"I remember looking down at the face of my father, beautiful and still in death, and for a brief, terrible moment feeling my heart rise up--surely it was in a strange, suffocating relief?--as the realization came to me: "Now I am free!"

His creed was that of Judaism, brought to the 20th century from the 15th, and held with an intensity and a passionate faith that would destroy everything in his life, the very happiness of his children, that it might not be, in one small observance, unhonored."

Eleanor Morton) 1937 [9] In 1916 Elizabeth Gertrude Stern's Essay, "My Mother and I," was published in the Ladies' Home Journal.

"Sagamore Hill.-- This is a really note-worthy story-- a profoundly touching story-- of the Americanization of a young girl, who between babyhood and young womanhood leaps over a space which in all cultural and humanizing essentials is far more important than the distance painfully traversed by her fore-fathers during the preceding thousand years.

When we tend to grow disheartened over some of the developments of our American civilization, it is well worth while seeing what this same civilization holds for starved and eager souls who have elsewhere been denied what here we hold to be, as a matter of course, rights free to all-- although we do not, as we should do, make these rights accessible to all who are willing with resolute earnestness to strive for them.

Taubenfeld suggests that Roosevelt may have championed Stern's story as part of an ongoing campaign to advance his own ideological goals via popular media.