Publisher's Synopsis
This remarkable collection of letters offers an intimate view of our nation's most challenging era, and a refreshingly personal portrait of a woman in the White House dedicated to aiding the less fortunate. Dear Mrs. Roosevelt is history from the grassroots and a testament to Eleanor Roosevelt's influence on the American consciousness and her effectiveness in catalyzing social change. Often addressed as "Mrs. President," Eleanor Roosevelt daily received hundreds of letters during her fourteen years as First Lady, and often responded by using the instruments of government to aid her correspondents. Historian Cathy Knepper has selected nearly two hundred of these letters, with many of Mrs. Roosevelt's replies, to tell the story of the Greatest Generation in its own words. The letters come from those impoverished during the Depression, the elderly in search of a pension program, blacks suffering the effects of racism, toilers in the New Deal, and mothers of soldiers during World War II. They transport readers to Oklahoma families forced to abandon their farms, mothers dealing with the blight of urban poverty, soldiers in Europe worried about their families at home, and servicemen in the Pacific desperate for a break from long years of war.
