American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
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    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
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      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
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      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map
  J. William T. "Bill" Youngs, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life, Chapter Three

                      "Portrait of Young Eleanor Roosevelt" courtesy of the National Archives

Mlle. Souvestre shocked me into thinking, and that on the whole was very beneficial.
- Eleanor Roosevelt, This is My Story

Chapter 3: Growing Up

Picture
"Young Eleanor Roosevelt" courtesy of the Wiki Commons

Summary

For an orphaned child, Eleanor Roosevelt had great opportunities and privileges.  She enjoyed an education in England and enjoyed a young life abroad.  This section focuses on her youth and education.  

Author reads from the Text

She Realized, of course, that not everyone was wealthy.  In her idyllic realm, however, even the poor seemed content to respect and serve the rich.  they were friendly servants in her grandmother's kitchen, a nice colored peddler who sold his wares on the train, and the slum children who were so appreciative when she and her aunts and uncles gave them Christmas presents and sang them carols.  Eleanor probably never stopped to wonder whether these people ever longed for smart carriages and country estates of their own, or why she had received such treasures and they had not.  She knew only the world as it was.  

One day, then she was about twelve, she glimpsed another world, where people were poor and desperate.  She was riding in a horse-drawn stage with her governess.  Suddenly a wretched-looking man jumped on the car and tried to snatch the purse form a woman nearby.  Failing, he jumped back to the street and ran through the crowd followed by shouts of "stop thief."  Eleanor was so shocked she jumped out of the moving stage and stood dumbfounded in the street until her maid came running and scolding after her.  She got back in the car and went on to her French lesson; but all that day and for months to come she was disturbed by "the face of that poor, haunted man."

That face had no place in Eleanor's childhood domain.  She would not really understand the man's desperation until two decades later when her own world collapsed around her.  


Links
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  • Study Questions
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Chapter 2: The Legacy
Eleanor Roosevelt Main Page
Chapter 4: Eleanor and Franklin