title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In August 1921, the family was vacationing at Campobello Island, New Brunswick, Canada, when Franklin was diagnosed with a paralytic illness, at the time believed to be polio. During the illness, through her nursing care, Roosevelt probably saved Franklin from death. His legs remained permanently paralyzed. When the extent of his disability became clear, Roosevelt fought a protracted battle with her mother-in-law over his future, persuading him to stay in politics despite Sara's urgings that he retire and become a country gentleman. Franklin's attending physician, Dr. William Keen, commended Roosevelt's devotion to the stricken Franklin during the time of his travail. "You have been a rare wife and have borne your heavy burden most bravely," he said, proclaiming her "one of my heroines".


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: This proved a turning point in Eleanor and Sara's long-running struggle, and as Eleanor's public role grew, she increasingly broke from Sara's control. Tensions between Sara and Eleanor over her new political friends rose to the point that the family constructed a cottage at Val-Kill, in which Eleanor and her guests lived when Franklin and the children were away from Hyde Park. Roosevelt herself named the place Val-Kill, loosely translated as "waterfall-stream" from the Dutch language common to the original European settlers of the area. Franklin encouraged his wife to develop this property as a place where she could implement some of her ideas for work with winter jobs for rural workers and women. Each year, when Roosevelt held a picnic at Val-Kill for delinquent boys, her granddaughter Eleanor Roosevelt Seagraves assisted her. She was close to her grandmother throughout her life. Seagraves concentrated her career as an educator and librarian on keeping alive many of the causes Roosevelt began and supported.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In 1924, she campaigned for Democrat Alfred E. Smith in his successful re-election bid as governor of New York State against the Republican nominee, her first cousin Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Theodore Jr. never forgave her. Eleanor's aunt, Anna "Bamie" Roosevelt Cowles, publicly broke with her after the election. She wrote to her niece, "I just hate to have Eleanor let herself look as she does. Though never handsome, she always had to me a charming effect, but alas and lackaday! Since politics have become her choicest interest all her charm has disappeared..." Roosevelt dismissed Bamie's criticisms by referring to her as an "aged woman". However, Bamie and Roosevelt eventually reconciled.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Theodore's elder daughter Alice also broke with Roosevelt over her campaign. Alice and her cousin reconciled after the latter wrote Alice a comforting letter upon the death of Alice's daughter, Paulina Longworth.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt and her daughter Anna became estranged after she took over some of her mother's social duties at the White House. The relationship was further strained because Roosevelt desperately wanted to go with her husband to Yalta in February 1945 (two months before FDR's death), but he took Anna instead. A few years later, the two were able to reconcile and cooperate on numerous projects. Anna took care of her mother when she was terminally ill in 1962.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt's son Elliott authored numerous books, including a mystery series in which his mother was the detective. However, these murder mysteries were researched and written by William Harrington. They continued until Harrington's death in 2000, ten years after Elliott's death. With James Brough, Elliott also wrote a highly personal book about his parents called "The Roosevelts of Hyde Park: An Untold Story", in which he revealed details about the sexual lives of his parents, including his father's relationships with mistress Lucy Mercer and secretary Marguerite ("Missy") LeHand, as well as graphic details surrounding the illness that crippled his father. Published in 1973, the biography also contains valuable insights into FDR's run for vice president, his rise to the governorship of New York, and his capture of the presidency in 1932, particularly with the help of Louis Howe. When Elliott published this book in 1973, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. led the family's denunciation of him; the book was fiercely repudiated by all Elliott's siblings. Another of the siblings, James, published "My Parents, a Differing View" (with Bill Libby, 1976), which was written in part as a response to Elliott's book. A sequel to "An Untold Story" with James Brough, published in 1975 and titled "A Rendezvous With Destiny", carried the Roosevelt saga to the end of World War II. "Mother R.: Eleanor Roosevelt's Untold Story", also with Brough, was published in 1977. "Eleanor Roosevelt, with Love: A Centenary Remembrance", came out in 1984.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In the 1930s, Roosevelt had a very close relationship with aviator Amelia Earhart (1897–1937). One time, the two snuck out from the White House and went to a party dressed up for the occasion. After flying with Earhart, Roosevelt obtained a student permit but did not further pursue her plans to learn to fly. Franklin was not in favor of his wife becoming a pilot. Nevertheless, the two women communicated frequently throughout their lives.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt also had a close relationship with Associated Press (AP) reporter Lorena Hickok (1893–1968), who covered her during the last months of the presidential campaign and "fell madly in love with her". During this period, Roosevelt wrote daily 10- to 15-page letters to "Hick", who was planning to write a biography of the First Lady. The letters included such endearments as, "I want to put my arms around you & kiss you at the corner of your mouth," and, "I can't kiss you, so I kiss your 'picture' good night and good morning!" At Franklin's 1933 inauguration, Roosevelt wore a sapphire ring Hickok had given her. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover despised Roosevelt's liberalism, her stance regarding civil rights, and criticisms of Hoover's surveillance tactics by both her and her husband, and so Hoover maintained a large file on Roosevelt, which the filmmakers of the biopic "J. Edgar" (2011) indicate included compromising evidence of this relationship, with which Hoover intended to blackmail Roosevelt. Compromised as a reporter, Hickok soon resigned her position with the AP to be closer to Roosevelt, who secured her a job as an investigator for a New Deal program.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: There is considerable debate about whether or not Roosevelt had a sexual relationship with Hickok. It was known in the White House press corps at the time that Hickok was a lesbian. Scholars, including Lillian Faderman and Hazel Rowley, have asserted that there was a physical component to the relationship, while Hickok biographer Doris Faber has argued that the insinuative phrases have misled historians. Doris Kearns Goodwin stated in her 1994 Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the Roosevelts that "whether Hick and Eleanor went beyond kisses and hugs" could not be determined with certainty. Roosevelt was close friends with several lesbian couples, such as Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, and Esther Lape and Elizabeth Fisher Read, suggesting that she understood lesbianism; Marie Souvestre, Roosevelt's childhood teacher and a great influence on her later thinking, was also a lesbian. Faber published some of Roosevelt and Hickok's correspondence in 1980, but concluded that the lovestruck phrasing was simply an "unusually belated schoolgirl crush" and warned historians not to be misled. Researcher Leila J. Rupp criticized Faber's argument, calling her book "a case study in homophobia" and arguing that Faber unwittingly presented "page after page of evidence that delineates the growth and development of a love affair between the two women". In 1992, Roosevelt biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook argued that the relationship was in fact romantic, generating national attention. A 2011 essay by Russell Baker reviewing two new Roosevelt biographies in the "New York Review of Books" ("Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage", by Hazel Rowley, and "Eleanor Roosevelt: Transformative First Lady", by Maurine H. Beasley) stated, "That the Hickok relationship was indeed erotic now seems beyond dispute considering what is known about the letters they exchanged."


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In the same years, Washington gossip linked Roosevelt romantically with New Deal administrator Harry Hopkins, with whom she worked closely. Roosevelt also had a close relationship with New York State Police sergeant Earl Miller, who was assigned by the president to be her bodyguard. Roosevelt was 44 years old when she met Miller, 32, in 1929. He became her friend as well as her official escort, teaching her different sports, such as diving and riding, and coached her in tennis. Biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook writes that Miller was Roosevelt's "first romantic involvement" in her middle years. Hazel Rowley concludes, "There is no doubt that Eleanor was in love with Earl for a time ... But they are most unlikely to have had an 'affair'."


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt's friendship with Miller occurred at the same time that her husband had a rumored relationship with his secretary, Marguerite "Missy" LeHand. Smith writes, "remarkably, both ER and Franklin recognized, accepted, and encouraged the arrangement... Eleanor and Franklin were strong-willed people who cared greatly for each other's happiness but realized their own inability to provide for it." Roosevelt and Miller's relationship is said to have continued until her death in 1962. They are thought to have corresponded daily, but all letters have been lost. According to rumor, the letters were anonymously purchased and destroyed, or locked away when she died.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt was a longtime friend of Carrie Chapman Catt and gave her the Chi Omega award at the White House in 1941.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Eleanor Roosevelt in private showed a revulsion against rich Jews in 1918, telling her mother-in-law the "Jew party [was] appalling... I never wish to hear money, jewels or sables mentioned again.". When she became co-owner of the Todhunter school in New York City, a limited number of Jews were admitted. Most students were upper-class Protestants, and Roosevelt said that the spirit of the school "would be different if we had too large a proportion of Jewish children." She said the problem is not just quantity but quality, since Jews were "very unlike ourselves" and had not yet become American enough. Her anti-Semitism gradually declined, especially as her friendship with Bernard Baruch grew. After World War II she became a staunch champion of Israel, which she admired for its commitment to New Deal values.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In the 1920 presidential election, Franklin was nominated as the running mate of Democratic presidential candidate James M. Cox. Roosevelt joined Franklin in touring the country, making her first campaign appearances. Cox was defeated by Republican Warren G. Harding, who won with 404 electoral votes to 127.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Following the onset of Franklin's paralytic illness in 1921, Roosevelt began serving as a stand-in for her incapacitated husband, making public appearances on his behalf, often carefully coached by Louis Howe. She also started working with the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), raising funds in support of the union's goals: a 48-hour workweek, minimum wage, and the abolition of child labor. Throughout the 1920s, Roosevelt became increasingly influential as a leader in the New York State Democratic Party while Franklin used her contacts among Democratic women to strengthen his standing with them, winning their committed support for the future. In 1924, she campaigned for Democrat Alfred E. Smith in his successful re-election bid as governor of New York State against the Republican nominee and her first cousin Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Franklin had spoken out on Theodore's "wretched record" as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the Teapot Dome scandal, and in return, Theodore said of him, "He's a maverick! He does not wear the brand of our family," which infuriated her. She dogged Theodore on the New York State campaign trail in a car fitted with a "papier-mâché" bonnet shaped like a giant teapot that was made to emit simulated steam (to remind voters of Theodore's supposed, but later disproved, connections to the scandal), and countered his speeches with those of her own, calling him immature. She would later decry these methods, admitting that they were below her dignity but saying that they had been contrived by Democratic Party "dirty tricksters." Theodore was defeated by 105,000 votes, and he never forgave her. By 1928, Roosevelt was promoting Smith's candidacy for president and Franklin's nomination as the Democratic Party's candidate for governor of New York, succeeding Smith. Although Smith lost the presidential race, Franklin won and the Roosevelts moved into the governor's mansion in Albany, New York. During Franklin's term as governor, Roosevelt traveled widely in the state to make speeches and inspect state facilities on his behalf, reporting her findings to him at the end of each trip.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In 1927, she joined friends Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook in buying the Todhunter School for Girls, a finishing school which also offered college preparatory courses, in New York City. At the school, Roosevelt taught upper-level courses in American literature and history, emphasizing independent thought, current events, and social engagement. She continued to teach three days a week while FDR served as governor, but was forced to leave teaching after his election as president.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Also in 1927, she established Val-Kill Industries with Cook, Dickerman, and Caroline O'Day, three friends she met through her activities in the Women's Division of the New York State Democratic Party. It was located on the banks of a stream that flowed through the Roosevelt family estate in Hyde Park, New York. Roosevelt and her business partners financed the construction of a small factory to provide supplemental income for local farming families who would make furniture, pewter, and homespun cloth using traditional craft methods. Capitalizing on the popularity of the Colonial Revival, most Val-Kill products were modeled on eighteenth-century forms. Roosevelt promoted Val-Kill through interviews and public appearances. Val-Kill Industries never became the subsistence program that Roosevelt and her friends imagined, but it did pave the way for larger New Deal initiatives during Franklin's presidential administration. Cook's failing health and pressures from the Great Depression compelled the women to dissolve the partnership in 1938, at which time Roosevelt converted the shop buildings into a cottage at Val-Kill, that eventually became her permanent residence after Franklin died in 1945. Otto Berge acquired the contents of the factory and the use of the Val-Kill name to continue making colonial-style furniture until he retired in 1975. In 1977, Roosevelt's cottage at Val-Kill and its surrounding property of 181 acres (0.73 km2), was formally designated by an act of Congress as the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site, "to commemorate for the education, inspiration, and benefit of present and future generations the life and work of an outstanding woman in American history."


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt became First Lady of the United States when Franklin was inaugurated on March 4, 1933. Having known all of the twentieth century's previous first ladies, she was seriously depressed at having to assume the role, which had traditionally been restricted to domesticity and hostessing. Her immediate predecessor, Lou Henry Hoover, had ended her feminist activism on becoming first lady, stating her intention to be only a "backdrop for Bertie." Eleanor's distress at these precedents was severe enough that Hickok subtitled her biography of Roosevelt "Reluctant First Lady".


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: With support from Howe and Hickok, Roosevelt set out to redefine the position. According to her biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook, she became "the most controversial First Lady in United States history" in the process. Despite criticism of them both, with her husband's strong support she continued with the active business and speaking agenda she had begun before assuming the role of first lady in an era when few married women had careers. She was the first presidential spouse to hold regular press conferences and in 1940 became the first to speak at a national party convention. She also wrote a daily and widely syndicated newspaper column, "My Day", another first for a presidential spouse. She was also the first first lady to write a monthly magazine column and to host a weekly radio show.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In the first year of her husband's administration, Roosevelt was determined to match his presidential salary, and she earned $75,000 from her lectures and writing, most of which she gave to charity. By 1941, she was receiving lecture fees of $1,000, and was made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa at one of her lectures to celebrate her achievements.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt maintained a heavy travel schedule in her twelve years in the White House, frequently making personal appearances at labor meetings to assure Depression-era workers that the White House was mindful of their plight. In one famous cartoon of the time from "The New Yorker" magazine (June 3, 1933), satirizing a visit she had made to a mine, an astonished coal miner, peering down a dark tunnel, says to a co-worker, "For gosh sakes, here comes Mrs. Roosevelt!"


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In early 1933, the "Bonus Army", a protest group of World War I veterans, marched on Washington for the second time in two years, calling for their veteran bonus certificates to be awarded early. The previous year, President Hoover had ordered them dispersed, and the U.S. Army cavalry charged and bombarded the veterans with tear gas.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: This time, Roosevelt visited the veterans at their muddy campsite, listening to their concerns and singing army songs with them. The meeting defused the tension between the veterans and the administration, and one of the marchers later commented, "Hoover sent the Army. [President] Roosevelt sent his wife."


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In 1933 after she became first lady, a new hybrid tea rose was named after her ("Rosa x hybrida" "Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt").


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In 1937 she began writing her autobiography, all volumes of which were compiled into "The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt" in 1961 (Harper & Brothers, ).


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Since 1982, the Siena College Research Institute has periodically conducted surveys asking historians to assess American first ladies according to a cumulative score on the independent criteria of their background, intelligence, value to the country, being their "own women", integrity, accomplishments, courage, leadership, public image, and value to the president. Roosevelt has been ranked by participating historians as the best-regarded first lady in each of the five such surveys to be conducted. In the 2003 survey, Roosevelt was ranked the highest in nine of the ten criteria (background, value to the country, intelligence, being her "own woman", integrity, accomplishments, courage, leadership, and value to the president). She was ranked the second-highest in the remaining category (public image) behind only Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. In the 2008 survey, Roosevelt placed first in eight of the ten criteria (intelligence, courage, value to the country, being her "own woman", integrity, accomplishments, value to the president, and leadership) and second in the two remaining categories (background and public image) behind only Jacqueline Kennedy. In additional questions included in the 2014 survey, Roosevelt was assessed by historians as having been the greatest among 20th and 21st century first ladies in regards to advancing women's issues, being a political asset, being a strong public communicator, public service performed after leaving office, and creating a lasting legacy. She was also found the be the second-easiest first lady for historians to imagine serving as president herself. In the 2014 survey, Roosevelt and her husband were also ranked the highest among first couples in terms of being a "power couple".


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: The American Youth Congress (AYC) was formed in 1935 to advocate for youth rights in U.S. politics, and it was responsible for introducing the "American Youth Bill of Rights" to the U.S. Congress. Roosevelt's relationship with the AYC eventually led to the formation of the National Youth Administration, a New Deal agency in the United States, founded in 1935, that focused on providing work and education for Americans between the ages of 16 and 25. The NYA was headed by Aubrey Willis Williams, a prominent liberal from Alabama who was close to Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins. Speaking of the NYA in the 1930s, Roosevelt expressed her concern about ageism, stating that "I live in real terror when I think we may be losing this generation. We have got to bring these young people into the active life of the community and make them feel that they are necessary." In 1939 the Dies Committee subpoenaed leaders of the AYC, who, in addition to serving the AYC, also were members of the Young Communist League. Roosevelt was in attendance at the hearings and afterward invited the subpoenaed witnesses to board at the White House during their stay in Washington D.C. Joseph P. Lash was one of her boarders. On February 10, 1940, members of the AYC, as guests of Roosevelt in her capacity as first lady, attended a picnic on the White House lawn where they were addressed by Franklin from the South Portico. The President admonished them to condemn not merely the Nazi regime but all dictatorships. The President was reportedly booed by the group. Afterwards, many of the same youth picketed the White House as representatives of the American Peace Mobilization. Among them was Joseph Cadden, one of Roosevelt's overnight boarders. Later in 1940, despite Roosevelt's publication of her reasons "Why I still believe in the Youth Congress," the American Youth Congress was disbanded. The NYA was shut down in 1943.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt's chief project during her husband's first two terms was the establishment of a planned community in Arthurdale, West Virginia. On August 18, 1933, at Hickok's urging, Roosevelt visited the families of homeless miners in Morgantown, West Virginia, who had been blacklisted following union activities. Deeply affected by the visit, Roosevelt proposed a resettlement community for the miners at Arthurdale, where they could make a living by subsistence farming, handicrafts, and a local manufacturing plant. She hoped the project could become a model for "a new kind of community" in the U.S., in which workers would be better cared for. Her husband enthusiastically supported the project.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: After an initial, disastrous experiment with prefab houses, construction began again in 1934 to Roosevelt's specifications, this time with "every modern convenience", including indoor plumbing and central steam heat. Families occupied the first fifty homes in June, and agreed to repay the government in thirty years' time. Though Roosevelt had hoped for a racially mixed community, the miners insisted on limiting membership to white Christians. After losing a community vote, Roosevelt recommended the creation of other communities for the excluded black and Jewish miners. The experience motivated Roosevelt to become much more outspoken on the issue of racial discrimination.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt remained a vigorous fundraiser for the community for several years, as well as spending most of her own income on the project. However, the project was criticized by both the political left and right. Conservatives condemned it as socialist and a "communist plot", while Democratic members of Congress opposed government competition with private enterprise. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes also opposed the project, citing its high per-family cost. Arthurdale continued to sink as a government spending priority for the federal government until 1941, when the U.S. sold off the last of its holdings in the community at a loss.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Later commentators generally described the Arthurdale experiment as a failure. Roosevelt herself was sharply discouraged by a 1940 visit in which she felt the town had become excessively dependent on outside assistance. However, the residents considered the town a "utopia" compared to their previous circumstances, and many were returned to economic self-sufficiency. Roosevelt personally considered the project a success, later speaking of the improvements she saw in people's lives there and stating, "I don't know whether you think that is worth half a million dollars. But I do."


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt is seen by historians as having been significantly more advanced than her husband on civil rights. During Franklin's administration, Roosevelt became an important connection to the African-American population in the era of segregation. Despite the President's desire to placate Southern sentiment, Roosevelt was vocal in her support of the civil rights movement. After her experience with Arthurdale and her inspections of New Deal programs in Southern states, she concluded that New Deal programs were discriminating against African-Americans, who received a disproportionately small share of relief money. Roosevelt became one of the only voices in her husband's administration insisting that benefits be equally extended to Americans of all races.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt also broke with tradition by inviting hundreds of African-American guests to the White House. In 1936 she became aware of conditions at the National Training School for Girls, a predominantly Black reform school once located in the Palisades neighborhood of Washington, D.C. She visited the school, wrote about it in her "My Day" column, lobbied for additional funding, and pressed for changes in staffing and curriculum. Her White House invitation to the students became an issue in Franklin's 1936 re-election campaign. When the Black singer Marian Anderson was denied the use of Washington's Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1939, Roosevelt resigned from the group in protest and helped arrange another concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Roosevelt later presented Anderson to the King and Queen of the United Kingdom after Anderson performed at a White House dinner. Roosevelt also arranged the appointment of African-American educator Mary McLeod Bethune, with whom she had struck up a friendship, as Director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration. To avoid problems with the staff when Bethune would visit the White House, Roosevelt would meet her at the gate, embrace her, and walk in with her arm-in-arm.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: She was involved by being "the eyes and the ears" of the New Deal. She looked to the future and was committed to social reform. One of those programs helped working women receive better wages. The New Deal also placed women into less machine work and more white-collar work. Women did not have to work in the factories making war supplies because men were coming home so they could take over the long days and nights women had been working to contribute to the war efforts. Roosevelt brought unprecedented activism and ability to the role of the first lady.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In contrast to her usual support of African-American rights, the "sundown town" Eleanor, in West Virginia, was named for her and was established in 1934 when she and Franklin visited the county and developed it as a test site for families. As a "sundown town", like other Franklin Roosevelt towns around the nation (such as Greenbelt, Greenhills, Greendale, Hanford, or Norris), it was for whites only. It was established as a New Deal project.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt lobbied behind the scenes for the 1934 Costigan-Wagner Bill to make lynching a federal crime, including arranging a meeting between Franklin and NAACP president Walter Francis White. Fearing he would lose the votes of Southern congressional delegations for his legislative agenda, however, Franklin refused to publicly support the bill, which proved unable to pass the Senate. In 1942, Roosevelt worked with activist Pauli Murray to persuade Franklin to appeal on behalf of sharecropper Odell Waller, convicted of killing a white farmer during a fight; though Franklin sent a letter to Virginia Governor Colgate Darden urging him to commute the sentence to life imprisonment, Waller was executed as scheduled.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt's support of African-American rights made her an unpopular figure among whites in the South. Rumors spread of "Eleanor Clubs" formed by servants to oppose their employers and "Eleanor Tuesdays" on which African-American men would knock down white women on the street, though no evidence has ever been found of either practice. When race riots broke out in Detroit in June 1943, critics in both the North and South wrote that Roosevelt was to blame. At the same time, she grew so popular among African-Americans, previously a reliable Republican voting bloc, that they became a consistent base of support for the Democratic Party.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Roosevelt spoke out against Japanese-American prejudice, warning against the "great hysteria against minority groups." She also privately opposed her husband's Executive Order 9066, which required Japanese-Americans in many areas of the U.S. to enter internment camps. She was widely criticized for her defense of Japanese-American citizens, including a call by the "Los Angeles Times" that she be "forced to retire from public life" over her stand on the issue.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: On May 21, 1937, Roosevelt visited Westmoreland Homesteads to mark the arrival of the community's final homesteader. Accompanying her on the trip was the wife of Henry Morgenthau Jr., the president's Secretary of the Treasury. "I am no believer in paternalism. I do not like charities," she had said earlier. But cooperative communities such as Westmoreland Homesteads, she went on, offered an alternative to "our rather settled ideas" that could "provide equality of opportunity for all and prevent the recurrence of a similar disaster [depression] in the future." Residents were so taken by her personal expression of interest in the program that they promptly agreed to rename the community in her honor. (The new town name, Norvelt, was a combination of the last syllables in her names: EleaNOR RooseVELT.) The Norvelt firefighter's hall is named Roosevelt Hall in her honor.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt was an unprecedentedly outspoken First Lady who made far more use of the media than her predecessors; she held 348 press conferences over the span of her husband's 12-year presidency. Inspired by her relationship with Hickok, Roosevelt placed a ban on male reporters attending the press conferences, effectively forcing newspapers to keep female reporters on staff in order to cover them. She relaxed the rule only once, on her return from her 1943 Pacific trip. Because the Gridiron Club banned women from its annual Gridiron Dinner for journalists, Roosevelt hosted a competing event for female reporters at the White House, which she called "Gridiron Widows". She was interviewed by many newspapers; the New Orleans journalist Iris Kelso described Roosevelt as her most interesting interviewee ever. In the early days of her all-female press conferences, she said they would not address "politics, legislation, or executive decision", since the role of the First Lady was expected to be non-political at that time. She also agreed at first that she would avoid discussing her views on pending congressional measures. Still, the press conferences provided a welcome opportunity for the women reporters to speak directly with the first lady, access that had been unavailable in previous administrations.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Just before Franklin assumed the presidency in February 1933, Roosevelt published an editorial in the "Women's Daily News" that conflicted so sharply with his intended public spending policies that he published a rejoinder in the following issue. On entering the White House, she signed a contract with the magazine "Woman's Home Companion" to provide a monthly column, in which she answered mail sent to her by readers; the feature was canceled in 1936 as another presidential election approached. She continued her articles in other venues, publishing more than sixty articles in national magazines during her tenure as first lady. Roosevelt also began a syndicated newspaper column, titled "My Day", which appeared six days a week from 1936 to her death in 1962. In the column, she wrote about her daily activities but also her humanitarian concerns. Hickok and George T. Bye, Roosevelt's literary agent, encouraged her to write the column. From 1941 to her death in 1962, she also wrote an advice column, "If You Ask Me", first published in "Ladies Home Journal" and then later in "McCall's". A selection of her columns was compiled in the book "If You Ask Me: Essential Advice from Eleanor Roosevelt" in 2018.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Beasley has argued that Roosevelt's publications, which often dealt with women's issues and invited reader responses, represented a conscious attempt to use journalism "to overcome social isolation" for women by making "public communication a two-way channel".


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt also made extensive use of radio. She was not the first first lady to broadcast—her predecessor, Lou Henry Hoover, had done that already. But Hoover did not have a regular radio program, whereas Roosevelt did. She first broadcast her own programs of radio commentary beginning on July 9, 1934. On that first show, she talked about the effect of movies on children, the need for a censor who could make sure movies did not glorify crime and violence, and her opinion about the recent All-Star baseball game. She also read a commercial from a mattress company, which sponsored the broadcast. She said she would not accept any salary for being on the air, and that she would donate the amount ($3,000) to charity. Later that year, in November 1934, she broadcast a series of programs about children's education; it was heard on the CBS Radio Network. Sponsored by a typewriter company, Roosevelt once again donated the money, giving it to the American Friends Service Committee, to help with a school it operated. During 1934, Roosevelt set a record for the most times a first lady had spoken on radio: she spoke as a guest on other people's programs, as well as the host of her own, for a total of 28 times that year. In 1935, Roosevelt continued to host programs aimed at the female audience, including one called "It's A Woman's World." Each time, she donated the money she earned to charity. The association of a sponsor with the popular first lady resulted in increases in sales for that company: when the Selby Shoe Company sponsored a series of Roosevelt's programs, sales increased by 200%. The fact that her programs were sponsored created controversy, with her husband's political enemies expressing skepticism about whether she really did donate her salary to charity; they accused her of "profiteering." But her radio programs proved to be so popular with listeners that the criticisms had little effect. She continued to broadcast throughout the 1930s, sometimes on CBS and sometimes on NBC.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: On May 10, 1940, Germany invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, marking the end of the relatively conflict-free "Phoney War" phase of World War II. As the U.S. began to move toward war footing, Roosevelt found herself again depressed, fearing that her role in fighting for domestic justice would become extraneous in a nation focused on foreign affairs. She briefly considered traveling to Europe to work with the Red Cross, but was dissuaded by presidential advisers who pointed out the consequences should the president's wife be captured as a prisoner of war. She soon found other wartime causes to work on, however, beginning with a popular movement to allow the immigration of European refugee children. She also lobbied her husband to allow greater immigration of groups persecuted by the Nazis, including Jews, but fears of fifth columnists caused Franklin to restrict immigration rather than expanding it. Roosevelt successfully secured political refugee status for eighty-three Jewish refugees from the S.S. "Quanza" in August 1940, but was refused on many other occasions. Her son James later wrote that "her deepest regret at the end of her life" was that she had not forced Franklin to accept more refugees from Nazism during the war.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt was also active on the home front. Beginning in 1941, she co-chaired the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD) with New York City Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, working to give civilian volunteers expanded roles in war preparations. She soon found herself in a power struggle with LaGuardia, who preferred to focus on narrower aspects of defense, while she saw solutions to broader social problems as equally important to the war effort. Though LaGuardia resigned from the OCD in December 1941, Roosevelt was forced to resign following anger in the House of Representatives over high salaries for several OCD appointments, including two of her close friends.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Also in 1941, the short film "Women in Defense", written by Roosevelt, was released. It was produced by the Office of Emergency Management and briefly outlines the way in which women could help prepare the country for the possibility of war. There is also a segment on the types of costumes women would wear while engaged in war work. At the end of the film, the narrator explains women are vital to securing a healthy American home life and raising children "which has always been the first line of defense".


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In October 1942, Roosevelt toured England, visiting with American troops and inspecting British forces. Her visits drew enormous crowds and received almost unanimously favorable press in both England and America. In August 1943, she visited American troops in the South Pacific on a morale-building tour, of which Admiral William Halsey Jr. later said, "she alone accomplished more good than any other person, or any groups of civilians, who had passed through my area." For her part, Roosevelt was left shaken and deeply depressed by seeing the war's carnage. A number of Congressional Republicans criticized her for using scarce wartime resources for her trip, prompting Franklin to suggest that she take a break from traveling.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt supported increased roles for women and African-Americans in the war effort, and began to advocate for women to be given factory jobs a year before it became a widespread practice. In 1942, she urged women of all social backgrounds to learn trades, saying: "if I were of a debutante age I would go into a factory–any factory where I could learn a skill and be useful." Roosevelt learned of the high rate of absenteeism among working mothers, and she campaigned for government-sponsored day care. She notably supported the Tuskegee Airmen in their successful effort to become the first black combat pilots, visiting the Tuskegee Air Corps Advanced Flying School in Alabama. She also flew with African-American chief civilian instructor C. Alfred "Chief" Anderson. Anderson had been flying since 1929 and was responsible for training thousands of rookie pilots; he took her on a half-hour flight in a Piper J-3 Cub. After landing, she cheerfully announced, "Well, you can fly all right." The subsequent brouhaha over the first lady's flight had such an impact it is often mistakenly cited as the start of the Civilian Pilot Training Program at Tuskegee, even though the program was already five months old. Roosevelt did use her position as a trustee of the Julius Rosenwald Fund to arrange a loan of $175,000 to help finance the building of Moton Field.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: After the war, Roosevelt was a strong proponent of the Morgenthau Plan to de-industrialize Germany in the postwar period. In 1947 she attended the National Conference on the German Problem in New York, which she had helped organize. It issued a statement that "any plans to resurrect the economic and political power of Germany" would be dangerous to international security.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Franklin died on April 12, 1945, after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia. Roosevelt later learned that her husband's mistress Lucy Mercer (now named Rutherfurd) had been with him when he died, a discovery made more bitter by learning that her daughter Anna had also been aware of the ongoing relationship between the President and Rutherfurd. It was Anna who told her that Franklin had been with Rutherfurd when he died; in addition, she told her that Franklin had continued the relationship for decades, and people surrounding him had hidden the information from his wife. After the funeral, Roosevelt temporarily returned to Val-Kill. Franklin left instructions for her in the event of his death; he proposed turning over Hyde Park to the federal government as a museum, and she spent the following months cataloging the estate and arranging for the transfer. After Franklin's death, she moved into an apartment at 29 Washington Square West in Greenwich Village. In 1950, she rented suites at the Park Sheraton Hotel (202 West 56th Street). She lived here until 1953 when she moved to 211 East 62nd Street. When that lease expired in 1958, she returned to the Park Sheraton as she waited for the house she purchased with Edna and David Gurewitsch at 55 East 74th Street to be renovated. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum opened on April 12, 1946, setting a precedent for future presidential libraries.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In December 1945, President Harry S. Truman appointed Roosevelt as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly. In April 1946, she became the first chairperson of the preliminary United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Roosevelt remained chairperson when the commission was established on a permanent basis in January 1947. Along with René Cassin, John Peters Humphrey and others, she played an instrumental role in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In a speech on the night of September 28, 1948, Roosevelt spoke in favor of the Declaration, calling it "the international Magna Carta of all men everywhere". The Declaration was adopted by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948. The vote was unanimous, with eight abstentions: six Soviet Bloc countries as well as South Africa and Saudi Arabia. Roosevelt attributed the abstention of the Soviet bloc nations to Article 13, which provided the right of citizens to leave their countries.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt also served as the first United States Representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and stayed on at that position until 1953, even after stepping down as chair of the commission in 1951. The UN posthumously awarded her one of its first Human Rights Prizes in 1968 in recognition of her work.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In the 1940s, Roosevelt was among the first people to support the creation of a UN agency specialized in the issues of food and nutrition.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: At that time, Frederick L. McDougall, an Australian nutritionist, wrote the “Draft memorandum on a United Nations Programme for Freedom from Want of Food”. McDougall strongly believed that international cooperation was key to address the issue of hunger in the world.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt learned about the memorandum and arranged a meeting between McDougall and her husband, the president of the United States of America. Following the discussion, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) was created on October 16, 1945.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In 1955, Eleanor Roosevelt and McDougall visited the new FAO headquarters in Rome and pushed the United Nations Programme into creating the Food from Hunger campaign, which ultimately saw the light in 1960 after a series of negotiations.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: The Campaign was created to mobilize non-governmental organizations against hunger and malnutrition in the world and help find solutions.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In the late 1940s, Democrats in New York and throughout the country courted Roosevelt for political office.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In 1950, she co-wrote, alongside Helen Ferris, editor in chief of the Junior Literary Guild, "Partners: The United Nations and Youth", a look at the nascent organization’s work with children of the world. It won the Child Study Association of America’s Children's Book Award (now Bank Street Children's Book Committee's Josette Frank Award).


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: She was an early supporter of the Encampment for Citizenship, a non-profit organization that conducts residential summer programs with year-round follow-up for young people of widely diverse backgrounds and nations. She routinely hosted encampment workshops at her Hyde Park estate, and when the program was attacked as "socialistic" by McCarthyite forces in the early 1950s, she vigorously defended it.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In 1954, Tammany Hall boss Carmine DeSapio led the effort to defeat Roosevelt's son, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., in the election for New York Attorney General. Roosevelt grew increasingly disgusted with DeSapio's political conduct through the rest of the 1950s. Eventually, she would join with her old friends Herbert Lehman and Thomas Finletter to form the New York Committee for Democratic Voters, a group dedicated to opposing DeSapio's reincarnated Tammany Hall. Their efforts were eventually successful, and DeSapio was forced to relinquish power in 1961.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt was disappointed when President Truman backed New York Governor W. Averell Harriman—a close associate of DeSapio—for the 1952 Democratic presidential nomination. She supported Adlai Stevenson for president in 1952 and 1956, and urged his renomination in 1960. She resigned from her UN post in 1953, when Dwight D. Eisenhower became president. She addressed the Democratic National Convention in 1952 and 1956. Although she had reservations about John F. Kennedy for his failure to condemn McCarthyism, she supported him for president against Richard Nixon. Kennedy later reappointed her to the United Nations, where she served again from 1961 to 1962, and to the National Advisory Committee of the Peace Corps.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: By the 1950s, Roosevelt's international role as spokesperson for women led her to stop publicly criticizing the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), although she never supported it. In the early 1960s, she announced that, due to unionization, she believed the ERA was no longer a threat to women as it once may have been and told supporters that they could have the amendment if they wanted it. In 1961, President Kennedy's undersecretary of labor, Esther Peterson, proposed a new Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. Kennedy appointed Roosevelt to chair the commission, with Peterson as director. This was Roosevelt's last public position. She died just before the commission issued its report. It concluded that female equality was best achieved by recognition of gender differences and needs, and not by an Equal Rights Amendment.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Throughout the 1950s, Roosevelt embarked on countless national and international speaking engagements. She continued to pen her newspaper column and made appearances on television and radio broadcasts. She averaged one hundred fifty lectures a year throughout the 1950s, many devoted to her activism on behalf of the United Nations.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt received the first annual Franklin Delano Roosevelt Brotherhood Award in 1946. Other notable awards she received during her life postwar included the Award of Merit of the New York City Federation of Women's Clubs in 1948, the Four Freedoms Award in 1950, the Irving Geist Foundation Award in 1950, and the Prince Carl Medal (from Sweden) in 1950. She was the most admired living woman, according to Gallup's most admired man and woman poll of Americans, every year between 1948 (the poll's inception) to 1961 (the last poll before her death) except 1951.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Following the Bay of Pigs in 1961, President Kennedy asked Roosevelt, labor leader Walter Reuther, and Milton S. Eisenhower, brother of President Eisenhower, to negotiate the release of captured Americans with Cuban leader Fidel Castro.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In April 1960, Roosevelt was diagnosed with aplastic anemia soon after being struck by a car in New York City. In 1962, she was given steroids, which activated a dormant case of tuberculosis in her bone marrow, and she died, aged 78, of resulting cardiac failure at her Manhattan home at 55 East 74th Street on the Upper East Side on November 7, 1962, cared for by her daughter, Anna. President John F. Kennedy ordered all United States flags lowered to half-staff throughout the world on November 8 in tribute to Roosevelt.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Funeral services were held two days later in Hyde Park, where she was interred next to her husband in the Rose Garden at Springwood Estate, the Roosevelt family home. Attendees included President Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and former presidents Truman and Eisenhower, who honored Roosevelt.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: After her death, her family deeded the family vacation home on Campobello Island to the governments of the U.S. and Canada, and in 1964 they created the Roosevelt Campobello International Park.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In 1966, the White House Historical Association purchased Douglas Chandor's portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt; the portrait had been commissioned by the Roosevelt family in 1949. The painting was presented at a White House reception on February 4, 1966, that was hosted by Lady Bird Johnson and attended by more than 250 invited guests. The portrait hangs in the Vermeil Room.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In 1989, the Eleanor Roosevelt Fund Award was founded; it "honors an individual, project, organization, or institution for outstanding contributions to equality and education for women and girls."


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: The Eleanor Roosevelt Monument in New York's Riverside Park was dedicated in 1996, with First Lady Hillary Clinton serving as the keynote speaker. It was the first monument to an American woman in a New York City park. The centerpiece is a statue of Roosevelt sculpted by Penelope Jencks. The surrounding granite pavement contains inscriptions designed by the architect Michael Middleton Dwyer, including summaries of her achievements, and a quote from her 1958 speech at the United Nations advocating universal human rights.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: The following year, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington D.C. was dedicated; it includes a bronze statue of Eleanor Roosevelt standing before the United Nations emblem, which honors her dedication to the United Nations. It is the only presidential memorial to depict a first lady.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In 1998, President Bill Clinton established the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights to honor outstanding American promoters of rights in the United States. The award was first awarded on the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, honoring Eleanor Roosevelt's role as the "driving force" in the development of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The award was presented from 1998 to the end of the Clinton Administration in 2001. In 2010, then-Secretary of State of the United States Hillary Clinton revived the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights and presented the award on behalf of the then-President of the United States Barack Obama.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: The Gallup Organization published the poll Gallup's List of Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century, to determine which people around the world Americans most admired for what they did in the 20th century in 1999. Eleanor Roosevelt came in ninth. In 2001, the Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Committee (Eleanor's Legacy) was founded by Judith Hollensworth Hope, who was its president until April 2008. It inspires and supports pro-choice Democratic women to run for local and state offices in New York. The Legacy sponsors campaign training schools, links candidates with volunteers and experts, collaborates with like-minded organizations and provides campaign grants to endorsed candidates. In 2007, she was named a Woman hero by The My Hero Project.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: On April 20, 2016, United States Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew announced that Eleanor Roosevelt would appear with Marian Anderson and noted suffragettes on the redesigned US$5 bill scheduled to be unveiled in 2020, the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed women the right to vote. In 2020, "Time" magazine included her name on its list of 100 Women of the Year. She was named Woman of the Year 1948 for her efforts on tackling issues surrounding human rights.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In 1972, the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute was founded; it merged with the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Foundation in 1987 to become the Roosevelt Institute. The Roosevelt Institute is a liberal American think tank. The organization, based in New York City, states that it exists "to carry forward the legacy and values of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt by developing progressive ideas and bold leadership in the service of restoring America's promise of opportunity for all."


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Eleanor Roosevelt High School, a public magnet high school specializing in science, mathematics, technology, and engineering, was established in 1976 at its current location in Greenbelt, Maryland. It was the first high school named for Eleanor Roosevelt, and is part of the Prince George's County Public Schools system.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Roosevelt lived in a stone cottage at Val-Kill, which was two miles east of the Springwood Estate. The cottage had been her home after the death of her husband and was the only residence she had ever personally owned. In 1977, the home was formally designated by an act of Congress as the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site, "to commemorate for the education, inspiration, and benefit of present and future generations the life and work of an outstanding woman in American history." In 1998, Save America's Treasures (SAT) announced Val-Kill cottage as a new official project. SAT's involvement led to the Honoring Eleanor Roosevelt (HER) project, initially run by private volunteers and now a part of SAT. The HER project has since raised almost $1 million, which has gone toward restoration and development efforts at Val-Kill and the production of "Eleanor Roosevelt: Close to Home", a documentary about Roosevelt at Val-Kill. Due in part to the success of these programs, Val-Kill was given a $75,000 grant and named one of 12 sites showcased in "Restore America: A Salute to Preservation", a partnership between SAT, the National Trust and HGTV. The Roosevelt Study Center, a research institute, conference center, and library on twentieth-century American history located in the twelfth-century Abbey of Middelburg, the Netherlands, opened in 1986. It is named after Eleanor Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt, all of whose ancestors emigrated from Zeeland, the Netherlands, to the United States in the seventeenth century.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In 1988, Eleanor Roosevelt College, one of six undergraduate residential colleges at the University of California, San Diego, was founded. ERC emphasizes international understanding, including proficiency in a foreign language and a regional specialization. Eleanor Roosevelt High School, a small public high school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, was founded in 2002. Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Eastvale, California, opened in 2006.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In the 1940s and 1950s, female impersonator Arthur Blake drew acclaim for his impersonations of Eleanor Roosevelt in his nightclub act. At the invitation of the Roosevelts, he performed his impersonation of Eleanor at the White House. He also impersonated F.D.R. in the 1952 film "Diplomatic Courier".


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: "Sunrise at Campobello," a 1958 Broadway play by Dore Schary dramatized Franklin's attack of and eventual recovery from polio, in which Mary Fickett starred as Eleanor. The 1960 film of the same name starred Greer Garson as Eleanor.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: "The Eleanor Roosevelt Story", a 1965 American biographical documentary film directed by Richard Kaplan, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The Academy Film Archive preserved it in 2006.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In 1976, Talent Associates released the American television miniseries "Eleanor and Franklin", starring Edward Herrmann as Franklin Roosevelt and Jane Alexander as Eleanor Roosevelt; it was broadcast on ABC on January 11 and 12, 1976 and was based on Joseph P. Lash's biography from 1971, "Eleanor and Franklin", based on their correspondence and recently opened archives. The film won numerous awards, including 11 Primetime Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and the Peabody Award. The director Daniel Petrie won a Primetime Emmy for Director of the Year – Special. In 1977 they released a sequel entitled "", with the same stars. It won 7 Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Special of the Year. Daniel Petrie again won a Primetime Emmy for Director of the Year – Special for the second film. Both films were acclaimed and noted for historical accuracy.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In 1979, NBC televised the miniseries "Backstairs at the White House" based on the 1961 book “"My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House"” by Lillian Rogers Parks.  The series portrayed the lives of the Presidents, their families, and the White House staff who served them from the administrations of William Howard Taft (1909–1913) through Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–1961).  Much of the book was based on notes by her mother, Maggie Rogers, a White House maid.  Parks credits Eleanor Roosevelt for encouraging her mother to start a diary about her service on the White House staff.  The series won the Writers Guild of America award for Long Form Television Series, received a Golden Globe nomination for Dramatic Television Series, and won an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Makeup.  Among the 10 additional Emmy nominations was Eileen Heckart for her portrayal of Eleanor Roosevelt.  She received an Emmy nomination again the following year for her performance as Eleanor Roosevelt in the NBC television movie "F.D.R.: The Last Year".


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In 1996, "Washington Post" writer Bob Woodward reported that Hillary Clinton had been having "imaginary discussions" with Eleanor Roosevelt from the start of Clinton's time as first lady. Following the Democrats' loss of congressional control in the 1994 elections, Clinton had engaged the services of Human Potential Movement proponent Jean Houston. Houston encouraged Clinton to pursue the Roosevelt connection, and while no psychic techniques were used with Clinton, critics and comics immediately suggested that Clinton was holding séances with Roosevelt. The White House stated that this was merely a brainstorming exercise, and a private poll later indicated that most of the public believed these were indeed just imaginary conversations, with the remainder believing that communication with the dead was actually possible. In her 2003 autobiography "Living History", Clinton titled an entire chapter "Conversations with Eleanor", and stated that holding "imaginary conversations [is] actually a useful mental exercise to help analyze problems, provided you choose the right person to visualize. Eleanor Roosevelt was ideal."


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In 1996, the children's book "Eleanor" by Barbara Cooney, about Eleanor Roosevelt's childhood, was published.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: In 2014, the American documentary series "" was released. Produced and directed by Ken Burns, the series focuses on the lives of Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. The series premiered to positive reviews and was nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards, winning the Emmy Award for Outstanding Narrator for Peter Coyote's narration of the first episode. In September 2014, "The Roosevelts" became the most streamed documentary on the PBS website to date.


title: Eleanor Roosevelt

text: Eleanor Roosevelt's life and time as First Lady are featured in the 2022 television series "The First Lady". She is played by Gillian Anderson, and by Eliza Scanlen as young Eleanor.


title: Chris Rock

text: Christopher Julius Rock (born February 7, 1965) is an American stand-up comedian, actor, and filmmaker. Known for his work in comic film, television and stage, he has received multiple accolades, including three Grammy Awards for best comedy album and four Primetime Emmy Awards as well as a Golden Globe Award nomination. He was ranked No. 5 on Comedy Central's list of the 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time. He also ranked No. 5 on "Rolling Stone" 's list of the 50 Best Stand-Up Comics of All Time.


title: Chris Rock

text: After years working as a stand-up comedian and appearing in minor film roles including "Beverly Hills Cop II", Rock gained prominence as a cast member of "Saturday Night Live" from 1990 to 1993. While at "SNL" he appeared in films "New Jack City", "Boomerang" and "CB4", which he also wrote and produced. He reached mainstream stardom with the critically acclaimed "" in 1996, the second of his five HBO comedy specials. His other HBO comedy specials include "Bigger & Blacker" (1999), "Never Scared" (2004), "" (2008), and "" (2018).


title: Chris Rock

text: He developed, wrote, produced and narrated the sitcom "Everybody Hates Chris" (2005-2009), which was based on his early life. From 1997 to 2000 HBO aired his talk show, "The Chris Rock Show", which gained critical acclaim for Rock's interviews with celebrities and politicians.


title: Chris Rock

text: Rock was cast in starring film roles in "Nurse Betty" (1999), "Down to Earth", "Pootie Tang" (both 2001), "Head of State" (2003), "The Longest Yard" (2005), the "Madagascar" film series (2005–2012), "I Think I Love My Wife" (2007), "Death at a Funeral", "Grown Ups" (both 2010), its sequel "Grown Ups 2" (2013), "Top Five" (2014) and "Spiral" (2021). He is known for his appearances in television including "Louie", "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee", "Fargo". He made his Broadway theater debut in the 2011 Stephen Adly Guirgis play "The Motherfucker with the Hat" for which he received Drama League Award for Most Distinguished Performance. He hosted the Academy Awards twice; in 2005 and 2016, and was involved in an incident on stage at the 2022 Awards.


title: Chris Rock

text: Christopher Julius Rock was born in Andrews, South Carolina on February 7, 1965. Shortly after his birth, his parents moved to the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. A few years later, they relocated and settled in the working class area of Bedford–Stuyvesant. His mother, Rosalie ("née" Tingman), was a teacher and social worker for the mentally handicapped; his father, Julius Rock, was a truck driver and newspaper deliveryman. Julius died in 1988 after ulcer surgery.


title: Chris Rock

text: Rock is the eldest of his parents' seven children (six boys and one girl), and he had an older paternal half-brother, Charles Ledell Rock, who died in 2006 after suffering from alcoholism. Rock's younger brothers Tony, Kenny, and Jordan are also in the entertainment business.


title: Chris Rock

text: Rock's family history was profiled on the PBS series "African American Lives 2" in 2008. A DNA test showed that he is of Cameroonian descent, specifically from the Udeme (Ouldémé) people of northern Cameroon. Rock's great-great-grandfather, Julius Caesar Tingman, was enslaved for 21 years before serving in the American Civil War as part of the United States Colored Troops. During the 1940s, Rock's paternal grandfather moved from South Carolina to New York City to become a taxicab driver and preacher.


title: Chris Rock

text: Rock was bused to schools in predominantly white neighborhoods of Brooklyn, where he endured bullying and beatings from white students. As he grew older, the bullying worsened and Rock's parents pulled him out of James Madison High School. He dropped out of high school altogether, but he later earned a General Educational Development (GED). Rock then worked various jobs at fast-food restaurants.


title: Chris Rock

text: Rock began working as a stand-up comic during 1984 in New York City's Catch a Rising Star. Upon seeing his act at a nightclub, Eddie Murphy befriended and mentored the aspiring comic. Murphy gave Rock his first film role and big break in "Beverly Hills Cop II". Rock rose up the ranks of the comedy circuit in addition to earning bit roles in the film "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka" and the TV series "Miami Vice".


title: Chris Rock

text: Rock was a cast member of the sketch comedy series "Saturday Night Live" from 1990 to 1993. He and other new cast members Chris Farley, Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider and David Spade became known as the Bad Boys of SNL. In 1991, he released his first comedy album, "Born Suspect" and won acclaim for his role as a crack addict in the film "New Jack City". His tenure on "SNL" gave Rock national exposure. (Rock has hosted "SNL" three times; in 1996, 2014 and 2020.)


title: Chris Rock

text: With plans to leave "Saturday Night Live" after the 1992–93 season, Rock was effectively "fired" from the show. Beginning that fall, he appeared in six episodes of the predominantly African American sketch show "In Living Color" as a special guest star. The show was canceled a month after he arrived. Rock then wrote and starred in the low-budget comedy "CB4", which made $18 million against its budget of $6 million. He signed on as client of 3 Arts Entertainment.


title: Chris Rock

text: Rock headlined his first HBO comedy special in 1994, titled "Big Ass Jokes", as part of "HBO Comedy Half-Hour". His second special, 1996's "", made Rock one of the most acclaimed and commercially successful comedians in the industry. Rock won two Emmy Awards for the special and gained large critical acclaim. A controversial part of the special was "Niggas vs. Black People".


title: Chris Rock

text: For his much-publicized role as a commentator for Comedy Central's "Politically Incorrect" during the 1996 Presidential elections, he earned another Emmy nomination. Rock also was the voice for the "Lil Penny" puppet who was the alter ego to basketball star Penny Hardaway in a series of Nike shoe commercials from 1994 to 1998, and hosted the '97 MTV Video Music Awards.


title: Chris Rock

text: Rock later had two more HBO comedy specials: "Bigger & Blacker" in 1999, and "Never Scared" in 2004. Articles relating to both specials called Rock "the funniest man in America" in "Time" and "Entertainment Weekly". HBO also aired his talk show, "The Chris Rock Show", which gained critical acclaim for Rock's interviews with celebrities and politicians. The show won an Emmy for writing. His television work has won him a total of three Emmy Awards and 15 nominations.


title: Chris Rock

text: By the end of the decade, Rock was established as one of the preeminent stand-up comedians and comic minds of his generation. During this time, Rock also translated his comedy into print form in the book "Rock This!" and released the Grammy Award-winning comedy albums, "Roll with the New", "Bigger & Blacker" and "Never Scared". Rock's fifth HBO special, "", premiered on September 27, 2008, and won him another Emmy for outstanding writing for a variety or music program.


title: Chris Rock

text: On October 30, 2016, Netflix announced that they would be releasing two new stand-up comedy specials from Rock, with Rock being paid $40 million per special. The first special, "", was released on Netflix on February 14, 2018. It was filmed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and was directed by comedian Bo Burnham. The specials marked the comedian's first concert specials released in 10 years. The special earned a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album nomination.


title: Chris Rock

text: It was not until the success of his stand-up act in the late 1990s that Rock began receiving leading man status in films. He began the decade with supporting roles in such films as "New Jack City" (1991) as crack addict Pookie, in the Eddie Murphy comedy "Boomerang" (1992), the Steve Martin comedy "Sgt. Bilko" (1996) as well as "Beverly Hills Ninja" (1997), and "Lethal Weapon 4" (1998).


title: Chris Rock

text: He also appeared in the Kevin Smith fantasy comedy film "Dogma" (1999). The film received positive reviews and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. The film starred an ensemble cast with actors such as Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Alan Rickman, Salma Hayek, and George Carlin. He then starred in the dark comedy "Nurse Betty" (2000) starring Renée Zellweger, Greg Kinnear and Morgan Freeman which also debuted at the Cannes Film Festival on May 11, 2000. The film was a critical success.


title: Chris Rock

text: In the later 2000s, Rock started to work increasingly behind the camera. He wrote the film "Down to Earth" (2001) along with friend and comedian Louis C.K. The film was based on the Warren Beatty film, "Heaven Can Wait" (1978). That same year Rock also produced and starred in the C.K. directed film "Pootie Tang" (2001). Rock also would work as a writer and director of the political comedy "Head of State" (2003) and marital comedy "I Think I Love My Wife" (2007). He also played the lead in both films. He also went on to star in films like "The Longest Yard" (2005) opposite Adam Sandler, and the action comedy film "Bad Company" (2002) opposite Anthony Hopkins.


title: Chris Rock

text: Starting in 2005, Rock has also voiced the eccentric zebra Marty in DreamWorks' animated film franchise "Madagascar". He started in two of the film's sequels, "" (2008), and "" (2013). In 2007 Rock voiced Mooseblood the Mosquito in the Jerry Seinfeld animated film, "The Bee Movie".


title: Chris Rock

text: In 2009, Rock released his first documentary, 2009's "Good Hair". The film focuses on the issue of how African-American women have perceived their hair and historically styled it. The film explores the current styling industry for black women, images of what is considered acceptable and desirable for African American women's hair in the United States, and their relation to African American culture. The film premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival where it earned critical acclaim and received a Special Jury Prize. The National Board of Review named it one of the five best documentaries of the year. Rock was also nominated for the Gotham Award for Best Documentary and for the Best Documentary Screenplay from the Writers Guild of America. Rock has since stated working on a documentary about debt called "Credit Is the Devil".


title: Chris Rock

text: Some of his 2010s film appearances include the black comedy "Death at a Funeral" (2010) a remake of the British comedy of the same name. The film starred Peter Dinklage, Martin Lawrence, Tracy Morgan, Kevin Hart, Zoe Saldana, and Luke Wilson. The film received mixed reviews, although Roger Ebert, critic of "The Chicago Sun-Times", praised the film writing: "I laughed all the way through, in fact. This is the best comedy since "The Hangover", and although it's almost a scene-by-scene remake of a 2007 British movie with the same title, it's funnier than the original." Rock also starred in the summer comedy "Grown Ups" (2010) alongside Adam Sandler, Kevin James, David Spade and Maya Rudolph.


title: Chris Rock

text: In 2012, he starred in the ensemble romantic comedy film "What to Expect When You're Expecting" alongside Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, Anna Kendrick, and Elizabeth Banks. Despite earning negative reviews, the film was a financial success. Rock earned a Teen Choice Award for Choice Movie Actor – Comedy nomination for his performance. That same year he starred in the romantic comedy "2 Days in New York" (2012) opposite Julie Delpy. The film served as the sequel to Delpy's previous film, "2 Days in Paris" (2007). The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival where it received positive reviews, with critics praising the chemistry between the two with Todd McCarthy of "The Hollywood Reporter" writing: "The best of the humor is verbal and attitudinal, all delivered at a rapid clip in overlapping languages that Preston Sturges or Howard Hawks would have admired."


title: Chris Rock

text: In 2014, Rock scripted, directed and starred in the film "Top Five", which critics have drawn comparison to Woody Allen's "Stardust Memories" (1980). The film is a social commentary on fame and society. The film premiered at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. Scott Foundas, critic for "Variety" praised the film writing: "Rock has finally found a big-screen vehicle for himself that comes close to capturing the electric wit, shrewd social observations and deeply autobiographical vein of his standup comedy." In "Rolling Stone" magazine, Peter Travers wrote in his review: "Rock delivers the laughs, big ones, laced with razor-sharp observations on everything from pop culture to racial politics... His confident, prowling wit as a stand-up has finally found its way to the screen, enhanced by a bracing vulnerability. "Top Five" is Rock's best movie by a mile."


title: Chris Rock

text: In 2015, Rock appeared as himself in Sofia Coppola's Christmas musical special, "A Very Murray Christmas" starring Bill Murray. In the film, Rock sings "Do You Hear What I Hear?" with Murray. The film debuted on Netflix and received the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie.


title: Chris Rock

text: He also appeared as himself in another Netflix film, "Sandy Wexler" (2017) starring Adam Sandler. In 2018, he starred in the Netflix comedy "The Week Of" directed by Robert Smigel starring Sandler. The film follows two fathers during the week of the wedding of their children. The following year, he briefly appeared in the comedy film "Dolemite Is My Name" (2019) starring Eddie Murphy. In the film, Murphy portrayed Rudy Ray Moore and centers around his career as a standup, and director of blaxploitation starting with "Dolemite" (1975). The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.


title: Chris Rock

text: In 2021, he starred in a reboot of the "Saw franchise", "Spiral" (2021), which dabbled into the territory of the horror film genre.


title: Chris Rock

text: In the fall of 2005, the UPN television network premiered a comedy series called "Everybody Hates Chris", loosely based on Rock's school days, of which he is the executive producer and narrator. The show has garnered both critical and ratings success. The series was nominated for a 2006 Golden Globe for Best TV Series (Musical or Comedy), a 2006 People's Choice Award for Favorite New Television Comedy, and two 2006 Emmy Awards for costuming and cinematography.


title: Chris Rock

text: He produced the series "Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell", which premiered in August 2012. While serving as producer, he had a production company, Chris Rock Enterprises (or CR Enterprises) for short.


title: Chris Rock

text: In February 2005, Rock hosted the 77th Academy Awards ceremony. The decision to have Rock host the awards was seen by some as a chance to bring an "edge" to the ceremony, and to make it more relevant or appealing to younger audiences. Jokingly, Rock opened by saying ""Welcome to the 77th and LAST Academy Awards!"" During one segment Rock asked, "Who is this guy?" in reference to actor Jude Law seemingly appearing in every movie Rock had seen that year and implied Law was a low-rent Tom Cruise (he made a joke about filmmakers rushing production when unable to get the actors they want: "If you want Tom Cruise and all you can get is Jude Law, wait [to make the film]!"). Subsequently, an angry Sean Penn took the stage to present and said, "In answer to our host's question, Jude Law is one of our finest young actors." (At the time, Penn and Law were shooting "All the King's Men".) Law was not the only actor that Rock roasted that evening, however—he turned the joke on himself at one point, saying, "If you want Denzel [Washington] and all you can get is me, wait!" Older Oscar officials were reportedly displeased with Rock's performance, which did not elevate ratings for the ceremony. Rock was also criticized for referring to the Oscars as "idiotic", and asserting that heterosexual men do not watch them, in an interview prior to Oscar night.


title: Chris Rock

text: On October 21, 2015, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Rock would host the 88th Academy Awards the following February. When the subsequent acting nominations turned out to include no racial minorities, Rock was called upon to join a boycott of the ceremony. Rock declined, stating at the ceremony that it would have accomplished little since the show would have proceeded anyway, with him simply replaced. Instead, Rock spoke of his concerns about the lack of diversity in AMPAS at various times during the show, closing by saying "Black Lives Matter".


title: Chris Rock

text: Rock's performance was largely praised by critics. "Los Angeles Times" critic Mary McNamara wrote: "Rock's Oscars had some of the most powerful moments seen in the telecast's history. His decision to honestly answer the question 'Is Hollywood racist?' was brave and effective," "The New York Times" television critic James Poniewozik, praised Rock's performance for being "evenhanded without being wishy-washy" and that he represented "an example of something the industry is still trying to learn: that you can achieve both inclusion and entertainment by giving the right person just the right opportunity."


title: Chris Rock

text: Rock presented the award for Best Documentary Feature at the 94th Academy Awards in March 2022. During the ceremony, Rock joked about Jada Pinkett Smith's shaved head, which he compared to Demi Moore's shaved head in "G.I. Jane", saying: "Jada, I love ya. "G.I. Jane 2," can't wait to see it!". Pinkett Smith had shaved her head due to alopecia areata. Her husband, Will Smith, responded to Rock's joke by walking onstage and slapping Rock, who remarked: "Will Smith just smacked the shit out of me". Smith then returned to his seat and yelled twice at Rock, "Keep my wife's name out your fucking mouth!" Later in the night, Smith was named Best Actor for "King Richard", and while accepting the award, he apologized to the Academy and the other nominees, but not to Rock, in his acceptance speech. Rock declined to file a report with the Los Angeles Police Department regarding the incident.


title: Chris Rock

text: The next day, amid public backlash, Smith issued a formal apology to Rock, adding that "a joke about Jada's medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally." He also stated that "I was out of line" and that his behavior was "unacceptable and inexcusable." During a stand-up performance in Boston, Rock stated that Smith had not reached out to him personally and they had not spoken since the ceremony.


title: Chris Rock

text: Claims that Rock had apologized circulated on social media but were debunked. There has been no verified public apology from Rock to Smith or Pinkett Smith.


title: Chris Rock

text: Rock's first music video was for his song "Your Mother's Got a Big Head" from his album "Born Suspect". Rock also made videos for his songs "Champagne" from "Roll With the New" and "No Sex (In the Champagne Room)" from "Bigger & Blacker".


title: Chris Rock

text: He directed and appeared in the music video for the Red Hot Chili Peppers song "Hump de Bump", and has simply appeared in several videos, including the Big Daddy Kane music video "Smooth Operator" as a guy getting his hair cut, one of the many celebrities seen lip-synching in Johnny Cash's "God's Gonna Cut You Down", a cameo in Madonna's "Bitch I'm Madonna", and as a Wild West sheriff chasing down an 1889 cowboy version of Lil Nas X in "Old Town Road".


title: Chris Rock

text: In 2011, Rock appeared on Broadway in Stephen Adly Guirgis' play "The Motherfucker with the Hat" with Bobby Cannavale and Annabella Sciorra. Rock was nominated for a Drama League Award. In an interview with "Vibe" magazine, Rock stated that he chose to do Broadway because he wanted more people to see him "really act. Sometimes when you do comedy, that can be a little formulaic, and it's hard for really good directors to see that you can act."


title: Chris Rock

text: Rock's subject matter typically involves family, politics, romance, music, celebrities, and race relations in the United States. Though not strictly autobiographical, much of his comic standpoint seems rooted in his teenage experience; his strict parents, concerned about the inadequacies of the local school system, arranged to have the adolescent Rock bused to a nearly all-white high school in Bensonhurst. In his memoir "Rock This", he recalls, "My parents assumed I'd get a better education in a better neighborhood. What I actually got was a worse education in a worse neighborhood. And a whole bunch of ass-whippings."


title: Chris Rock

text: Rock has not wavered from a position explored in his 1996 "Roll With The New" show, and reiterated in his 1997 memoir: "Why does the public expect entertainers to behave better than everybody else? It's course, this is just for black entertainers. You don't see anyone telling Jerry Seinfeld he's a good role model. Because everyone expects whites to behave you've got to be an entertainer and a leader. It's too much." Often the subject of tabloids, when asked about paparazzi and the other negative aspects of fame, Rock says he accepts the bad with the good: "You can't be happy that fire cooks your food and be mad it burns your fingertips."


title: Chris Rock

text: At the London Live Earth concert on July 7, 2007, which was broadcast live on the BBC, before introducing the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rock called the crowd "motherfuckers" and said "shit", and after a brief pause said he was joking. Due to the broadcast being at 5:45p.m., Rock was immediately cut off, and the BBC made several apologies for his use of the word "motherfucker".


title: Chris Rock

text: Chris Rock has been an avid fan of the New York Mets baseball team since childhood. He complained that his team "had no money" during a 2011 interview with David Letterman.


title: Chris Rock

text: In May 2021, Rock voiced opposition to cancel culture. He said that it has led to "boring" and "unfunny" material from comedians. He also commented that there is an existing built-in mechanism for audiences informing comedians that their content does not work, like the audience not laughing at their jokes. Rock went on to say "Everybody's scared to make a move. That's not a place to be. You know, we should have the right to fail because failure is a part of art."


title: Chris Rock

text: Rock has said that he was influenced by the performing style of his paternal grandfather, Allen Rock, a preacher. Rock's comedy influences are Bill Cosby, Redd Foxx, Dick Gregory, Flip Wilson, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, Pigmeat Markham, Woody Allen, Bill Maher,


title: Chris Rock

text: Comedians who have cited Rock as an influence include Dave Chappelle, Christian Finnegan, George Lopez, Kevin Hart, and Trevor Noah.


title: Chris Rock

text: Rock married Malaak Compton-Rock on November 23, 1996. Compton-Rock is the founder and executive director of StyleWorks, a non-profit, full-service hair salon that provides free services for women leaving welfare and entering the workforce. The couple lived in Alpine, New Jersey with their two daughters. In December 2014, Rock filed for divorce from Compton-Rock. Rock admitted to infidelity in the marriage, as well as struggling with a pornography addiction. The divorce was finalized on August 22, 2016.


title: Chris Rock

text: Rock has campaigned against the racial profiling of African-Americans, and often speaks of the everyday racism he experiences “despite being famous”. In a 2013 episode of "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" with Jerry Seinfeld, Rock and Seinfeld are pulled over by the police for speeding while Seinfeld was driving. In the episode Rock admits to Seinfeld that "If you weren't here, I'd be scared. Yeah, I'm famous – still black." In 2015, Rock was pulled over three times in the first three months of the year. Each time Rock posted a selfie of the incident, without further comment as to the reason for the stops or whether he was issued a citation.


title: Chris Rock

text: On August 20, 2019, Rock, along with several other celebrities, invested in a funding round for Lowell Herb Co, a California cannabis brand. He is known to be "a dedicated cannabis consumer".


title: Chris Rock

text: On September 18, 2020, Rock said that he was diagnosed with a non-verbal learning disorder, a neurological condition that makes it difficult for him to understand non-verbal social cues.


title: Chris Rock

text: On September 19, 2021, Rock announced on Twitter that he had been tested positive for COVID-19. He strongly advocated getting vaccinated to his followers.


title: Chris Rock

text: On July 7, 2022 it was reported that Rock had started dating actress, screenwriter and director Lake Bell.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: Microsoft Teams is a proprietary business communication platform developed by Microsoft, as part of the Microsoft 365 family of products. Teams primarily competes with the similar service Slack, offering workspace chat and videoconferencing, file storage, and application integration. Teams replaced other Microsoft-operated business messaging and collaboration platforms, including Skype for Business and Microsoft Classroom. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Teams, and other software such as Zoom and Google Meet, gained much interest as many meetings moved to a virtual environment. As of 2022, it has about 270 million monthly users.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: Microsoft announced Teams at an event in New York, and launched the service worldwide on March 14, 2017. It was created during an internal hackathon at the company headquarters, and is currently led by Microsoft corporate vice president Brian MacDonald. Microsoft Teams is a web-based desktop app, developed on top of the Electron framework from GitHub which combines the Chromium rendering engine and the Node.js JavaScript platform.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: On August 29, 2007, Microsoft purchased Parlano and its persistent group chat product, MindAlign. On March 4, 2016, Microsoft had considered bidding $8 billion for Slack, but Bill Gates was against the purchase, stating that the firm should instead focus on improving Skype for Business. Qi Lu, EVP of Applications and Services, was leading the push to purchase Slack. After the departure of Lu later that year, Microsoft announced Teams to the public as a direct competitor to Slack on November 2, 2016.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: Slack ran a full-page advertisement in the "New York Times" acknowledging the competing service. Though Slack is used by 28 companies in the Fortune 100, "The Verge" wrote executives will question paying for the service if Teams provides a similar function in their company's existing Office 365 subscription at no added cost. ZDNet reported that the companies were not competing for the same audience, as Teams, at the time, did not let members outside the subscription join the platform, and small businesses and freelancers would have been unlikely to switch. Microsoft has since added this functionality. In response to Teams' announcement, Slack deepened in-product integration with Google services.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: On May 3, 2017, Microsoft announced Microsoft Teams would replace Microsoft Classroom in Office 365 Education (formerly known as Office 365 for Education). On July 12, 2018, Microsoft announced a free version of Microsoft Teams, offering most of the platform's communication options for no charge but limiting the number of users and team file storage capacity.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: In January 2019, Microsoft released an update targeting "Firstline Workers" in order to improve the interoperability of Microsoft Teams between different computers for retail workers.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: In September 2019, Microsoft announced that Skype for Business would be phased out in favor of Teams. Hosted Skype for Business Online was discontinued for new Office 365 customers that same month and was discontinued entirely on July 31, 2021.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: On November 19, 2019, Microsoft announced Microsoft Teams reached 20 million active users. This was an increase from 13 million in July of that year. It announced a "Walkie Talkie" feature in early 2020 that uses push-to-talk on smartphones and tablets over Wi-Fi or cellular data. The feature was designed for employees who speak with customers or run day-to-day operations. On March 19, 2020, Microsoft announced Microsoft Teams had hit 44 million daily users, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Microsoft reported that by April 2020, Microsoft Teams had hit 75 million daily users. On a single day in April, it logged 4.1 billion meeting minutes.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: On June 22, 2020, Microsoft announced that its acquired video game live streaming service Mixer would shut down in July of that year and that its staff would be transferred to the Microsoft Teams division.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: Teams allows users to communicate in two-way persistent chats with one or multiple participants. Participants can message using text, emojis, stickers and gifs as well as sharing links and files. Messages can be marked as urgent or important. In August 2022, the chat feature was updated for "chat with yourself"; allowing for the organization of files, notes, comments, images, and videos within a private chat tab.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: Teams allows communities, groups, or teams to contribute in a shared workspace where messages and digital content on a specific topic are shared. Team members can join through invitation sent by a team administrator or owner or sharing of a specific URL. Teams for Education allows admins and teachers to set up groups for classes, professional learning communities (PLCs), staff members, and everyone.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: Channels allow team members to communicate without the use of email or group SMS (texting). Users can reply to posts with text, images, GIFs, and image macros. Direct messages send private messages to designated users rather than the entire channel. Connectors can be used within a channel to submit information contacted through a third-party service. Connectors include MailChimp, Facebook Pages, Twitter, PowerBI and Bing News.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: Ad-hoc groups can be created to share instant messaging, audio calls (VoIP), and video calls inside the client software.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: A feature available on one of the higher cost licencing tiers allows connectivity to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) telephone system. This allows users to use Teams as if it were a telephone, making and receiving calls over the PSTN, including the ability to host 'conference calls' with multiple participants.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: Meetings can be scheduled with multiple participants able to share audio, video, chat and presented content with all participants. This supports thousands of users that can connect via a meeting link.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: Automated minutes are available using the recording and transcript features. Teams has a plugin for Microsoft Outlook to schedule a Teams Meeting in Outlook for a specific date and time and invite others to attend. If a meeting is scheduled within a channel users visiting the channel are able to see if a meeting is in progress.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: Teams Live Events replaces Skype Meeting Broadcast for users to broadcast to 10,000 participants on Teams, Yammer, or Microsoft Stream.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: Front Row adjusts the layout of the viewer's screen, placing the speaker or content in the center of the gallery with other meeting participant's video feeds reduced in size and located below the speaker.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: Microsoft Teams for Education allows teachers to distribute, provide feedback, and grade student assignments turned in via Teams using the Assignments tab through Office 365 for Education subscribers. Quizzes can also be assigned to students through an integration with Office Forms.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: Microsoft Teams is based on a number of Microsoft-specific protocols. Video conferences are realized over the protocol MNP24, known from the Skype consumer version. VoIP and video conference clients based on SIP and H.323 need special gateways to connect to Microsoft Teams servers. With the help of Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE), clients behind Network address translation routers and restrictive firewalls are also able to connect, if peer-to-peer is not possible.


title: Microsoft Teams

text: Microsoft Teams has integrations through Microsoft AppSource, its integration marketplace. In 2020, Microsoft partnered with KUDO, a cloud-based solution offering language interpretation, to offer integrated language meeting controls. In June 2022, an update was released using AI to improve call audio through the elimination of background feedback loops and canceling non-vocal audio.


title: Elizabeth Banks

text: Elizabeth Banks (born Elizabeth Irene Mitchell; February 10, 1974) is an American actress and filmmaker. She is known for playing Effie Trinket in "The Hunger Games" film series (2012–2015) and Gail Abernathy-McKadden in the "Pitch Perfect" film series (2012–2017). Banks made her directorial film debut with "Pitch Perfect 2" (2015), whose $69 million opening-weekend gross set a record for a first-time director. She also directed, wrote, produced, and starred in the action comedy film "Charlie's Angels" (2019). Banks founded the film and television production company Brownstone Productions in October 2002, with her husband Max Handelman.


title: Elizabeth Banks

text: Banks made her film debut in the low-budget independent film "Surrender Dorothy" (1998). She starred in the films "Wet Hot American Summer" (2001), Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man" trilogy (2002–2007), "Seabiscuit" (2003), "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" (2005), "Slither" (2006), "Invincible" (2006), "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" (2008), "Role Models" (2008), "The Next Three Days" (2010), "Man on a Ledge" (2012), "What to Expect When You're Expecting" (2012), "Movie 43" (2013), "The Lego Movie" (2014) and its , "Love & Mercy" (2014), "Walk of Shame" (2014), "Magic Mike XXL" (2015), "Power Rangers" (2017), and "Brightburn" (2019). She is currently directing the horror comedy film "Cocaine Bear".


title: Elizabeth Banks

text: On television, Banks had a recurring role as Avery Jessup on the NBC sitcom "30 Rock", which earned her two Primetime Emmy Award nominations. She had recurring roles on the comedy series "Scrubs" and "Modern Family", the latter of which earned her a third Primetime Emmy Award nomination. Banks starred in the Netflix miniseries "" (2015) and "" (2017). As of 2019, she hosts a revival of the 1980s game show "Press Your Luck" on ABC. The show is now in its fourth season.


title: Elizabeth Banks

text: Banks was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and grew up on Brown Street, the eldest of four children of Ann (née Wallace) and Mark P. Mitchell. Her father, a Vietnam War veteran, was a factory worker for General Electric and her mother worked in a bank. She has said that she grew up "Irish + WASP + Catholic." Growing up, Banks played baseball and rode horses. She was in Little League when she broke her leg sliding into third base. She then tried out for the school play, which was her start in acting.


title: Elizabeth Banks

text: She graduated from Pittsfield High School in 1992, and is a member of the Massachusetts Junior Classical League. She attended the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a member of the Delta Delta Delta Sorority and was elected to the Friars Senior Society. She graduated "magna cum laude" in 1996 with a major in communications and a minor in theater arts. In 1998, she completed schooling at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, California, where she earned an MFA degree.


title: Elizabeth Banks

text: Banks changed her name upon joining the Screen Actors Guild, as actress Elizabeth Mitchell was already registered in the union under that name.


title: Elizabeth Banks

text: After auditioning in New York, she was offered a role on the soap opera "Santa Barbara". Taking the role would have required her to quit her education at the American Conservatory Theatre, and Banks ultimately decided to forgo the offer due to having taken out student loans to complete her degree. She made her acting debut in the 1998 independent film "Surrender Dorothy", as Elizabeth Casey, and appeared in various films over the next seven years including "Wet Hot American Summer" (2001), "Swept Away" (2002), and "Seabiscuit" (2003).