Elliott Roosevelt
Elliott Roosevelt, born on September 23, 1910, in New York City, was the fourth child of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. He took a non-traditional route in his education, choosing not to attend Harvard after Groton, and instead worked as a horse wrangler in the West. His career spanned various fields, including advertising, radio broadcasting, and aviation journalism, ultimately leading him to become president of Hearst Radio. Elliott had a complex relationship with his parents, particularly during his early life marked by public dissent and multiple marriages, which challenged the family's dynamic.
During World War II, he served as a pilot in the U.S. Army Air Forces, earning the rank of brigadier general and participating in significant missions in Europe and North Africa. After the war, he shifted his focus to writing, producing several volumes to present his perspective on his parents' legacies, alongside fictional works that featured his mother as a detective in mystery novels. These novels not only entertained but also addressed social issues such as racism and anti-Semitism of the time. Elliott Roosevelt passed away on October 17, 1990, in Scottsdale, Arizona, leaving behind a multifaceted legacy shaped by both his familial connections and his individual pursuits.
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Elliott Roosevelt
Author
- Born: September 23, 1910
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: October 27, 1990
- Place of death: Scottsdale, Arizona
Biography
Son of former United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and Eleanor Roosevelt, Eliott Roosevelt was born September 23, 1910, in New York City, the fourth of five surviving children. He attended Groton but refused to go on to Harvard, instead going West as a horse wrangler. He became an advertising executive, a radio broadcaster, an aviation editor for William Randolph Hearst newspapers, and, later, president of Hearst Radio. He married five times. His early life, his public opposition to his father, and his divorces tested his parents’ patience, but, by World War II, they were reconciled.
Elliott became a pilot in the U.S. Army Air Forces, flying many combat missions. He commanded a photo reconnaissance unit important to the Allied invasions of Normandy, North Africa, and Sicily. By 1945, he was a decorated brigadier general. He accompanied FDR to the Casablanca and Cairo-Teheran Conference in 1943 and 1944. After FDR’s death in 1945, Elliott assisted his mother with her writing and radio and television broadcasts. After the publication of Joseph P. Lash’s Eleanor and Franklin (1971) and Eleanor: The Years Alone (1972), he published three volumes as a corrective to Lash’s view of his parents: An Untold Story: The Roosevelts of Hyde Park (1973), A Rendezvous with Destiny: The Roosevelts of the White House (1975), and Mother R.: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Untold Story (1977). All were written with James Brough.
When, in 1984, he published the first of the mystery novels in which Eleanor Roosevelt was detective, his view of her innocence and bluntness, gradually modified by a growing political and social awareness, and of his father’s relative subtlety and sophistication are generally consistent with the views of the biographies. Set in the 1930’s and 1940’s, the novels employ casts of real and imagined events and people. Scholars assume that some or all of the novels were ghostwritten by William Harrington; the strongest novels instead suggest the collaboration of a professional writer with a man who had actually experienced the people and era. Frequently, in these novels, Eleanor Roosevelt, with her commitment to the underdog, solves a case to protect a young woman who is accused, on flimsy evidence, of murder. Details give the novels individuality.
A First Class Murder (1991) is set in 1938 on the Normandie liner sailing from France to the United States; the future President John Fitzgerald Kennedy serves as her detective assistant, and the cast includes aviator Charles Lindbergh, comedian Jack Benny, and African American entertainer Josephine Baker. The presence of Baker and the Jewish Benny allows Roosevelt to show the anti-Semitism and racism of the time.
Roosevelt often varied the formula. In Murder at the Palace (1987), he wrote a traditional locked-room mystery, although the locked room is in Buckingham Palace in 1942. Nonseries mysteries include The President’s Man (1991) and New Deal for Death (1993), stories closer to the hard-boiled tradition. His hero, “Blackjack” Endicott, protects FDR, physically when necessary. In New Deal for Death, Endicott must stop an assassination attempt triggered by FDR’s determination to end Prohibition and thus eliminate a source of criminal wealth. Roosevelt died October 17, 1990, in Scottsdale, Arizona.