Eleanor Roosevelt: The Legacy of Uncle Theodore

A Lonely Childhood

Eleanor was born in 1884 to Elliott Roosevelt and Anna Rebecca Hall. Eleanor adored her father. Elliott Roosevelt was playful and loving with her, but he was fighting alcoholism, and his drinking kept him away from home for long stretches. The adults around her kept her visits with him to a minimum. Eleanor, too young to understand why, simply missed him.

Her mother died when Eleanor was eight years old. Her father died when she was nine. Before her tenth birthday, Eleanor had experienced the death of both her parents and had lived a childhood marked by loss and upheaval. She was taken in by her maternal grandmother and raised in a household that was respectable but not particularly warm, proper but not particularly affectionate.

In this context of loss and uncertainty, Eleanor's relationship with her Uncle Theodore became of enormous importance. Her uncle represented a vision of what a person of privilege could be if they were willing to commit themselves to service and principle.

Uncle Theodore's Influence

Visits to Sagamore Hill brought Eleanor into the noisy, active world of her Roosevelt cousins: pillow fights, story times, picnics and hikes. Uncle Theodore taught the children to swim by having them jump off the dock into deep water, and a terrified Eleanor jumped too. Her uncle also modeled for her what a serious engagement with the world's important questions could look like. Most significantly, he demonstrated through his own life that a person of privilege and power could use those advantages in service of something larger than personal gratification.

Eleanor's own social conscience took shape at boarding school in England, under a bold headmistress named Marie Souvestre. When she came home in 1902, her Uncle Theodore was President, and she threw herself into volunteer work in New York.

When Eleanor came of age and was presented to society as a young woman of good family, Theodore gave her away at her wedding to her cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1905. It was a symbolic moment: the sitting president, the uncle who stood for principle and duty, giving his niece away to the young man who would one day become the second Roosevelt president. Theodore perhaps did not fully realize in that moment that Eleanor would become the longest-serving First Lady in American history, and the first to hold her own press conferences, or that she would use her position to advance causes and principles that went far beyond what most of her contemporaries would have imagined possible for a woman in that role.

Translating Theory into Practice

Eleanor Roosevelt took her Uncle Theodore's ideas about service and obligation and lived them out in ways that were both continuous with his vision and distinctly her own. Where Theodore had preached the "strenuous life" and had lived that philosophy through physical vigor, political activism, and energetic engagement with the world, Eleanor lived the strenuous life through relentless work on behalf of the dispossessed, the marginalized, and the forgotten.

As a young volunteer with the Junior League, she taught classes at the Rivington Street Settlement House on the Lower East Side and joined the National Consumers League, seeing firsthand how poor New Yorkers lived and worked. She became involved in labor activism and reform movements. She took stands on racial justice and civil rights at a time when such stands were unpopular and costly. She used her position as First Lady not to retreat into ceremonial duties, but to advocate forcefully for causes she believed in. She wrote newspaper columns, gave speeches, held press conferences, traveled the country, and made it clear that a First Lady could be a political actor and not merely a ceremonial presence.

In all of this, Eleanor was living out principles that Theodore had taught—not through explicit instruction, but through the example of his own life. She believed, as Theodore believed, that a person's life should mean something, should contribute to something beyond the self. She believed that courage and principle mattered more than comfort or security. She believed that injustice should be resisted and that those with power had an obligation to use that power on behalf of those without it.

Partnership with Franklin

Eleanor and Franklin married for love, after a secret courtship and an engagement his mother tried to break up. The marriage changed in 1918, when Eleanor discovered Franklin's affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer. Divorce was discussed, but they stayed together, and over the years the marriage grew into a working political partnership. What made the partnership work was that Eleanor and Franklin shared similar commitments to progressive reform and social justice. Franklin provided the political position and the executive power; Eleanor provided the moral passion and the willingness to push beyond conventional boundaries.

Together, they transformed the presidency and the role of First Lady in ways that would have been impossible for either of them alone. Franklin depended on Eleanor's judgment, her connections, and her willingness to advocate for causes that he could not openly support. Eleanor used her position to advance her own agenda and to amplify the voices of those who had no platform. Their marriage was a political partnership of extraordinary significance.

The United Nations and Human Rights

After Franklin's death in 1945, Eleanor could have retired from public life. She was already in her sixties. She had accomplished enough for two lifetimes. But instead, she accepted an appointment as a delegate to the United Nations and became the chair of the commission that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, stands as one of the most important statements of human dignity and human rights ever composed.

Eleanor's role in the creation of the Universal Declaration was crucial. She fought for language that would protect the rights of all people, regardless of national boundaries or political systems. She insisted on the inclusion of civil and political rights, and on economic and social rights as well. She refused to allow Cold War politics to undermine the document's universal commitment to human dignity.

A Life of Extraordinary Achievement

Eleanor Roosevelt lived until 1962, passing away at the age of seventy-eight. She had lived through the Great Depression, two world wars, and the beginning of the Cold War. She had witnessed enormous changes in American society and in the world. And throughout all these changes, she had remained committed to the principles that had animated her life: that privilege carries obligations, that injustice should be resisted, that a person's life should mean something, should contribute to something beyond the self.

What is remarkable about Eleanor is that she took the lesson of her Uncle Theodore's life—the idea that a person of privilege and power should use those advantages in service of something larger than themselves—and lived it out not just for a moment, not just in a particular arena, but across an entire lifetime and across the entire range of human experience. She worked for civil rights, for economic justice, for women's rights, for the rights of working people, for human dignity in all its forms.

Her influence extended far beyond her lifetime. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights that she helped create became a touchstone for human rights activism around the world. Her example of how a woman could use power and position to advance justice inspired generations of activists and reformers. Her writings and speeches remain widely read and widely quoted.