By Annette Dumbach

For some time it’s been a mystery to me why the greatest couple in the 20th century — as a couple and as individuals — have virtually gone down the black hole of memory in the United States.

The mystery is all the greater because, with President Obama having to lead an America now battered by multiple crises, their example should shine more brightly.

I speak of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States for twelve years and Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the Land — and often in her time — called First Lady of the World. I am now re-reading Eleanor and Franklin, the splendid biography by Joseph Lash, which won the Pulitzer Prize in the early 1970s. An outstanding work of research, style and compassion, unlike most biographies about political figures that are churned out today with a mix of platitudes and lewd gossip. The book is out of print, depriving millions of Americans of later generations from becoming aware of this remarkable story; his writing opens up an era, a time and place that enlarges our vision and knowledge of our national heritage.

Lash does not avoid the personal aspects of the story; on the contrary, he deals with the deep fissures in the Roosevelts’ marital life with taste and understanding; he does not moralize or cheapen their complex feelings for one another. Their early lives as well as their political and social engagement later on are explored in depth through letters and diaries.

Eleanor’s lonely early life is a compelling story of sadness, it makes her later accomplishments all the more dazzling and incredible. How they met and married and how their weaknesses and mistakes became apparent make their life together almost an American Tolstoyan epic. Both suffered terrible pain which seemed to toughen the inner sinews of spirit; he in his anguished battle with infantile paralysis and hers with the knowledge that he loved another woman

They both become very real and alive; we are brought back to Edith Wharton’s “Age of Innocence,” that time of fancy parasols, life made easy by a small army of servants, and a time of rules and rigidity and upper-class conformity that made even a breath of freedom almost impossible. Somehow in this rich, constricted universe they lived in, Eleanor and Franklin grew beyond their breeding and charm to become powerful and larger-than-life figures on the American scene. Step by step, in the 1920s, they faced and endured and triumphed over their private agonies, and soon this man, a lawyer, political dilettante, a bland ambitious political figure, went on — on crutches — to become governor of New York State.

In 1932 he was elected President in the midst of the Great Depression, elected by a people who finally understood that totally free enterprise means freedom for the rich and the powerful who have a cold disregard for those who did not share their status. Unlike the majority of their social class, both Franklin and Eleanor knew and felt the pain of ordinary people, and with the help of friends like Louis Howe, Harry Hopkins, Rose Schneiderman and Mary McCleod Bethune, they broke the bounds of class, race and ethnicity; they were an unofficial team who revived the broken morale of the American people, fighting for the right of workers to organize into unions, for safety on the job, for security in work, for social security for the aged — and for the regulation and monitoring of industries that were accustomed to treating their workers as dispensable and cheap material on the assembly line. In his early days of the Presidency, he and the Congress passed legislation that was perhaps the first real moment of government compassion for its people; only one President before him had tried — Eleanor’s “progressive” Republican uncle, Theodore Roosevelt.

When war came to America in l941, Eleanor continued travelling the country, serving as “the eyes and ears” of her husband, inspecting conditions in factories and nurseries for children whose mothers were now full-time breadwinners in the booming American industrial plant. She undertook a dangerous trip through the South Pacific to visit wounded serviceman in makeshift hospitals and to see how morale was holding up in the bloody and dragged-out island-hopping that was leading, slowly and savagely, toward the islands of Japan.

Her lengthy visit aroused great admiration, even from the skeptical military brass — with the exception of General Douglas MacArthur, the prima donna of the Pacific Theatre; he refused to meet her. She worked tirelessly to save the stranded Jews threatened with death in the precariously unoccupied ports of southwestern Europe. She pressed the President for emergency visas that saved many lives. Tragically though, those emergency decisions were often evaded or ignored by Breckinridge Long and his colleagues in the State Department; antisemitism was a traditional undercurrent in the upper-class corridors of power where traditional “American interests” were pursued.

After the war, Eleanor as a delegate was crucial in bringing to life the Proclamation of Human Rights as part of the United Nations Charter. It serves as the basis today for any commitment to an international response to bringing to justice those who have carried out genocide. For 17 years after Franklin’s sudden and shocking death on April 12, 1945, she worked with all her enormous energies and determination to strengthen the United Nations.

My question is: how can a man and a woman who had such an enormous positive impact on their country for such a long period of time be totally ignored — in the media and in the schools? Why is it happening?

It struck me most strongly in the last year or so, when comparisons between “then and now” were so clear — the return of depression — the loss of jobs, homes, all forms of security. One might expect that the New Deal and FDR would be mentioned, but no, the names brought up as admirable leaders by the then-candidate Barack Obama in his quest for “non-partisanship” were John Kennedy and The Great De-regulator, Ronald Reagan.

Doesn’t the Democratic Party want to remember its own past? I am, as are many others, more in tune with the “non-non-partisans.” Worse than this lack of memory is the fact that the adversaries of a social, compassionate government are alive and well, as well as they were when they were fighting FDR. Back then, private fancy clubs rejoiced in the death of FDR, “the traitor to his class,” as the nation wept. Today, it is Tea Parties, distinctly lower-class in tone, that mouths the same meaningless mantra about “getting the government off our backs.”

So I ask you, the reader: are our leaders too busy trying to sound conservative to notice that they are driving a carriage where the horses have run away? Is the disinterest in the past and ignorance of the past just part of the way we see things in America beyond theme parks and a few battlefields? Do the insidious accusations about FDR and Pearl Harbor make an indent in people’s minds, always a claim asserted by the radical-right? Why is this book out of print?

Why have we forgotten people who can help us, revive us, give us the vigor — that is a word from their time – who can give us strength for the future?

Annette Dumbach is a journalist and university lecturer currently living in Munich, Germany. She is the co-author, with Jud Newborn,of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, the story of five German university students and their professor, who in the midst of World War II organized a resistance movement to the Third Reich.