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

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"Cynics, take note as you come and go.
Youth has a dream and a leader who heeds it.
Hark how the challenging echoes flow —
"Hold fast to your dream. America needsitt."

The above lines were sent me the other day by Mrs. Armstrong Allen of Nashville, Tennessee, and they strike a note of hope which I hope may prove itself in fact. If young America can dream dreams and hold fast to them, then a great future lies before us.

I still believe it is the minority of youth which thinks only of material things and does not dream dreams for its own future and that of the race.

Christ in His Second Commandment: "Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself", laid the basis for all successful dreaming and it is borne in on me more and more that only as our youth dreams in terms of living will this world see much change in philosophy or action.

For some time past some friends have been sending me The National Parents Teacher Magazine. It is interesting even if you do not belong to the Parent Teachers organization, for all of us are interested in youth, but two lines of an editorial in the October issue by Mrs. Langworthy may give parents food for thought. She writes: "Why not enjoy life's October, for its precious beauty and brilliance as we do nature's October with no foreboding and with real anticipation?"

Grand idea and all very well, but how can we do it unless we are sure that the youth of today is really dreaming dreams? For certainly we can not enjoy the October of our lives with the fear of hanging over us that history is going to repeat itself.

We have had two lovely days in the country and the four grandchildren seem to be thriving.

An amusing request came in yesterday. It seems that on our drive from Niagara to Buffalo my husband's hat blew off and a little boy picked it up. He says the President thanked him twice. On returning to his class, he and his class mates evidently decided he should have kept the hat so they all wrote letters to the President as did their teacher. These letters came to me and are really most entertaining. They want that hat! I think it will have to be cut into a good many pieces if each child is to have his or her share. Perhaps they plan to hang it up in the classroom. In any case, I'm trying to get it for them, but they have no idea of my husband's affection for a campaign hat. He clings to them like a barnacle to a rock.

E.R.


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, October 26, 1936

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
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.

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Transcription created from a photocopy of a draft version of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. My Day column draft dated October 25, 1936, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY
TMsd, 25 October 1936, AERP, FDRL