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

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HYDE PARK, Tuesday—I spent yesterday in New York City and one is certainly conscious of the Legionnaires. They are everywhere and I like them. They were evidently having a good time!

Today they had their big parade and the papers warned all motorists to keep their cars out of town. General Eisenhower was to walk in the parade, which must have added very much to its interest.

I had a fairly busy day in New York City. We started early and as we sat at our seven-thirty breakfast my youngest son, John, walked in and announced that a new daughter had arrived during the night to him and his wife. I knew he had very little sleep but he drove us to town and went to his office as usual.

He drove back early in the afternoon but I had to stay in town because I had a number of appointments and I came back home by train.

I went straight to the hospital in Poughkeepsie to see my nineteenth grandchild. She certainly is a cunning baby with quite a bit of dark hair and little ears, close to her head.

On the way home I read General Eisenhower's speech to the legion. It was an interesting speech. Though it was not supposed to be political, it could not help but have a bearing on political subject. Practically, he gave suggestions as to what our attitude on foreign affairs should be. The headlines in the papers yesterday afternoon reporting it said that it served notice on the Kremlin of what we would not tolerate in the future.

I must say, however, that I find it a little difficult to understand how we implement what we say in a peaceful way. It is true that if we are so strong that the Kremlin would have no thought of attacking us at any time, perhaps we would have enough influence to free some of the people which General Eisenhower enumerated as being on our conscience. But it seems to me that without real force to back up such demands, there is little chance of our having any great success.

Once established, police states can usually be dislodged only by revolution. As General Eisenhower enumerated the number of people that have come under Soviet control, it made one realize how many people today in the world are really not free. What a long struggle we have before us when we talk about the Soviet Union returning to its original borders and freeing such areas as Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia as well as all the other European and Asiatic countries which have come under Soviet control.

It was a fine speech, but it left me much to think about as to how it was to be implemented in a peaceful way. If force is to be used, would it be U.N. force or U.S. force?

Surely the freedom of these people does not lie only on the conscience of the people of the United States, it must lie on the conscience of all the peoples of the free world.

E. R.

(WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1952, 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, August 27, 1952

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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