Eleanor Roosevelt addresses Red Cross officials and troops at a London club. (Photo: Toni Frissell)

Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the 32nd president, was an ardent supporter of the American Red Cross. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin in No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, Roosevelt worked with the American Red Cross during World War I in Washington where her husband served as assistant secretary of the navy. She had helped run the canteen at Union Station where dressed "in the familiar khaki uniform, she and her fellow volunteers had handed out cups of coffee, newspapers, sandwiches, candy, and cigarettes to trainloads of soldiers en route to army camps and ports of embarkation. 'I loved it,' she said later. 'I simply ate it up.' Freed by the war from the social duties she detested, she was able, for the first time in her married life, to spend her days doing work she truly enjoyed."

As the nation's First Lady, she served as Honorary Chairman of the Red Cross National Committee on Volunteer Service in the 1930s. She participated in radio broadcasts that supported the Red Cross fundraising Roll Calls and World War II War Fund drives. She knitted sweaters and other garments for the Red Cross World War II refugee relief program. She attended Red Cross conventions and District of Columbia chapter events and wrote from time to time about the Red Cross in her syndicated newspaper column, "My Day."

In 1942, she accepted an invitation to visit England to see what British women were doing for the war effort and to convey a message of support from her husband to the American troops stationed there. While in England she visited several Red Cross service clubs and noted that they were much appreciated by American GIs.

In an American Red Cross oral history interview, Lois Laster, a Red Cross worker, gave a first-hand account of Mrs. Roosevelt's visit to the Liberty Club in London. "She was a very gracious woman," Laster recalled. "She didn't rush in and rush out. She mingled . . . [and] sat down and talked with the troops."

The next year she made a goodwill trip to the South Pacific. In her autobiography, she related that the president suggested that she visit Australia and New Zealand since they were so far away from the United States and he thought those countries felt neglected due to a lack of visitors. Before her departure, she visited Norman Davis, chairman of the American Red Cross, and asked if she could assist him by reviewing various Red Cross installations. Davis had been planning to send someone to inspect installations in the Pacific, so he asked her if she would wear a Red Cross uniform and make a report back to him upon her return.

The president and Mrs. Roosevelt discussed Davis's suggestion and determined that there were advantages to it. First, if she was going to wear uniforms most of the time there would be need for less luggage during air travel. Second, the uniform was familiar and would put people at ease when she visited hospitals and met servicemen. As she described it, ". . . I bought at my own expense the thinnest uniforms I could find, also a heavy one with a warm top coat, because I knew I would encounter extremes of weather. I conscientiously inspected every Red Cross activity in every area I visited and I hope that my reports were some compensation to Mr. Davis for the criticism heaped upon him for permitting me to go in uniform as a Red Cross representative."

Republican members of the Red Cross board were fearful that some large donors who were strongly opposed to President Roosevelt politically would cease making contributions. To help deflect criticism, Mrs. Roosevelt donated the money earned from her newspaper column to the Red Cross and American Friends Service Committee during her travels and for a time afterward. Her trip lasted for five weeks and took her to 17 Pacific islands in addition to New Zealand and Australia.

Mrs. Roosevelt was also a regular donor of blood to the Red Cross. Shortly after her birthday in 1944, she went to donate but an embarrassed young woman told her that she had passed the age limit and no one over the age of 60 could give blood. "I was unable to see how in a few weeks my blood could have changed," she wrote, "but I felt I really entered old age on October 11, 1944."

It hardly seems necessary for me to make an appeal for the Red Cross, but sometimes we take it for granted because an organization is so well known that it will received almost universal support and we forget that each one of us has a definite individual responsibility. The Red Cross should receive from every person who can possibly afford it support and whole-hearted assistance, and I hope all those within the sound of my voice will not forget to participate in its work during the coming year. - Eleanor Roosevelt from the White House in a 1934 radio address to the nation.

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