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Louis Howe told Eleanor Roosevelt after her husband's election to the White House that "he could make her president in ten years, just as he had Franklin." https://books.google.com/books?id=iB3QsnzHV2UC&pg=PA222 Now I don't know how seriously Howe meant it--he may simply have been bragging, and he may have been trying to persuade her to take a public role unlike those taken by previous First Ladies, by suggesting it could ultimately lead to the presidency. In any event Howe was dead within a few years, and I have never considered an Eleanor Roosevelt presidency a real possibility. But something I recently read in Joseph Lash's *Eleanor: The Years Alone* makes me think there may have been a real though slim chance for it.

As the Democrats gathered for their national convention in Philadelphia in 1948, with their prospects for retaining the presidency seemingly gloomy, Claire Boothe Luce, who of course was a Republican, offered them some advice. Their only chance, she said, was to nominate a Truman-Eleanor Roosevelt ticket. This would at once inspire the women voters of the country and take the FDR mantle away from Wallace. Mrs. Luce's column was good copy and got headlines, but some of Eleanor's friends saw a trap: she just wants you to be on the ticket so that the Republicans can make FDR and his alleged appeasement at Yalta an issue, they told her. They noted that Mrs. Luce was no friend of Mrs. Roosevelt's, politically or otherwise.

"The president, predicting his own nomination at Philadelphia on the first ballot, said Mrs. Roosevelt would be acceptable to him as a running mate. What else did they expect him to say, he added almost *sotto voce.*" https://books.google.com/books?id=deEhBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT84 Obviously, he did not want to appear to insult her, while at the same time he knew that without his active support she would never be nominated, so there was no harm in saying that she was "acceptable." Anyway, Mrs. Roosevelt promptly put out the word that she would not be a candidate for any elective office whatsoever. Reporters rightly sensed a mutual coolness between her and Truman. She thought he had appointed too many second-rate men; he thought that Roosevelts and "professional liberals" in general showed insufficient appreciation of his own liberal efforts (although Eleanor unlike some other Roosevelts had not endorsed the "draft Eisenhower" movement).

Eleanor took some time to endorse Truman, though ultimately she did so. (There was never any prospect of her supporting Wallace: She "wrote in 'My Day,' her newspaper column, that 'Mr. Wallace should really take a good look at those who controlled his convention, both in his own age group and among the younger ones.' 'By working with the youth movement in the early days of the depression,' the former first lady told a colleague, 'I learned to understand Communist tactics and what their discipline is...I wish Mr. Wallace had had some of the same experiences.'" https://books.google.com/books?id=a8sbrXAKLB0C&pg=PA205)

Suppose Truman actually decides that Eleanor *is* his only hope for winning. (This would involve among other things an overestimation of the Wallace danger and a feeling that FDR-haters and hard-core racists will never vote for him anyway, so he might as well go liberal) and gives her his active support rather than the tepid "acceptable" comment--and she is persuaded that indeed only she can prevent the Republicans from completely dominating Washington and undoing her husband's work? There is certainly an argument that a Truman-Eleanor ticket will lose; as Samuel Lubell notes, one of the keys to Truman's victory was getting ethnic Catholic votes, in some cases doing better among them than FDR had done in 1944. Eleanor might lose some of those votes for the ticket, by making it easier for Republicans to make Yalta an issue. She would also hurt the ticket in the South. Yet on the other hand, Eleanor's appeal to Jewish and liberal voters otherwise tempted by Wallace might enable Truman to carry New York state, which he narrowly lost in OTL.

Anyway, the Harry Truman-Eleanor Roosevelt ticket wins. Two years later, a Puerto Rican nationalist gunman has better luck than he did in OTL, and the US gets its first woman (and third Roosevelt) in the White House.

Thoughts? (I know this is unlikely. The only motive that I could see for Truman agreeing to this is fear of Wallace, and Truman in OTL was less afraid of Wallace than some of his advisers were. Moreover, Gallup polls showed that large percentages of the American electorate were unwilling to vote for a woman--only in 1949 did the percent willing to do so equal the percent unwilling. http://www.gallup.com/poll/3979/americans-today-much-more-accepting-woman-black-catholic.aspx And to some--though an obviously much lesser--extent, this would presumably extend to the vice-presidency. But I was trying to think of a scenario that would make Eleanor Roosevelt president, and this is the least implausible one I could think of. This post incidentally is something of an extension of my post at https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showpost.php?p=11428458&postcount=51)
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