Eleanor

New York Times BestsellerPrizewinning bestselling author David Michaelis presents a "stunning" (The Wall Street Journal) breakthrough portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, America's longest-serving First Lady, an avatar of democracy whose ever-expanding agency as diplomat, activist, and humanitarian made her one of the world's most widely admired and influential women.In the first single-volume cradle-to-grave portrait in six decades, acclaimed biographer David Michaelis delivers a stunning account of Eleanor Roosevelt's remarkable life of transformation. An orphaned niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, she converted her Gilded Age childhood of denial and secrecy into an irreconcilable marriage with her ambitious fifth cousin Franklin. Despite their inability to make each other happy, Franklin Roosevelt transformed Eleanor from a settlement house volunteer on New York's Lower East Side into a matching partner in New York's most important power couple in a generation.When Eleanor discovered Franklin's betrayal with her younger, prettier social secretary, Lucy Mercer, she offered a divorce and vowed to face herself honestly. Here is an Eleanor both more vulnerable and more aggressive, more psychologically aware and sexually adaptable than we knew. She came to accept FDR's bond with his executive assistant, Missy LeHand; she allowed her children to live their own lives, as she never could; and she explored her sexual attraction to women, among them a star female reporter on FDR's first presidential campaign, and younger men.Eleanor needed emotional connection. She pursued deeper relationships wherever she could find them. Throughout her life and travels, there was always another person or place she wanted to heal. As FDR struggled to recover from polio, Eleanor became a voice for the voiceless, her husband's proxy in presidential ambition, and then the people's proxy in the White House. Later, she would be the architect of international human rights and world citizen of the Atomic Age, urging Americans to cope with the anxiety of global annihilation by cultivating a "world mind." She insisted that we cannot live for ourselves alone but must learn to live together or we will die together.Drawing on new research, Michaelis's riveting portrait is not just a comprehensive biography of a major American figure, but the story of an American ideal: how our freedom is always a choice. Eleanor rediscovers a model of what is noble and evergreen in the American character, a model we need today more than ever....

Autorentext
David Michaelis is the bestselling author of Schulz and Peanuts and N.C. Wyeth, which won the Ambassador Book Award for Biography. He lives in New York with his wife and family.

Klappentext

Michaelis presents a portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, America's longest-serving First Lady, an avatar of democracy whose ever-expanding agency as diplomat, activist, and humanitarian made her one of the world's most widely admired and influential women.

Zusammenfassung
"An excellent single-volume biography of America's greatest first lady . . . Absolutely spellbinding."
-Douglas Brinkley, The Washington Post

Leseprobe
Chapter One

ONE

IN FEBRUARY 1884, JUST AS Anna Hall Roosevelt learned that she was pregnant, a blinding fog closed over Manhattan. Thicker and heavier than any in recent memory, it shut the city down for days.1

Late on February 12, the fifth straight night of precautionary bells tolling along rails and rivers,2 Anna’s husband, Elliott Roosevelt, was summoned through the filthy gray cloud to the family townhouse at 6 West Fifty-Seventh Street. His brother Theodore’s “flower-like” young wife,3 Alice Lee Roosevelt, had given birth to their first child, also Alice. Elliott wired the happy news to Albany, where Theodore, only twenty-five, was in his third term as the blond, side-whiskered “Cyclone Assemblyman,” crusading against machine politics, corruption, and “that most dangerous of all dangerous classes, the wealthy criminal class.”4

But delivery had gravely weakened the mother, and by next evening everything was falling apart. “There is a curse on this house,” groaned Elliott to his younger sister, Corinne.5 By the time Theodore burst through the front door, his wife was semi-comatose from Bright’s disease while, a floor below, his mother, fifty-year-old Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, sank beneath acute typhoid fever. By three in the morning, Mittie was gone.

By two that afternoon Alice had died in Theodore’s arms, only twenty-two. It was St. Valentine’s Day.

The double catastrophe knocked the surviving Roosevelts entirely off course. Putting the city of death behind him, Theodore stumbled west to his Dakota ranch, leaving his older sister, Anna, known as Bamie (pronounced “BAM-ie”), to take care of little Alice.

For Elliott, twenty-four and unmoored by the loss of his mother, Alice Lee Roosevelt’s death cast a dread of fatherhood over his wife’s recently established pregnancy. Anna herself now feared that childbirth would kill her. The whole family was wracked with apprehensions.6

LESS THAN EIGHT MONTHS LATER, on a fair, breezy Saturday, October 11, 1884, Anna and Elliott’s little girl was born—at eleven in the morning, behind the brownstone front of 29 East Thirty-Eighth Street.7 Her birth coincided with the last rusty quarter of October’s “blood moon,” an orange rind rising over Gotham that night at ten minutes past eleven.8

In years to come, when editing her father’s letters, she would introduce her birth into the family epic as the first clear footprint in a dark trail: “Life treads so closely on the heels of death!”9 So painfully did she associate labor and delivery with inescapable doom that when she recalled bearing her first child in 1906, she dwelled on the resignation that closed over her: “This was something I could do nothing about—the child would come when it would come, as inevitably as death itself.”10

She had no birth certificate. Her parents somehow let her arrival go unrecorded in the municipal archives,11 instead marking her name in a family Bible, at the head of a new page of births: Anna, for her mother and her father’s elder sister; Eleanor, from Elliott’s childhood nicknames, Ellie and Nell.

Her father embraced her as a “miracle from Heaven,” though Elliott and Anna had been hoping for a male heir, a “precious boy jr”12 to put an end to the Roosevelt clan’s “plague,” as one biographer would term the family’s recent “sending of girls.”13 Time was on Anna’s side. She was twenty-one, with a healthy baby,14 a dashing husband, and her horizons open wide.

BUT THE YOUNG PARENTS HAD already begun to drift.

Their first discovery was that each was set on being the loved one. Each deeply needed the other’s attention and esteem: both were acutely sensitive to disapproval.15 One or the other was always pouting in a dark room, injustice hanging its sulky cloud in the hallways, meals on trays creaking with reproachful indignation upstairs.

Time, if still on their side, was carelessly weaponized. Elliott never came home in the evening when he had said he would, and Anna on no occasion appeared downstairs be…