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

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KANSAS CITY, Mo., Saturday—Yesterday I finished reading and signing some two hundred letters which were forwarded to me here and they with the telegrams and telephone messages which have come to us at every place where we have stopped, have served to accentuate my gradual understanding of the feeling many people have for my husband.

People call up just to ask me to thank the President, sometimes for something as intangible as the fact that he has given them back their courage. One woman had finally obtained a job after long months of hardship during which her father and mother had gone to an old people's home. She was grateful for the fact that her job had come in time so that when her father died, she could bear the expense of his burial and now things were so improved that she and her sister both were at work and they had a little home again and their mother was back with them. She just wanted the President to know that she was one of many people who had lost faith in their country in 1932 and had gained it back by 1936.

There is something very touching but also a little awe inspiring in all this. You can not help saying over and over again to yourself: "What a responsibility for one man to carry"! Of course, no man could carry it unless the people carried it with him, and perhaps after all the most important thing that they can be grateful for is their return to faith and courage.

I wish I were going to be in New York on November seventeenth. The Public Education Association in which I have long been interested is to hold a luncheon on that day for the purpose of discussing: "The School child and his health". I can think of nothing more important, for without health no amount of education is of any value and we still find so much ignorance as to the proper care of children.

Mrs. Scheider and I spent a quiet afternoon at the Allis Hotel in Wichita, Kansas, yesterday before my speech in the evening and we returned on the night train.

At eleven this morning, Miss Ann Laughlin, NYA Director for the State of Kansas, came for me at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, and drove me back into Kansas to see a girls' camp under the NYA They have initiative and originality in this state and I think they are going to prove what I have always contended, that there are work projects which girls can do in camps as well as boys. These girls looked well and happy and I was glad of a chance to see them.

They have set an objective to shoot at in the Youth Administration here, they wish in every community every young person might have a sponsor who would assume the responsibility of seeing that they obtained proper training and later, a job. That's grand objective, I wish we could spread it throughout the country and obtain it. It would be good for both young and old.

E.R.


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  • Kansas City (Mo., United States) [ index ]


About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, November 16, 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

  • Brick, Christopher (Editor)
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  • Regenhardt, Christy (Associate Editor)
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  • Black, Allida M. (Editor)
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  • Binker, Mary Jo (Associate Editor)
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  • Alhambra, Christopher C. (Electronic Text Editor)
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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 November 15, 1936, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY
TMsd, 15 November 1936, AERP, FDRL