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 >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • 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
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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 Two

                                               "Young Eleanor Roosevelt" courtesy of the Wiki Commons

The Christian life and spirit of the parents, which are in and by the Spirit of Gods, shall flow into the mind of the child.
- Horace Bushnell, Christian Nurture

Chapter 2: The Legacy

Picture
"Elliot and Anna Hall Roosevelt" courtesy of the Wiki Commons

Summary

The troubled childhood of Eleanor Roosevelt was marked by a series of deaths, first her Mother Anna, her Brother Elliot Jr, and then finally her father.   Eleanor learns to live with death by confronting it head-on.  The events of a few short years would shape her character in the decades to come.  The sad events of these years are what make up the second chapter. 

Author reads from the Text

An Abingdon newspaper summarized local feeling for Elliot by saying, "His name was a byword among the needy."  Florance Sherman wrote his sister, lamenting his loss. "He was so strong," she said, "and had such a gay, sweet nature."  Even the boatman, who had met Elliot only once when he had taken him with Mrs. Sherman for a sail, had been drawn to him.  When Florence Sherman said he was dead, the boatman replied simply, "That's wrong."

It was wrong for Elliot to have died, Mrs. Sherman thought.  Elliot had been exiled for reasons that made sense to Victorian moralists, but she viewed the situation differently, seeing Elliot as a tender man who missed his family.  He loved his children, "and ought to have been with them," she said.  Elliot was dead, but something in him deserved to live.  "See to it that he does not lose the place he deserves in his children's lives," she urged.  A year later she wrote again.  "I have been sadly wondering about his children," she said, "if they are well and strong and inherit anything of his charm."

Eleanor had begun to adjust to her father's death.  She was accustomed to change, having lost her mother, father, and brother in less than two years.  Only recently everything the world could offer had been hers: loving parents, houses in the city and country, pets and toys.  One by one the pillars of that world had fallen.  She adjusted, making do with less while dreaming of more.  On learning of her father's death she pressed her regret into one pathetic sentence.  "I did want," she said, "to see my father once more." 

Links
  • Web-sources
  • Study Questions
  • Quizlet
  • Outline

Chapter 1: A Victorian Family
Eleanor Roosevelt Main Page
Chapter 3: Growing Up