49 Fun Facts About Eleanor Roosevelt

How was Eleanor related to President Theodore Roosevelt?

His niece: her father was Theodore's younger brother, so she was born a Roosevelt and kept her surname when she married Franklin.

What nickname did Eleanor's mother give her for being such an old-fashioned child?

Granny: her mother, one of New York's great society beauties, teased her for her plain, serious manner. Eleanor later wrote, 'I was a solemn child without beauty.'

At 15 Eleanor was sent to Allenswood Academy, a finishing school in which city?

London: Allenswood's headmistress Marie Souvestre pushed her girls to think for themselves, and Eleanor later named her among the greatest influences on her life.

Before becoming her husband, Franklin D. Roosevelt was already Eleanor's what?

Fifth cousin once removed: Franklin's mother Sara opposed the match and made the couple keep their engagement secret for a year.

Eleanor and Franklin's wedding was set for which holiday, when President Theodore Roosevelt would be in New York for the parade?

St. Patrick's Day: the president came to town for the parade on March 17, 1905, then gave the bride away, and the wedding made the front page of The New York Times.

How did Franklin's mother Sara link the couple's New York townhouse to her own?

By sliding doors: Sara had the twin townhouses built with connecting doors between them, and she went on to run both households.

In 1918 Eleanor discovered Franklin's affair with Lucy Mercer, whom she had hired in 1914 as what?

Her social secretary: Lucy Mercer ran Eleanor's Washington social calendar and filled empty seats at dinner. Eleanor found her letters in Franklin's luggage, and the couple weighed divorce.

Lucy Mercer, by then the widowed Mrs Rutherfurd, was quietly present at which event?

Franklin's fatal stroke at Warm Springs: he had promised Eleanor never to see Lucy again, and she was hurt to learn that Lucy had been with him when he died.

Where was the family holidaying in August 1921 when Franklin was struck by his paralytic illness?

Campobello Island, New Brunswick: afterwards Sara wanted Franklin to retire to Hyde Park as a country gentleman, but Eleanor backed his return to politics.

In New York's 1924 governor's race, Eleanor trailed her Republican cousin in a car topped with what?

A giant papier-mâché teapot, rigged to puff steam, tied the Republican to the Teapot Dome oil scandal while she campaigned for his rival, Al Smith.

What does Val-Kill, the name of Eleanor's Hyde Park cottage retreat, roughly mean in Dutch?

Waterfall-stream: the stone cottage stood on the banks of the Fall Kill creek, and Franklin encouraged Eleanor and two friends to build it in 1925 as a place of their own.

At Todhunter, the New York girls' school she co-owned from 1927, what did Eleanor teach?

History and literature: her exams asked girls to argue for or against women holding office, and she kept teaching three days a week as the governor's wife. 'I teach because I love it,' she said.

Which record does Eleanor Roosevelt hold among America's First Ladies?

Longest time in the role: Franklin won four elections, so she served just over twelve years, though she had told a reporter in 1932, 'I never wanted to be a President's wife.'

Which first for a presidential spouse did Eleanor achieve in July 1940?

Addressing a national party convention: she went to Chicago to speak for Franklin's disputed choice of Henry Wallace as running mate, and talked one of her own sons out of nominating a rival.

Who was barred from Eleanor's White House press conferences?

Male reporters were kept out, so newspapers and news agencies had to keep or hire women to cover the briefings.

What was the title of Eleanor's syndicated newspaper column, which ran from 1935 until 1962?

My Day: the syndicate chose the title and asked for a chatty diary of her days, but she soon turned the column into a platform for the New Deal, civil rights and later the United Nations.

Which paid work did Eleanor swear off in 1933 after an avalanche of critical letters, then resume the next year?

Sponsored radio shows: she broke her own rule in 1934 to raise money for charity, and had her fees sent straight to the causes she chose.

A veteran of the 1933 bonus march said Roosevelt 'sent his wife' to their camp, whereas Hoover had sent what?

The Army: in 1932 troops under Douglas MacArthur had tear-gassed the veterans and burned their shacks. A year later Eleanor came without Secret Service guards and mixed easily with the men.

Eleanor's chief New Deal project, the Arthurdale community for jobless coal miners, was built in which state?

West Virginia: she pressed for indoor plumbing and insulation in the miners' new houses and even persuaded General Electric to open a plant there, but the government sold out in 1941.

Norvelt, a New Deal town in Pennsylvania that Eleanor visited, takes its name from what?

The ends of her two names: residents of the relief community were so taken by her visit that they renamed it for EleaNOR RooseVELT.

Eleanor Roosevelt quit the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1939 after it barred which singer from its hall?

Marian Anderson was refused the hall because she was Black. Eleanor resigned in protest and then helped arrange a far bigger open-air concert for her in the capital.

Where did the singer barred by the DAR in 1939 give her open-air concert instead, with Eleanor's help?

The Lincoln Memorial: on Easter Sunday the contralto sang from its steps to about 75,000 people and a radio audience of millions, singing 'My Country, 'Tis of Thee' before Lincoln's statue.

Eleanor lobbied for the 1934 Costigan–Wagner Bill, which aimed to do what?

Make lynching a federal crime: Eleanor backed the NAACP's Walter White in pressing for the bill, but Franklin would not publicly support it for fear of losing Southern votes in Congress.

At Tuskegee in 1941, what did Eleanor do despite her Secret Service detail's worries?

Flew with a Black pilot: the airfield's chief flight instructor took her up over Alabama, and she had the flight photographed so she could carry the picture back to Franklin.

Which of Franklin's wartime orders, signed in February 1942, did Eleanor privately protest to him?

The internment of Japanese Americans: shocked by Executive Order 9066, she objected in private, met a 'frigid' response, and after touring the Gila River camp in 1943 pressed Franklin to start releasing people.

In 1941 Eleanor took an unpaid Office of Civilian Defense post as deputy to which mayor?

Fiorello La Guardia of New York ran the air-raid drills while she pushed the agency's volunteer and welfare work. Attacked in Congress over a friend's salary, she resigned in February 1942.

Which admiral said Eleanor Roosevelt's 1943 South Pacific tour did 'more good than any other person' who visited?

William Halsey Jr. had dreaded the visit and dismissed her as a 'do-gooder', then changed his mind completely once he saw her effect on his men.

Which Associated Press reporter grew so close to Eleanor on the 1932 campaign that she gave up the beat?

Lorena Hickok left the AP in 1933 because she could no longer report objectively on Eleanor and Franklin. Eleanor found her a job investigating relief conditions, and she later lived at the White House.

Which agency's director thought Eleanor a communist pawn and built one of its largest files on her?

The FBI: J. Edgar Hoover had agents monitor her and record her telephone calls, convinced that her defence of civil rights and civil liberties made her a tool of the communists.

Whom did Franklin take to the Yalta Conference in 1945 as his aide and companion?

Their daughter Anna had moved back into the White House as his assistant, and stood in as hostess whenever Eleanor was away.

Which president first appointed Eleanor a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly?

Harry Truman named her months after Franklin's death and came to rely on her at the UN. Eisenhower replaced her in 1953, and Kennedy sent her back in 1961.

Eleanor became the first chair of which UN body in 1946?

The Commission on Human Rights chose her unanimously at its first meeting. She gave up the chair in 1951 and stayed on as the US member until Eisenhower replaced her in 1953.

The UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948 not in New York but in which city?

Paris: Eleanor spent that autumn there steering the text past weeks of Soviet delaying amendments, and it passed 48 to 0 with eight abstentions.

Urging the UN to adopt the Universal Declaration, Eleanor said it might become the international what 'of all men everywhere'?

Magna Carta: in the same speech she set the coming vote beside France's 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and America's Bill of Rights, and the Assembly passed it the next day.

Which legal scholar drew up the blueprint of the Universal Declaration?

John Peters Humphrey, a Canadian on the UN staff, compiled the blueprint, and René Cassin of France then reworked it into the draft the delegates debated.

What did the UN General Assembly give Eleanor when the Declaration was adopted in 1948?

A standing ovation followed a tribute from the Assembly's president, Herbert Evatt of Australia. She counted the Declaration's passage as her greatest single achievement.

Prospects of Mankind, the monthly talk show Eleanor hosted from 1959, aired on the forerunner of which network?

PBS: its forerunner, National Educational Television, carried the Boston-made series, and John F. Kennedy came on as a guest in the first days of his 1960 presidential run.

Which Democrat did Eleanor loyally back over John F. Kennedy in the 1960 nomination fight?

Adlai Stevenson would not campaign openly for a third nomination, so Eleanor fronted a committee to draft him and went to the Los Angeles convention to press his name, in vain.

Kennedy named Eleanor to chair which new body in 1961?

The Commission on the Status of Women: Eleanor had scolded Kennedy for naming so few women to federal posts, and he asked her to chair it. She died before its report appeared.

Eleanor died in November 1962 at 78 after steroid treatment reactivated what?

Dormant tuberculosis in her bone marrow flared up when doctors treated her aplastic anaemia with steroids. President Kennedy and two of his predecessors came to her funeral at Hyde Park.

In 2023 the US Mint put Eleanor Roosevelt on which coin, in a series honouring American women?

The quarter: its reverse shows her beside the scales of justice with a globe behind, a nod to her work on the Universal Declaration.

Which admiring title did a US president give Eleanor for her work at the United Nations?

First Lady of the World: the tribute came from a president she had nearly refused to endorse in 1948, when she thought him weak and disliked his cabinet choices.

Which of Eleanor's sons put his name to a mystery series featuring his mother as the detective?

Elliott put his name to the series and also produced his mother's radio and television shows, though the mysteries themselves are said to have been ghostwritten by William Harrington.

Which First Lady wrote in her memoir about holding 'imaginary conversations' with Eleanor Roosevelt?

Hillary Clinton called a memoir chapter 'Conversations with Eleanor'. When the habit came out in 1996, papers wrote of seance-like sessions, though a poll found most people took them as imaginary.

Which actress voiced Eleanor in Ken Burns's 2014 documentary series The Roosevelts?

Meryl Streep spoke Eleanor's words, while Edward Herrmann, who had played Franklin on screen in 1976, returned to voice him.

Who became Eleanor's guardian after both her parents died?

Her maternal grandmother, Mary Hall, raised her in Manhattan and at Tivoli on the Hudson, and later called Eleanor home from a school she loved to make her society debut.

As a young woman, what did Eleanor teach in the East Side slums through the New York Junior League?

Dancing and calisthenics: she taught immigrant children at the Rivington Street settlement house, and Franklin, then courting her, came along and was horrified by the tenements he saw.

Which two physicists were among the guests when Eleanor's 1950 NBC programme opened with a debate on the hydrogen bomb?

Einstein and Oppenheimer were guests on the first episode of her first television programme, broadcast less than two weeks after the president announced his decision to develop the hydrogen bomb.

In 2016 the Treasury announced Eleanor would appear on the redesign of which US banknote?

The $5 bill: Lincoln keeps the front, while the planned back honours figures tied to great civil rights gatherings, among them Eleanor and Martin Luther King Jr. The same plan put Harriet Tubman on the $20.