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

      

HYDE PARK, Sunday—What a change a week can make in the countryside! Already, as we drove from the station on Friday, I could see whole trees of flaming red and others completely yellow. There is still, of course, a great deal of green everywhere and in the sheltered part of the garden I still have flowers, though some of them have been nipped by frost this week.

It troubles me a little to find that, in the New York police force shake-up, all the policemen and small people are getting punished, whereas there must have been people above them who knew what was going on and were not exactly active in taking the temptation out of the way of the men under them. So often it seems that this is the way things work. The little man does wrong and gets punished, but the man who should have foreseen and prevented the whole unfortunate situation seems never to be discovered.

That must have been a rather moving scene when General MacArthur turned over the South Korean area to the elected president, Syngman Rhee. Some people say his government is not as perfect a democracy as it should be. Well, as time goes on, the South Koreans may make better and better use of their ballot. We have seen occasions in the United States, where we have been governing ourselves for some time, when people have made mistakes. But as a rule, in the long run, the people come pretty nearly to finding out the truth and acting accordingly.

Friday night I went to the Chapel Corners Grange meeting. This is the grange to which my husband belonged for many years and to which I belong. It was an interesting program and I was glad I got there early enough to watch the demonstration of what can be done with a certain kind of equipment to prevent lightning damage to houses and barns.

I had been asked to talk about my trip to Europe this summer, and also anything about the United Nations that I cared to put in. It was particularly interesting afterward to talk to some of the members and hear their questions. There is no doubt but that television has opened a great many peoples' eyes to the USSR tactics. Many people have watched the Security Council's meetings. They talked about Mr. Malik and Ambassador Austin as though they were intimate friends.

One man wanted to know whether the USSR delegates really believed what they said. I told him that that was hard to say, but I thought it quite possible that those who had had much chance to move about in the United States probably knew a good deal more about this country than they ever reported to the Kremlin. It would not be possible to be here long and actually believe some of the things which have been said by both the satellite and the USSR delegates; but as long as they say them they must be held accountable by us. They do little in any case to change the propaganda carried on in the Soviet Union, and in countries under their control, through newspapers and radio.

E. R.

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


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  • Hyde Park (Dutchess County, N.Y., United States) [ index ]


About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, October 2, 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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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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