Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 731

or large humiliations have gradually taught them their personal insignificance as compared to other people. They are not the whole cheese. They are not destined to control the world as an individual. They have a role to play, but they must play that with others and in a spirit of love and good will.

I would like to think that Roosevelt's growth had been so sufficient that he would have continued to grow in that way, but I sort of think that it would not have been. I think the personal quality that was torturing him brought him out with this completely humane sympathy, which he perhaps could never have even imagined otherwise.

I knew A. Mitchell Palmer. He was Alien Property Custodian. I didn't like him. I thought he was most unpleasant. He was then Attorney General. He had a political build-up out there. There's no question about that. He seemed to me to be a man behaving contrary to his own nature. He was raised in a good Quaker family. He seemed to me to have all of the qualities, as I saw him in operation there and as I knew about him as Attorney General and Alien Property Custodian, which the Quakers would most dislike - arrogance, aggresiveness, utter inconsideration of other people. I never knew him well enough to know what his inner life was. I remember thinking, “How could that man have been raised in





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help