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much more beautifully dressed than Aileen and I were, because in New York women don't dress as dressily in the middle of the day as they do in the West. Aileen and I felt that if somebody had given us a gardenia we would have looked pretty plain, although we had on perfectly respectable clothes.
That was a very interesting meeting, because there again you learned from that meeting that these were really very intelligent women who had political ideas, but not too much political experience. Again, we made the same kind of a speech about the quality of Smith personally, Al Smith as a human being, his family, his family life. I always ran in my story about what he had done in the way of social welfare. That we learned, and I guess it went well all over the country, that women's groups were interested in that. That caught the women's ear. Practically all the women who are interested in politics are women who are interested in civic affairs. Therefore their minds had been at least attracted to whatever efforts were made in the community for child welfare, for the relief of the poor, or for public parks and playgrounds. The same kind of women who are concerned about politics will think about them in civic terms. They were always interested in the social program.
We also had a big meeting in one of the big hotels
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