January 26, 1922
Dear Miss Addams:
I spent last evening with you -- or to be specific, with your Chapter XI, and I again found myself caught up by your frontier habit of visualizing things of the spirit to build on even when so acutely conscious as you are of the "hideous state of a world facing starvation and industrial confusion." The reading quickened my old desire to have you in this last [installment] less of a historian and more of a prophet.
Coming flush to the point where we should send this chapter to the printers, for our March issue, the difficulties it presents are very real. When all is said and done in the form in which it appears in the book, it is a conference report -- a conference held last July and this is March; a conference which we reported quite fully last October; a conference held in Vienna whose conditions you describe and whose conditions Dr. [Elliott] described for us a year ago to the extent of an eight-page supplement. These are the difficulties And it is a chapter which will be out in book form almost a month before our March number comes from the press. These are the difficulties.
On the first reading last night I was almost in despair. On the other hand, you had clearly indicated your preference for Chapter XI as our third [installment] and I think your instinct was right. It does give a picture, as has not been done before, of the things the women are standing for in Europe in the midst of the starvation and confusion there today. It gives a sense not only of their yearning but of their organized purpose and action. And I am very anxious to get that picture over to the group of Americans who read The Survey and so make for understanding.
It seemed to me on second reading that, if we could get away even just a little from the earmarks of a conference report and make it an interpretation of the stand taken by the women on these issues of peace and bread, using their discussions at the Vienna conference as an illustration of what they are thinking and feeling and doing, then it might be managed. [page 2]
I found two or three paragraphs in your afterword which could be used, if you will, by way of introduction in a way which would give a fresh approach to these very things. I found that by transferring a paragraph on page 211, (which tended to confirm the impression that one by one you were reviewing the proceedings of the conference at Vienna) to your description of the international office of the League at Geneva, where it was very germane, it helped convey a new impression; namely, that here you were telling, as in truth you are, not only of the Congress at Vienna, but a school at Salzburg, an office at Geneva, the three focal points of the women's movement of last summer which you visited.
It is possible also, I thought, to cut out a paragraph or so on page 216 and 217 which again overemphasizes the convention atmosphere.
As there is time it seems to me I should put these changes before you and I am, therefore, returning Chapter XI with a new introduction and the changes indicated before sending it to the printer.
If the spirit moves you to go further than I have, well and good. But please, may we go so far?
Unfortunately the copies of the Christian Century which you mention sending have not reached me so that I am not at all sure whether you sent them that part of Chapter X -- in regard to food and internationalism -- which had not been published in the New Republic a year ago. If you did not send that section to the Christian Century and feel that any pages of it could be substituted for parts of Chapter XI, as at present organized, I should feel quite happy about it. For example, we have written again and again about conditions in Vienna and I should be quite willing to sacrifice pages 214 to 216, or certain other of the convention topics for more of your original and creative thought from Chapter X. If, of course, you placed it in the Christian Century, no matter.
You will see that underlying all this is my very keen appreciation of the fact that the next move toward sanity and construction abroad will be economic rather than political and that it is in your food theme that you have something which, while it has tragic history to it, [nonetheless] gives people something to lay hold of who don't want to be "kept apart but to come to terms with one another."
We should like to be able to send this last [installment] to the printers by the middle of next week. There is no question of withdrawing it, of course. We have announced it. But more than that we want it -- and it is only because I feel it has such big [page 3] potentialities wrapped up in it that I venture this last plea.
Is the title I suggest all right? Perhaps you can improve upon it.
Sincerely,
Paul Kellogg [signed]
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