C-SPAN FIRST LADIES ELEANOR ROOSEVELT JUNE 9, 2014 11:33 a.m. ET (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: I'm speaking to you tonight at a very serious moment in our history. The cabinet is convening and the leaders in Congress are meeting with the president. The State Department and Army and Navy officials have been with the president all afternoon. In fact, the Japanese ambassador was talking to the president at the very time that Japan's airships were bombing our citizens in Hawaii and the Philippines and sinking one of our transports, loaded with lumber on its way to Hawaii. By tomorrow morning, the members of Congress will have a full report and be ready for action. (END VIDEO CLIP) PETER SLEN, HOST: And you've been listening to some of Eleanor Roosevelt's radio address hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. In fact, she gave that address before her husband, FDR, even spoke to the nation. For the next two hours, we're going to get to know this transformational first lady. She's consistently ranked first in historians' polls on first ladies. And we're going to look at her life, her relationships, and her time in the White House from 1933 to 1945. Well, good evening and welcome to C-SPAN's "First Ladies: Influence and Image" series. Joining us this evening to talk about Eleanor Roosevelt, Allida Black, who is the editor of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project at George Washington University and a historian, and another historian, Doug Brinkley, who is also an author from Rice University. Thank you both for being here with us this evening. Doug Brinkley, it's March 1933. The Roosevelts are being inaugurated. They enter the White House. What are they walking into? What was the country like? DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, PROFESSOR, RICE UNIVERSITY: Well, FDR didn't even get to walk in. He came in on a wheelchair. And the very fact that somebody who was crippled from -- in the lower half said we have nothing to fear but fear itself, and that's perhaps the most famous phrase out of any inauguration. And what people was fearing was unemployment, chaos, Hoovervilles, agricultural angst, top soil had blown all over, dust bowls, the October 1929 crash of the stock market. So our country was really in tatters. And there is Franklin Roosevelt, this man who's overcome such odds in his personal life, overcoming polio and being sidelined from politics, now ushering in a new progressive era and offering 100 days of the New Deal programs right off the bat, what people call the alphabet soup of the New Deal, trying to get banks to run properly, starting a Civilian Conservation Corps that would plant 2 billion trees, starting to create, you know, in a WPA and the like, workers progress, get employment back up, jobs, jobs, jobs. SLEN: Allida Black, in that first 100 days, what was Eleanor Roosevelt doing? And how she define her role? ALLIDA BLACK, ELEANOR ROOSEVELT PAPERS PROJECT: Well, Eleanor struggled to define here role because she was exceedingly active before she went into the White House. She was a party operative. He edited basically all of the national Democratic Party publications, as well as the New York tate publications covertly. She was on the board of labor unions. She was on the board of social reform organizations. She taught civics, history, literature at a girls school. She was a major political force in her own right, so much so that, during the campaign, all of the major newspapers in the United States would run full-page stories on her own political career and her own ambitions. But when she comes into the White House, FDR says you have to resign all your positions, you have to stay really and be the traditional first lady. She tells a friend that the thought of living in the White House fills her with the greatest sense of possible dread that, you know -- that the White House eats women, that she fears a lifetime of white glove tests, you know, where she's running her gloves down the banister to see if the dust has been taken off. And so she says to FDR, let me help you with your mail. He says no. She says, well, let me help you with your calendar. He says no. She said, well, let me go out and be your eyes and ears. He says no. So she's in the White House, you know, desolate, just saying, you know, she loves her husband, she wants him to be happy, but what has happened to my life, what has happened to my hard-won independence? And so literally, from the first day she's in the White House, she's trying to figure out how to resurrect her own of voice in a way that will give her the latitude she needs to be herself while at the same time not undercut her husband's agenda. SLEN: Very quickly, Doug Brinkley, what were some of the issues that she got involved in? BRINKLEY: Oh, well, she's the great first lady -- as Harry Truman said, the first lady of the world, but she's... BLACK: A phrase she hated. BRINKLEY: ... hated, yeah -- she -- civil rights. She got very involved with getting African- Americans more equal rights, working in West Virginia with coal miners and the working people of America, the forgotten people, the downtrodden, and also, which I'm sure we'll talk about a lot, women's issues, getting women into the forefront of American political life. She had no role model as first lady. She created this role all on her own, which is -- there's really nobody quite like her. SLEN: And here she is in 1933 on the radio talking to women about their need to volunteer. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: If the women are willing to do things because it's going to help their neighbors, I think we'll win out, we'll win out not because of a government, not even because of our leaders, but because, as a people, we've had a vision and we've worked for it and we've seen it through. (END VIDEO CLIP) SLEN: Allida Black, she spent a lot of time on the radio. BLACK: Absolutely she did. She was on the radio before FDR. She had her own radio show. She will have become her own syndicated columnist in 1935, beginning 1936. By the end of her life, she'll write over 8,000 columns, more than 500 articles, more than 27 books, give 75 speeches a year, and write an average of 150 letters a day, all without a ghostwriter. But if I could go back and piggyback on Doug for a little bit, I mean, Eleanor hit the ground running on policy in ways that we don't really think about. I mean, Eleanor doesn't hit the ground on race. Eleanor doesn't hit the ground on education. Eleanor hits the ground on employment first. The second day of the Roosevelt administration, the day -- I mean, I'm sorry, the day after FDR closes the banks, he sends the Economy Act to Congress, which is going to cut by federal employment by 25 percent, right? People are freaking out. The unemployment rate -- the official unemployment rate is 25 percent. Anybody with a brain over a squashed pea will know that it's really about 40, because it's the first time that we've really started taking the unemployment rate, and it doesn't take into account the 12 years the depression has hit the South and the West. And so to take 25 percent of the federal payroll out in the middle of the depression and to say to federally employed women that you're going to lose your job if you're married to a federally employed man, Eleanor hits the roof. And she issues, in this first week of her husband's presidency, her own opinion piece saying this legislation is wrong. And so FDR and -- FDR and Eleanor have dueling editorials in the paper, dueling editorials in all of the Democratic Party press over the injustice of this act. And she does win out, which is why she's so intense about women in that speech. BRINKLEY: True, but it's something that FDR and the White House staff doesn't like. And Eleanor Roosevelt is very, very cognizant that you just can't be on wrong message with your husband all the time, that you're going to have to find common ground. Otherwise, you're going to create just a shambles of things. And she did a marvelous job of kind of holding her own, writing letters to Harold Ickes at Interior, Harry Hopkins she was close to, but phrasing it in a way that wasn't being commandeering, but trying to say, will you look into this one case for me? And so she handled, I think, very well, but she's mentioned the one time they caught a bit of a crossed wire early out of the gate, but she fell in line well. BLACK: Well, I would strongly -- I think we could give the public, if we will, examples of way good friends who respect each other can disagree. I will argue that FDR knew that she was going to do this. The correspondence shows that. And so what they were trying to do is to bring this issue front-and-center, you know, and buy support and curtail some of the backlash.