Earlier we were speaking of the polio diagnosis of President Franklin Roosevelt. Now let’s chat a bit about the stamina of his wife, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
For years, Eleanor wrote a syndicated newspaper column titled My Day. “For years” is underselling the thing: she knocked out this national column six days a week from 1936 until 1961. At that point, being 77 years old, she cut back to a mere three days a week, and kept it up until just a few weeks before her death on November 7, 1962. For the first nine years, she was writing the column while she was First Lady. It was a pace that would have worn out many a grizzled old newspaperman with suspenders over his shoulders and a cigar in his mouth.
What did Mrs. Roosevelt write about? Just about everything. Sometimes she cracked on the terrible conditions at a school for delinquent girls (“badly heated, rat infested… children walled in like prisoners”), sometimes she mused on the Cold War or birth control in Japan, sometimes she just chatted about making supper.
George Washington University has done a remarkable job of indexing all her My Day columns by topic, by date, and more. Browsing through the years, this entry from 70 years ago — October 2, 1951 — caught our eye:
A verse in the Bible we very seldom hear was used as a text in the morning sermon. Evidently back in Bible days there were people who thought the “good old days” were better than the present. This must always have been a way of escape for some of us. If life seemed particularly hard, all we had to do was to say how much better it used to be, and how dreadful it was to be born in a generation that had to endure all the modern horrors.
On all sides we often hear: “The young people are worse today than ever before“; “We used to get on well without all these modern inventions, which get out of order to make our lives hideous“; “When there weren’t any automobiles you could not go dashing around the country at high speed and suffering accidents“; “We did not have a crime wave or dope rings in the old days—they are all the product of the modern age.”
…There are fewer drunken men reeling around the streets today than there were when I was a child. It seems to me that each age has its own drawbacks and they have to be met by the people confronting them. If you look back over several decades you can usually see how some people have done a good job in meeting the difficulties of their particular time and how some have failed.
She might as well have been talking about today, eh? “All these modern inventions, which get out of order to make our lives hideous” — how many thousands of times a day is this said about mobile phones, the Internet, leaf blowers, SUVs, or Twitter?
Old Mrs. Roosevelt was right: each age has its drawbacks to be dealt with. If ours seem unusually hard to us — from Covid to climate change — well, it was ever thus. “Some people have done a good job in meeting the difficulties of their particular time and some have failed.”
And though it may not always seem like it, there are fewer drunken men reeling around the streets today than 100 years ago. Progress!