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

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WASHINGTON, Tuesday—It is a great tribute to Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt and Miss Josephine Schain that the Cause and Cure of War Conference this year is better attended than ever before. One might expect women to feel that the world was so filled with wars, it would be useless to discuss ways and means for preventing them in the future.

Lady Layton, whose English organization corresponds to our group, made a courageous speech and a representative from France, who is allied with Lord Robert Cecil's peace group, also spoke with great ardor. I fear, however, that in some cases his desire for a hopeful outlook outran his real basis of facts, but that is apt to happen to us all.

I went to bed fairly early last night and read the last installment of Mrs. Woodrow Wilson's memoirs. I find the editor's notes, which skip over what you feel must be interesting reading, a little disconcerting. I suppose this is done to keep more of the interest for the book, which will appear later. In this last installment, Mrs. Wilson describes some of the most interesting events in the history of our times. It must be a tremendously stirring thing to go over those experiences and try to describe them so that the things of real significance stand out.

This has been a rather peaceful morning, broken only by a press conference at 11:00 o'clock at which Miss Erna Fergusson was present. She told something of the plans for the festival to be held in New Mexico during the summer of 1940. This festival will celebrate the establishment of the first white man's settlement and there should be much of great interest to everyone in the country. She came back to lunch with me and told me a little more in detail about the plans.

Another lady came to lunch to discuss ways and means of giving more people a sense of security in the air. A number of people will say to you: "Oh, no I have never flown, I wouldn't dare leave the ground," and I always think of the people who undoubtedly felt that way about their first train trip. The other day I saw all the dire prophecies which were made about what would happen to agriculture because of the speed of those terrible first trains which travelled at 20 miles per hour! There was a similar feeling about automobiles. Accidents are bound to happen in all transportation, but then I heard of someone the other day whose occupation is one of those rated as fairly hazardous and who has come through a great many years unscathed, till he broke his leg in his own bathroom!

Miss Evelyn Heepe, who is an Englishwoman living in Denmark, also lunched with me and told me something about her lectures on Danish and English literature which she is giving. Her interest is in schools and colleges and I am sure she will be able to give our young people an insight into Danish life which will be of great interest.

E.R.

(COPYRIGHT, 1939, by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.)


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, January 25, 1939

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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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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