We Can Do It!
This is the humanities project that we presented at exhibition. This project consisted of many parts. First, we just learned about WWII. Then we learned and presented a play that was called 'We Can Do It!' which we presented about a week before our official exhibition. After that, we made vignettes about specific topics of the war. The vignette that my group and I did was about Eleanor Roosevelt. We then wrote a paragraph about her and hung it for the night of exhibition. Below, you can read the paragraph we wrote and the vignette that we made about Eleanor Roosevelt.
Eleanor Roosevelt was born Anna Eleanor Roosevelt in the year 1884. Engaged at nineteen, she married her fifth cousin once removed when she was twenty one. When he became president, she held the position of First Lady for a span of twelve years, from 1933 to 1945. During this time, she completely redefined the meaning of First Lady, offering up both her time and efforts not only to the people of the United States, but to the world as a whole. As a firm believer in human rights, she defied the segregation laws that the U.S. followed in the year 1939, when World War II began. Arriving at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham, Alabama, she sat between the two races, instead of with “her own.” Continuing to show her disapproval for the U.S.’ tendency towards segregation, she left the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1941 when they refused to allow Marian Anderson, an African American singer, to perform. That same year, she arranged for Anderson to perform at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday. In 1945, she helped African Americans to gain access to positions in the Army Nurse Corps and became part of the board of directors for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. Returning to her work during World War II, Roosevelt traveled overseas to both Europe and the South Pacific to boost the soldiers’ morale. Focusing on her trip to the South Pacific, Roosevelt spent five weeks touring islands being used to “house” the troops, beginning and ending her travels at Christmas Island. While there, she acted as a representative of the Red Cross, viewing all facilities, interacting with all soldiers, and, upon her return, wrote a nine page report assessing the facilities she saw. Her husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had an affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer. However, she remained with him until his death in 1945, so as to help his public image while running for, and after achieving, the presidency. While she was away on charity work that year, her husband died of a cerebral hemorrhage, with Mercer at his bedside. After his death bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and though Eleanor did not want to kill the innocents whose lives the bombs claimed, she felt the it was the only way to end the war, and so she supported the action. She also held a different belief than her husband in relation to the Japanese Americans, and strongly disagreed with the internment camps, stating that “it was wrong for ‘innocent people [to] suffer for the few guilty ones’(Gibo)”. Roosevelt also had a column called “My Day,” where she wrote about what she did in her day-to-day life and often responded to letters she received from everyday women who she encouraged to write to her. She started this about four years before the war, and kept up the column until her death on the 6th of November 1962, in New York.
Eleanor Roosevelt was born Anna Eleanor Roosevelt in the year 1884. Engaged at nineteen, she married her fifth cousin once removed when she was twenty one. When he became president, she held the position of First Lady for a span of twelve years, from 1933 to 1945. During this time, she completely redefined the meaning of First Lady, offering up both her time and efforts not only to the people of the United States, but to the world as a whole. As a firm believer in human rights, she defied the segregation laws that the U.S. followed in the year 1939, when World War II began. Arriving at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham, Alabama, she sat between the two races, instead of with “her own.” Continuing to show her disapproval for the U.S.’ tendency towards segregation, she left the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1941 when they refused to allow Marian Anderson, an African American singer, to perform. That same year, she arranged for Anderson to perform at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday. In 1945, she helped African Americans to gain access to positions in the Army Nurse Corps and became part of the board of directors for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. Returning to her work during World War II, Roosevelt traveled overseas to both Europe and the South Pacific to boost the soldiers’ morale. Focusing on her trip to the South Pacific, Roosevelt spent five weeks touring islands being used to “house” the troops, beginning and ending her travels at Christmas Island. While there, she acted as a representative of the Red Cross, viewing all facilities, interacting with all soldiers, and, upon her return, wrote a nine page report assessing the facilities she saw. Her husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had an affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer. However, she remained with him until his death in 1945, so as to help his public image while running for, and after achieving, the presidency. While she was away on charity work that year, her husband died of a cerebral hemorrhage, with Mercer at his bedside. After his death bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and though Eleanor did not want to kill the innocents whose lives the bombs claimed, she felt the it was the only way to end the war, and so she supported the action. She also held a different belief than her husband in relation to the Japanese Americans, and strongly disagreed with the internment camps, stating that “it was wrong for ‘innocent people [to] suffer for the few guilty ones’(Gibo)”. Roosevelt also had a column called “My Day,” where she wrote about what she did in her day-to-day life and often responded to letters she received from everyday women who she encouraged to write to her. She started this about four years before the war, and kept up the column until her death on the 6th of November 1962, in New York.