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

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NEW YORK—I don't know whether anyone else was as surprised as I was to realize that under the McMahon bill the United States is forbidden to share scientific information with its allies.

I can well understand why President Eisenhower has felt strongly that this bill should be amended at once. It must have put our allies to a great expense in developing techniques we probably could have given them with great ease, and it placed a handicap on our allied position.

It is amusing to me that people believe whatever they see in print if it happens to be something which they wish to believe, and they rarely take the trouble to find out if it is true or not.

I have an anonymous letter which accuses me of hypocrisy because a certain columnist had said, according to the writer, that my husband would not allow Negroes near the Warm Springs Foundation!

What, of course, the writer does not mention is that the law in Georgia forces you, if you own land, to include certain clauses in the lease and to follow certain legal restrictions, and so my husband could not do anything but observe the existing law. He did, however, do all that he could to increase the opportunities for the care of Negro polio patients, though a separate institution had to be established in Tuskegee, Ala., because of the existing law in the state of Georgia.

He would have been glad to see the law changed, but just as President Eisenhower cannot change the laws of certain states, my husband could not change them, either, but that does not mean that he liked them.

The lady who wrote about this also asked me whether any Negroes live near me either in New York or in Hyde Park.

I would like to say that I have had Negroes living near me in many places where I have lived, and I do not think they or I have ever felt that our proximity to each other caused a difficulty of any kind.

I went to a concert in Carnegie Hall last week when the New York Philharmonic Society orchestra had Louis Kentner as its guest pianist and Thomas Schippers as conductor.

I think I enjoy Mr. Kentner more than any concert pianist who comes to us from overseas. I am no critic, but I love to watch his hands, and his interpretation of whatever he undertakes seems very satisfying to me. I also thought that the conductor made the Sibelius Symphony No. 2 in D Major a particularly beautiful performance.

It was a beautiful day for my flight to Cape Girardeau, Mo., where I spoke, and the trip all the way could not have been more pleasant.

I had a wonderful break on my return flight. I thought I was going to have to spend several hours at the airport in St. Louis in the early hours of the morning. Instead, I caught a belated TWA plane and arrived in New York much earlier in the morning than I had dared hope would be possible.

E.R.

(Copyright, 1957, by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.)


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, October 24, 1957

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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Digital edition published 2008, 2017 by
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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 UFS wire copy of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
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