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

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NEW YORK—Tuesday morning Clark Eichelberger and I made a 7:30 train which got us into Hartford, Conn., at 9:30. Hartford now boasts the most modern and interesting new hotel in the Statler chain, and we had time to go there and get settled before our first meeting, which was an effort to organize a chapter of the American Association for the United Nations in Hartford.

Hartford always has been a very difficult place in which to create interest in the AAUN, since it has a World Council and many other organizations that do good international work.

In Connecticut and in New England generally, the World Federalists are strongly established. Therefore, the idea of a separate organization, with the primary interest of increasing the knowledge of the people generally about the U.N. and getting their active participation, is something evidently new and has not seemed to be a real necessity by more than a handful of people.

Our visit, I think, perhaps will help to pave the way for a real organization meeting. And I can only hope that our new state chairman in Connecticut, Mrs. Hayes, will be able to arouse more interest throughout the state than has been possible in the past.

I was astonished to see an article in one of our metropolitan papers stating that the doctor shortage in this country is considered so critical that hospital authorities "are searching European and Asian fields for internes."

I can hardly believe this, because I am still getting letters from young students who tell me how difficult it is to get into medical schools and then to find hospitals which will take them in.

I should think the first move to remedy this situation would be to make arrangements for more of our own young citizens to get medical training in this country before we go searching the schools in other areas of the world.

We evidently have neglected the expansion of the facilities for training doctors in our own country. I am quite sure there is no lack of young men and women who want to become doctors, an indication that here is another area where we apparently have been too complacent and not farsighted enough to prepare for our own needs.

Last spring I told you about the Library Club which the Book Manufacturers Institute started in New York's Lower East Side public schools to encourage the young people to read more and better books.

Now this same group says that it has started literary clubs in schools in upper New York State, New Jersey, Ohio, California, Louisiana, and Kansas. There is even a chapter at the dependent school of an overseas air base and others in parochial schools in Brooklyn, with most satisfactory results. I am delighted, for I think one of our real needs is for more young people who read.

E.R.

(Copyright, 1956, by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.)


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, May 10, 1956

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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