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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Thanks for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on-demand, I am grateful you are here on this Presidents' Day. Here's a little presidential trivia. When was George Washington's actual birthday? If you said February 11th, you would be correct. If you said February 22nd, you would also be correct. It depends on which calendar you're using. When George Washington was born, it was February 11th, 1731 on the Julian calendar, which the Brits swapped out for the Gregorian calendar in 1752 because it factors in leap years and doesn't have to be reset every so often.

Depending on how you look at it, happy early or belated birthday to our first president on this Presidents' Day. Now on to some people who have been the confidants and advisors to leaders of the free world, on today's show, we're going to learn about some of the first ladies who have occupied the White House. Two first ladies to be exact who were both the subjects of our full bios series that we do here at All Of It. We take a big juicy biography and over the course of a week, we serve you up a conversation about it in more manageable portions.

Coming up in the second hour of the show, you'll hear parts of my full bio conversation about Lady Bird Johnson who bankrolled Lyndon's congressional campaign, made over a million dollars in the broadcast business, and helped study the White House through a hasty transition after JFK's assassination. This hour we're talking about another influential first lady, someone who wanted to rethink the official role of the president's spouse and wound up setting the tone for what it means to hold that office today, Eleanor Roosevelt.

The biography is by David Michaelis. It took him more than 10 years to write and research the book using more than a million documents in the Roosevelt archives. The book comes in at over 700 pages. The book is simply titled Eleanor. Let's get into the first of our first lady full bio conversations today with Eleanor's early life which took place right here in New York City.

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Alison Stewart: First we begin with Eleanor's story with her tumultuous childhood. In 1884, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, known as Little Nell, was born to Elliott Roosevelt and Anna Rebecca Hall Roosevelt, representing the union of two powerful wealthy American families. Wealth and power did not insulate young Eleanor from loneliness, almost crippling self-doubt as a young woman, and the horrors of addiction. Eleanor's story is really a New York story. The family had been in the city since 1649. She was born in a brownstone at 29 East 38th Street and spent part of her adolescence at the Hall family brownstone at 11 West 37th Street.

Eleanor's family was known as the Oyster Bay Roosevelts for the summer homes they established on the North Shore of Long Island. Eleanor spent time living in different houses around Manhattan and, as David will share, her experiences growing up here really shaped Eleanor's future work as first lady. Before we get to all of that, I began the conversation by asking David about his research process.

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Alison Stewart: Eleanor left a huge paper trail making her personal and professional papers available for study. So much of the FDR Library and Museum in Hyde Park, there are more than a million papers of hers and they rise over 889 cubic feet. Where did you even begin when you started to think, "I have to tackle these papers."?

David Michaelis: Actually I got lucky because some of the decisions were made for me because they were reorganizing the research room at the FDR library. They told me, "If you want to see the following collections, they're about to go into deep storage for five years, you better look now." That actually made the initial few months not as shocking, but the shock came when that reorganization finally took place. There came a day where all the cartons, the million documents in cartons, the 836 cubic feet were literally trucked out of the back room and began on trolleys to make their way to their storage facility while the renovations were going on.

At that moment, I literally saw the scale of Everest, and so I paled. Literally, I went pale and my friend there, the wonderful supervisory archivist Bob Clark, looked at me, saw what was happening, and said, "Oh, David, they're there." He said, "That's why you're here. You are here to select. There's so much in those papers. There's so much in those million documents. We don't need to hear so we need the story." This was what was missing.

Oddly enough, out of all the books written about Eleanor Roosevelt at the time, there was not a single one volume, one book that told the whole story in one go, like doing the whole thing in charades. It was on me now to grasp all of this and bring it into one volume. That was actually terrifying. Even more than my face went pale, it drove me nuts for 10 years. Here we are.

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Alison Stewart: This is an obvious next question, but how did you decide what was important to include? What were the steps before you started the selection process?

David Michaelis: I think the main thing was, first of all, I had this image of myself writing a single-volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, and I said to myself something crazy like, "I won't have to really write about Franklin. [chuckles] I won't have to really go into the Franklin Roosevelt. The four million, the five million, I won't have to actually go into the presidential pick."

Then I realized what a mistake I had made, as soon as I was into the book, which is I was both lured, as everyone always is, by FDR and convinced suddenly that I was making a terrible mistake. I really did need to understand and that was really true, I did need to know a great deal more about FDR. What finally became and what really was the guiding principle in each selection as I went forward was I realized this is Jane Eyre turns into the Statue of Liberty, that's the ark of this book. She starts out as an orphan and she ends up as the Statue of Liberty.

That's just in a very elevator pitch way, but it means that sticking with her point of view, staying with Eleanor, staying with a person who then was to me Mrs. Roosevelt, I really have not yet even gotten close enough to say to myself, "Oh, I can call her Eleanor." I was really stuck at the beginning on my childhood and my adult, respect for this icon, Mrs. Roosevelt. I kept trying to find ways to limit the perspective by bringing the narrative, the point of view of the narrative directly to her. Actually, that proved to be my saving grace.

It's a little like if you were going to climb Everest, you're going to find a single route up that's going to take you again and again and again to the crux of the matter. Every time it came to a place in Eleanor's life that was a turning point and inflection point, a point where she had to decide, it always became clear to me how to go up to the next part by seeing how she had responded in action.

This is the thing about Eleanor, she's a woman of action. She is a woman of words, all those millions of documents. Actually, her books, the books she wrote, dozens of volumes, and the column that she wrote from 1935 to 1962 missing four days when FDR died, a daily essentially what we would today think of as a live blog of her thoughts. She was a woman of words, but actually, for me, it was not so much seeing what she then wrote or then recorded, he was seeing what she actually did, and that would lead me to the next part of the drama.

Alison Stewart: After spending so much time with her and with her words, do you have any thoughts on why Eleanor Roosevelt left behind so much documentation rather than keeping these things private?

David Michaelis: It's a really good question. I haven't thought of it that way because it speaks to her wish to be useful, which is an overwhelming wish in her life. It does not speak to her wish for attention. She very clearly said to Lorena Hickok, her close confidant toward the end of her life, she said, "I want the plainest coffin and just to be remembered by the people I loved and who loved me, but I don't want to be remembered." Eleanor did not have a wish to exist in history. In fact, she often would say, "If it weren't for my husband, within a few years from now, I'll be forgotten." She really believed that, so she wasn't ready for posterity.

I think she was writing and leaving a record of things because that was what a professional did, that is what a person of purpose and a person who had a connection to other people who depended on her-- I think she felt strongly, for instance, in her column, that that was a daily connection to people and to anybody. It was the person over the fence. It was the person in the next seat in the train. It was the person that she hadn't yet met on the street in the town she was going to visit. There was a way for her always to connect through words.

In the plainest of style, in the plainest of language, she always said what she meant and it was a way of connecting, was actually to mean what she said, and to say what she meant. I think that was another good reason to leave the words there, but I don't think she ever thought of herself as a personage in a large sense the way, of course, FDR did and the way the men of that era. The Churchills, the Stalins, they all had the grandest of self-image. She did not. In a way, that freed her to do the things she did. General George Marshall once said, "You can accomplish anything in Washington, DC so long as you don't need the credit for it." She didn't need the credit.

Alison Stewart: Before we dive into the book, I feel like we need to share with our audience that New York is all over this book, that you could take this book and make a walking tour [chuckles] of various Roosevelt homes and places that are important. What was New York to Eleanor Roosevelt?

David Michaelis: She was a lifelong Gothamite. I think of the city that she was born into and bred from as Gotham. She was born and bred from generations of Seaport Roosevelts who had a hardware store down on Maiden Lane at the foot of Manhattan Island. They had a sense of the city as an island. They imported glass from France and Belgium. Those shipments came into the wharves. They owned the wharves, the Roosevelts, her direct line descendants. Franklin Roosevelt, we need to remember quickly here, her future husband, was an upriver Roosevelt, up the Hudson.

Her family, her uncle, Theodore Roosevelt, Uncle Ted, the 26th President of the United States, was also a born and bred New Yorker and her father was a born and bred New Yorker. Her grandfather, the first Theodore, Roosevelt Senior, cared a great deal about the city and was one of the first great advocates for the poor, for the marginalized, for the mentally distressed, and the mentally ill. He was on the board of the new Museum of Natural History. They were absolutely part of the fabric of the city.

The city, it's important to remember, that she was born into and the city of her childhood is the city that is such a complex and contrasting history as what it was just then becoming, which was the nation's and the world's capital of wealth and the nation's capital of immigration. The contrast between those things, you could walk a block in the city and go from direst poverty to fantastic wealth in the city of her childhood, and it gave her her first vision of the United States as a liberal, pluralist democracy.

All of her early experiences of the city, even including riding the Fifth Avenue Coach, which was a horse-drawn vehicle, as a child, seeing a man appear before her and put his hand out and ask desperately for anything that she could give, it gave her her first look at and understanding of what was needed. It was a world also, by the way, that was not regulated. It was a world where disease was rampant.

It was a world where all the things that became part of the Liberal and Democratic Party and of the New Deal even eventually were then being answered by the Democratic machine, by Tammany Hall. If you showed up in Manhattan as an immigrant, Tammany Hall would come to you and start bringing you ice and asking you what you needed. The government wasn't there for you. The government was a corrupt institution. New York and its constant composting and constant divisions between wealth and poverty really were her great laboratory.

Alison Stewart: Initially as a young woman, she was not particularly confident. Her parents had a great deal to do with that. You write in your book, "Her father embraced her as a miracle from heaven, though Elliot and Anna, her parents, had been hoping for a male heir, a precious boy junior to put an end to the Roosevelt clans plague, as one biographer would term the families recent sending of girls." The relationship she had with her parents was quite different. Her mother, who was thought to be one of the most beautiful women in New York City, was really rather cruel to her, called her granny at a young age. How would you describe her mother's parenting style and its impact on young Eleanor?

David Michaelis: Cold, icy, also very needy in a narcissistic way that Eleanor be a reflection of herself, and barring that, at least a very fine reflection of the family in its graces and elegances. Eleanor had a sweet face as a child. It was commented upon in newspapers and magazines at the time that she was a very adorable, attractive child. She's not some duck-toothed figure out of an Edward Gorey cartoon standing in the corner, but that's how her mother cast her.

She would say that when her mother criticized her openly and called her granny in this very contemptuous, demeaning way that she wanted to sink into the floor for shame. Shame was really the ruling emotion, humiliation was the ruling emotion that she felt from her mother. One thing that should be said about her mother, not to excuse but to explain, which is her mother wasn't just some society lady who was terribly determined to have Eleanor be something.

What she was was herself afraid, and what she was afraid of was falling down in class, becoming marginalized so that all the badges of status that she needed to wear, she very much wanted Eleanor to wear too. It meant something to her that Eleanor would be a youthful, blind, carefree figure instead of what she saw her as, which was downcast and stern and old and granny-like. She wanted nothing to do with oldness and sternness and someone sitting in the parlor with a long face.

Alison Stewart: Eleanor Roosevelt would say of her father, "Most of all, I wanted to be loved by my father." Elliott Roosevelt was certainly affectionate to his daughter. He also had severe addiction issues with alcohol, with laudanum. What impact did this have on Eleanor and where do we see it later in her life?

David Michaelis: Essentially, she and her father had a wonderful codependent relationship. They understood each other and he depended on her, and she depended on him. That was all very positive and rewarding until it wasn't, until addiction impacted on her in a pretty simple way, which is that she became his rescuer, she became his caretaker, she became his wife more than his wife in the sense that she took care of her father. When he finally plunged into the really dark end of his disintegration, she could only do so much as a child. She was 8, she was 9, she was 10. These are the years when this was going on, so she could only barely function in these roles that I'm describing.

Alison Stewart: I just want to point this to people, and you get this from the book, his addiction was ferocious.

David Michaelis: It was based on a lifelong-- In the Roosevelt family, that is to say the Theodore Roosevelt, Elliott Roosevelt, Bamie, and Corinne Roosevelt, these are the children of Theodore Senior and Mittie Roosevelt, they were taught self-medication. They were taking mercury-based medications as kids. They were losing their cognitive abilities because their southern mother thought that calomel and blue pill and other mercury medications were cure-alls for all kinds of things. Taking self-medication is a starting point.

You then add alcohol and alcoholism in the sporting younger set gentleman sportsmen world of Elliott and Anna Roosevelt in their early marriage and all the drinking that was going on, and then you add all that to finally an injury that really got the better of him during a society circus, so-called, a big party under a tent where he did stunts with other young men on horses, but he fell. He broke his leg. It had to be reset.

As he tried to recover from this drastic break of his femur, he got addicted to laudanum which was a tincture of opium and highly addictive. As you mixed laudanum with alcohol, as you mixed laudanum with almost everything, its effects were the effects of an opiate. The downward spiral is its own dark nightmare that Eleanor wasn't fully aware of until later, until she was 15, and the truth was told to her by a sadistic aunt. What she did see and was aware of was in the thinking he was in control, all the stress and dread and tension it brought to her household and brought to the family, this was doom and dread. Elliott Roosevelt was going down.

Alison Stewart: He did die by falling out of a window. Eleanor became an orphan and she was sent to school in England, to the Allenswood School. Up until this point, her education had been a little bit scattershot, and she meets a woman who really changes her life, the headmistress there.

You write about her arriving, "Within the gate, the lower branch of the lofty cedar of Lebanon pointed up to the drive to the school portico. There, a regal woman with a head of snow-white hair came buzzing down the steps to welcome Eleanor. When their eyes met, the newcomer felt the headmistress's hard black stare 'drill right through to my backbone.' Eleanor would later poeticize her first impression as one of immediate liberation upon crossing the school's threshold. What did that school offer her?

David Michaelis: An open mind. She had a mind. It was an extraordinary [chuckles] discovery. It's so sad. The way women's education was viewed was that it might actually turn her insane. Women's education was believed to turn women insane. It was believed to have the most deleterious effects on women. Women were thought to perhaps if they got education, they would certainly not be marriageable. It was the most horrible idea when you get right down to it. This is part of what we're seeing today. When we see a woman vice president, we're seeing the other end of this arc.

I think what Eleanor felt right away was the challenge. This was the challenge that Marie Souvestre, the head of that school, Allenswood, gave her, which was what's in your mind? Can you think for yourself? Can you make decisions? Can you see what's in front of you and then absorb it and learn from it and then make your own choices? All those things were completely foreign to a young woman like Eleanor Roosevelt and the way she'd been raised. By the way, there was no expectations she would ever go to college. It would today be a college level, I think, in terms of the intellectual requirements.

For instance, one of the things that made her such an immediate success at the school and immediately comfortable was that she had absorbed French from a governess and could speak fluently. Unlike some of the other young women at the school, she could actually speak in French all day long and she could converse as an adult to teachers and to Madame Souvestre and to Madame Souvestre's learned and glamorous and intellectual visitors from London at the table. All the things she learned at that school, it was almost as if Eleanor Roosevelt had a crash course in world statesmanship or diplomacy or how do you speak to people at a table where you know only just so much, but you're learning as you go.

She learned to think on her feet. She learned to think for herself. Above all, she learned to trust herself and know that she wasn't what she had been taught all along by the women, essentially, in her life in her family, which was that she was less than the men, that she was granny, that she was some figure that ought to want to sink into the floor. This was a complete revolution.

Alison Stewart: We have to take a short break, but we'll be right back in a minute with more of my conversation with David Michaelis about his Eleanor Roosevelt biography, Eleanor. This is All Of It.

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