Stephen Drury Smith discusses "The First Lady of Radio: Eleanor Roosevelt's Historic Broadcasts"

“[Eleanor Roosevelt] was terrified of speaking in public at first, and her high-pitched voice could sail off uncontrollably. Yet she became one of the most effective speakers of her time.”--David McCullough

On December 7, 1941, as a stunned nation gathered around the radio to hear the latest about Pearl Harbor, Eleanor Roosevelt was preparing for her weekly Sunday evening national radio program. At 6:45 p.m., listeners to the NBC Blue network heard the First Lady’s calm, measured voice explain that the president was conferring with his top advisers to address the crisis. It was a remarkable broadcast. With America on the verge of war, the nation heard first not from their president, but from his wife.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s groundbreaking career as a professional radio broadcaster is almost entirely forgotten. As First Lady, she hosted a series of prime-time programs that revolutionized how Americans related to their chief executive and his family. Now The First Lady of Radio rescues these broadcasts from the archives, presenting a carefully curated sampling of transcripts of Roosevelt’s most famous and influential radio shows, edited and set into context by award-winning author and radio producer Stephen Drury Smith. With a foreword by Roosevelt’s famed biographer, historian Blanche Wiesen Cook, The First Lady of Radio is both a historical treasure and a fascinating window onto the power and influence of a pioneering First Lady.

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Stephen Drury Smith is the executive editor and host of American RadioWorks®, the acclaimed national documentary series from American Public Media®. He is a co-editor (with Catherine Ellis) of Say It Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches and Say It Loud: Great Speeches on Civil Rights and African American Identity and (with Mary Marshall Clark, Peter Bearman, and Catherine Ellis) of After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 2001 and the Years That Followed, and the editor of The First Lady of Radio: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Historic Broadcasts. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Boston, Massachusetts.