The first surviving column opens like this:
I wonder if any one else glories in cold and snow without, an open fire within, and the luxury of a tray of food all by one’s self in one’s own room?
She had shut her bedroom door at half past seven. The house was full of young people. Her husband had a cold and was in bed having milk-toast for his supper. She lit her fire, read for three hours, and went to sleep at ten thirty, which she notes was so unusual that she woke the next morning “with a feeling that I must have slept for several years!”
Her husband was the President of the United States. What he ate in bed went out over a national wire.
That column carries the dateline 1 January 1936, and it is the earliest one in the digital edition at George Washington University, whose page for it notes that the text has emendations. The sources give slightly different dates for the very first column, all of them within a few days of the end of December 1935, and the article will not pretend to settle that.
Eleanor Roosevelt then wrote one of these six days a week for the next twenty-seven years.
Look at What That Entry Actually Is
Strip the byline off and read the form.
There is a domestic scene. There is a specific time of night. There is a list of what she read, which she gives in full: a report on educational work in the CCC Camps, a copy of Progressive Education dealing with the problems of youth, the first issue of a magazine edited by a group of young people, and a chapter in manuscript. There is a note about how she slept. The next day gets a paragraph: sixteen for lunch, and a boy staying in the house who observed that every meal in it was different.
That is a journal entry. It has the two things that make a good entry worth rereading later, which are a specific hour and a specific object, and none of the things that make one embarrassing. It would sit without complaint among ordinary entries about ordinary days.
It also happened to appear the following morning in dozens of newspapers.
The Sentence That Makes This a Journalling Story
The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project has spent nearly a decade transcribing these columns. Its own introduction to the edition contains this:
ER did not keep a regular diary and her extant appointment books are woefully incomplete. Thus “My Day” is the only consistent existing account of her public actions.
She kept no diary.
Not a lost one, not a burned one, not one sealed for fifty years. There was no private version. For twenty-seven years the only running written record of Eleanor Roosevelt’s days is the one that was wired to newspapers before she went to bed.
This site has spent a long time on the notebooks it keeps track of, and almost all of them work the same way: someone writes for themselves, and much later somebody else reads it. Roosevelt is the inversion. She wrote the entry knowing that four million people would read it over breakfast, and she did not keep a second one for herself.
The project’s own summary describes her development from awkward “diarist” to skilled advocate. The quotation marks around diarist are theirs, not mine. Even the archive that holds the whole run is not quite sure the word applies.
The Syndicate Wrote the Brief, and It Asked for a Letter
Here is the part that surprised me most.
United Features Syndicate did not simply buy whatever the First Lady felt like sending. It defined the product. It chose the title. It asked her for the “day-to-day experiences, interests and observations” she would be “willing to make public”. It wanted the column “glittering with names”.
And it told her to write them “as if they were letters written to a dear friend”.
A commercial syndicate, specifying a mass-market newspaper feature in 1935, reached for the form of private correspondence. That instinct was correct and it is why the column worked, but look closely at the qualifier attached to it: willing to make public.
That is the filter. Every person who has ever written a public journal, a newsletter, a blog, or a post about their own life runs some version of it, usually without noticing. Roosevelt’s was written into her commission on day one.
How the Entries Were Actually Made
The romance of the thing falls away fast when you read the project’s editorial method.
She dictated. Her secretary transcribed the dictation and sent the text to the syndicate’s copy desk by telegraph. The copy editors were meant to fix her spelling and grammar and did not always do it. When they were rushed they left it to local newspaper copy editors, and every paper that carried the column had the authority to cut it.
The Papers Project then had to copy-edit the whole run itself. Among the things it corrected: the spelling of proper names, and her habit in the early columns of writing “to-day” with a hyphen. It standardised her datelines and her sign-off to E. R. It deliberately did not change her grammar, the length of a column, or what she chose to write about.
So the entry a reader saw over breakfast had passed through at least three pairs of hands after leaving her mouth, and the entry we can read now has passed through a fourth.
That is worth sitting with if you have ever wondered whether to write for an audience. A notebook has one hand on it. Everything else is a collaboration, whether or not you agreed to one.
The question of whether to write for yourself or for readers usually gets answered with a slogan. It is more interesting to look at people who actually chose one and see what happened to the writing. That is most of what I send in a short email every so often. You can subscribe here.
Three Positions, and the Site Now Has All of Them
This is where Roosevelt earns her place rather than merely occupying a gap.
Anaïs Nin kept a private diary for decades and then edited it for publication, so there exists a raw version and a public version of the same life, and the difference between them is visible. Privacy came first; the public act came later and was a decision.
Virginia Woolf kept twenty-six years of a diary for herself and it was published after her death by someone else.
Roosevelt is the third case, and the only one of the three that anybody has ever chosen from the start: public from the first line, twenty-seven years of it, with nothing underneath.
Set the three side by side and you get something close to a controlled experiment on a question people ask this site constantly, which is whether it is all right to write a journal that other people will read.
What It Cost
Two things, and they can both be named precisely.
The first is money, and there is a number for it. In 1956 she came out strongly for Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign, and the Scripps Howard chain dropped her column, “reducing her income by almost two-thirds”. A private diary cannot cost you two-thirds of your income. A public daily record can, and did, and she went on writing it.
The second cost has no number and it is the more interesting one. An entry written for four million readers has very little room for a doubt, a quarrel, a fear, or a thing not yet decided. That is not a fault in her. It is a property of the form, and any honest account of writing in public has to say so.
The clearest case is in April 1945. Her husband had died on the twelfth. The column of the twenty-sixth is datelined Hyde Park, Wednesday, and opens like this:
I had to go around so actively with executors and appraisers all day yesterday, that I almost forgot to stop and really enjoy the country.
Executors and appraisers. That is the entire mention. What follows is two hundred words on waking early to the first birds twittering around her porch, on walking up the hill behind her cottage to watch the sun go down so flamingly through the trees that she thought a house was on fire, on the soft spring rain “which gives you the feeling you can almost see things grow”, on her lilies-of-the-valley coming up as young green shoots and two white dogwoods almost in full bloom. It ends: “Yes, the world does live again. Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.”
Then a section break, and a paragraph reporting that Miss Thompson, her secretary, is still sitting with clothesbaskets of mail around her, that Thompson’s own ration books have been posted to her and are somewhere among a few thousand unopened letters, and that she nonetheless keeps finding the letters that matter.
I am not going to tell you what Roosevelt was feeling that week, because the column does not say and nobody else is entitled to. What it shows is precisely where the edge of the form sits. The grief is in there, but it is in there sideways: one clause about executors, one sentence claiming that nature has more to give “from the healing point of view, than any human being”, and a great deal about leaves.
It also shows the other half of the trade, which is that this really is a diary. Nobody writing for effect puts their secretary’s missing ration books in the paper.
So Should You Write in Public?
The honest answer is that the trade Roosevelt made is real and it is not free.
What she got is not small. A daily deadline with an audience attached is the strongest habit machinery there is, stronger than any of the systems in the usual advice about making a practice stick, and it kept her writing every day for twenty-seven years through a war, a presidency, widowhood, and a second career. By 1946, asked to state her profession, she put “journalist” ahead of everything else she was.
What she gave up is the entry nobody sees. The one where you are wrong, or frightened, or being unfair about someone, and where the value is precisely that no one will read it.
The question this site keeps coming back to is who a journal is actually for, and Roosevelt’s answer was: readers, always, from the first line. It worked spectacularly. It is also, I think, why almost everyone who writes well in public keeps something else that nobody sees. She is the exception that shows why the rule exists.
Her last column was published in late September, a few weeks before she died. The Papers Project’s own page gives two different years for it, which is a small and very human piece of untidiness at the end of the tidiest daily record anybody in public life has ever kept.
Twenty-seven years, six days a week, and not one page of it hers alone.
If you are sitting on the question of whether to keep your journal private or write it for other people, it helps to know that the two produce genuinely different documents, and that the choice is older and better tested than the internet makes it look. I write about what is actually inside the famous notebooks, which is rarely what the legend says. The email goes out from here.
