The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt

[This column has emendations. View original version]

      

NEW YORK, Monday—As I walked through the woods yesterday morning the sun shone and hardly a breath of air seemed to be stirring. The colors are quite lovely now—bright red maples, rusty brown oaks, and brilliant yellow leaves on other trees. It was as though nature were holding her breath, letting summer rest gently upon the landscape and knowing full well that the rains and the winds of November would bring all this beauty tumbling to earth.

I love these October days. Someone told me they thought it was Indian summer, but in my childhood we called Indian summer the few sunny days that came upon us in November.

On the sheltered side of my stone cottage, roses and some flowers still bloomed on Saturday for the picnic we arranged for some of the members of Committee #3. Everything went well except for the fact that some of our guests lost their way. Instead of arriving at 12:30, they did not come until two o'clock, and I am sorry to say we had eaten most of the food! I hope they had enough to eat, but I felt very sad that I was not as hospitable as I might have been an hour and a half earlier! They all went over to the big house and the library, and I hope the drive was lovely enough to compensate for any discomfort.

Sir Campbell Stuart spent the weekend with us. He is the managing editor of the London Times and chairman of The Pilgrims of Great Britain. He has come to the United States for one of his fairly frequent visits, during which he combines business with pleasure. His special interest in Hyde Park was in seeing how the library had used the replica of the Grosvenor Square statue of my husband, which the Pilgrims so kindly gave me, and the items that they have sent me since.

Sir Campbell was a little disappointed at the way in which the statue was displayed, and I felt more than ever that we need a wing in which the gifts from foreign governments and from people in foreign countries can be properly arranged. They should be permanently set up to the greatest possible advantage and not changed about to make room for other exhibits.

I have been urging the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Foundation to raise money to build such a wing, and I hope someday they will be able to do so. I feel sure that it is one of the things that will contribute to better understanding in our international relations. My husband had an astonishing number of ties with countries and individuals throughout the world, and I think it helped him to find ways of improving our diplomatic relations.

I came down from the country in time for the television show at 3:30 on Sunday afternoon. We had thought the World Series might crowd us out, and I would have welcomed an extra afternoon at Hyde Park, but since the Series came to an end on Saturday afternoon, I met my guests and we discussed the problems of Asia.

I was impressed with the fact that each of my four guests, General Carlos Romulo of the Philippines, Sir Mohammed Zafrulah Kahn of Pakistan, Madame Pandit of India and Dr. Lambertus Nicodemus Palar of Indonesia, seemed to agree that while we had done many good things in their area of the world it would be well to stress the fact that Asia could help us from the point of view of the spiritual things of life. It was also impressed on me that often we do not understand the proper way to approach our Asiatic friends and neighbors.

E. R.

(WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1950, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC. REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART PROHIBITED.)


Names and Terms Mentioned or Referenced

Persons
Organizations
Geographic
  • New York (N.Y., United States) [ index ]


About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, October 10, 1950

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
[ ERPP bio | LC | VIAF | WorldCat | DPLA | Wikidata | SNAC ]

Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007

  • Brick, Christopher (Editor)
    [ VIAF | ORCID ]
  • Regenhardt, Christy (Associate Editor)
    [ ISNI ]
  • Black, Allida M. (Editor)
    [ VIAF | ISNI ]
  • Binker, Mary Jo (Associate Editor)
    [ VIAF | ORCID ]
  • Alhambra, Christopher C. (Electronic Text Editor)
    [ VIAF | ORCID ]

Digital edition published 2008, 2017 by
The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project

Available under licence from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

Published with permission from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

MEP edition publlished on June 30, 2008.

TEI-P5 edition published on April 28, 2017.

XML master last modified on May 2, 2022.

HTML version generated and published on May 3, 2022.

Transcription created from a photocopy of a UFS wire copy of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
TMs, AERP, FDRL