Ralph Roeder

Who was Ralph Roeder?

Ralph Roeder was an American author.

Ralph Edmund LeClercq Roeder was born in New York, a son of German immigrant George Roeder and Ida Carolina LeClercq of Charleston, South Carolina. His maternal grandmother was the American composer Marie Regina Siegling LeClercq. He was educated at Harvard and at Columbia University. In the 1920’s he was Rome correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. He contributed articles to The Arts and to Theater Arts Monthly and had a brief career as an actor on Broadway, playing among other roles, Orestes in Sophocles’s “Electra”. On December 3, 1929 he married Russian born Fania Esiah Mindell of New York, a theater set and costume designer, artist, and feminist who, together with Margaret Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrne, had been a co-defendant in the Brownsville Clinic Trials of 1917.

Roeder spent much of his later life as an expatriate in Mexico City where he wrote and translated works of a mostly historical nature. He spoke German and French fluently, and authored books in Spanish. His biography of Benito Juárez won acclaim in the United States and earned him Mexico's highest literary award, the Orden del Águila Azteca.