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

      

HYDE PARK, Friday—The first few days of this week in the country were beautiful beyond description. White snow lay heavily on the evergreens and on the ground. The plow had been through the road from my cottage to my son's on the hill; so the little black dogs and I could trot along through the woods without sinking in too far.

They could stand on their hind legs and look over the snow banked by the side of the road. Tamas McFala saw a squirrel in the distance and jumped into the deep snow to give chase. At the foot of the first tree he realized he could make no headway and started back, only to find he could not get purchase enough to jump over the snow bank from the other side. I had to take him by the collar and give him a helping hand back to the safety of the road.

Fala is too old and wise to try any such excursions.

I had to go in to town on Wednesday to attend a dinner and a meeting of Freedom Lodge of B'nai B'rith. At the meeting I was given an award and a sum of money was donated to the United Jewish Appeal in memory of the late Mrs. Henry Morgenthau Jr.

With the weather as it is and the coal shortage, trains are taken off schedule unexpectedly, so commuting to New York City from Hyde Park is a somewhat uncertain pastime. I am glad that I could spend all but two nights up here this week and enjoy walking in the snow with my dogs in the early morning.

What a funny world we live in when people at home get on so badly that the whole community has to be inconvenienced. All because the coal operators and the union men cannot sit down and come to an amicable solution of their differences.

It seems to me that perhaps we should put a little extra effort on learning how to get along together in this country. We never before needed unity as we do now, and we will not go into the United Nations conferences with as much strength behind us if we have troubles at home between different groups of our citizens.

I know well that when times are good, it is normal and natural to have strikes; when times are bad men hang on to their jobs no matter how little they like them. Labor leaders must take advantage of good times to get from the employers concessions which they may need in bad times.

Nevertheless, it is not the best way of settling difficulties. And it is certainly not the best way for the leading democracy of the world to present the most persuasive picture of the advantages of democracy to the rest of the peoples of the world.

E. R.

(WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1950, 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 ]
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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, February 18, 1950

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

  • Brick, Christopher (Editor)
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  • Binker, Mary Jo (Associate Editor)
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  • Alhambra, Christopher C. (Electronic Text Editor)
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Digital edition published 2008, 2017 by
The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project

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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