Eleanor Roosevelt – My Day (Oct. 1939)

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October 25, 1939

New York, Tuesday –
Dr. Gilmore of Iowa State University gave a most interesting speech at the Parents Magazine Annual Luncheon yesterday. It was a difficult thing to do, for he had to make it in two parts since only half of it could be on the air. He gave everybody present much food for thought. I felt deeply honored that the Committee had chosen me to receive their award this year. The child’s head on the medal I received is really a lovely thing which I shall enjoy. Of course, I realize that it is because of my good fortune in being associated with so many groups who are doing good work for the children of our country that I have been given this recognition and I wish all of them could have been honored with me.

It speaks well for the parents of the country that the circulation of this magazine has passed the half-million mark, for it means a really serious effort on their part in self-education.

Between all my engagements yesterday, I did a little Christmas shopping. Among other things, I spent some very pleasant moments picking out books which I thought would be enjoyed later on by some of my friends. At 4:00, I was finding my way to the Women’s City Club, which is now in Rockefeller Center. I had not been to the club since it moved and there were so many people there that it was difficult to picture what it would be like under normal circumstances. I enjoyed seeing old friends and made up my mind I must try to go there more often.

At 6:00, I took the train to Philadelphia to attend the evening meeting of the National Girl Scout executives. It was held in the Convention Hall and hundreds of girls filled the main floor. They were followed by the massed flags of the United States, accompanied by flags of other nations where girl scouting is being carried on. The scene was a thrilling one.

I think Mrs. Hoover, who has made the Girl Scouts one of her main interests, must have a great sense of satisfaction in looking at so many young girls together and realizing what this organization she has fostered has been able to do for them all over the country.

Back at my apartment in New York, I could not help spending a little time glancing through two books which had been sent me. One has a most intriguing name and came as a result of the Parents Magazine lunch. It is called Do Adolescents Need Parents?, and is written by Katharine Whiteside Taylor, and published for the Committee on Human Relations of the Progressive Education Association. There is much in it, I think, which parents and young people will find interesting and helpful.

Then I turned to a book called The Living Goya by Miss Mercedes C. Barbarrosa. This I found fascinating reading and the numerous illustrations of Goya’s work add greatly to the book. He was one of Spain’s great artists. His story is an interesting one, so it seems to me this book will be of value in any school or library where children are to be given an opportunity to know great painters.

Today, I am going on with my shopping and attending the first session of the Herald Tribune Forum.

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October 26, 1939

Muncie, Ind., Wednesday –
I spent from 1:45 until 4:30 at the Herald Tribune Forum in New York City yesterday afternoon. The keynote speech was given by Dr. Conant of Harvard, and then there were a great many able, clever speakers, all pointing up the central theme, “The Challenge to Our Democracy.” The speech which seemed to me the most sane and sensible for this particular period was made by Mr. John Lord O’Brian. He stressed the fact that, in the World War, there had been much hysteria and that in many ways we had found ourselves unprepared to meet the demands of the war situation, but stated that at present our laws and our administrative setups were quite capable of meeting our present situation. He felt we needed to remain calm and go about our daily business unafraid.

I was sorry to have to leave without hearing the concluding speakers, particularly Mrs. William Brown Meloney, but I was taking an evening train and had a guest waiting for me at the apartment, so I dashed back there and spent the next three hours very pleasantly before getting started on my lecture trip at 8:00 p.m.

Miss Thompson and I slept late this morning. When there is no real reason for rising early, it always gives me a rather luxurious feeling to be late for breakfast.

Rain greeted us in Muncie, Indiana. I am afraid I shall not see a great deal of this city, which was made famous as the original Middletown, a book very widely read and which everyone with an interest in average American life must have found an interesting study.

After a short press conference, we started on our mail and the necessary unpacking for the evening. Shortly, Mr. Sterling, of the NYA, appeared to show me some photographs and to tell me something of their work in this area. The NYA boys have done a great deal of construction work. The girls are doing largely clerical work in schools and libraries. They have a great many more boys than girls on their projects. NYA seems to have done a good job of interesting the communities in their youth, which is, after all, one of the best things that can come out of this work.

When we went down to luncheon, Mr. E. Connor, a regional supervisor on WPA, greeted me. While Miss Thompson and I ate our lunch, he brought four other WPA officials to sit around our table and talk to us. They have not yet started on their new program of workers education, which I talked over with Miss Kerr, Miss Hilda Smith and various other interested people, before I left Washington. I hope before long, however, a real workers service program will be underway. Adult education has suffered greatly from the 18 months cut, but I gather that everyone concerned is proud of the projects as a whole and the way they have been run in this state.

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October 27, 1939

Ann Arbor, Mich. –
I did not have space yesterday to tell you that I had the pleasure of meeting, in Muncie, Ind., the two young fliers who set the new endurance record by staying in the air for 22 days. They were in a plane which did not allow them to stand up, so one boy said that when they finally landed, his knees buckled under him. I asked them what they had to eat during this long period and was told that tomato juice and fried chicken was a favorite diet. One boy added that it still is his favorite diet in spite of having had a good deal of it during the past few weeks. They are going to have their first flight in a Douglas transport plane this week, since they are journeying to New York to appear on a radio program.

On arriving in Detroit this morning, we made our way to the station restaurant for breakfast where we were joined by four of my nieces and a sister-in-law, and then we continued on our trip to Ann Arbor, Michigan.

I have heard so much about the University of Michigan, that I am particularly glad of the opportunity to see it. The trees alone would make the grounds attractive, but the campus has some really beautiful buildings and I am looking forward to seeing the interior of some of them this afternoon.

This morning, I went out with Mr. Connor, Regional Director of WPA, and saw a project which is being conducted in collaboration with the university. Men and women, under able supervision, are gathering source material for use throughout the state by other projects which are making visual material of various kinds to be used in public school work.

For instance, in the source project, a young colored man showed me drawings he had executed of a Dutch kitchen. It was perfect in every detail. With the kitchen went the details of figures showing the clothes worn by men and women of the period and listing the materials from which they were made. There will be an exhibit here next week showing examples of this work as done throughout the state, and this morning I saw part of the exhibit. There were dolls in foreign and period costumes, ships which began with the savage who floated on a log and continued up to the modern steamships, houses of various periods and many other things, all beautifully made. The thing which interested me the most was a series of maps showing the condition of the soil in various parts of the state. I was told that the material for these maps had been gathered over a long period of years, but never before had been made available to the public because there was no money to do the work of cataloguing and making the maps.

There is one unique project being carried on here – a correspondence course available to people of low incomes at whatever level of education they may find themselves. This is a much needed personal service, and the fact that papers come in for correction at the rate of some 200 a day would tend to show that people are anxious to avail themselves of this new opportunity for education.

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October 28, 1939

Youngstown, Ohio, Friday –
Yesterday afternoon, Mrs. Ruthven, who is the perfect hostess, took me to see a number of the Ann Arbor buildings on the campus of the University of Michigan. The graduate students building is really beautiful and the dormitories we visited were liveable and charming. Much of the work has been done either by PWA or WPA, and I feel a great pride in what has been accomplished through cooperation with the federal government.

We went to see Mrs. Alexander Dow and enjoyed the lovely view from her house over the treetops to the lake below. Then we stopped in for tea and at a girls’ dormitory on the way back. President and Mrs. Ruthven were so kind that I left with great reluctance after my lecture and wished I could have had a longer stay in Ann Arbor really to appreciate all the work carried on there.

The state press association was meeting in Ann Arbor and I was happy to see some old friends, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Treanor, for a few minutes after my lecture.

We arrived in Youngstown this morning to find so many things of interest which could be done during the day, that it has been difficult to plan what we would do. Of course, the press conference came first and then I went to see my first steel mill, the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company. It is a very modern plant and looks extremely efficient. They pointed out to me that the modern machinery made the work for the men lighter than it had been in the old days. They said that though fewer men were needed for certain operations, this did not mean that fewer men were actually used in the mill, because in the finishing processes more labor was required and steel is used in many new ways today.

Youngstown has always been a one industry city and the whole valley is dependent on the steel business for a livelihood. There is a big problem before them at present because their cost of production is higher than it is in places where they have water transportation as well as rail transportation. By good management, they have been able to compete so far, but they feel that unless a certain canal is built which will give them access to the river and the Great Lakes, this competition may become impossible to meet in the future. It is a serious situation and one which can be duplicated in other areas where there are other interests.

I am beginning to think that we need not only a National Resources Board, to look into what the nation’s resources are and report on them, but a group made up of industrialists and labor leaders to do research work in all these different problems which affect different areas throughout the country. They should be looked at from the point of view of the eventual development of the country as a whole and planned on a wide basis. I can think of many objections to this plan, among others, the difficulty of making people think on a national instead of a local basis where their personal interests are involved. I have an idea, however, that this is something which we ought to be thinking about for the future.

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October 30, 1939

Birmingham, Ala., Sunday –
Limited space prevented my telling you about several interesting things which I did in Youngstown, Ohio, last Friday. Today, I shall try to tell you a little more about this city, which seems to exist primarily for the production of steel.

There is a certain majesty to this industry which catches one’s imagination. We came out from a street to find ourselves looking down over what seemed to be an almost limitless array of factory buildings and chimneys. The driver of our car said:

That is the U.S. Steel Company and it covers six miles.

Think of the investment represented and of the stake which the people working here have in the success or failure of that business, not to mention the innumerable people who own a part of the invested capital. It takes your breath away just to think that any human beings are responsible for anything so vast and far-reaching.

I saw two WPA projects during the morning. One, a visual education project in a school, was turning out extremely good material such as posters, pictures of birds, samples of grass, trees, bugs, etc. for use in schools throughout the district. The other, an Ohio State project being carried on in several big cities, I have never happened to come across anywhere else, though it is doubtless being done in many places. Newspapers in the various cities are being indexed and microfilms of the pages are being made. These films can be stored and lent with ease, and the indexing material will make available information on the news for the years which these projects cover. It takes several weeks to train a man for work on this project which requires intelligence and accuracy. I was interested to see that men and women of various ages and nationalities, including two colored men, were working on it.

After lunch at one of the clubs in the city, I had an opportunity to talk with a number of WPA and NYA groups. In industrial centers there is a pickup in employment which is felt on both WPA and NYA projects, but this is not the case as yet in small towns or rural areas.

Youngstown has a symphony orchestra which is entirely self-supporting and which was started by two young Italian boys. Many workers in the steel mill play in it, for among our American citizens of foreign nationalities, we are more apt to find artistic ability – one of their contributions for which we should be grateful.

I visited a slum clearance project in the afternoon which covers a large area and which they tell me replaces some long condemned buildings, which had been a blot on the city and a danger to the health of the people. I also had a glimpse of the park, which is one of the most beautiful natural parks I have ever seen.

We left Youngstown immediately after my lecture, spent a few hours in Columbus, Ohio, yesterday and found ourselves engulfed in a football crowd. We were tempted to stay over to see the Cornell–Ohio State game so as to be able to cheer our own state college.

Now, after part of a day and another night on the train, we are in Birmingham, Alabama. This country is a big country when you start to criss-cross it!

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October 31, 1939

Memphis, Tenn., Monday –
We left Birmingham, Ala., last night, escorted to the train by Mrs. Luke, who is one of the most meticulous of lecture managers in seeing that everything is done for your comfort. In one way, lecturing in the afternoon is rather nice, for it gives you a sense of freedom about your dinner and evening hours.

I invited two old friends to join us, Judge Louise Charlton and Miss Mollie Dowd, and we talked over many things. I am particularly interested in the plans for the next conference on human welfare which will be held in Chattanooga, Tenn., in March. It seems to me that this conference is most important to the South, because it will so much in changing social condition and in improving economic conditions, if the plans which they make can be carried through.

Here, in Tennessee, we are spending the day in Memphis before proceeding to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. In Tennessee, which I always think of as the home of marvelous forests, I would like to tell you about a little book I have just finished. It is The Story of a Thousand Year Pine by Enos A. Mills and particularly interesting because of the rather new idea it conveyed to me of the possible study of history contained in old trees when they are cut down. Here is the record of what happened in this particular countryside around the old pine over a period of a thousand years. I can imagine how exciting it must have been to delve into these secrets of the past.

There are several things which I have not had space to mention in the last few days which have interested me greatly. In the Youngstown, Ohio, public library I saw the first “mother’s room” established in any library in this country, or for that matter, in the world. It is planned to aid parents from the time their children are little until they are grown. It has been extensively used by the Parent Teacher Association and mothers’ clubs.

I can see innumerable ways in which it would be of great value to the mothers of growing children. Here is a place to find books which may answer questions coming up in daily life at home, to obtain information on the books which children should read, to gather material for the stories which children are constantly asking, and here are trained consultants ready to talk over individual problems or to lead discussion groups. I wish there were such a room in every library.

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