Eleanor Roosevelt

In the summer of 1918, Eleanor Roosevelt, mother of five, discovered that her husband Franklin (soon to become the political giant FDR) was having an affair with a young hired nanny named Lucy Mercer. Although Eleanor responded by making the end of the affair an absolute condition of their continued marriage, she would discover nearly 40 years later that as her husband lay dying on April 12, 1945, the woman at his deathbed was none other than Lucy Mercer. Born October 11, 1884 into upstate New York silver spoon society, Eleanor Roosevelt's life would be rife with betrayal, abandonment, loss and chronic depression--but only in private. In public, she would rise to become one of the foremost champions for democratic ideals of the past century, lobbying for civil rights when it was politically incorrect to do so (and briefly earning a KKK bounty on her head, as well as amassing a file in J. Edgar Hoover's cabinet that ran some 3,000 pages), insisting on the rights of women to participate in a free democracy, and eventually expanding her mission to encompass the globe when she played a pivotal role in shepherding in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Losing both her mother to illness and her father to alcoholism before she was ten-years-old, disappointed in marriage, plagued by doubts over her mothering abilities (her five children had nineteen marriages), Eleanor Roosevelt, nevertheless, not only redefined the role of First Lady in America, but became the most admired woman in the world. She lived her life with a strong sense of duty, believing, like many other Roosevelt's, that you owed something back to those less fortunate than yourself (even if your "fortune" was wholly external). Written and directed by Sue Williams, and featuring mellifluous narration by Alfre Woodard, and solid interview clips with family and scholars (although Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin is conspicuously absent here), this excellent biographical entry in the acclaimed The American Experience series is highly recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)