She treated all the world as her own personal slum project

From A torch kept lit: great lives of the twentieth century by William F. Buckley, Jr., a collection of obituaries.  I came across his obituary for Eleanor Roosevelt early today.  A sizzler.  He apparently wrote of her often, critical of a naive and uninformed desire to do good without her knowing the how of doing good.  The term was not in use at the time, but he was criticizing her for her pathological altruism, "altruism in which attempts to promote the welfare of others instead result in unanticipated harm."

I have read dozens of articles about or related to Eleanor Roosevelt but I have little comprehensive knowledge of her life.  My anecdotal knowledge holds about as much weight as what I have read.

Anecdote 1:  The story is retailed within the family of my father in his childhood who had an ugly tortoise whom, because of its appearance, he named Eleanor.  This in a working class Democratic family, in a Democratic neighborhood in a Democratic town.  He was young enough for it to be passed over as childish humor.

Anecdote 2:  My uncle born in 1921, was twelve or fourteen years old when he had the opportunity to travel with the Boy Scouts from the midwest to Washington, D.C. circa 1933-5.  He was a keen amateur photographer and lugged his boxy photographic paraphernalia with him to the nation's capital.  

At one point, they were to visit a hotel where FDR was to give a speech.  Taking into account the light and his film and the angles, he set himself up with his camera to take the great man's picture when he arrived.  

In the event, it was not FDR but Eleanor who arrived.  Her car swept up right in front of my uncle, getting ready to take the picture.  Out stepped Eleanor who brushed by him with a curt "Get out of my way little boy" or words to that effect.  

Many decades later my sweet mother, my uncle's youngest sister, still relayed that account with a certain suppressed anger.  Her brother rated far higher in her estimation than the putative great Eleanor.

It took a while but I found Buckley's full obituary of Eleanor Roosevelt.  Much of his language and criticism holds as true today of our current batch of well but naively intended progressives who almost always make things worse.  But with great emotional confidence in their actions.  

From A Torch Kept Lit.  With an introduction from the editor.

How, in retrospect, did National Review go seven whole issues before taking on Eleanor Roosevelt?  The former first lady represented just about everything Buckley, his family, and his fellow editors abhorred about midcentury America.  In the eighth issue, which hit the newsstands in January 1956, WFB set to work.  The pretext was Mrs. Roosevelt's joining in a petition that urged President Eisenhower, in the spirit of Christmas, to grant clemency to sixteen leaders of the Communist Party serving prison sentences under the Smith Act.  Buckley reminded Mrs. Roosevelt that the anti-sedition law had been signed "during the reign of" her late husband, President Franklin Roosevelt, and that much of her latter career had constituted an “indirect” rebuke of FDR's legacy.  Galled that the petitioners, including prominent socialists, had claimed to be motivated “by their intellectual attachment to the democratic way of life," WFB argued that the petition in fact "discloses a deep contempt for the democratic way of life.... Those who are prepared to defend democracy must be prepared to execute democracy's decisions."  As a woman, a former first lady, and an intellectual darling of the Eastern Establishment, Eleanor Roosevelt presented an especially tricky target for WFB and other conservatives in the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, when she used her newspaper column and television appearances to advance causes she had championed, in some cases for decades: civil rights and humanitarianism, the value of the United Nations, the imperative of negotiating with the Soviet Union.  To Buckley, she embodied the worst of what in subsequent decades would be called political correctness: the mindless application to every issue of a platitudinous egalitarianism whose practical effect invariably is to expand the reach of totalitarianism.  Amid the tributes that poured in from around the world, the critical treatment in WFB's eulogy below surely stood out; dissenting from the beatification of Eleanor Roosevelt was "standing athwart history" in its rawest form.  But it paid handsome dividends historically: At their very first meeting, in 1961, a random encounter at a restaurant, the very first thing that Ronald Reagan said to WFB was to quote, with relish, one of his recent wisecracks about Eleanor Roosevelt. 

 

"Mrs. Roosevelt, RIP" 

Notional Review, January 29, 2963. 

(signed by 'Wm, F. Buckley Jr .)

I have been sharply reminded that I have not written about [the death of] Mrs. Roosevelt, and that only a coward would use the excuse that when she died, he was in Africa.  There, there are lions and tigers and apartheid.  Here, there was Mrs. Roosevelt to write about.  Africa was the safer place. 

People get very sore when you knock the old lady.  And it isn't just the widow who thinks of Mrs. Roosevelt as the goddess who saved her children from getting rickets during the Depression.  It is also the Left — intellectuals.  "When are you going to stop picking on Mrs. Roosevelt?" a very learned writer asked me at a reception a few years ago after one of my books was published.  (I had a sentence in it that annoyed him, something like, "Following Mrs. Roosevelt in search of irrationality is like following a lighted fuse in search of an explosion: one never has to wait very long.")  I answered: "When you begin picking on her."  I meant by that that people are best reformed by those they will listen to.  Westbrook Pegler could never reform Mrs. Roosevelt, or her legend.  But Adlai Stevenson, or Max Lerner, might have.

A GREAT MIND? 

The obituary notices on Mrs. Roosevelt were as one in granting her desire to do good — she treated all the world as her own personal slum project; and all the papers, of course, remarked on that fabulous energy — surely she was the very first example of the peacetime use of atomic energy.  But some publications (I think especially of Time) went so far as to say she had a great mind.  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of Euclid. 

Does it matter?  Alas, it happens to matter very much.  For Mrs. Roosevelt stamped upon her age a mode.  Or, it might be said by those who prefer to put it that way, that in Mrs. Roosevelt the age developed its perfect symbol.  Hers is the age of undifferentiated goodness, of permissive egalitarianism.  Mrs. Roosevelt's approach to human problems, so charming in its Franciscan naivete, was simply: do away with them — by the most obvious means.  The way to cope with Russia is to negotiate. ...  The way for everyone to be free in the world is to tell the UN to free everyone. ...  The way to solve the housing shortage is for the government to build more houses. ... 

All that is more than Mrs. Roosevelt writing a column.  It is a way of life.  Based, essentially, on unreason; on the leaving out of the concrete, complex factor, which is why they call it "undifferentiated" goodness.  Negotiation with Russia, you see, implies there is something we are, or should be, prepared to yield. ...  And everyone in the world cannot be free so long as freedoms are used by whole nations to abuse the peoples of other nations or the freedoms of their own people. ...  Latin American poverty is something that grows out of the pores of Latin American institutions and appetites, and cannot be seriously ameliorated by mere transfusions of American cash. ...  And the way to get houses built is to reduce their cost, so that poor people can buy them, without paying crippling wages to monopoly labor unions, or crippling prices to manufacturing concerns that have to pay the taxes of a government which among other things decides it needs to get into the housing business. ...

PRINCIPAL BEQUEST 

Mrs. Roosevelt's principal bequest, her most enduring bequest, was the capacity so to oversimplify problems as to give encouragement to those who wish to pitch the nation and the world onto humanitarian crusades which, because they fail to take reality into account, end up plunging people into misery (as Wilson's idealistic imperialism plunged Europe into misery for years, and spawned Hitler), and messing up the world in general (under whose statecraft did Stalin prosper?).  Above all it was Mrs. Roosevelt who, on account of her passion for the non sequitur, deeply wounded the processes of purposive political thought.  "Over whatever subject, plan, or issue Mrs. Roosevelt touches." Professor James Burnham once wrote, "she spreads a squidlike ink of directionless feeling.  All distinctions are blurred, all analysis fouled, and in the murk clear thought is forever impossible."

Some day in the future, a Liberal scholar will write a definitive thesis exploring the cast of Mrs. Roosevelt's mind by a textual analysis of her thought; and then history will be able to distinguish between a great woman with a great heart, and a woman of perilous intellectual habit.  "With all my heart and soul," her epitaph should read, "I fought the syllogism."  And with that energy and force, she wounded it, almost irretrievably — how often have you seen the syllogism checking in at the office for a full day's work lately?