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      Eleanor review: sensitive and superb biography of a true American giant

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      As the 2020 US presidential election winds toward a tortuous and dysfunctional certification, it is tempting to imagine that intrigue and machinations belong only to this particular heated moment in American life and history. That would be wrong.There is always intrigue in American politics, though nothing approaching the current state of near-sedition. We would be also be wrong if we dated the role of iconic first ladies only as far back as Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton, or even Jackie Kennedy. Before there was Jackie or Hillary or Michelle, there was Eleanor. Niece to one president, wife to another; activist, global citizen; mother of the Democratic party in the mid-20th century, when the mother of the party was still a thing.You will find all these identities in David Michaelis’s elegant new biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, but the beauty of this robust volume is that there are so many more Eleanors to meet. Awkward girl; yearning and unappreciated wife; shy but committed romantic; resolute partner; distant mother. Michaelis, a veteran biographer, shows us all these many faces, rendering a complex and sensitive portrait of a woman who bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, reimagining herself many times with both courage and resilience.Born into the strictures of upper-class white womanhood, Eleanor was conversant with and adjacent to political power from an early age. Born to a beautiful, critical mother and an affectionate, drug- and alcohol-addicted father, she might well have been identified in the 21st century as an adult child of an alcoholic, with all the needy and compliant behavior implied. Her mother, Anna, consumed with keeping up appearances, was no better than any other woman of her class; indeed, her constant mockery of the young Eleanor certainly compounded the child’s insecurity and desire to truly belong. Michaelis writes with great sensitivity, utilizing Eleanor’s own recollections and other research materials to set the backdrop for recurring themes in his young subject’s life, including her mother’s “ritualized humiliation … as often as not in front of company”, including her mocking nickname of “Granny”.With both parents and a brother dead by the time she was 10, Eleanor found herself introduced to tragedy – as well as to something steadfast within herself: “No matter what happened to one in this world, one had to adjust to it.” And adjust she did, to her grandmother’s strictures, her mother-in-law’s disdain, the ambitions of her husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This biography gives equal weight to Eleanor’s personal and political longings, her frustrations with her husband and her fury at his indiscretions; and her own loves, requited and otherwise.At the same time, however, Michaelis reveals, again and again, that Eleanor found her truest self through duty, hard work and sometimes punishing overachievement. She felt most loved in partnership and was misled by the illusion of it. Longing to be the center of one person’s love, she settled instead for the larger, public love of a generation as she wrote, traveled and agitated to change the world. What is especially refreshing about this biography are the ways in which Michaelis refuses to hide the fact that Eleanor’s struggles for justice had limits, drawn not only by her grudging acceptance of a political spouse’s role, but also through the limitations of her race and class.Impressively, the author does not sugarcoat or diminish the casual racism and xenophobia of the age, highlighting FDR’s use of the N-word and comfort with segregation, as well as the well-documented anti-Asian racism undergirding the internment of Japanese citizens during the second world war. Indeed, Michaelis’s framing of these deficiencies in American political life helps us to trace their provenance in our own era and allows us to see what Eleanor was up against in her bravest as well as her most timid moments.Her commitment to global citizenship and human rights served to mirror white activists in that period as well as this one: they find the courage to fight for human rights and dignity in the far corners of the globe yet choke at the exact moment when their courage could be most effective. She found herself in full command of the symbolic gesture – making it possible for Marian Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln memorial and resigning from the Daughters of the American Revolution but refusing to attend the concert herself, at a moment when such a symbolic gesture might have made a greater difference.These sections will not surprise many African or Japanese Americans. Such readers will likely have personal experience with the failures of white Americans who talk a good game about democracy and equal justice under law, but who can’t deliver when the chips are down. Indeed, Michaelis does such an excellent job of outlining Eleanor’s grueling work to bring to fruition the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the country’s domestic deficiencies during and after FDR’s presidency are drawn in sharp relief. More

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      in US Politics

      Strongmen review: a chilling history for one nation no longer under Trump

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      This terrific history of strongmen since Mussolini makes it clear that despite a horrific pandemic and massive economic disruption, ordinary democratic Americans have more to be thankful for this Thanksgiving than ever before.Comparing the gruesome, granular details of the reigns of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Gaddafi, Pinochet, Mobuto, Berlusconi and Erdoğan to the acts and aspirations of Donald Trump, New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat makes a powerful argument that on the scary road to fascism, America just came perilously close to the point of no return.Almost everything Trump has done has come straight from the authoritarian playbook. Every dictator, for example, has built on the accomplishments of his predecessors.“Just as Hitler watched Mussolini’s actions carefully,” Ben-Ghiat writes, “so did Gaddafi learn from Lt Col Gamal Abdul Nasser’s 1952 overthrow of the monarchy in Egypt.” Then in the 1980s and 90s, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich served as models for Europeans looking for “a more radical form of conservatism”. Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America was echoed a year later by the Front National, with its “contract for France with the French”. Berlusconi’s Contract with Italians followed six years later.In Egypt, Nasser hired “former Nazi propagandists for their expertise in antisemitic messaging”. In Zaire, from 1965, Mobutu Sese Seko’s media handlers reimagined Leni Riefenstahl’s image of Hitler descending from the sky by opening the television news each night with a picture of the dictator’s face, hovering up in the clouds.The parallels between Trump and his role models are endless. Ben-Ghiat writes of “watching Trump retweet neo-Nazi propaganda, call for the imprisonment [of Hillary Clinton] and lead his followers in loyalty oaths at rallies seemed all too familiar”– and how it filled her “with dread”.Before the Putin-Trump bromance there was Putin and Berlusconi, grinning at each other from Zavidovo to Sardinia. The way Trump talked about Mexicans was hardly different from Hitler’s words about the Jews or Berlusconi’s about Africans. The Italian media mogul and prime minister was himself just a pale imitation of Mussolini. In the pre-war period, he was responsible for the deaths of 700,000 Libyans, Eritreans, Somalis and Ethiopians.Every authoritarian regime has seen a crucial alliance between big business and the dictator, from Putin and his oligarchs to Hitler and German industrialists and Trump and the Wall Street elite. The German businessman Ernst von Hanfstaengl, Ben-Ghiat writes, introduced a “cleaned-up Hitler to the moneyed social circles that mattered” – just as Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman helped legitimize Trump with tens of millions in campaign contributions to him and his Republican allies.Like all his role models, Ben-Ghiat sees in Trump a “drive to control and exploit everyone and everything for personal gain. The men, women and children he governs have value in his eyes only insofar as they … fight his enemies and adulate him publicly. Propaganda lets him monopolize the nation’s attention, and virility comes into play as he poses as the ideal take-charge man.”The US has done so much to promote authoritarianism abroad during the last 100 years, it’s actually surprising it took so long before we had to confront it at home.When Mussolini desperately needed international legitimacy and economic aid in 1926, it was a fascist proselytizer and JP Morgan partner Thomas Lamont who rescued him, brokering a $100m US government loan. Fifty years later, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger told CIA director Richard Helms to make Chile’s “economy scream”, so Gen Augusto Pinochet could overthrow the socialist Salvador Allende. Kissinger and William F Buckley became fervent Pinochet apologists, even as thousands were tortured and disappeared. More

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      Romance novelists raise $400,000 for Georgia Senate races – with help from Stacey Abrams

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      Rallying behind Stacey Abrams, the Democratic politician, voting rights activist and romance author, American romance novelists have helped raise nearly $400,000 to help elect two Democratic senators in Georgia.Now, Abrams herself has joined the “Romancing the Runoff” fundraiser, and has donated a copy of the first of her eight published romance novels–one signed with both her real name, and her pen name, Selena Montgomery.“I’m privileged to be one of you,” Abrams wrote on Twitter, praising the romance authors’ “amazing” fundraising efforts.Abrams’ work fighting against suppression of black voters and organizing voter registration efforts is widely credited with helping Joe Biden become the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia in more than a quarter century. Democrats have said her work was “pivotal” in flipping Wisconsin and other battleground states.Thank you @RomancingRunoff for your amazing efforts. I’m privileged to be one of you. For the cause, I’d like to throw in an autographed copy of my first novel, Rules of Engagement, in the rare hardback version. Both Selena & Stacey will sign. 😉https://t.co/32aiezmJmW— Stacey Abrams (@staceyabrams) November 25, 2020
      Since election day, Abrams has not stopped fighting: a January runoff between two pairs of Democratic and Republican candidates in Georgia will determine whether Republicans maintain control of the US senate – and have the votes to block Democrats and the incoming Biden administration from enacting any substantial new policy agenda.In the week after the election, Abrams helped raise $3.6m in just two days to help campaigns for the Georgia Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock as they fight re-matches in a runoff election against the incumbent Republican senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.Meanwhile other American romance novelists, many of whom have active social media platforms, began organizing to auction off romance-novel related items to support the Democratic candidates through donations to the New Georgia Project, Black Voters Matter, and Fair Fight, the voting rights group Abrams founded.“Democracy only thrives when every vote can be cast and counted, and we are fighting to help dismantle the legacy of voter suppression in Georgia,” the four bestselling authors who organized the auction said in a statement.Political activism is not a new development in the American romance writing community, which has been fighting fierce battles over entrenched racism in the publishing industry, as well as within their own industry trade group, the Romance Writers of America, for years.But the Georgia fundraising effort is also a testament to romance novelists’ pride in Abrams, who has continued to tout her work as an author of romantic suspense, even as she has become a star in national Democratic politics and a bestselling author of political nonfiction, including her memoir, Lead from the Outside.When writers who got their start publishing romance novels move on to more prestigious genres, “they sometimes back away from romance, like it’s this dirty secret in their past: ‘Oh, I don’t write those kinds of books any more,’” the author Courtney Milan, one of the auction’s organizers, said. “Stacey Abrams has never once done that to us.”“She’s not playing the game of trying to advance where she is by denigrating where she’s been,” Milan said. “She’s very clear that she doesn’t think any apologies are needed, which they aren’t.“I revel in having been able to be a part of a genre that is read by millions and millions of women, in part because it respects who they are,” Abrams told Entertainment Weekly in an interview in 2018, when she was campaigning to be governor of Georgia.Asked by the Washington Post how she would respond to people who made fun of the romance genre, Abrams wrote: “Telling a well-crafted story is hard. Full stop. Regardless of genre, good writing is good writing”. She added that she was “honored to be in the company of extraordinary writers.”The “Romancing the Runoff” auction had grown past its initial goal of raising $20,000, Milan said, as a wide range of authors and romance fans donated thousands of items, including first editions of romance novels, including the first Harlequin novel published by a black author, Sandra Kitt’s Rites of Spring; one-on-one sessions for writing advice, a chicken recipe from Dame Barbara Cartland, and handmade crafts, such as a “blue wave” crocheted scarf to a hand-embroidered sampler reading “F*ck the GOP”.The fantasy and science fiction novelist Neil Gaiman also joined the effort, donating a signed collector’s edition of one of his novels that sold for $4,590.A spokesperson for Fair Fight did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment about the Romancing the Runoff fundraiser beyond Abrams’ tweet.Milan said she had “no clue” how much money the copy of Abrams’ own signed romance novel might raise for the Georgia election, but she expected it would “easily be four figures”.Hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent on political advertising in Georgia in the weeks before the runoff election on 5 January, NBC News reported this week, with at least $46m already spent since election day. More

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      in US Politics

      It was hard not to laugh at Rudy Giuliani's hair malfunction – but it's time to stop equating looks with character | Emma Beddington

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      Weren’t the pictures of Rudy Giuliani’s hair malfunction last week wonderful? I was transfixed by footage of him bug-eyed and ranting at a press conference, as dark rivulets of hair dye (or mascara, expert opinion was divided) ran down his sweaty cheeks. The incident spawned a delighted outpouring of comment and mocking tweets. He was a Scooby-Doo villain unmasked; a gargoyle, a comic-book grotesque, and it felt so apt. For critics, it was as if corruption, lies and moral turpitude were finally oozing out of him as a tarry discharge.It is the same satisfaction we feel as we dissect the brittle spun-sugar edifice of Trump’s hair, the harshly theatrical lines of his makeup (“una naranja espantosa”, a scary orange, as a White House housekeeper described it to the Washington Post) or his cack-handed panda-eye concealer habit. It is delicious when the facade cracks, especially in one so obsessed with surface. It feels like poetic justice when a man who built a gold tower, regularly comments on his daughter’s looks and mocked a disabled reporter is caught looking diminished and ridiculous.No amount of expensive vanity, it seems, can cover what is essentially rotten about these men: the ugliness keeps showing through. “If a person has ugly thoughts it begins to show on the face,” Roald Dahl wrote in The Twits. Except, of course, that is nonsense. I don’t believe for a moment that any of us actually thinks there is any correlation between looks and character. So why do we still allow and amplify this lazy trope?Years of cultural conditioning doesn’t help, I suppose. Hollywood has been conflating ugliness and moral failing since cinema began, and Shakespeare was doing it 500 years ago. The messaging is at its most intense in childhood: villains, from Disney to Harry Potter, are fat, disfigured or ugly. David Walliams has been called out for it; Dahl is infamous for it. Reading The Witches to my sons when they were small was an odd experience: they adored the story and Quentin Blake’s enchanting illustrations, but the diagram and explanation of an unmasked witch confused them – because it looked like me. I have alopecia and, like the witches, am bald beneath my wig. Was I planning to turn them into mice?Even in 2020, Anne Hathaway’s Grand High Witch in the new screen version is revealed, beneath her disguise, to be a bald monster with disfigured, claw-like hands. Weary disability campaigners were provoked into action once more on the film’s release, condemning yet another depiction of disability as evil. People with limb differences, from Paralympians to Bake Off’s Briony Williams tweeted pictures of themselves tagged #notawitch and Warner Bros was flustered into one of those weaselly not-quite apologies. The studio declared it was “deeply saddened … our depiction of the fictional characters in The Witches could upset people with disabilities”.Things are slowly changing: the British Film Institute has said it will not support films with facially scarred villains, and the campaigning group RespectAbility is dedicated to analysing shortcomings in Hollywood’s portrayal of disability and trying to shift its portrayals.From a fictional perspective, it is surely more interesting to subvert the “ugliness as evil” trope anyway. One of the best things about the Amazon’s ultra-gory, superheroes-gone-bad series The Boys is how absurdly good-looking the truly repellent baddies are, all chiselled cheekbones and dewy beauty.But this reframing needs to go further than fiction, and that is up to us. Corruption and amorality can also be high-definition glossy and ready for its closeup: think of Ivanka and Jared. The next generation of hard-right demagogues probably won’t look like Trump or Steve Bannon (another whose general aura of dissolution and decay it is terribly hard not to conflate with his repellent politics). Isn’t that actually far scarier?There are many reasons to loathe Trump and Giuliani, but a heavy hand with the retouching wand, a pale expanse of paunch spilling out of a golf shirt, or a turbo-charged bad hair day are not among them. They are rotten to the core; let’s resist the temptation to fixate on the surface. More

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      in US Politics

      Can American democracy survive Donald Trump?

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      “I WON THE ELECTION!” Donald Trump tweeted in the early hours of 16 November 2020, 10 days after he lost the election. At the same time, Atlantic magazine announced an interview with Barack Obama, in which he warns that the US is “entering into an epistemological crisis” – a crisis of knowing. “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false,” Obama explains, “by definition our democracy doesn’t work.” I saw the two assertions juxtaposed on Twitter as I was finishing writing this essay, and together they demonstrate its proposition: that American democracy is facing not merely a crisis in trust, but in knowledge itself, largely because language has become increasingly untethered from reality, as we find ourselves in a swirling maelstrom of lies, disinformation, paranoia and conspiracy theories.
      The problem is exemplified by Trump’s utterance, which bears only the most tenuous relation to reality: Trump participated in an election, giving his declaration some contextual force, but he had not won the election, rendering the claim farcical to those who reject it. The capital letters make it even funnier, a failed tyrant trying to exert mastery through typography. But it stops being funny when we acknowledge that millions of people accept this lie as a decree. Their sheer volume creates a crisis in knowing, because truth-claims largely depend on consensual agreement. This is why the debates about the US’s alarming political situation have orbited so magnetically around language itself. For months, American political and historical commentators have disputed whether the Trump administration can be properly called “fascist”, whether in refusing to concede he is trying to effect a “coup”. Are these the right words to use to describe reality? Not knowing reflects a crisis of knowledge, which derives in part from a crisis in authority.
      However, the very fact that we need to ask this question helps answer it – for lying, paranoia and conspiracy are also defining features of the totalitarian societies that American society is being so hotly compared to. As Federico Finchelstein maintained in his recent A Brief History of Fascist Lies: “As facts are presented as ‘fake news’ and ideas originating among those who deny the facts become government policy, we must remember that current talk about ‘post-truth’ has a political and intellectual lineage: the history of fascist lying.” Both George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, two of history’s most acute observers of totalitarianism, situated lying squarely at the heart of the totalitarian project. Not just the Hitlerian big lie of propaganda, but a culture of pervasive lying, what Arendt called “lying as a way of life” and “lying on principle”, systematic dishonesty that destroys the collective space of historical-factual reality. Orwell similarly insisted that lying is “integral to totalitarianism”: indeed, for Orwell, totalitarianism probably “demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth”. And as Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, both the Nazis and the Soviets created markedly paranoid societies, in which the capillary action of conspiratorial fictions did as much work as ideological infrastructure. More

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      Barack Obama on the moment he won the presidency – exclusive extract

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      More than anything campaign-related, it was news out of Hawaii that tempered my mood in October’s waning days. My sister Maya called, saying the doctors didn’t think Toot [Obama’s grandmother] would last much longer, perhaps no more than a week. She was now confined to a rented hospital bed in the living room of her apartment, under the care of a hospice nurse and on palliative drugs. Although she had startled my sister with a sudden burst of lucidity the previous evening, asking for the latest campaign news along with a glass of wine and a cigarette, she was now slipping in and out of consciousness.And so, 12 days before the election, I made a 36-hour trip to Honolulu to say goodbye. Maya was waiting for me when I arrived at Toot’s apartment; I saw that she had been sitting on the couch with a couple of shoeboxes of old photographs and letters. “I thought you might want to take some back with you,” she said. I picked up a few photos from the coffee table. My grandparents and my eight-year-old mother, laughing in a grassy field at Yosemite. Me at the age of four or five, riding on Gramps’s shoulders as waves splashed around us. The four of us with Maya, still a toddler, smiling in front of a Christmas tree.Taking the chair beside the bed, I held my grandmother’s hand in mine. Her body had wasted away and her breathing was labored. Every so often, she’d be shaken by a violent, metallic cough that sounded like a grinding of gears. A few times, she murmured softly, although the words, if any, escaped me.What dreams might she be having? I wondered if she’d been able to look back and take stock, or whether she’d consider that too much of an indulgence. I wanted to think that she did look back; that she’d reveled in the memory of a long-ago lover or a perfect, sunlit day in her youth when she’d experienced a bit of good fortune and the world had revealed itself to be big and full of promise.I thought back to a conversation I’d had with her when I was in high school, around the time that her chronic back problems began making it difficult for her to walk for long stretches.“The thing about getting old, Bar,” Toot had told me, “is that you’re the same person inside.” I remember her eyes studying me through her thick bifocals, as if to make sure I was paying attention. “You’re trapped in this doggone contraption that starts falling apart. But it’s still you. You understand?”I did now. More

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      in US Politics

      As Donald Trump refuses to concede: the etymology of 'coup'

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      As Donald Trump sulked in the White House after the election and refused to concede defeat, many wondered if he was plotting a “coup”, in the sense of an illegitimate seizure of power. This is short for the French coup d’état, literally “blow” or “stroke” of state, but it took a silent linguistic coup for that to become its meaning.“Coup” is traced back to the Latin colaphos, for a punch or cuff. As the phrase itself suggests, a coup d’état was originally (from the 17th century) a decisive action by a (legitimate) government, such as the formation of an alliance or a cunning marriage; only later did it come to mean the seizure of the apparatus of state from outside. All coups, however, seem to require an element of surprise, just like a coup de foudre (literally, lightning strike) is love at first sight, and a “coup” in short is often cause for celebration: an admirable, unexpected success.Pleasingly, “coup” also has an old Scottish use, meaning: “The act of tilting or shooting rubbish from a cart, wheelbarrow, etc.” In this sense, emptying the White House of Trump will itself constitute a coup to be marked with much revelry.• Steven Poole’s A Word for Every Day of the Year is published by Quercus. More