Eleanor and Ike: Historical Fiction Parallels Today’s Presidential Campaign Politics

My first attempt at fiction, The Sex Ed Chronicles, was based on historical events in my hometown and state, but it was a story of fictional characters. However, there are brilliant works of historical fiction that stay truer to history, when they use well-known historical figures in alternate scenarios.

Eleanor and Ike is one such work.

In Eleanor and Ike, the presidential race features no incumbent president or vice president, only the year is 1952 and the former First Lady at the top of the ticket is Eleanor Roosevelt. It’s interesting, as I read this story, the similarities to the current aspirations of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Like Hillary, Eleanor subordinated personal political ambitions to advance the career of her husband. As First Ladies both traveled around the world representing the United States, were active in the cause of working women and opposition to racial discrimination. Both played important roles in shaping foreign policy. They also had to lead in times of war. Sadly, both had to deal with extramarital affairs before their husbands became President.  

Robin Gerber, the author of Eleanor and Ike, is an Eleanor Roosevelt scholar; she’s also written a non-fiction work about the late First Lady’s leadership style.

In this work, Eleanor does not promise to continue the economic policies of her late husband’s New Deal in this post-World War II world. She calls her platform America’s Deal based on equality of rights: the right to an education according to ability; the right to earn a living according to ability; the right to equal justice before the law; and the right to participate in government through the ballot, protection of civil liberties, and universal health care.

That’s a platform Hillary Clinton, or any other Democratic candidate, could have run on 56 years later.

America’s Deal would not be the only similarity; we feared nuclear proliferation and the emergence of controversial leadership in Korea then, as now. There were also concerns about homeland security dominating the news in 1952, just as they do today. We also have fears at home; then it was the spread of Communism, today it is terrorism.

Had Eleanor Roosevelt actually run for President, she, like Hillary Clinton, would have led at a time after our institutions, such as Congress and the presidency, had been attacked at gunpoint. President Eleanor Roosevelt would have taken office two years after immigrant gunmen attempted to assassinate President Truman, in the cause of Puerto Rican independence. Puerto Rican Nationalists opened fire on a live session of the House of Representatives 14 months after Eisenhower took office, injuring five members of Congress.

In Gerber’s work, Eleanor’s campaign also thinks about “change”, just as presidential candidates do today.  As she is about to kick-off her campaign, a band plays Rocket 88 by Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner, a hymn of praise to the joys of the Oldsmobile “Rocket 88″ automobile; it’s also rumored she will campaign in an Oldsmobile 88 convertible. When Eleanor asks about the choice of song, she’s told: “It represents change. It’s a young people’s song, not a gray-haired grandma kind of song.”

This is where historical fiction breaks away from the realities of today’s Democratic campaign; Hillary Clinton has been unfairly portrayed as old news and politics-as-usual, when the truth is that she has not been a member of the party in power during six of her seven years in the Senate. I don’t see how any Democratic candidate who comes from the Senate could be viewed as a leader for change when they didn’t have the chance to win votes for their legislation.

That goes for Senators Clinton and Obama; John Edwards has not been an office holder for the past four years. However, it also goes true for the Republicans; as former House Speaker Dennis Hastert once said, they’ve carried the water for their president. There are not many new tunes from the other side, just a rewind of the same Bush songs.

When asked if Eleanor Roosevelt could be elected president today, Gerber said that she’d win in a landslide. She says there is a deep hunger in our country for a leader with conviction, integrity, demonstrated compassion, and authentic humanity.

Those are all traits where Hillary Clinton scores low in opinion polls and Senator Obama appears to score high.

Maybe she should buy a copy of this book.

The Abstinence Teacher Gets an A in My Grade Book

Tom Perrotta and I have two things in common: New Jersey roots and novels about sex education; his latest work, The Abstinence Teacher is the only other novel, besides my own, The Sex Ed Chronicles, that I have read which covers a subject that is still considered taboo in some social circles.

The Abstinence Teacher has two main characters: Ruth Ramsey, a divorcee’ and high school sex educator who makes one inappropriate comment too many, drawing the ire of the evangelical Tabernacle church and its’ hell for leather Pastor Dennis, and Tim Mason, a former stoner and rock n’ roller, also divorced, turned born-again Christian and doting soccer dad. Tim is struggling to stay along the straight and narrow path, as defined for him by the very same evangelical leader who torments Ruth.

The descriptions of Ruth and Tim’s mental conflicts are fascinating. They are both searching for self-worth through someone else.  Since their divorces, Ruth and Tim’s lives have taken divergent paths, but each believes that they have lost something that one might call faith. They are both close-minded, though Tim’s close-mindedness is manufactured from his relationship with the Tabernacle. It was interesting that Tim likened the fellowship of the Tabernacle to the camaraderie of the rock bands of his youth; both are closed circles that welcome loners who are taught to pity or look down on others who don’t fit in. 

Tim has tried to embrace a Christian life, though his sexual desires for his ex-wife and unhappiness in his second marriage lead him to doubt his piety. Tim repeatedly returns to Pastor Dennis to reconcile his adopted faith. Tim and Carrie, his second wife, try to find sexual bliss under a church-defined set of rules; the rules for shopping, for instance, try to draw a fine line between naughty and nice.

Ruth has lived professionally by the mantra that “pleasure is good, shame is bad and knowledge is power,” however she doubts that her students are listening to her more medically accurate, age appropriate messages. In her private moments, she doubts her own sexuality, wondering if love, or just plain good sex, will elude her for the rest of her life. Her desperation reaches new heights as she seeks an old high school flame through the ‘Net.

Ruth and Tim’s paths cross at a soccer game where Tim has asked his team, including Ruth’s daughter Maggie, to join in prayer after a victory. Ruth objects, drawing further wrath from the Tabernacle faithful. Her first clash led her principal and superintendent to institute an abstinence-only sex education course that she lacks the heart to teach. Her second compromises her relationships with her two daughters: Maggie, who wants to continue to play soccer for Tim, and Eliza who uses her mother’s objections to public prayer as a means to consider evangelical fellowship for herself.

Unlike my work, The Sex Ed Chronicles, which takes place in 1980, a time before sex education had been adopted in many public schools; Teacher is based in our times. In Chronicles, I was guided by the history and politics of the late 1970’s. Teacher devotes more attention to the culture of fundamentalist Christianity than the art, science and politics of teaching sex education in public schools. In Teacher, sex education is a regular part of the school day.

 In reading Teacher and Chronicles back to back, I noticed similarities.  Both novels position sex educators under the belief that knowledge is power and show that sex education is too important and too difficult a subject to teach poorly in the classroom. I made the same point as an observing news reporter as Perrotta makes by getting inside Ruth Ramsey’s head. In Teacher and Chronicles, the teachers are also asked to swallow some pride. I will only say that Ruth is asked to swallow harder.

Chronicles and Teacher share concerns about abstinence-only sex education being something that is watered down and therefore, not taking too seriously—unless it is consistent with the teachings of their family or place of worship. However, sex education outside of the public schools is less consistent from student to student, than inside the classroom—and both sides of the culture wars acknowledge this point.

Then the academic questions that come from reading Teacher and Chronicles are who provides the views that will dominate, and not demonize, public school sex education? Which minority view will take center stage in a theatre where parents and students are a silent majority? Will it be activist conservatives (they are not all Christians; Orthodox Jews and Muslims share deep seeded objections to comprehensive sex education) or activist educators perceived to be liberal, or is it more appropriate to say, sexually liberated?

And, do students and school administrators really care about the material taught in those classes? There is evidence in Teacher and Chronicles that administrators care mainly about staying out of trouble that comes in the forms of negative press and parental pressures and, that most students will “learn” whatever their school system decides to put in front of them.

 The Abstinence Teacher made me more concerned for the professional well-being and skin thickness of sex educators who work in settings similar to Ruth. A teacher cannot teach well when forced to suppress their own values to protect faculty colleagues from embarrassment.   I likened Ruth Ramsey’s job to managing the late shift at the 24-hour convenience mart, a no-win scenario whenever you lose your cool in head-to-head or eye-to-eye combat.

For this reason, as well as Perrotta’s humorous and insightful scenes of sex re-education in our times, The Abstinence Teacher gets high marks in my grade book.