No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II

We do not have to become heroes overnight,” Eleanor once wrote. “Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appears, discovering that we have the strength to stare it down.

She feared that she would become a slave to superficial, symbolic duties.

If I wasn't busy," she replied, "I'd go crazy.

The domestic scene,” she admitted, referring not only to the coal dispute but to a rash of racial disturbances that had recently broken out, “is anything but encouraging and one would like not to think about it, because it gives one a feeling that, as a whole, we are not really prepared for democracy.

FDR, even weakened and near the end of his life, opted to allow disabled veterans to see his true condition. This allowed them to understand the life which could still be before them.

The same magazines which not long before advertised products which would quickly allow women to return to their war work now extolled elaborate recipes which women could attempt if they stayed home and vacated jobs for men.

The habit of mobility had become ingrained.

Spring had come to Washington. The cherry blossoms were in bloom. Yet the glacial mood of the capital refused to melt. Accusations

If he could not go out into the world, the world could come to him.

The author writes that key FDR aide Harry Hopkins was in such poor health near the end of his boss's second term that one observer said he didn't know how Hopkins could possibly report to the president. But, at the onset of war and genuine national emergency, Hopkins was animated with a new sense of purpose.

We should constantly be reminded of what we owe in return for what we have.

Through the last days of May and the early days of June, Eleanor

Nothing so extraordinary has ever happened in American politics,” a dazed Harold Ickes wrote. “Here was a man—a Democrat until a couple of years ago—who, without any organization went into a Republican National Convention and ran away with the nomination for President .

Eleanor had defended over the years, that the money spent on arms would be much better spent on education and medical care.

On the morning of June 20, at a hastily arranged conference at New York’s Gramercy Park Hotel, a new umbrella organization was born with Eleanor as honorary chair—the U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children. The purpose of the new committee was to coordinate all the different agencies and resources available in the United States for the care of refugee children.