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They were not easily transferable commodities. But then, little about Eleanor Roosevelt's life has been easy; her autumnal blossoming is also the triumph of a shy, lonely ugly duckling. "I must have been very sensitive, and with an inordinate desire for affection and praise—perhaps brought on by ... my plain looks . . ." she wrote of her childhood. She had a child's uneasy knowledge of tragedy-even before she was orphaned at ten: her father had a "weakness"—drink. His wife died before him, and "My grandmother did not feel that she could trust [him] to take care of us. He had no wife, no children, no hope!"
She had few playmates. She began her days with character-building cold sponge baths. She was tall and awkward, and at Christmas dances she had to wear dresses cut inappropriately above the knee by adults who knew best. When she was 15, for fear of too much gaiety, she was sent to Mile. Souvestre's French school (every girl confessed before dinner if she had used an English word during the day) outside London.
She felt like an alien when she came home three years.later to struggle in dutiful, unhappy competition with the belles of New York society. But when she was 19 her second cousin Franklin Roosevelt proposed marriage—a marriage approved by adults on both sides of the family. She rejoiced, as only a plain girl can, in a handsome husband, solemnly sure that the world was hers at last.
The Millstones. But from the beginning she found herself overshadowed by competitors. "Uncle Ted" attended her wedding, and the bride & groom found themselves standing alone at the reception while the guests crowded up to hear the President tell stories. After the honeymoon her mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt, treated her like a child. The old lady controlled the family purse strings; she hired the bride's servants, and ruled the bride's house and husband: Franklin always deferred to his mother. A longtime acquaintance remembers Sara Roosevelt saying before company, in thoughtless brutality: "Eleanor, don't act the fool!"
Then Franklin entered politics. The awful cigar smoke of strange men drifted between them.
Between those millstones, the character of Eleanor Roosevelt was slowly shaped. She strove with almost panicky dutifulness to be a good mother and a helpful and understanding wife. Doggedly, despite shyness, awkwardness and naivete, she also strove, as the decades passed, to break out into a world of her own.
In a sense, her husband's election to the presidency was a triumph for her—after his attack of polio his mother had done everything in her power to keep poor Franklin at home by her side in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. But Usher Ike Hoover recalled Eleanor Roosevelt's first day in the White House—he discovered her hard at work tugging furniture into new positions, as if by that housewife's gesture she could make a home out of the halls in which Lincoln had lived and a million tourists had wandered.
She had already ventured experimentally into the world of unions, of feminist movements, of the "ill fed and ill housed." She began the incessant traveling, the incessant high-voiced speeches, the incessant do-gooding of the New Deal.