After her brother died, Aunt Eleanor indeed worked harder than ever before to help others.  Part of that work was logistical: answering mail.  The amount of mail Aunt Eleanor received in the White House was far more than her secretary could handle by herself, so there were others at work in a mysterious office somewhere, just as there was an office dedicated to taking care of the president's mail.
During my week-long visits to the White House, I usually started each morning in Tommy's office, interrupting her work and listening to her amusing account of household events of the previous day.
    I also got a short view of the letters my aunt received.  Sometimes a letter was written on a torn piece of lined paper, laboriously spelled out, with a poignant lea for assistance.  Sometimes the message was a treatise on the wrongs in the world and how they should be righted, a document that rambled on for several pages with no punctuation and no return address.  Most of the letters were reasonable requests for help, financial help as a rule, for the unemployed, students, young people out of work,  young single mothers, hopeful authors of half written books, homeless folks, or seniors.  And then there were the children who wanted autographs, and the parents who would like to come to the White House and meet the first lady. 
    Tommy protected my aunt from mail that was not worth her while to answer, but she knew she couldn't discard any reasonable request.  Her boss wanted to know, through her mail as well as her travels, what the temper of the country was, and she personally answered as many of the letters as her incredibly busy schedule allowed.  Autographs were sent, and parents were invited to one of the teas for 200 that Aunt Eleanor regularly hosted to let the people know that the White House really belonged to them. 
    Sometimes she was moved to send money to a young person, and sometimes she made lifelong friends in this way.  One young man, who was able to finish medical because she sent him the $500 he had to have at the end of his last year, kept in touch with Aunt Eleanor for many years as he moved ahead in his profession.  But my aunt knew, of course, that she couldn't hand out dollars to everybody.  In the first place, she didn't have dollars to hand out, but, more important, she felt that every citizen in our democracy deserved at least the advice of the experts who were appointed to serve them when thy were in trouble.  So she appealed to those appointees on the citizens behalf.  She sent letters to the State department if someone was being wrongfully denied a passport or if the service was so slow that the person was suffering. Her letters went to the Labor Department for a laid-off worker or to the Labor union to ask them to support their members or to the Department of Health and Human services or to the Department of Education
    It became a joke in every department.  They all recognized my aunt's unassuming stationary, and I am sure they all hoped the letter was directed to someone else.  For here was the first lady again asking why they were not doing their job.  It was difficult to send a reply without being able to report some action in response to her request.  And this was just what Aunt Eleanor expected.  She used her influence well.