“THE RELIGION OF ELEANOR ROOSEVELT”

A sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, October 21, 2007

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

Let me begin with a verbal description of two political cartoons from the era of Eleanor Roosevelt. It is the midst of the Great Depression, and the cartoon showed dirty coal miners discovering a woman entering the mine wearing a miner’s hat. With astonishment, one says to the other, “My gosh! There’s Mrs. Roosevelt!” Another cartoon showed a shipload of immigrants in New York’s harbor. A mother and her young son were looking at the Statue of Liberty, and when the mother asks if he knows who that is, the boy responds saying, “Of course I know who that is. That’s Mrs. Roosevelt!”

Those of you who have been around here awhile are familiar with an occasional series of sermons I’ve given on “The Religion of. . .” various notable people of history. Some have been Unitarian or Universalist, like Susan B. Anthony or Frank Lloyd Wright, but others have had no direct ties to our tradition, like Mark Twain, Albert Einstein or Kahlil Gibran. Today I speak on Eleanor Roosevelt, who was raised and remained Episcopalian her whole life, though she was respectful of, and appreciated, diverse religious traditions. The only direct connection to Unitarians that I could find was her close personal friendship with Adlai Stevenson, an active Unitarian statesman. When Eleanor died, it was Stevenson who was chosen deliver her eulogy.

In doing this series, the primary lesson I have learned is that religion has less to do with theological belief and far more to do with the values that shape life. Religion is about the principles that guide our life in this world far more than our speculations about the nature of the world beyond us. So when I speak of the religion of a person’s life, I am referring not so much to their views on God or the trinity or afterlife or anything metaphysical. I am speaking primarily about the religion that is revealed by the way they lived their life.

Eleanor Roosevelt said as much directly. In a 1932 speech entitled “What Religion Means to Me,” she said this:

“To me religion has nothing to do with any specific creed or dogma. It means that belief and that faith in the heart of (people) that make (them) try to live life according to the highest standard which (he or she) can visualize. . . . In all cases, the thing that counts is the striving of the human soul to achieve spiritually the best that it is capable of and to care unselfishly not only for personal good but for the good of all. . . . The important thing is neither your nationality nor the religion you profess, but how your faith translated into your life.”

I have often said to those who inquire about Unitarian Universalism, that our religion isn’t based on beliefs. It is not that beliefs aren’t important; it is that religion is revealed more realistically in a person’s life through the values that are expressed by how we live. It is instructive, then, to look at the lives of others that show us the best kind of religion there is – a life of integrity and high purpose. Religious creed is a distant factor. People like Eleanor Roosevelt tell us more about living religiously than can any theologian.

According to Gallup Polls, Eleanor Roosevelt was the most admired woman in the world (the world!) for fifteen consecutive years, from 1946 to 1961. That admiration was earned by the evidence of a profound integrity of character.

I want to suggest this morning that her greatest contribution to our life as a society was to provide a conscience to guide us. Conscience is, among other things, an expression of religious values.

She was born on October 11, 1884 in New York City. She was a child of wealth and privilege. Both parents came from prominent families, and her father’s brother was Theodore Roosevelt, a political celebrity on his way to the White House at the time. And yet her childhood was, by her own account, miserable. Her mother attached great importance to the New York social scene, and showed a passion for the superficial. Her mother felt that Eleanor was a homely child, and called her by the nickname “Granny,” which made Eleanor feel ugly. Her father was kinder and more loving toward Eleanor, but he was also an alcoholic and philanderer who didn’t have any focus in life. This unfortunate home-life changed for her at a young age, but not necessarily for the better. Her mother died of diphtheria when Eleanor was eight, and two years later her father died of complications from alcohol.

The orphaned Eleanor was sent, along with her two brothers, to be raised by her maternal grandmother, Mary Ludlow Hall. Her grandmother approached life and parenting much the same way her mother did, belittling Eleanor in public and private. The biggest difference was that her grandmother was a far stricter disciplinarian.

As a result of these experiences, Eleanor Roosevelt was exceedingly shy. She would not speak out in school when called upon, and found it hard to make friends. At age 15, though, her life finally changed a bit for the better. Eleanor was sent to a boarding school in England for two years to finish her education. Away from the influence of her dysfunctional family, she began to blossom. The school’s headmistress, who was an outspoken feminist and a freethinker, took a special liking to Eleanor, and became somewhat of a mentor.

By the time she returned to the United States at age 17, Eleanor was beginning to come out of her shell. She still thought of herself as ugly and inferior, but she was not the wallflower she had been. Though she was given a debutante party at the Waldorf, Eleanor was deeply uncomfortable with the pretensions of high society and volunteered with the Junior League, which provided services to many of the poorer neighborhoods of the city.

Soon after her return, Eleanor became reacquainted with a distant cousin, a fifth cousin “once removed,” by the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They had known each other vaguely as children, but now a courtship began that led them to marriage in 1905. Her Uncle Theodore, at that time President of the United States, gave the bride away in lieu of her parents. (Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter once commented that he had a secret desire to be the bride at every wedding, the baby at every christening, and the corpse at every funeral).

The marriage of Franklin and Eleanor, we all know, was rocky from the start, mostly because of Franklin’s affairs but also because of the meddling of his mother. Eleanor’s deep personal insecurities didn’t help as well. And yet they maintained a mutual respect for each other that was so deep, it often must have felt like love. They shared values, goals, and aspirations, too. They were, in that sense, good for each other, and became and stayed close as life partners, however complex the marriage.

It was in the early 1920s that Franklin first contracted polio, which would eventually cripple him, making him unable to walk. From the beginning, Eleanor gave him complete support and in some ways became his “legs,” so that he could be successful.

After they were married, children came in rapid succession – six children were born between 1906 and 1916, though one child died in infancy. And while Eleanor was learning parenting, Franklin was climbing the rungs of the political ladder, becoming governor of New York in 1928. During this time, Eleanor also became active in politics and social causes. She campaigned for Alfred E. Smith for president, and worked for the Women’s Trade Union League, which promoted a 48 hour work week, minimum wage, and the abolition of child labor. She also worked with the League of Women Voters and taught literature and American history at the Todhunter School for Girls in New York City.

She was a busy woman from the start, but life became even busier when Franklin was elected president in 1933. Eleanor was determined that her life as First Lady would make a difference in the world. She broke the mould of First Ladies. By the end of her career she became known as “First Lady to the World.”

These were unique times and they called for a different kind of leadership. The country was in the middle of a devastating economic depression. People felt threatened and powerless, and lived daily with fear of further disaster.

Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to give people comfort and confidence. In many ways she became the conscience of the New Deal recovery program. While the federal government was developing big and complex programs to turn around the depression, she became, quite literally, the liaison between the government and individuals who were suffering. She would personally visit the slums of cities, talk to miners and destitute farmer, sit with widows and orphans and hear their stories. She was the conscience of the government by showing the human face of sympathy and concern, rather than simply an impersonal government program. She was the human face of the New Deal.

In his biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, J. William T. Youngs put it this way:

Eleanor Roosevelt “could project herself compellingly to humankind en masse: to blacks, Jews, the poor, the oppressed; she could shake a hundred hands in a receiving line and seem interested in every one she met; she could sign and send a hundred letters a day. But in order to deal with the generalities, she needed particularities. She understood the suffering of millions of American blacks because she knew a few blacks well. She understood the plight of unemployed coal miners because she visited and revisited one mining community. And above all, she understood people because she had come to love a few people as much as life itself.” (p.5)

After the Depression came the War, and again she represented the conscience of the nation. As she had visited the people who were suffering economic wounds, now she visited the American soldiers in hospitals and heard their stories and gave them comfort. She represented to them the love and concern of their own mothers. She traveled the country giving pep talks to swarms of citizens who would gather to hear her words of comfort and encouragement.

She was our national conscience at that time. In the years leading up to the war she lobbied to accept more Jewish immigrants fleeing Nazi terror, when Congress wanted to put a cap on such immigration.

In some ways, when the war came, she did more than anyone else in uniting the diverse segments of society in joining together in common cause for the war effort. She was instrumental in establishing a training program for African American combat pilots in an illustrious group that became known as the Tuskegee Airmen. She also organized a training program for women military pilots. I remember the story of the late Madge Minton, long-time All Souls member, who spoke of personally writing a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt in order to be accepted into this pilot training program, and how personally grateful she was to Mrs. Roosevelt.

Throughout her life, she represented the conscience of the nation when it came to race relations. She was a vocal advocate of racial equality when hardly anyone in power acknowledged that it was an issue. In 1939, the distinguished organization called the Daughters of the American Revolution stained its reputation by denying to the popular African American singer Marian Anderson use of its Washington Hall. Mrs. Roosevelt publicly resigned from membership in the D.A.R. and helped organize a concert for the singer on the steps of the Lincoln memorial. Later, she served on the Board of Directors of the NAACP.

Once, when she visited a public lecture in the segregated South and discovered whites were required to sit on one side of the aisle and blacks on the other side, she physically moved her seat to the middle of the center aisle to protest the policy. Her conscience was ahead of its time.

She was the conscience of the nation in matters of civil liberties. During the war, privately and frequently, she reminded the President and anyone else who would listen that fighting to protect our nation can only be justified if we also protect the rights of our citizens. Her voice of conscience said that if we lose human rights at home on the altar of war, then we don’t deserve to win. She spoke out strongly within the government against the policy of placing all Americans of Japanese descent into internment prison camps during the war. She lost the argument, and the nation now looks back in shame on that policy.

After Franklin died, President Truman appointed Eleanor Roosevelt as our first delegate to the new United Nations. In that capacity, her main focus was protecting human rights. She became co-chair of the UN’s Human Rights Commission and the person most responsible for getting nations to approve the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a milestone on the road of civilization.

She was a staunch defender of the separation of church and state. In the 1950s, she engaged in a public exchange of opinions against New York’s Cardinal Spelmen, opposing federal aid to parochial schools. When the dispute became too heated, she invited the Cardinal to her home to talk more personally and calmly.

It was perhaps her active role in racial civil rights and citizen civil liberties that caused J. Edgar Hoover to suspect her of being a communist. At the time of her death, Eleanor Roosevelt, the voice of our national conscience, had the thickest F.B.I. file of anyone in the country. In hindsight, this was an achievement worthy of respect.

Eleanor Roosevelt had deep respect for religion. But for her authentic religion is not something handed down as creeds and doctrines. Authentic religion is something that is lived. Her views reflect the sense of individual integrity that lies at the core of our own tradition. At one point she said it this way:

“I think it is essential that you should teach your child that he has an intellectual and spiritual obligation to decide for himself what he thinks and not to allow himself to accept what comes from others without putting it through his own reasoning process.”

Like anyone, the religion of Eleanor Roosevelt is observed not in the words she spoke, but rather in the life she lived. Hers was a religion of conscience and compassion.

According to her son Elliot, Eleanor Roosevelt ended each day reciting the same prayer. It is a prayer of aspiration and a prayer of personal challenge. It is appropriate to close this sermon with her prayer:

“Father, who has set a restlessness in our hearts and made us all seekers after that which we can never fully find: forbid us to be satisfied with what we make of life. Draw us from base content and set our eyes on far-off goals. Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we me be driven to Thee for strength. Deliver us from fretfulness and self-pitying; make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness others hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new.” AMEN

READING

From Adlai Stevenson Eulogy to Eleanor Roosevelt

1962

“How much she had done – how much still unchronicled! We dare not try to tabulate the lives she salvaged, the battles – known and unrecorded – she fought, the afflicted she comforted, the hovels she brightened, the faces and places, near and far, that were given some new radiance, some sound of music by her endeavors. What other single human being has touched and transformed the existence of so many others?

“She imparted to the familiar language – nay, what too many have come to treat as the clichés – of Christianity a new poignancy and vibrancy. She did so not by reciting them, but by proving that it is possible to live them. It is this above all that rendered her unique in her century. It was said of her contemptuously at times that she was a do-gooder, a charge leveled with similar derision against another public figure 1,962 years ago.

“Her life was crowded, restless, fearless. Perhaps she pitied most not those whom she aided in the struggle, but the more fortunate who were preoccupied with themselves and cursed the self-deceptions of private success. She walked in the slums and ghettos of the of the world, not on a tour of inspection, nor as a condescending patron, but as one who could not feel complacent while others were hungry, and who could not find contentment while others were in distress. This was not a sacrifice; this, for Mrs. Roosevelt, was the only meaningful way to live. . . .

“Eleanor Roosevelt’s childhood was unhappy – miserably unhappy, she sometimes said. But it was Eleanor Roosevelt who also said that ‘one must never, for whatever reason, turn (one’s) back on life.” She did not mean that duty should compel us. She meant that life should. ‘Life,’ she said, ‘was meant to be lived.’ A simple statement. An obvious statement. But a statement that by its obviousness and its simplicity challenges the most intricate of all the philosophies of despair. . . .