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

      

NEW YORK, Tuesday—What a relief it is to have someone speak up fearlessly as Ambassador Philip C. Jessup has now done in his own defense and to have both General Marshall and General Eisenhower back him up.

Guilt by association is a very dangerous accusation and the smearing of people before you have proved them guilty puts our country in a strange light before the rest of the world.

It seems to me that Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and those who support him have done a great deal of harm to the possible building up of a strong bipartisan foreign policy. In addition, they have shown a total lack of appreciation of what this sort of performance does in weakening our representation in other parts of the world.

We have an extremely strong and able Secretary of State in Dean Acheson. He is ably supported by loyal and devoted American citizens. If our legislative branch can find and prove that there are a few people in the State Department who should be removed, it should be done quietly and quickly, with as little publicity as possible.

The accusers cannot realize how much their methods do to help the Communists. What rejoicing it must bring in the Kremlin when they can say: "The United States is divided; they find Communist sympathizers everywhere."

That is certainly music to Communist ears and should give gentlemen like Senator McCarthy pause in pursuing the present tactics.

I must say a word in this column about the late Ellis Gimbel. It has always seemed to me that he personified really responsible citizenship in a community.

Not being a Philadelphian, I cannot, of course, know of all the ways in which he helped people to raise the level of civic responsibility among the well-to-do in his city. It is many years now since I first heard of the award which he gave annually and I have always thought that it offered encouragement to obscure people who might never have had recognition if he had not sought them out and pointed to the value of the services they were rendering in their community. He will be missed by many and when I go to the City of Brotherly Love I shall regret not finding him there to greet me.

Sunday night I went to see a play, called "The Great Big Doorstep," given at the DeWitt Clinton Community Center. It was written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and directed by Steffen Zacharias. It is the third in a series of four productions by the Actors Equity Theatre and is a non-profit project of the Actors Equity Association. Everyone taking part gets union wages, and the tickets cost only 60 cents.

Each play is given four times, Friday evening, Saturday evening, and Sunday afternoon and evening, and occasionally stars get time off from other engagements to take part in these Equity shows. It is really an effort to bring good plays, well acted and staged, to the public at low prices and to give unemployed actors a chance to act and to earn something.

The whole idea originated with John Golden and he is still very much interested in its development. I enjoyed the evening and hope that many people who see these plays given at the Lenox Hill Neighborhood Playhouse or perhaps in various high school auditoriums will enjoy them also.

E. R.

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


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, March 22, 1950

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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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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