"My Day"

Martha Custis Washington was a planter's lady who scorned the rabble and would not have dreamed of exposing the intimacies of the Presidential household to every lout with the price of a newspaper in his pocket. Margaret Smith Taylor, wife of the twelfth U. S. President, was a pipe-smoking frontierswoman who shut herself up in the White House second story and would have had little of interest to report to the Press even if she had been able and willing. Such were some of the reasons why the current comings & goings of the most interesting and important household in the land have not been regularly described to the public by the person best qualified to do so.

Last fortnight United Feature Syndicate announced that, beginning with the New Year, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt would write for it a daily feature called "My Day," reporting her thoughts and doings "serious or humorous, important or trivial." There would be no chance in this chronicle, set down fresh every day at teatime, for the kind of afterthought and reflective emendation which usually lessen the historical value of memoirs. After reading her first week's stint, which appeared in some 50 newspapers last week, journalists and historians had reason to regret that the U. S. had never before possessed a First Lady so zestful, so democratic, so gregarious, so inexhaustibly energetic, so naively unselfconscious as Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt.

Excerpts:

P: All during this past autumn our two Harvard boys [Franklin Jr. and John] have been attending a course in sociology given by Professor Zimmerman, and one of them has had as an adviser Professor Boldyreff. Because the course dealt with questions of our own government, and there were conflicting points of view, the boys were anxious to have these gentlemen come down here. So last night they came. The subject under discussion was the AAA, so Secretary and Mrs. Wallace and Mr. and Mrs. Chester Davis were also asked, together with a large group of young cousins. ... I provided a movie for the latter's entertainment and when the boys told me they felt the discussion would be of greater interest if there were not too many people there I attended the movie with the ladies. ... At 11:30 the movie was over and the young people, with Mrs. Wallace and Mrs. Davis, decided to go home. . . . [Later] Professor Zimmerman and I almost started the discussion anew, but I came to the conclusion that it was one of those discussions that are more or less profitless. . . .

P:Thursday night we gave the second big official dinner of the year. It was held in honor of the Vice President. To this dinner come high ranking members of both political parties in the Senate and House of Representatives, and so the Vice President sat on my right and Senator Borah on my left. ... We had hardly seated ourselves when, with a wicked twinkle, my husband leaned forward to murmur a few things about candidacies to my left-hand neighbor. As one woman said to me afterwards, it was a friendly dinner.

P: We did not have a very large family group to see the new year in. At n 145 we were sitting in my husband's study, the Oval Room, and we turned on the radio so as to be sure of the exact moment. A traditional New Year's eggnog was passed around. As the clock struck 12 we all stood up and over the radio floated "Old Lang Syne," as my husband proposed the first toast, which is always "To the United States!"

A first cousin miles removed from Mrs. Roosevelt in temperament, ideas and political attachments is Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of Roosevelt I, relict of the late Speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth. This week that acid-tongued, political kibitzer, who generally gets credit for most wisecracks uttered in Washington, was put forward by McNaught Syndicate as successor to its late great Will Rogers. Appearing in some 100 newspapers, Alice Longworth's brief daily comment is served hot by telegraph to most subscribers. First sample:

"Now that the kleig lights are off and the thrill of the beautiful voice has vanished. Congress faces the job of carrying out such suggestions as it can find in the message on the State of the Union. . . . President Roosevelt is becoming more precise as the campaign progresses. He quoted himself, Shakespeare and the Bible correctly. The Bible and Shakespeare were quoted briefly. . . ."

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