March 9, 1916.
Dear Miss Addams:
Your letter of February 18th and the copy of your testimony before the Committee on Military Affairs has gone the rounds of the staff, and we won't make that slip again. The account was made up largely from clippings from the New York Evening Post, who had a representative there and from whose report we drew the quotations. If you feel that it is important, we could very well publish a little jotting calling attention to the error in attributing to you the advocacy of international disarmament at the end of the war. But our joint judgment is to call it spilt milk and make sure not to do any more spilling!
I am sending you carbons of letters I have written to Miss Wald and Rabbi Wise bearing on what it seems to me should be the next stage in our work of agitation.
We have been having snows and [blizzardy] weather and I only hope that these March days are of a very different sort with you in California and that you will find them greatly invigorating.
Last night Ambassador [Morgenthau] spoke at the annual dinner of the Free Synagogue, and there was no disguising the fact that he is a straight-from-the-shoulder pacifist; feels that none of the belligerents really want us to come into the war; and that we can aid not only in bringing a settlement [page 2] nearer, but in framing that settlement in large and just ways if we press forward in doing the very thing which he has been endeavoring to do for a dozen races at Constantinople -- service; American service to them; and he was outspoken in showing how his capacity and instinct for rendering it grew out of the civic and neighborhood activities with which he had been connected here in New York. (notably "The House on Henry Street")
His was all a thoroughly enheartening statement -- an affirmative social program of service to the nations, in contrast to the negative stand-up-for-our-rights program which has marked too much of the activity of the Wilson administration; and as [Morgenthau] is strong for Wilson, and had just come from conferences with him, it would seem to me that Mr. [Morgenthau's] influence could scarcely have been other than to emphasize this neglected, affirmative side to him; and moreover that Mr. [Morgenthau] must have had some assurances as to what can be expected in that direction.
Moreover, Mr. [Morgenthau] made it perfectly clear that it was not our battleships but the things we stood for which counted. While he did not counter the preparedness agitation by the president or anyone else, military business is very evidently only a small element in our foreign policy as he sees it.
Couple this with the fact that at our last meeting of the Anti-Preparedness Committee on last Monday, Rabbi Wise, a close confidant of Mr. [Morgenthau], made a strong point that we should attack militarism, and not Wilson, in the two weeks' tour of the Middle-West which the committee is planning for early in April. He argued for this on the ground that "we are not sure the president will be found on the other side" in the course of the next few months.
And couple it further with the appointment of Mayor Baker to the war portfolio, and the latter's public statement (which warmed Mrs. Kelley's heart) that he belonged to several peace organizations and saw no need for resigning from them, -- and I feel the developments of the last few weeks have not been against us.
With best wishes,
Sincerely,
Paul U. Kellogg [signed]
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