By Catherine Ulrich Brakefield
In my September 16th blog post, “Courage More Exhilarating than Fear” Eleanor and Franklin chose not to divorce, to mend their differences, and live with each other’s faults. Now with this new disease, polio, raising its ugly head, Eleanor urged Franklin not to give in to self-pity, and continue his political career.
Eleanor worked diligently to help her husband win the governorship of New York. With the help from her grassroots connections, Franklin was elected governor of New York in 1928.
Now that he was elected, Eleanor’s duties and workload doubled. She had promised to be his eyes and feet. This did not come easy. She loved helping her husband however, she missed being as close to her children as she once was. Meeting people and being involved in projects daily took its toll.
She pressed on and earned many strong supporters, one of whom was newspaper reporter Lorena Alice Hickok, he had earned the nickname “Hick.” His endorsement and encouragement helped Eleanor start writing the column, My Day.
Through her column, she encouraged her readers to write to her. She received hundreds of thousands of letters and did her best to reply to them.
Eleanor felt Americans’ needs deeply and heard their voices. Nor was she shy, nor did she hesitate to whisper her information into the ear of the governor.
Franklin listened to her. After all, she had known him longer than any of his constituents. Franklin knew he could trust her more than anyone else.
Her work as a grassroots activist and settlement worker was an asset. Her enthusiasm, zeal, and dedication allowed Franklin to see, through his mind’s eye, New York’s problems clearly and what needed to be done for the suffering citizens.
October 29, 1929, came in with a punch in the gut to every American. The stock market crash on October 29th, was known as Black Friday. This depression continued through the late 1930s and as I say in my novel Waltz with Destiny, wages remained low throughout the early 1940s.
Americans never experienced such want. History books would record this period as the Great Depression. No statesman had ever experienced a desolation of this magnitude. President Herbert Hoover did his best. But it was time to give someone else a chance to help those floundering in the sea of depression America found itself swimming in.
As I explained in Destiny of Heart, those who owned their homes often rented out rooms to pay for their taxes. Those who did not own their homes were sometimes forced to pack up what belongings they could on their automobiles, live out of them or find a place to live and work.
Whenever people are caught in the throngs of confusion, the ugly head of socialism and communism will rear its deceptive head. Widespread unemployment and poverty prompted the attraction of Marxism. Many viewed socialism and communism as a remedy for their woes and economic struggles. Little did anyone know how treacherous these ideologies were. Nor that in the 1940s World War II would awaken the world to the need to fight for the very freedom they once took for granted!
When the presidential election season rolled in, Franklin’s bold words “there is nothing to fear but fear itself” gave hopeless Americans new hope in Franklin’s “New Deal,” which Eleanor’s influence helped her husband draft. This “New Deal”, propelled Franklin into the presidency in 1936.
Eleanor would write in My Day, “We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face…we must do that which we think we cannot.”
Waltz with Destiny: Esther (McConnell) Meir finds herself in a story-book romance that swirls into a rendezvous with destiny when Eric Erhardt is swept up into Hitler's diabolical war. Eric wages his battle for survival as a rifleman in the 34th Infantry Division traveling up the boot of Italy—.
"…of Waltz with Destiny… I was reading Capt. Kimble’s words about D-Day… the music I had going started playing “God Bless the USA.” Goose bumps popped up all down my arms and legs, and I’m sitting here with tears in my eyes. The message of the Destiny series is even more applicable to today than when it first released…" Debra B.
Catherine is the award-winning author of Wilted
Dandelions, Swept into Destiny, Destiny’s Whirlwind, Destiny of Heart, Waltz with Destiny, and Love's Final Sunrise. She has written two pictorial history books, The Lapeer Area and Eastern Lapeer, and short stories for Guideposts Books, CrossRiver Media Group, Revell Books, and Bethany House Publishers. Catherine and her husband of fifty-three years live on a ranch in Michigan and have two adult children, five grandchildren, four Arabian horses, two dogs, two cats, one bunny, and six chickens. See CatherineUlrichBrakefield.com for more information.
See previous Roosevelt posts for previous references of these blogs.
No comments:
Post a Comment