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

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WESTBROOK, Conn., Tuesday—I got home on Sunday morning with great success. The air was cool and crisp and the day beautiful. To my joy I found my garden filled with roses and I picked enough to make my house fragrant and to fill my little apartment in New York—and even give a few away.

Every time I pick flowers at this season I feel it may be the last time before frost. That makes my garden flowers all the more precious.

My son, John, is still walking around on crutches because of his sprained ankle and I felt very sad for him because this is the time of year when doing things out-of-doors is the pleasantest of occupations.

We lunched by the swimming pool with the sun shining on us and had very pleasant company in Mr. and Mrs. Ed Murrow who are really fairly near neighbors (from Quaker Hill near Pawling) but we do not very often see them, so this was a great joy. I was encouraged to find that Mr. Murrow and I have been thinking along somewhat similar lines on a number of subjects. It made me feel much more confident in my own reasoning to find that he, who is so much closer to the pulse of world affairs, shared some of my thoughts.

Little Mrs. Cho, who acted as one of the secretaries in the group helping the exchange visitors in Japan last year, also spent the day with me at Hyde Park. She was just back from the Evanston Conference where she was appointed an adviser. I was happy to see her but a little saddened by her report of the way the Japanese people were feeling about the consequences to Japanese fishermen of our H-bomb experiment.

Mrs. Cho brought me extracts from many newspapers in Japan. It seemed to me they were filled with daily reports on the fishermen who are slowly dying as a result of injuries incurred. She also told me that people felt that we, in America, were paying no attention to the individual hardship which those people in Japan have endured as a result of that experiment. She said no statement of sympathy about this individual suffering had been made, and that the formal expression of regret made through our ambassador had not really convinced her people that Americans realized what this had meant to Japan.

Perhaps they are right, but it is difficult for us at such a great distance to feel about the individuals who suffered as we would for someone who lived close by. However, we should remember that our proud boast is concern for the individual. The Soviets think little of risking individual human life, but we profess to think much of the value of every human being. If that is so, we must prove it by our concern for everyone injured in connection with one of our experiments.

E.R.

(WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1954, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC. REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART PROHIBITED.)


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  • Westbrook (Conn., United States) [ index ]


About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, September 15, 1954

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
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Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007

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Digital edition published 2008, 2017 by
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Available under licence from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

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MEP edition publlished on June 30, 2008.

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