3 Answer
the following questions on the basis of the text. Do not quote whole
sentences from the text. Arrows, fragments and abbreviations will not
be accepted. (5 points each, total: 20)
a) In what way was Nesbitt inept?
b) Is Eleanor Roosevelt depicted as an idol in Cook's book?
c) What are the two basic differences between the two books?
d) According to the reviewer, what was the reason for Eleanor Roosevelt's
silence about Hitler?
4 For each item, find a word or phrase
in the text that is closest to the meaning of the given word or explanation
(2 points each, maximum total: 10 points).
| a) fall quickly |
par. 1 |
| b) strong and not changing |
par. 3 |
| c) tense |
par. 6 |
| d) keep silent |
par. 10 |
| e) in a direct way |
par. 10 |
|
Eleanor Roosevelt is one of the twentieth
century's most admired and influential women. At
|
| a time when the reputations of other political
figures, past and present, are plummeting, hers
|
| continues to rise, almost four decades after
her death. The first volume of Blanche Wiesen Cook's
|
| biography (reviewed in the TLS,
May 2l, l993) took Eleanor Roosevelt through her troubled
|
| childhood, her courtship and marriage to her
distant cousin Franklin, her feelings of betrayal after his
|
| affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer,
during the First World War, and her determination to
|
| build a fulfilling life for herself
in the l920s. It ended as a despondent Eleanor worried that her
hard-won |
| independence would be lost after her husband's
election to the presidency in November l932,
|
| and inauguration four months later.
|
| What will surprise readers about Cook's new
volume is her decision to limit its coverage to
|
| the years l933 to l938. Knowing how much more
of Eleanor Roosevelt's life is to come (she was a
|
| dominant figure in American politics and culture
until her death in l962), they may at first be
|
| impatient with Cook for not finishing the task
at hand. But once they begin to savour her skill as a
|
| storyteller and biographer, such misgivings
will melt away.
|
| This volume covers Eleanor Roosevelt at midlife.
Forty-eight years old when her husband
|
| was elected president, she blossomed during
the period of social and political experimentation
|
| known as the New Deal. Lorena Hickok, ER's
intimate friend in these years, remarked, "I'd never
|
| have believed it possible for a woman to develop
after 50 as you have. ...". Eleanor loved the game
|
| of politics, and knew how to play it well,
but she also approached public life with a deep and
|
| unswerving commitment to social betterment.
Her efforts in such areas as affordable housing, racial
|
| tolerance and social security reveal a visionary
who was not afraid to ask, why do some people have
|
| to be poor?
|
| One of the great pleasures of the biography
is encountering a range of friends, family and
|
| associates who were part of Eleanor Roosevelt's
daily life. At the top of the list is her devoted but
|
| opinionated secretary, Malvina Thompson (always
known as Tommy), who probably spent more
|
| hours with her than any other living
soul. And then there is the much (and rightly) maligned White |
| House housekeeper, Henrietta Nesbitt, who tormented
the President with such mediocre food that
|
| guests learned to take a snack before White
House events. Nesbitt's ineptness is often cited as proof
|
| of Eleanor's lack of attention to household
concerns, but Cook reminds us that she was in fact quite
|
| fussy about such details. So why did she keep
Nesbitt on? Cook speculates that it was part of
|
| Eleanor's "passive-aggressive" response
to the complexities of her marriage, one way that she could
|
| get back at FDR without confronting
him directly. |
| Political
associates share the stage too, offering a window on the countless areas of American life
|
| that Eleanor Roosevelt touched as First Lady.
Progressive reformers such as Jane Addams, Lillian Wald
|
| and Carrie Chapman Catt were ER's role models
of public-spirited womanhood, and these women,
|
| along with many other female reformers she
met in New York in the l920s, greatly influenced the
|
| New Deal's social agenda. The educator Mary
McLeod Bethune and the NAACP bead Walter White
|
| are given credit for their efforts to put civil
rights on the agenda of the New Deal, and eventually of
|
| the nation. Bernard Baruch showers Eleanor
with gifts, and she taps his wealth for many of her pet
|
| causes. Portraits of Louis Howe, Harry Hopkins
and Harold Ickes are also sharply drawn.
|
| It is hard not to slip into hagiography when
writing about Eleanor Roosevelt. Cook shares a
|
| healthy respect for all that the First
Lady accomplished, but shows readers sides of her that are less |
| than perfect. Lorena Hickok was the most important
person in Eleanor Roosevelt's life in these
|
| years, and the cautionary tale of the love
they shared, especially at its most intense and passionate
|
| between l933 and l935, provides a principal
emotional axis for the book. (Eleanor and Franklin's
|
| marriage, which was mutually satisfactory
on their own terms but also often troubled, supplies |
| the other.)
In the end, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Hick (as she
was always called) gave up |
| more than she got. She was one of the
country's top female reporters; and her fateful decision to |
| resign from the Associated Press because
her friendship with the First Lady compromised her |
| journalistic objectivity cut her loose
from a profession she loved. Just
as Eleanor was inventing her |
| role as the conscience of the New Deal,
Hick was floundering in a variety of makeshift jobs that put |
| increasing tension on their already
strained friendship. "Hick dearest, I went to sleep saying
a little |
| prayer, 'God give me the depth not
to hurt Hick again'", wrote Eleanor in late 1933 after one |
| especially stormy encounter. |
| The significance of the relationship
between ER and Lorena Hickok has been the source of |
| controversy and recrimination (to put
it mildly), since their letters were opened to the public in l978. |
| In fact, it was the defensive and unbelieving
tone of Doris Faber's l980 biography of Hickok, which |
| dismissed the intensity of the relationship
as a naive (if belated) schoolgirl crush between two lonely |
| women, that set Blanche Wiesen Cook,
then a diplomatic historian specializing in l950s foreign |
| economic policy, on her new career
as Roosevelt biographer. |
| In addition to Cook's even-handed and
decidedly unsensationalist treatment of the |
| relationship, readers can also turn
to Rodger Streitmatter's Empty Without
You: The intimate letters |
| of Eleanor
Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, which includes excerpts from
300 of the approximately |
| 3,500 letters the two women exchanged
over their thirty-year friendship. The tone and focus of this |
| book differ from Cook's approach. By
concentrating on the personal, Streitmatter highlights the |
| more titillating aspects of the correspondence,
and pushes the broader New Deal context into the |
| background. In contrast, Cook interweaves
ER's relationship with Hick into all the other things the |
| First Lady was doing, which meant just
about everything. In that context, Hick emerges as just one |
| of the many parts of ER's full and
complicated life. |
| To his credit, Streitmatter gives readers
a sense of the profound, long-term importance of this |
| relationship to both
women by taking the story through the l960s, a perspective
that is necessarily |
| missing in the Cook volume, which stops
in l938. Especially poignant is the account of the support, |
| financial and emotional, that Eleanor
gave an increasingly incapacitated Hick in the last decades of |
| her life. She may have caused Hick
emotional distress in the l930s and replaced her at the centre of |
| her universe, but, like most of ER's
friendships, this one was ended only by death. |
| There has been a tendency among American
historians to see the l930s solely through the lens of |
| domestic issues, and the l940s mainly
from an international perspective; Cook makes an important |
| contribution by showing this bifurcation
to be highly misleading. Eleanor Roosevelt always kept a |
| dual focus, and consistently made linkages
between events abroad and in events at home. At a time |
| when both FDR and v- American public
opinion were decidedly isolationist, Roosevelt showed her |
| internationalist sympathies by supporting
the World Court and the League of Nations, and by |
| challenging American neutrality on
the Spanish Civil War. Unlike the domestic arena, where she |
| enjoyed a much freer hand to hold opinions
that differed from the President's, on foreign affairs |
| Cook shows us that ER was effectively
muzzled throughout the l930s. Practically every time she |
| wanted to take a public stand, the
State Department or FDR said no. Cook's intriguing hypothesis is |
| that much of the impetus behind Eleanor's
support of issues such as anti-lynching, racial tolerance |
| and civil rights (on which she was
light years ahead of most American citizens, including FDR) was |
| a kind of subterfuge or redirection
of her energies; if she couldn't speak out on foreign affairs, then |
| she could try to improve conditions
at home. To put it bluntly, she made the connection between |
| white supremacy, segregation and lynching
in the United States, and racial violence in Germany. |
| Why, then, does Cook come down so hard
on Eleanor Roosevelt's silence about Hitler, |
| which she calls "grievous and
prolonged", a "silence beyond repair"? It was not
a question of |
| Eleanor (or for that matter, Franklin)
not knowing about what was going on in Germany; they both |
| had reports from respected friends
like Alice Hamilton and Felix Frankfurter, who had travelled in |
| Germany in the l930s, and yet they
said nothing. In the harshest language in the book, Cook writes, |
| "History will always be haunted
by ER's reverberating silence on this subject, since on virtually
all |
| others ER was adamant: Silence is the
ultimate collusion." What especially troubles Cook is that
she |
| found not one example in ER's private
correspondence where she comments specifically on the |
| treatment of the Jews in Germany. |
| In truth, Eleanor Roosevelt was of
a class and time when anti-Semitism was an accepted part of |
| society. and she rose above this (just
as she did with racism) with much effort. Her silence is |
| puzzling, but it is hard to share Cook's
indignation when the leader is also given so much evidence |
| of ER's other actions: privately challenging
anti-Semitism by resigning from the Colony Club when |
| her friend Elinor Morgenthau was blackballed,
working tirelessly on refugee issues, trying to |
| improve the racial climate at home
so that it could not be used to justifyGermany's treatment of the |
| Jews. Given the political constraints
that she was under, an alternative reading of her actions in the |
| l930s would credit her with recognizing
the dangers of the international situation long before the |
| issue even registered in the consciousnesses
of most Americans. |
| Unlike the closure that Eleanor Roosevelt's
move into the White House gave the first |
| volume, this
instalment ends rather abruptly at the end of l938, as Munich
and Kristallnacht have |
| demonstrated the inevitability of another
world war. Here readers will confront one of the |
| consequences of Cook's decision to
foreshorten the time frame: so many stories remain unfinished |
| that readers may feel left hanging
in mid-air. My guess is that enthusiasts who have relished the |
| story so far will be more than willing
to wait for future volumes. |
