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Many an editor presumed that her newspaper column would die a natural death when she left Washington. But "My Day," the chatty daily diary of her travels, opinions and dinner conversations, is currently running in 75 newspapers (at its peak it averaged 90) in the U.S. and abroad. Mrs. Roosevelt writes a monthly question & answer page for McCall's magazine. Before this year's U.N. session, she was doing five radio interviews and a half-hour television show every week.
She has earned a small fortune: in 1949-50, her biggest year, her gross was $250,000. During her years in the White House she gave all her earnings to charity. She still contributes heavily. But although she is a wealthy woman, having inherited more than $1,000,000 from the Roosevelt estate, she tries frugally to preserve her capital. Her trip to India was no exception: she did not undertake it until Harper & Brothers had agreed to publish a book of her impressions and thus, in effect, underwrite her expenses.
The First Lady. Amidst all these endeavors, she has also become an international figure of tremendous influence and prestige, both as the widow of Franklin Roosevelt and, increasingly, as a delegate to the U.N. To millions in the Western world, who react with uneasiness and doubt to the U.S. atom bomb and U.S. emphasis on material success, she is a symbol of hope, sanity and human dignity. Her earnest idealism, which many of her own countrymen sometimes find a little absurd, is eminently reassuring to great masses of people who are exposed to Communist cries of American warmongering. So is her habit of attacking complex problems in hopeful, homely terms. She is received abroad as a sort of senior "First Lady" of the U.S. At home, the Gallup poll for the past four years has found her the woman Americans admire most.
To many of her girlhood friends, this kind of adulation and the unique achievements which have prompted it are added proof that the Roosevelts, man & wife, "betrayed their class" for the bauble of fame and the doubtful company of reporters, social workers and ward heelers. "Oh," says Mrs. Roosevelt with a smile—a tolerant, contented smile which recalls the ever-righteous crusades of the New Deal —"they think I am most peculiar." She adds: "I still see them—occasionally they - find it interesting to have a peculiarity to dinner."
Actually, Mrs. Roosevelt's career has been a triumphant assertion of the code of a half-forgotten 400—of that fortlike social world which existed in New York when sleek carriage horses still clopped along Fifth Avenue, when her "Uncle Ted" was President, and when World War I had yet to create the disconcerting erosions of the speakeasy age. When she abandoned that world she did not abandon its ways. Its aristocratic accents, its manners, its almost arrogant denial of ostentation, its odd blindnesses—even, it seemed, a lady's instinctive feeling that feminine candor would not be betrayed—all went with her to the union hall, the youth forum, the press conference.