Eleanor Roosevelt received death threats so regularly that the Secret Service assigned her a bodyguard. She refused to carry the gun they gave her but agreed to take pistol lessons so she could stop people from worrying about it. She then continued doing exactly what had generated the death threats in the first place: visiting coal mines, speaking at Black churches, advocating for civil rights, and telling the American public things they did not want to hear. She did this for twelve years as First Lady. She did it for another seventeen years after her husband died. She did not slow down until she was seventy-eight, and even then she mostly stopped because she was dead.

She Grew Up Rich and Miserable and Chose to Be Useful Instead

Eleanor was born in 1884 to one of the wealthiest families in New York. Her mother was a society beauty who openly expressed disappointment in her daughter's appearance. Her father was an alcoholic who adored her but was mostly absent. Both parents were dead by the time she was ten. She was raised by a grandmother who considered displays of emotion vulgar. Biographers at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library have documented that Eleanor's childhood was characterized by emotional deprivation of a kind that usually produces either permanent withdrawal or fierce compensating engagement with the world. She chose engagement. She chose it at Allenswood Academy in London, where the headmistress Marie Souvestre taught her that privileged women had an obligation to fight for those without privilege. She never stopped. She married her fifth cousin Franklin in 1905. The marriage became a political partnership after she discovered his affair with her secretary Lucy Mercer in 1918. The discovery, she later said, was the making of her. It freed her from the expectation of domestic happiness and redirected her considerable energy into public life.

She Resigned From the Daughters of the American Revolution Over a Concert

In 1939, the DAR refused to allow the Black contralto Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall in Washington. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the organization publicly, in a newspaper column read by millions, and helped arrange an alternative concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Anderson sang before 75,000 people and a national radio audience. Research from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History has documented that Roosevelt's public resignation was one of the most significant acts of white allyship in the pre-Civil Rights era. She did not issue a private letter. She did not quietly withdraw. She told the entire country why she was leaving and let the DAR deal with the consequences. She did this at a time when the Democratic coalition depended on Southern segregationists. She did it knowing it would cause political problems for her husband. She did it because Marian Anderson should have been allowed to sing and the DAR was wrong and Eleanor Roosevelt did not have the patience to pretend otherwise.

She Wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

After Franklin's death in 1945, Harry Truman appointed Eleanor as a delegate to the newly formed United Nations. Her colleagues assumed she was a sympathy appointment. She chaired the committee that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948. The Declaration is thirty articles long. It establishes the right to life, liberty, education, work, and freedom from torture and slavery. It has been translated into over 500 languages, making it the most translated document in human history. Research from the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project at George Washington University has documented that Roosevelt personally negotiated the language of multiple articles, mediating between Soviet delegates who prioritized economic rights and Western delegates who prioritized civil liberties. Truman called her the First Lady of the World. She said she would rather be remembered as someone useful. She was both, and the difference between those two things is the entire story of Eleanor Roosevelt.