Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume One, 1884-1933

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

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Critical Overview

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Eleanor Roosevelt was an immediate commercial success. The book was on the New York Times bestseller list for about three months and sold about 100,000 copies. It also won the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

While the book-buying public was enthusiastic, the response of critics and scholars was decidedly mixed. Cook’s conclusions about Eleanor Roosevelt’s private life proved controversial. Not only was the Roosevelt family angered, conservative critics also were aghast at Cook’s argument that Roosevelt probably had an affair with her bodyguard, Earl Miller, and with her friend, the reporter Lorena Hickok. In a mocking article in National Review, Florence King made fun of many of Cook’s premises, as in the following passage:

Lesbianism is often on the author’s mind and she goes out of her way to find it, even hinting that Elliott Roosevelt’s sister—ER’s Aunt Corinne—had some sort of passionate interlude with her brother’s mistress, to whom she wrote overheated poems that Eleanor Roosevelt kept and cherished. This is supposed to prove how worldly Eleanor Roosevelt was on the subject, but in case we still don’t get it, we are told that Eleanor Roosevelt was the model for a character in Olivia, a lesbian schoolgirl novel by her old classmate, Dorothy Strachey.

Geoffrey C. Ward, himself a biographer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, weighed in with a long review in the New York Review of Books, in which he refuted both of Cook’s controversial claims about Eleanor Roosevelt’s alleged affairs. Ward argued that most scholars who have examined the evidence did not agree with Cook’s conclusions, that Cook offered no new evidence to support her claims, and where existing evidence contradicted them, Cook simply left it out. Ward pointed out that Miller himself denied any affair, and the passionate exchange of letters between Eleanor Roosevelt and Hickok did not prove anything, since Roosevelt wrote in a similar vein to many of her friends. Although Ward had some praise for the other aspects of Cook’s work, he also accused her of presenting many of the men in the book unjustifiably as cads, while almost all the women seemed ‘‘uniformly worthy.’’

David M. Kennedy in the New York Times was less willing to reject the controversial aspects of Cook’s arguments, and he offered praise for the book as a whole. He wrote:

Ms. Cook scrupulously notes the gaps in the evidence, and alerts the reader to the inferential leaps she makes from the documented record. . . . The author makes her case responsibly and cogently, and she tells her story with verve and charm.

In general, Cook’s exposition of the public aspects of Roosevelt’s life won high praise. According to Joyce Antler in The Nation, ‘‘In Cook’s splendid biography, Roosevelt emerges as a bold and innovative feminist politician who was convinced that women’s public activities would determine America’s political future.’’ Merle Rubin, in the Christian Science Monitor, applauded Cook’s ‘‘timely and interesting account’’ of the split in the early feminist movement between those who supported the equal rights amendment and those, including Eleanor, ‘‘who feared such an amendment might undo the legislation that they were urging to protect women and children from exploitation in the workplace.’’

One dissenting note in this area was sounded by Christine Stansell in New Republic , who argued that Cook’s Eleanor Roosevelt seemed a little too good to be true, and that Cook sometimes drew grand conclusions based on scanty evidence: ‘‘Cook sees positions as courageous and radical chiefly because Eleanor Roosevelt espoused them.’’ Stansell sees little merit in Cook’s argument that in the Red Scare of 1919 to 1920,...

(This entire section contains 724 words.)

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Eleanor voiced principled opposition to the repression of radicals. According to Stansell, Cook relies

on assertions about Eleanor Roosevelt’s state of mind extrapolated from the scantiest of evidence and one resolution she introduced at the League of Women Voters’ convention in 1921 to condemn Calvin Coolidge’s polemic against women’s colleges as hotbeds of Bolshevism. On this frail bark Cook floats a typically booming assessment of Roosevelt’s political virtue: ‘She rarely hesitated when a cause was just and compelling.’

Scholarly disagreements of this kind notwithstanding, Eleanor Roosevelt, together with volumes two and three of this multi-volume biography, is likely to prove an influential book for many years to come.

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