Eleanor Roosevelt

It's the birthday of the longest-serving First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, born in New York City (1884) who said, "A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water." She began a secret courtship with her cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During World War I, she went off to Europe and visited wounded and shell-shocked soldiers in hospitals there. Later, during her husband's presidency, she campaigned hard on civil rights issues - not a universally popular thing in the 1930s and 1940s.

After FDR died in 1945, she moved from the White House to Hyde Park, New York, and taught International Relations at Brandeis University. As anti-communist witch-hunting began to sweep the U.S., she stuck up for freedom of association in a way that few Americans were brave or bold enough to do. She chided Hollywood producers for being so "chicken-hearted about speaking up for the freedom of their industry." She said that the "American public is capable of doing its own censoring" and that "the judge who decides whether what [the film industry] does is good or bad is the man or woman who attends the movies."

She said that the Un-American Activities Committee was creating the atmosphere of a police state in America, "where people close doors before they state what they think or look over their shoulders apprehensively before they express an opinion."

In 1947, a couple years before the McCarthy Era had reached full swing, she announced, "The Un-American Activities Committee seems to me to be better for a police state than for the USA."

She once said, "We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk."

And, "You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do."