Casting Her Own Shadow: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of Postwar Liberalism

In Casting Her Own Shadow, historian Allida Black chronicles Eleanor Roosevelt's considerable---if often unacknowledged---influence on liberal politics. Throughout her adult life, Roosevelt campaigned for civil rights and women's issues, conducting a vigorous campaign of editorials in publications like Redbook and The New York Times to advance the causes she espoused. She enjoyed a huge following, Black notes, not least because her writing was commonsensical and good-humored, even when Roosevelt was clearly irritated. "I am beginning to think," she once observed, for instance, "that if you have been a liberal, and if you believe that those who are strong must sometimes consider the weak, and that with strength and power goes responsibility, automatically some people will consider you a Communist." Better known than her husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when he entered national politics, Eleanor managed to keep her own identity even as his advisors urged her to keep a lower profile and stay out of the news. What bearing does all this have on the present? Well, this is a matter being played out even now in Washington, for no one quite resembles Roosevelt so much as Hillary Clinton, whose work as a politician and newspaper columnist echoes Roosevelt's---and who has been similarly reviled for expressing independent ideas.