Eleanor Roosevelt Was Teddy Roosevelt’s Niece

Eleanor had presidential connections far before her marriage to FDR, and when the time came, she didn’t even have to worry about taking his last name (she was born Anna Eleanor Roosevelt). She was Theodore Roosevelt’s niece; her father was Teddy’s younger brother Elliott.

In case you’re wondering, FDR comes from a different branch of the Roosevelt family. He was Teddy’s fifth cousin (and fifth cousin once removed to Eleanor). The family was split into two distinct clans, both based in New York and each with its own distinct culture and ethos; FDR came from the Hyde Park Roosevelts, while Teddy (and Eleanor) came from the Oyster Bay Roosevelts.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s First Career Was Teaching

Public service was deeply meaningful to Eleanor throughout her life, including in her younger days. Not long after turning 18, she started teaching at the Rivington Street Settlement House, a social services facility serving New York City’s Lower East Side, particularly its immigrant population.

She continued teaching even as her family’s political responsibilities increased. In 1926, she, along with suffragist Marion Dickerman, bought a K-12 private school for girls called the Todhunter School, also in New York City. Eleanor was a popular teacher, and covered a variety of subjects: history, current events, literature, and drama. After her husband was elected governor of New York in 1929, she continued to teach, even though the position required living in Albany. She commuted back and forth between the capital and the city several days a week.

Her Marriage Wasn’t Strictly Monogamous

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s marriage started out, at least from the outside, as pretty ordinary. They were married in 1905, and had six children between 1906 and 1916. In 1918, however, Eleanor found out that Franklin was having an affair with Lucy Mercer, her former social secretary, which was devastating — at least, at first. The pair remained married as close, supportive partners — Eleanor was hugely supportive of Franklin’s continued political career after he was stricken with polio, and the pair even retained their pet names for one another — but pursued romantic relationships elsewhere, although biographers aren’t sure how physical those relationships got. Franklin continued seeing Mercer, and was even with her when he died in 1945. Eleanor, meanwhile, found relationships with both men and women.

She Wrote a Newspaper Column for Nearly 30 Years

Starting at the very end of 1935 and continuing until her death in 1962, Eleanor kept a regular, nationally syndicated newspaper column called “My Day.” Eventually, it appeared in 90 different U.S. newspapers, detailing both her actions of the day and causes she supported — including ones that perhaps diverged a little from FDR’s views. After her husband’s death, she spoke even more freely about her viewpoints, and chose to keep advocating through her writing instead of running for office herself. Some newspapers dropped her column after she advocated for the election of Adlai Stevenson II in his run against Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, leading United Features Syndicate to instruct her to limit her support for candidates, which she did not do.

For the majority of the run, Eleanor published six columns a week; only after her health began to decline in the last couple of years of her life did she cut that down to three.

She Publicly Resisted Racial Segregation

Eleanor’s lifetime overlapped with some particularly dark chapters in America’s treatment of its Black citizens, and by 1939, she was using her platform to loudly and publicly speak against racism and segregation. In 1939, she resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution, announcing her departure in her column, after the group refused a venue to prominent African American musician Marian Anderson. She and some other presidential advisers, as well as NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White, took the issue to FDR, and Anderson eventually appeared at a much bigger venue — the Lincoln Memorial — performing for a crowd of 75,000.

Even as FDR remained more tepid in opposing segregation, Eleanor kept swinging. When she learned in 1938 that a series of public meetings in Alabama called the Southern Conference for Human Welfare was split down the middle and segregated by race, she tried to sit in the Black section. When a police officer threatened to remove her, she moved her folding chair to the center of the aisle between the white and Black sections, where she stayed for the rest of the conference. Even after facing staunch criticism from conservatives after the Detroit Race Riots of 1943 — she had supported integrating the local housing project at its center — she kept going, and even led civil rights workshops in schools.

She was far from perfect, and even opposed a proposed 1940s march on Washington for racial equality, although she did arrange a meeting between organizers and FDR. But she continued to speak out against segregation for the rest of her life, including strongly advocating for school integration in both her column and in person, especially around the time of Brown v. Board of Education. Her last column before her death emphasized the connection between school integration and aggressive police tactics.

The FBI Investigated Eleanor Extensively for Communist Activity

Between her support for civil liberties and doing stuff like inviting a student advocacy organization accused of communist connections to crash at the White House while they waited to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Eleanor was pretty unpopular with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. It didn’t help that she called Hoover’s tactics “Gestapo-ish,” either.

She was the subject of one of the largest single files from the era, adding up to around 3,000 pages. In addition to investigating her friends, family, and colleagues, the FBI tracked the existence of supposed “Eleanor clubs,” which white Southern segregationists claimed were secret organizations planning uprisings that would cause their Black domestic employees to turn against them. It turned out that, of course, they were just rumors started by segregationists, who expressed fear of having to work in the kitchen or pay higher wages.