swimming, or riding her old mare Dot. She eats like an ostrich: anything, everything. After breakfast she answers mail, dictates her column, which has not once been tardy through fault of hers. A somewhat shrill yet mellow chortle is the tune of her whole day. (She has been taking voice lessons to improve on the radio.)
Since developing from a painfully shy, homely gosling and an inhibited, inferior-feeling wife and daughter-in-law, into a self-confident swan of a woman with the nation for her pond, she has learned to sail through life with serenity. In the rarefied top stratum of official existence, where one can see anything, learn anything, go anywhere, get almost anything done, she wastes no chance to compensate for long years of being (by her own account) a cloistered nobody.
A lady Democrat asked her last month: "What do you consider the greatest dangers to democracy? Do you think propaganda, exaggeration and misrepresentation. . . ?"
Extrovert Eleanor Roosevelt replied: "The greatest dangers to democracy seem to me to be apathy, a lack of personal responsibility and ability to look courageously at the world. . . ."