| The U.S. election, you may have heard, is less than three weeks away. Should Kamala Harris win, she’ll make history in a variety of ways, including as the first woman and the first person of Asian ancestry to serve as President. She would also become the first Commander-in-Chief married to a first gentleman. If Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, gets the job, he’d do well to consider the legacy of Eleanor Roosevelt, arguably the most influential first spouse to precede him. In 1948, The New Yorker’s E. J. Kahn published a two-part Profile of Roosevelt, whose time in Washington had ended, three years earlier, with the death of her husband, F.D.R. Rather than fade into the background, Roosevelt “spiritedly, and characteristically, upset the longstanding American tradition that the widows of Presidents should be rarely seen and practically never heard,” Kahn wrote. Instead, the sixty-three-year-old had become more publicly engaged than ever, serving as the “chairman,” in Kahn’s phrase, of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, and publishing a syndicated newspaper column on the side. Widely known as “Mrs. R.,” she generally struck a diplomatic tone, but could be feisty when something, such as Soviet relations, required it. Her approach earned admiration in surprising quarters—including among the sorts of Republicans who had opposed her husband, and also, Kahn reported, from one of America’s staunchest enemies overseas. “There’s no getting around the fact that Eleanor Roosevelt is still the first lady of this country,” a Democratic official said at the time. According to others, Kahn noted, “she can be even more aptly termed the first lady of the world.” | 
No comments:
Post a Comment