WASHINGTON, Tuesday—I had the pleasure yesterday of having a small group of the Cabinet ladies at luncheon. At 3 o'clock the chorus from "Winged Victory" came to the White House with Lt. Col. Walter M. Dunham. I had collected most of my guests from the service hospitals on this same day so they could have the pleasure of hearing this chorus, and for three-quarters of an hour we sat in the East Room and enjoyed a musical program which featured individual soloists as well as group singing. All of the men enjoyed it, and I was most grateful to the singers.

While we were being served refreshments in the State Dining Room, and the men were wandering around the rooms, I signed innumerable short-snorter bills and scraps of paper of every kind.

In the evening I attended the Business and Professional Women's dinner, and a group of young Navy men from the Navy's School of Music played for us. It certainly added to the enjoyment of the tired business women present!

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This morning I went at 10 o'clock to the naturalization ceremonies at the District Court. There must have been a group of some 60 people about to be granted their citizenship. After the presentation of the colors, the judge addressed them and then asked me to say a few words. It was a much nicer ceremony than many which I have witnessed in the past, and I am always very glad when we do something which really gives the proper dignity to the acquiring of new citizenship.

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I wonder how many Democrats actually know how the rooster came to be the Democratic Party's emblem. I am very sure that any number of young people think the donkey, and the donkey alone, is the party's emblem. But someone wrote me the other day of a little book entitled "The Rooster," which was written many years ago by John Fowler Mitchell Jr.

"At the close of a most notable campaign in American history," says the author, "when a Democratic victory had swept the country from coast to coast, it is fitting that the story of the party's emblem—the rooster—be told in this little volume, for it was in the heart of Indiana in a pioneer campaign back in 1840 that this proud bird came into its own. To be more exact, the emblem's birthplace was Greenfield, Hancock County, Indiana, and its originator Joseph Chapman, one of her famous sons."

If you want to know more you will have to look up the book in the Congressional Library, but I thought my fellow Democrats, if they did not already know it, might be amused to learn where their original emblem had had its birth. And if they happen to like James Whitcomb Riley as much as I do, they will be glad to know that Greenfield is also his birthplace, so we can claim a mutual tie.