Early Years

Born in October 1884 in New York, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, who went by Eleanor, was the niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. After being orphaned in childhood, Eleanor Roosevelt attended boarding school in England. By the time she returned to New York, she had become inspired to use her wealth and privilege to help those less fortunate. During her debutante year, she met and fell in love with her fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). They were married in 1905 and had six children, five of whom survived to adulthood.

FDR’s early political career included serving as assistant secretary of the Navy during World War I and unsuccessfully running for vice president in 1920. In August 1921, he contracted a disease, likely poliomyelitis (polio), that permanently paralyzed him from the waist down. As FDR recovered, Eleanor Roosevelt took on a more prominent social and political role, often giving speeches on her husband’s behalf. She supported his desire to continue in politics and actively participated in his successful campaigns to become governor of New York in 1928 and president of the United States in 1932.

The White House

On March 4, 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as president of the United States. Accustomed to an active political life, Eleanor Roosevelt was reluctant to become a social hostess, the first lady’s traditional role. Instead she transformed her position, advocating for the many progressive causes she supported.

Eleanor Roosevelt held her own press conferences and only allowed female reporters to attend. She also traveled frequently throughout the United States, giving lectures and radio broadcasts, surveying Americans’ working and living conditions, and sharing her observations with the president. She communicated with the American people through her syndicated newspaper column, “My Day,” which first appeared on January 1, 1936. Many Americans felt close to the Roosevelts and believed that the first lady, like her husband, cared about them personally.

As Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews intensified and its control expanded across Europe, Eleanor Roosevelt advocated for aid to refugees who were fleeing Nazi persecution. In at least one instance, she personally tried to sponsor a refugee, and she also contributed money to aid organizations intended to fund refugees’ passage to the United States. She donated the proceeds of her “My Day” column to the American Friends Service Committee, which was actively involved both in alleviating poverty in the United States and in aiding European refugees, most of whom were Jewish.

In February 1939, the First Lady joined a list of prominent Americans who supported the passage of the Wagner-Rogers Bill, which proposed to “permit the entry of 20,000 German refugee children, ages 14 and under, into the United States” over a two-year period and outside of the existing, restrictive immigration quota system. Though she was often outspoken on behalf of causes she cared about, this was the first time she publicly endorsed a piece of pending legislation as first lady. Eleanor Roosevelt told reporters that the bill was “a wise way to do a humanitarian act.” The president never officially commented on the proposed legislation. The bill was never voted on.

In 1940, the year after World War II began in Europe, Eleanor Roosevelt called a meeting of government officials, social workers, and representatives from refugee aid organizations to develop a plan for rescuing children from war zones. The US Committee for the Care of European Children (USCOM), established as a result of this meeting, worked with Jewish, Unitarian, and Quaker aid organizations to bring hundreds of orphaned and unaccompanied children from Europe to the United States, including Jewish refugee children from southern France.

In September 1940, Eleanor Roosevelt learned that the SS Quanza, a ship carrying nearly 100 refugees who had been turned away from Mexico, was preparing to dock in Norfolk, Virginia, before returning to Europe. Passengers aboard the ship sent telegrams pleading for Eleanor’s assistance. She expressed her concern to the State Department—as she often did when contacted about the plight of individual refugees. State Department officials ultimately allowed the passengers to disembark in the United States but made clear such permission would not be granted again.

During World War II, Eleanor Roosevelt continued to travel the country on behalf of her husband. At a time when many Americans supported the forced relocation of people of Japanese ancestry in the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, she personally visited the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona, where more than 13,000 Japanese Americans were detained. In September 1944, she also visited the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter in Oswego, New York. There, she met nearly 1,000 refugees, most of them Jewish. They were the only refugees the US government brought to the United States outside of the immigration process.

“First Lady of the World”

After FDR died in April 1945, President Harry S. Truman appointed Eleanor Roosevelt as the US delegate to the first United Nations (UN) General Assembly. She served until 1952, including as the chairperson of the UN Human Rights Commission. Eleanor Roosevelt also drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was passed by the General Assembly in December 1948.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy reappointed Eleanor Roosevelt to the American delegation to the UN, and she became the chairperson of the President's Commission on the Status of Women. Until her death in 1962, Eleanor Roosevelt remained active in the civil rights movement and in a wide range of human rights issues.