“He has put his foot down several other times, too,” the article said. Still, in 1936, the New Yorker reported that FDR either instructed or asked ER to decline a series of 13 commercial broadcasts. And a simple little note: ‘This word seems to me less antagonistic.'” “But I remember once sending him a column because I thought I touched on something controversial the he might think was harmful. “In all the years we were in the White House, he never asked me not to do anything,” ER told an interviewer after FDR’s death. But FDR himself supported his wife’s work. Some of FDR’s advisers, who were mostly men, wished for a first lady who was more of a conventional White House hostess. ER also sometimes nudged his policies in directions she cared about. But ER knew what her husband’s goals were, and many of her public statements helped move the president’s agenda forward.

FDR supported her public activities, in part, because they benefited his own political ends.Įleanor Roosevelt’s public appearances, newspaper columns and radio broadcasts were not managed by the FDR’s advisers.

She was the first to hold a government job and to address a national political convention. She was the first to testify before Congress. She was the first president’s wife to fly in an airplane. Eleanor Roosevelt was a first lady of firsts.

Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt were not the first White House couple to act as political partners, but they were the first to do so in such a public fashion.

Fdr fireside chats eleanor