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

[Original version of the column. Text in red are tagged with <sic> (needs correction); text in purple are tagged with <orig> (needs regularization); and text in blue are tagged names of persons or organizations. View emended version]

      

Hyde Park, Sunday—Late Friday afternoon in New York City, I went to see the Puerto Rican Needlework Cooperative, which has an office at 99 Madison Avenue, and which is now selling wholesale to shops in New York. The needlework trade in Puerto Rico employs a great many women, chiefly in their own homes, though there are a few factories. Their work is exquisite, but I thought at one time that much of this work was put on materials which were not good enough to warrant it, except that labor was so cheap they were able to sell what looked like elaborate underclothes but which were really of little value.

The Cooperative seems to me, from the work I saw, to be using good materials. They are not skimping in the cutting or the sizes and the designs were among the most attractive and original which I have seen in a long while. They have adopted the trade name "Linda", which in Spanish means beautiful and is a very appropriate name. I am very much interested in the success of this venture for it would probably help the women of Puerto Rico very much if fair wages could be paid in this trade and the manufacturers could still make a reasonable profit.

Our drive up to Hyde Park was uneventful, though I expected to find trees across the road and signs of flood in many places. We were extremely lucky here and only lost half a tree on the avenue to the big house. The electricity went off for a time and our cellars at the cottage were flooded with water, so that we have neither hot water nor furnace heat to dry anything out, still we can be most thankful that no more serious damage was done.

My son, John, called me from Nahant, Massachusetts, last night and said that all but one boat in the harbor had been lost. While Mrs. Clark's house did not suffer, they had seaweed on every window, practically every tree was gone and the garden looked as though it had been plowed. Mrs. Clark had left for New York City by boat, for travelling by train was still almost an impossibility.

New England has suffered, of course, from floods many times, but I doubt if the coast has had such a bad storm in many years. The Red Cross is asking for financial assistance from the public to aid the sufferers, and the various Government agencies are doing all they can. I am always impressed by the valiant work down in all these crises by the WPA men and the CCC boys, who have become our first line of defense in all catastrophes wherever they may occur throughout the country.

This is a most beautiful day and three of us are motoring up to lunch with a friend in Albany.

E.R.

(Copyright, 1938, by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.)


Names and Terms Mentioned or Referenced

Geographic
  • Hyde Park (Dutchess County, N.Y., United States) [ index ]


About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, September 26, 1938

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
[ ERPP bio | LC | VIAF | WorldCat | DPLA | Wikidata | SNAC ]

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)
    [ VIAF | ORCID ]
  • Regenhardt, Christy (Associate Editor)
    [ ISNI ]
  • Black, Allida M. (Editor)
    [ VIAF | ISNI ]
  • Binker, Mary Jo (Associate Editor)
    [ VIAF | ORCID ]
  • Alhambra, Christopher C. (Electronic Text Editor)
    [ VIAF | ORCID ]

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.

XML master last modified on: June 9, 2017.

HTML version generated and published on: May 3, 2022.

Transcription created from a photocopy of a UFS wire copy of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
TMs, AERP, FDRL