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

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NEW YORK—On Wednesday I went down to Greensboro, N.C., to speak at an opening session for the American Friends Service Committee on the outlook for peace in the world.

We are all interested in peace, but I think the difficult thing to impress on people today is that peace may be a matter of long waiting. Just not to be at war is something which we should all be very grateful for.

I noted with interest that President Eisenhower told the graduation class at West Point that it might belong to a generation that would live in uncertainty and in the meantime we must work for peace, not just be passive.

Peace will come when we have created an atmosphere in which people can trust each other. That means we must build confidence in America and confidence in our ability to keep peace in the world and in our real intentions to do so. We will have to demonstrate what we can do to help people to have better living conditions in order to refute Communist promises. None of this can be done overnight—it must go on day in and day out.

On Tuesday I talked with Miss Longyear, the executive director of our particular branch of the Women's Hospitality Committee for New York City, which is part of Mr. Richard C. Patterson's Hospitality Committee for the City of New York. She was telling me of very nice small things they have been able to do to make life pleasanter for some of our United Nations guests.

One Brazilian lady carries on work for the blind as her chief interest at home, and Miss Longyear is arranging to have her see the work that is done in this country.

Other young groups have been interested in things that could be arranged for them and said this was their first opportunity really to get to know Americans.

That is the whole object of our committee, and I am glad it is working out through the doing of little things. Big parties may be essential now and then, but it is the little things that build real friendship.

One of the things we are interested in doing is to give our U.N. guests an opportunity to see the city. One of the excursions has been to the Central Park Zoo and that seemed to have been very successful. Now a trip to Jones Beach is planned, as well as a boat trip around Manhattan Island. Both of these seem excellent choices to me.

I think we also should consider a trip to the Statue of Liberty and the Bronx Zoo, and there certainly should be an interest in the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of the City of New York. However, it probably would be wiser to send small groups to the museums because I find they can really be appreciated only when one is more or less alone.

I am glad that our hospitality work is developing in this way.

E.R.

(Copyright, 1955, by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.)


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, June 11, 1955

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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