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and everybody else sort of automatically said, “Well, this is the time for her to speak.” I think they interrupted the business to introduce Mrs. Roosevelt. They introduced her and allowed her to speak.
This account in Eleanor Roosevelt's book, This I Remember, on pages 214-217 more or less jibes with my recollection, except that she, of course, is speaking of her feeling and of who she spoke to from the time she got to the field to the time she got on the platform. She says that it was Frank Walker who said to her, “Now is the time they're going to call on you to speak.” She was sitting in back of the platform until they brought her out, sitting in that little corridor that communicated with the platform. That's where they put her when she first came. She then came out to the platform, sat beside Mrs. Wallace, held her hand and squeezed it.
Poor Mrs. Wallace was almost out of her mind. I remember seeing that Henry Wallace was suffering terribly, but Mrs. Wallace was reeling. You could just see it. Her brain was reeling around inside of her head. Mrs. Roosevelt says that she didn't think that Mrs. Wallace even followed the roll call. She certainly didn't. She couldn't keep her mind on the politics of it. The antagonism and the ill will was a crushing thing, a very
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