Of the several refugee camps that Eleanor toured the most memorable was Zilcheim, a Jewish camp outside Frankfurt, where the refugees had built an earthen hill on top of which they placed a stone monument "To the Memory of All Jews Who Died in Germany." As a young woman Eleanor had disdained Jews, but her attitude had changed with her personal growth. Her journey into humanity made her more sensitive to the needs of women and blacks and taught her to recognize the dignity and the suffering of Jews in America and abroad. At the beginning of the war, she had urged Franklin to receive more Jewish refugees into the United States. Now she was standing among the survivors of the holocaust.

Eleanor could see grief in the faces of the men and women in the Jewish camp; each "seemed to represent a story more tragic than the last." An old woman who had lost her family knelt in the mud before Eleanor and threw her arms around her legs. "Israel," she murmured, "Israel, Israel." A boy of twelve approached Eleanor. He had wandered into the camp holding his younger brother, about six, firmly by the hand. He did not know his own name, or where he lived, or what had happened to his parents. "He was just there," Eleanor wrote, "taking care of his younger brother." He wanted to sing for her, and so she and her guides stopped to listen. Then standing in the mud of the dirty refugee camp the orphan raised his small head and sang" A Song of Freedom." For a moment all the world was that small boy, and "no one listening could speak." Eleanor, who had been an orphan when she was twelve, with a younger brother, in a place that was not home, listened intently to the song that was sung for her.... 

At various times in the more than 100 years that have elapsed since the song was written, particularly during the John F. Kennedy administration, there have been efforts to give "America the Beautiful" legal status either as a national hymn, or as a national anthem equal to, or in place of, "The Star-Spangled Banner," but so far this has not succeeded. Proponents prefer "America the Beautiful" for various reasons, saying it is easier to sing, more melodic, and more adaptable to new orchestrations while still remaining as easily recognizable as "The Star-Spangled Banner." Some prefer "America the Beautiful" over "The Star-Spangled Banner" due to the latter's war-oriented imagery. Others prefer "The Star-Spangled Banner" for the same reason. While that national dichotomy has stymied any effort at changing the tradition of the national anthem, "America the Beautiful" continues to be held in high esteem by a large number of Americans.

Tuesday, Dec 30th, 1851

This afternoon being on fair Haven Hill I heard the sound of a saw-and soon after from the cliff saw two men sawing down a noble pine beneath about 40 rods off. I resolved to watch it till it fell-the last of a dozen or more which were left when the forest was cut and for 15 years have waved in solitary majesty over the sproutland. I saw them like beavers or insects gnawing at the trunk of this noble tree, the diminutive mannikins with their crosscut saw which could scarcely span it. It towered up a hundred feet as I afterward found by measurement-one of the tallest probably now in the township & straight as an arrow, but slanting a little toward the hill side. -its top seen against the frozen river & the hills of Conantum. I watch closely to see when it begins to move. Now the sawers stop-and with an axe open it a little on the side toward which it leans that it may break the faster. And now their saw goes again- Now surely it is going-it is inclined one quarter of the quadrant, and breathless I expect its crashing fall- But no I was mistaken it has not moved an inch, it stands at the same angle as at first. It is 15 minutes yet to its fall. Still its branches wave in the wind as if it were destined to stand for a century, and the wind soughs through its needles as of yore; it is still a forest tree-the most majestic tree that waves over Musketaquid. - The silvery sheen of the sunlight is reflected from its needles-it still affords an inaccessible crotch for the squirrel's nest-not a lichen has forsaken its mastlike stem- -its raking mast-the hill is the hull. Now's the moment-the mannikins at its base are fleeing from their crime-they have dropped the guilty saw & axe. How slowly & majestically it starts-as if it were only swayed by a summer breeze and would return without a sigh to its location in the air-& now it fans the hill side with its fall and it lies down to its bed in the valley from which it is never to rise, as softly as a feather, folding its green mantle about it like a warrior-as if tired of standing it embraced the earth with silent joy. - returning its elements to the dust again-but hark! there you only saw-but did not hear- There now comes up a deafening crash to these rocks-advertising you that even trees do not die without a groan. It rushes to embrace the earth, & mingle its elements with the dust. And now all is still once more & forever both to eye & ear.

I went down and measured it. It was about 4 feet in diameter where it was sawed-about 100 feet long. Before I had reached it-the axe-men had already half divested it of its branches. Its gracefully spreading top was a perfect wreck on the hill side as if it had been made of glass-& the tender cones of one years growth upon its summit appealed in vain & too late to the mercy of the chopper. Already he has measured it with his axe-and marked out the mill logs it will make. And the space it occupied in upper air is vacant for the next 2 centuries. It is lumber He has laid waste the air. When the fish hawk in the spring revisits the banks of the Musketaquid, he will circle in vain to find his accustomed perch. - & the henhawk will mourn for the pines lofty enough to protect her brood. A plant which it has taken two centuries to perfect rising by slow stages into the heavens-has this afternoon ceased to exist. Its sapling top had expanded to this January thaw as the forerunner of summers to come. Why does not the village bell sound a knell. I hear no knell tolled-I see no procession of mourners in the streets--or the woodland aisles- The squirrel has leapt to another tree--the hawk has circled further off-& has now settled upon a new eyre but the woodman is preparing to lay his axe at the root of that also. 

The week of January 6, 1884 brought winter to New York. An ocean steamer came into port from the icy North Atlantic, her sides covered with a frozen waterfall of spray, her ice-coated rigging sparkling with rainbow colors. On the streets omnibus drivers shivered in the open air beneath blankets, overcoats, caps, and mittens. Newsboys poorly clad, some wearing carpets, sacking, or newspapers bundled around their waists for insulation, danced the sailor's hornpipe for warmth while waiting for the wagon with the five o'clock edition.

Anna and Elliott left no written record of their activities during the week of January 6, 1884. But the weather must have drawn them out to enjoy sleigh-riding on colder days, and pressed them closer to the fire in the evenings. They had been married for six weeks and had begun to know one another as lovers. Anna may have been frightened by the strangeness of sex - Victorian women were not expected to enjoy love as unabashedly as their great-granddaughters of a century later. But physical contact must have extended the personal intimacy of previous months, and during the winter of 1884 they conceived their first child.

The days grew longer. Crocuses and sweet-smelling hyacinths pushed through the ground. On Bedloe's Island an army of Italian workmen raised blocks of stone onto a huge pedestal. For eight years there had been stories about a gigantic statue coming to New York from France. Curiosity had turned to skepticism, but now the platform made tangible the promise of a figure representing liberty soon to grace the harbor.

In June the muggy heat of summer enveloped New York. Anna and Elliott attended horse shows and polo matches, visited friends on the Hudson, and vacationed in Newport. In that favored place they sipped tea with the Vanderbilts and dined aboard the Morgan yacht. Anna's pregnancy was beginning to show, and during the summer she and Elliott began to feel the child's movements. As the days shortened and the time for Anna's delivery drew near, the young couple's anticipation was tainted with fear. Children were still delivered at home in the 1880s, and death in childbed was common. Only a few months before, Elliott's sister-in-law, Alice Roosevelt, had died after giving birth to a baby girl.

On October 11 Anna's frame was wracked with pain. Elliott must have waited apprehensively outside the room where his wife, attended by a physician or midwife, struggled with the delivery. Elliott may have heard frenzied movements and a baby's cry. Finally he was told: he was the father of a baby girl, and mother and child were doing well. Relieved, he was allowed to see his daughter, soon to be known as Eleanor. He called her" a miracle from heaven." 

The infant Eleanor was probably turned over to a wet nurse, for children of the upper classes were usually not nursed by their own mothers. A few days later she was clothed in a long white christening dress and baptized. Elliott's brother, Teddy, was her godfather. 

On the day when Eleanor Roosevelt was born the Civil War was only two decades past, Custer's defeat at the Little Big Horn had occurred only eight years before, and the last Indian Wars had yet to be fought. There were no automobiles and few telephones or electric lights, and New York was a city of five-story buildings lit by gas. A schooner coming into New York would have found a harbor full of sails. Fishing sloops darted across the bay; majestic iron ships under billowing canvas glided on the breezes; and flat side-wheeled ferry boats crowded with horses and carriages paddled back and forth between New York and New Jersey. Manhattan appeared as a wedge of land in the emerald waters of the bay. On the waterfront a latticework of timber, the spars of ships, framed row upon row of warehouses, stores, and office buildings. Flat facades of wood and brick rose to five stories above the water as far as the eye could see. 

Eleanor was confident of her parents' love. In the mornings she came to her father's dressing room and chattered to him and danced in circles. Then he complained that she made him dizzy and tossed her high in the air. She called herself "father's little golden hair." As Elliott tucked her into bed on the night of her fourth birthday, she told him, "I love everybody, and everybody loves me." Such a cunning, funny little tot, Elliott thought.

On October 1, 1889, when Eleanor was nearly five, Anna gave birth to a second child, Elliott, Jr., who was nicknamed Ellie. Eleanor learned about her new brother while visiting her grandmother at Tivoli. Undeterred by this possible rival, she dictated a letter to her father. What did her brother look like, she asked. Some people said a bunny, others an elephant. She hoped he did not cry, but if he did, she advised, Elliott should have the nurse "give him a tap, tap." She closed, "I love you very much and mother and brother too if he has blue eyes." 

On the tenth of February 1675, came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster: their first coming was about sunrising; hearing the noise of some guns, we looked out; several houses were burning, and the smoke ascending to heaven, and There were five persons taken in one house, the father, the mother and a sucking child, they knocked on the head; the other two they took and carried away alive. There were two others, who being out of their garrison upon some occasion were set upon; one was knocked on the head, the other escaped; another there was who running along was shot and wounded, and fell down; he begged of them his life, promising them money (as they told me) but they would not hearken to him but knocked him in head, and stripped him naked, and split open his bowels. Another, seeing many of the Indians about his barn, ventured and went out, but was quickly shot down. There were three others belonging to the same garrison who were killed; the Indians getting up upon the roof of the barn, had advantage to shoot down upon them over their fortification. Thus these murderous wretches went on, burning, and destroying before them.

Some in our house were fighting for their lives, others wallowing in their blood, the house on fire over our heads, and the bloody heathen ready to knock us on the head, if we stirred out. Now might we hear mothers and children crying out for themselves, and one another, "Lord, what shall we do?" Then I took my children (and one of my sisters', hers) to go forth and leave the house: but as soon as we came to the door and appeared, the Indians shot so thick that the bullets rattled against the house, as if one had taken an handful of stones and threw them, so that we were fain to give back.... But out we must go, the fire increasing, and coming along behind us, roaring, and the Indians gaping before us with their guns, spears, and hatchets to devour us.

Visiting an Extraordinary College Graduation with Words, Images, and Music

Booker T. Washington and the Hampton Experience

Out of deference to their southern masters, and perhaps from fear of punishment, they did not openly express their northern sympathies. But their excitement grew with each year of the war. Washington remembered awakening one night in his bed of rags and seeing his mother kneeling over her three children praying for the success of Lincoln’s armies. The yearning for freedom pulsed through the slave quarters. Night after night blacks stayed up late to sing their plantation songs, which contained words about freedom. The slaves had once associated these words—for their master’s benefit—with the next world, but now the songs took on a new, bolder tone; the slaves “were not afraid to let it be known that the ‘freedoms’ in these songs meant freedom of the body in this world.”    

As the school appeared before him, he was struck with wonder. The academic building was an imposing three-story edifice. Undoubtedly he had seen larger buildings in Richmond, but none dedicated to the education of his people. “It seemed to me,” he later recalled, “to be the largest and most beautiful building I had ever seen.”

His three years at the Hampton Institute were spent in rigorous physical and intellectual labor. The students arose at 5:00 a.m. and were inspected for dress and grooming forty-five minutes later. At 6:00 a.m. they had breakfast, then prayers and room inspection. Classes and study hall occupied most of the remainder of the day. The curriculum included reading, geography, history, algebra, government, natural science, and moral philosophy. Hampton was a trade school as well as an academy, and the students worked as waiters, farmers, janitors, carpenters, painters, printers, and shoemakers. 

There was much to like about Hampton and many men and women to admire on the faculty. Above all, there was the head of the school, Gen. Samuel Chapman Armstrong, of whom Washington said, “I never saw a man who so completely lost sight of himself.” Armstrong was a slender, soldierly man who had risen to command as a youth in his twenties during the Civil War. A northern idealist, he had resigned from the army after the war in order to devote his life to the education of the former slaves. As the school’s head he seemed to embody its emphasis on hard work, liberal intelligence, and moral rectitude. The students were so devoted to him that one winter when the men’s dormitory became overcrowded, almost everyone in one class volunteered to sleep outside in tents. Each morning during that cold season the general came by the tents to see how the men were doing, and out of loyalty to him they never admitted their acute discomfort in the canvas dwellings. Armstrong became like a father to Washington, helping the young man with his career and providing a role model for his work as an educator.

Commencement Ceremonies at Hampton Institute, 1875 -- First Glance

The promise and achievement of the Hampton Institute was symbolized by the commencement exercises in June 1875, an impressive event attended by both black and white observers, including journalists from northern newspapers and magazines. Several students recited poetry, and a chorus sang “Farewell My Own True Love” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” Seniors read their essays on “Beauty,” “Compulsory Education,” and “The Black Man as a Voter and Citizen.” Washington and another student debated “The Annexation of Cuba,” Washington taking the negative side and impressing several reporters with his forceful oratory and keen logic.

The most engaging performance of all was a lecture on slave music by a student, Joseph B. Towe. A reporter from the Springfield Daily Republican was spellbound by the presentation. “The writer,” he said, “himself brimful of song, a powerful soloist, with a voice of wonderful sweetness, took us back into the past of slavery, and even further back, into Africa itself, for the original sources of this strange music.” Towe described the work songs of his own plantation days “when the fields were full of music.” Slave soloists were especially important, leading the field hands in song. They drew a large price from plantation owners, “for it paid well in the increased amount of work when the air was alive with work songs.” Towe remembered one soloist, John Jones, who could speak an African language.

He recalled the cadences and variations of the work songs. “I will give you an instance,” he said, and a chorus of students began to sing. The music, born in Africa, nourished through generations of slavery, uttered now by a chorus of young emancipated black students, swelled through the auditorium. Towe continued his lecture, pausing again and again while the students illustrated his points with song. The audience was entranced, and even former secessionists congratulated the school for its fine program.

Booker T. Washington’s career at Hampton ended in a celebration of his people’s past achievements, current attainments, and future hopes.... 

It was a historical and illustrated analysis of the plantation music. The writer, himself brimful of song, a powerful soloist, with a voice of wonderful sweetness, took us back into the past of slavery, and even further back, into Africa itself, for the original sources of this strange music. It flowed straight from the invisible fountains of the heart, its joy or sorrow leaping forth into music.