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Eleanor Roosevelt
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Ms. Corbin and Amelia Earhart
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Blast from the Past: Earhart and Roosevelt

April 5, 2018

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From the Spring 2018 issue of Western: The Magazine for Alumni of Western Illinois University

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By Kathy Nichols '89 MA '94, WIU Archives

Many noted lecturers have come to Western over the years, to entertain and inform. Most often in early decades, they spoke in the auditorium on the third floor of Sherman Hall. That auditorium was first ready for use in 1906. It was dedicated in June of that year, with a program including the Choral Society's performance of "Handel's Elijah"—a major early musical event.

Starting in 1906, daily assemblies were held in the auditorium. Attendance was mandatory, and students had assigned seats. However, other events took place there, including oratorical competitions among students. Later, Morgan Gym was also a noted site for talks, and in modern times, many noted speakers have appeared at Western Hall and in the University Union.

Without a doubt, two of the greatest speakers who came to campus during its more than 100-year history have been women—Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt. They appeared in two different eras, but both made a huge impact. Their words, for students and local residents, are still inspiring today.

Earhart came to Macomb on April 8-9, 1936. As John Hallwas notes in a Dec. 5, 2009, "On Community" article, for the McDonough Voice, "She was, by that time, perhaps the most famous woman in America, a cultural heroine who had dared to assert herself, commit her life to something very difficult, and realize her potential through determination and courage—just like a remarkable man might do."

The first female to fly the Atlantic (although as a passenger) in 1928, she later flew solo across that ocean, in 1932, when navigation was difficult, and she had no radio to rely on. In recognition of that flight, she was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross—a military decoration given for heroism or extraordinary achievement while participating in an aerial flight. She was the first woman to receive that honor. Three years later, in 1935, she became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to the U.S. mainland.

Earhart arrived in Macomb on the morning of April 8, driving her own car—which in itself was an assertion of female independence at that time. She stopped at the Macomb Airport to explain to Harry Clugston that she wasn't flying because not all of the towns she was visiting had airports, and because she enjoyed driving.

She registered at the Lamoine Hotel and granted an interview to Macomb Journal reporter Vail Morgan. That evening, she addressed a joint dinner meeting of the Business and Professional Women, the Rotary Club and the Kiwanis Club at the hotel. The newspaper reported that 260 people were gathered around tables in the Woman's Club room, in the hallway, and in the hotel lobby.

She told the assembled group she had intended to be a physician but became interested in aviation when she took a short pleasure flight in 1920 with Frank Hawks, who later became a famous speed flyer. When her father declined to give her the $1,000 she needed to take a course in flight instruction, she got a job as a file clerk in a Los Angeles telephone company office and worked there until she had earned the money she needed.

Both in her press conference and at the dinner, Earhart promoted flying as a safe means of travel that men and women alike could engage in, as well as telling of her trans-Atlantic and Hawaii to California flights. She ended her talk with a prophecy that someday flying the Atlantic would be commonplace and would be done on a scheduled basis.

At the close of her talk, when asked about her motivations for flying, she declared, "I do these things for no reason except for my own wish to do them. I feel that all women should strive for success in some field outside of what is known as 'their own sphere.'" What she meant, of course, was that women must learn to follow their own inner drives. The removal of social barriers, which confined them within a limited "sphere," as homemakers, would otherwise have no significant impact.

The following day, Earhart addressed a packed auditorium at Western, where she told of her long struggle to enter aviation, and then recounted her risky and almost catastrophic 1932 solo flight across the Atlantic, when the plane's altimeter soon stopped operating, the exhaust pipe burned off, and then she encountered a sleet storm. She had to keep the ice from disabling her plane by flying just above the whitecaps of the frigid and turbulent ocean. Flying without the kind of navigational equipment developed later, she ended up in Ireland, rather than France, but she made it.

Her talk was riveting for the crowd of college and academy students—and for the many young women and girls there, it was inspiring.

One who was forever impacted by that event was young Viletta Hillery '48 MS-Ed '53, then a college freshman. At Earhart's request, the program host asked if any young woman in the audience was named Amelia. It happened that Viletta's middle name was Amelia, so she alone in the packed room proudly raised her hand. As a result, she was invited to come forward, meet, and sit next to, the world famous woman.

That was Earhart's way of emphasizing that other young women are all potential Amelias, if they would only commit themselves to their own career choices and pursue what she called "the inner desires of your own heart." (As many of us who grew up in Macomb know, "Miss Hillery" later became the most noted and respected Macomb school principal of her era.)

Another speaker at Western, who drew a record-breaking audience, was former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. She was the widow of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president credited by some for leading the country out of the Great Depression by means of his New Deal policies and blamed by others for unnecessarily involving the nation in World War II. President Roosevelt died in 1945, so by the time Eleanor came to Macomb, in May 1960, she was 75 years old. She had been a widow for 15 years, and she would die from cardiac arrest, complicated by tuberculosis, two years later.

As the Western Courier pointed out in an article about her coming talk, Mrs. Roosevelt had been born to socialites in Manhattan during 1884. Her mother died from diphtheria in 1892, and her father, an alcoholic, died two years later. A thoughtful and serious child, she wrote, at the age of 14, that one's prospects in life were not totally dependent upon physical beauty, that "no matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and loyalty are stamped upon her face all will be attracted to her." Indeed that was a revolutionary idea for a time when society promulgated the notion that the goal of women was to attract a husband by means of her physical attributes and to settle down to the keeping of a household and raising children.

Mrs. Roosevelt received private tutoring and completed her education at a private finishing school in England from 1899-1902. As she mentioned in Macomb, she met FDR during the summer of 1902 and married him March 17, 1905.

Mrs. Roosevelt quickly became one of the best known women in America, studying the political scene at the time and taking an active part in her husband's career. During World War I, while FDR was working in Washington D.C. as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, she worked in a Navy hospital. An April 27, 1960, Western Courier article states, "She was the first wife of a president of the United States to maintain a career of her own, the first to hold regular press conferences, and the first to travel by plane. During this time, she visited and lectured to groups all over the U.S. Her daily newspaper column, 'My Day,' which she began in 1935, had over five million readers." She was a ground-breaking figure in America.

After FDR's death in 1945, Mrs. Roosevelt moved to Hyde Park, NY, the couple's home. In December 1945, she was selected to attend the United Nations General Assembly sessions held in London, and the following April she was elected president of the U.N. Economic and Social Council's Commission on Human Rights. Through various involvements since that time, she championed racial tolerance, advocated civil rights and social progress for minorities, and toured the U.S., lecturing at numerous universities, including in the Spring 1960, at Western.

Mrs. Roosevelt's talk, "Is America Facing World Leadership?," was delivered on the evening of May 4 to a packed audience in Morgan Gym. It directly reflected the crucial Cold War conflict between the Soviet Union and the U.S., so it was engaging for the public. The event was sponsored by the Western Community Forum, the American Association of University Women, the local Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, and the Luncheon Lecture Club, so it was a great example of town-gown cooperation.

As Mrs. Roosevelt explained at the outset of her talk, "Two strong ideas—the democratic idea and the Communist idea—are struggling for the uncommitted peoples of the world." She went on to remind her audience that the Soviet Union had achieved success, in Russia and in other parts of the world, "through thought control, iron discipline, police state methods, and rule by fear." She was talking about the mindset of the two great world powers of the time, which divided the world, and in doing so, created unforgettable tension among people who might have otherwise found ways to work together.

During her talk, Mrs. Roosevelt criticized the methods employed by the Khrushchev administration to gain control over the Russian people—"="thought control, iron discipline, police state methods, and rule by fear." As an example, she cited a conversation she had with a patient at a medical facility during a visit to Russia. The young man had willingly answered every question she had regarding his recent operation. However, when she opened up the subject of politics, "He shut up like a clam, seeming to say to me, 'You are unmannerly. Don't you know you are putting your host in danger?'" To an extent she was, since people who dared to speak out in those days against Soviet leadership, and who therefore became an inconvenience, regularly disappeared from public view.

Mrs. Roosevelt went on to say, "The Soviet Union has put all its energy and all its concentration in gaining our nuclear knowledge. They have succeeded in getting it because the Soviet leaders believe in research and because they do not have to go to the people."Put another way, Soviet leaders had succeeded in their quest for power because they had made use of propagandistic tactics to assert control over people who were poorly educated and otherwise uninformed. That was a great message for college students.

Those of us who were pre-teens or teenagers in the 1950s and 1960s can recall the stone-faced members of the central committee of the Communist Party, who sometimes surrounded Khrushchev at public events and who, as Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley and others reported, operated behind the walls of the Kremlin in ways we didn't wholly understand and that therefore frightened us. The result of the paranoia that came into being as a result of fear among Soviet and American citizens resulted in an arms race that endangered the entire world. Every person in America was aware of that tension.

As she said to the students, and faculty members, and other local residents who crowded into Morgan Gym in the Spring 1960 to hear the former first lady, "The real struggle is for the uncommitted peoples of Africa, Asia and South America. Khrushchev doesn't trust just military power, however. His campaign is carefully planned along economic and cultural lines. Russians learn the language of the people she hopes to persuade. Young people learn to speak Chinese, English and German like natives. Children are forced to take 10-year courses in one or the other and by rote and repetition, day after day, are compelled to learn." As she knew, that kind of "learning" enabled youngsters to become functionaries, serving the purposes of their leaders, while depriving them of the kind of knowledge that would have prompted them to make independent judgments.

Mrs. Roosevelt asserted that by means of their carefully employed tactics, Communist leaders had managed, in an astonishingly short time, to gain a kind of control that enabled them to convert a largely backward nation into a major world power. She was able to look beneath the surface of matters to understand Khrushchev and his advisors were as intent on employing manipulation of the mind as they were about using physical force to achieve their goals. For that reason, she warned her audience that lacking sufficient awareness of Communist tactics, they "may wake up to find that Russia has won over the majority of the peoples of the world."

To combat pro-Communist coercion of people in Russia, as well as in China and Cuba and other places, including in the United States, Mrs. Roosevelt advocated increased cultural understanding, including awareness of habits and customs of the people and in particular study of their languages. Of course, her comments were particularly appropriate for an audience of young people engaged in the pursuit of broad knowledge, with the intent for the most part of becoming educators themselves. In the 1950s and 1960s, Western was still very much focused on teacher training.

In a follow-up article in the Courier, female feature writer and education major, Andi Alessi (now Kaumeheiwa) ‘61 said "Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt sat in a chair shaking hand after hand as approximately 100 people filed past her in the patio lounge last night. She smiled at me very warmly when I asked her if she knew that she had spoken to a capacity crowd tonight and if she was used to breaking such records." Her response was, "I don't often speak to a poor audience." She also went on to say that the audience in Morgan Gym had been "so very attentive and very good."

Too often young women of the past have lacked good role models from their own gender. Clearly, Viletta and Andi profited from their contacts with Earhart and Roosevelt, as many others in their audiences must have. Opportunities for interaction with motivated and far-sighted individuals can be an important part of higher education. Western has seen many other noted figures speak on campus over the generations, but it can be especially proud of once serving as host for these two exceptional women.

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