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, Friday—Late Tuesday evening I left here with the purpose of keeping two early appointments in New York. The first was with a lady at 9 A.M. after which I attended a meeting of the American Association for the United Nations.

Wednesday afternoon I took the plane for Martha's Vineyard to spend the night with my friends, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph P. Lash, and returned to New York Thursday in time to take the evening train back to Hyde Park.

My niece and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Edward Elliott, will be leaving September first and that is so close now that I hate to be away for any length of time. After their departure I shall be quite bereft of my family in my own house, and after Labor Day week end I shall begin to devote more of my time to the various activities with which I am associated.

I was interested to see in a Tuesday newspaper that we were going to step up the United States Information Agency's work in Indo-China. A cultural drive is being carried on in Southeast Asia by the Chinese Communists and we are going to try to meet this drive through our information program by stressing two central points.

We will assert that the U.S. supports an Indo-Chinese peoples program for full independence and unity. Then an effort will be made systematically to expose the realities of life behind the Iron Curtain. If we are able to drive these two things home, it would be a very good thing because in two years Indo-China will hold an election, and both North and South Indo-China will be asked to decide between the Communist world and the free world.

I can't help believing it would be a more effective job, and better understood, if our government could put in some very able Point 4 administrators who would help in the tangible problems that confront the people in the whole of Indo-China.

If we could show that we had raised the standard of living, I think it would have greater effect than any words we can invent to tell the story of conditions in Communist China.

There seems to be more and more difficulty about agreement on the European Defense Community treaty. Nobody knows exactly what the final decision of the French Assembly will be nor what Sir Winston Churchill actually means by saying that he will do all he can to help. But in this country we have felt, and still feel, that Europe needs to be economically bound together and also to be a military unit. It is true that even in this country there is some fear of a rearmed Germany. But there is also a feeling that an armed Germany within a European army is safer than an armed Germany building up its own forces to a point which would make them usable, beyond defense, for aggression.

E.R.

(WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1954, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC. REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART PROHIBITED.)


Names and Terms Mentioned or Referenced

Persons
  • Churchill, Winston, Sir, 1874-1965 [ index ]
         British politician; UK Prime Minister, 1940-1945 and 1951-1955
         [ LC | ISNI | VIAF | Wikidata | SNAC | FAST | US Nat. Archives | NPG-UK ]
  • Elliott, Edward P. [ index ]
         Spouse of ER's brother Hall's daughter Eleanor Roosevelt
  • Lash, Joseph P., 1909-1987 [ index ]
         American author and activist; wrote ERP's biography; Secretary for the Human Rights Committee
         [ ERPP bio | LC | VIAF | Wikidata | SNAC | FAST | US Nat. Archives | ANB ]
  • Lash, Trude W. [ index ]
         German; served on Human Rights Committee; Executive Director of the Citizens' Committee for Children; spouse of Joseph P. Lash
         [ LC | ISNI | VIAF | Wikidata | SNAC | FAST ]
  • Wotkyns, Eleanor R. (Eleanor Roosevelt), 1919- [ index ]
         Daughter of ER's brother Hall Roosevelt
         [ LC | ISNI | VIAF | SNAC | FAST | Other source ]
Geographic
  • Hyde Park (Dutchess County, N.Y., United States) [ index ]


About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, August 28, 1954

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: May 2, 2022.

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