Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3: The War Years and After, 1939-1962

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

Overview

One of the New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2016
One of NPR's 10 Best Books of 2016

"Heartachingly relevant...the Eleanor Roosevelt who inhabits these meticulously crafted pages transcends both first-lady history and the marriage around which Roosevelt scholarship has traditionally pivoted." — The Wall Street Journal

The final volume in the definitive biography of America's greatest first lady.

 “Monumental and inspirational…Cook skillfully narrates the epic history of the war years… [a] grand biography.” — The New York Times Book Review


Historians, politicians, critics, and readers everywhere have praised Blanche Wiesen Cook’s biography of Eleanor Roosevelt as the essential portrait of a woman who towers over the twentieth century. The third and final volume takes us through World War II, FDR’s death, the founding of the UN, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s death in 1962. It follows the arc of war and the evolution of a marriage, as the first lady realized the cost of maintaining her principles even as the country and her husband were not prepared to adopt them. Eleanor Roosevelt continued to struggle for her core issues—economic security, New Deal reforms, racial equality, and rescue—when they were sidelined by FDR while he marshaled the country through war. The chasm between Eleanor and Franklin grew, and the strains on their relationship were as political as they were personal. She also had to negotiate the fractures in the close circle of influential women around her at Val-Kill, but through it she gained confidence in her own vision, even when forced to amend her agenda when her beliefs clashed with government policies on such issues as neutrality, refugees, and eventually the threat of communism. These years—the war years—made Eleanor Roosevelt the woman she became: leader, visionary, guiding light. FDR’s death in 1945 changed her world, but she was far from finished, returning to the spotlight as a crucial player in the founding of the United Nations.

This is a sympathetic but unblinking portrait of a marriage and of a woman whose passion and commitment has inspired generations of Americans to seek a decent future for all people. Modest and self-deprecating, a moral force in a turbulent world, Eleanor Roosevelt was unique.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780670023950
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/01/2016
Pages:	688
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Blanche Wiesen Cook is a distinguished professor of history at John Jay College and Graduate Center, City University of New York. In addition to her biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, her other books include The Declassified Eisenhower and Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution. She was featured on air in Ken Burns’s recent documentary, The Roosevelts.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: "Lady Great Heart" 1

Chapter 1 "We All Go Ahead Together, or We All Go Down Together" 17

Chapter 2 "You Cannot Just Sit and Talk About It, You Have to Do Something" 39

Chapter 3 Tea and Hot Dogs: The Royal Visit 58

Chapter 4 "We Must Think of the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number" 84

Chapter 5 "If They Perish, We Perish Sooner or Later" 113

Chapter 6 "We Have to Fight with Our Minds" 131

Chapter 7 Red Scare, Refugees, and Racism 155

Chapter 8 The Politician and the Agitator: New Beginnings 187

Chapter 9 Radical Youth and Refugees: Winter-Spring 1940 202

Chapter 10 "When You Go to War, You Cease to Solve the Problems of Peace": March-June 1940 227

Chapter 11 "If Democracy Is to Survive, It Must Be Because It Meets the Needs of the People" 255

Chapter 12 "The World Rightly Belongs to Those Who Really Care": The Convention of 1940 279

Chapter 13 War and The Moral Basis of Democracy 303

Chapter 14 "Defense Is Not a Matter of What You Get, Bur of What You Give" 320

Chapter 15 "Heroism Is Always a Thrilling Tiling": The Politics of Race 353

Chapter 16 "Isolationism Is Impossible": The Politics of Rescue 369

Chapter 17 "To Know Me Is a Terrible Thing": Friendship, Loyalties, and Alliances 405

Chapter 18 "Golden Footprints": A Permanent Bond in War and Peace 439

Chapter 19 "The White Heron of the One Flight": Travels in the Pacific and Beyond 479

Epilogue: ER's Legacy: Human Rights 543

List of Archives 571

Note on Sources and Selected Bibliography 573

Notes 587

Index 655

A Section of Photographs Follows Page 272

Editorial Reviews

Three-volume biographies of women are extremely rare, so the completion of Blanche Wiesen Cook's monumental and inspirational life of Eleanor Roosevelt is a notable event. And if any American woman deserves such sustained attention, it's surely "the first lady of the world"…It's a tribute to Cook's rich portrait that after three enormous volumes, I still wanted to know more…Eleanor Roosevelt was indeed a luminous beacon of courage and hope; yet the heroine of Cook's grand biography is not the remote icon, but the full-bodied, indomitable woman who welcomed life, as she put it, with "an unquenchable spirit of adventure."

The New York Times Book Review - Elaine Showalter

09/19/2016
In the third and concluding volume of this splendid biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, Cook doesn’t have to make a case for her subject. Roosevelt’s life and character do that well enough on their own. If there’s a theme to the volume, it’s the way Roosevelt moved out of her husband’s massive shadow during WWII to live an active, complex, and independent life well before F.D.R.’s death in 1945. All the while, she was part of “one of history’s most powerful and enduring partnerships”—a partnership of “mutual respect and shared commitments”—and she was often F.D.R.’s stand-in, though at other times she was silenced for political or security reasons. Always in Roosevelt’s corner, Cook skillfully weaves her subject’s active and emotional life among friends and family members into the depiction of her public role. The champion of human rights, the anti-Fascist, the foe of anti-Semites, the protector of the ill and infirm, the superb personal diplomat is everywhere in sight, as are Roosevelt’s sometimes-bitter disagreements with, and disappointments in, her husband. If there’s any criticism of this otherwise superb book, it’s that it simply peters out—at the end of these three fine volumes, readers look for and deserve a summation, a rounding-out, and Cook never provides one. Agent: Charlotte Sheedy, Charlotte Sheedy Literary. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume One

“Impassioned and sensitive, tender and angry . . . spirited and absorbing.”
—The New York Times Book Review

Praise for Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume Two

“Irresisibly readable . . . definitive.”
—The Washington Post

From the Publisher

10/01/2016
General readers and scholars alike will welcome this long-awaited finale to Cook's (history, John Jay Coll., City Univ. of New York; Eleanor Roosevelt: The Defining Years, 1933–1938) massive three-volume portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962). Utilizing family archives, Eleanor's published writings and vast correspondence, and the resources of the Franklin D. Roosevelt library, Cook has penned a highly readable and richly detailed narrative of an accomplished yet controversial first lady. While this entry, which is simultaneously chronological, descriptive, and analytical, begins in the months prior to World War II, an introductory chapter summarizes Eleanor's life for readers who may not be familiar with the details. Here, the focus is on her quest for international peace and justice during World War II and beyond, culminating in her "brilliant diplomacy" that resulted in the passage of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The author presents the political and human side of Eleanor, providing a candid assessment of her marriage to Franklin Roosevelt as well as the nature of her relationships with friends. VERDICT Clearly sympathetic to her subject's ideologies, Cook succeeds in demonstrating how Eleanor's political ideas regarding human rights, economic insecurity, and the plight of refugees echo today. This monumental biography will be enjoyed by a wide readership.—Marie M. Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ

Library Journal

★ 2016-07-19
Having already devoted more than 1,200 pages to the extraordinary life of Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) in two previous installments, the skilled biographer offers the final volume.Although the third book focuses on the period from 1939 to 1945, Cook (History/John Jay Coll., Graduate Center, CUNY; Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume 2, The Defining Years, 1933-1938, 1999, etc.) also covers the remainder of Roosevelt's meaningful accomplishments and personal relationships until her death in 1962. No hagiographer, the author presents Roosevelt's strained personal relationships, occasional passive-aggressive behavior, moral equivocations due to electoral politics, and other less-than-admirable qualities. Overall, though, Cook shows Roosevelt as empathetic to the less fortunate in both America and overseas, relentlessly optimistic about eventually achieving world peace, courageous in the face of personal danger, and almost superhumanly energetic until her final year. What may resonate most for contemporary readers is Roosevelt's crusade for greater racial harmony. She did not merely offer lip service to racial equality; she modeled it in her friendships and in the issues she promoted to Congress and her husband, despite widespread discrimination against blacks that showed no signs of abating. Cook notes that while outlining the current volume, she chose to develop the metatheme of the first lady obsessing about "race and rescue." Because most of the narrative unfolds during World War II, Cook amply examines Eleanor's efforts to influence the decisions of her husband. The president and Eleanor had to negotiate a rocky personal relationship due to his philandering and her unusual romantic liaisons, but as partners in politics, the mutual respect between them never wavered. The final pages about Eleanor’s postwar activities seem overly telescoped, but that’s a minor quibble in this outstanding work of biography. Cook makes a strong case that her subject is the most influential first lady in American history and even the most influential woman in world affairs since at least 1900. A winning concluding volume in a series that does for Eleanor Roosevelt what Robert Caro has done for Lyndon Johnson.

Kirkus Reviews