August 23, 1919.
Dear Miss Addams:
That is a wonderful interpretation of human travail which you and Dr. Hamilton have written -- heart searching, conscience searching. It is generous of you to give it to us.
I have only one criticism and that is that it offers no conduits for translating the emotion of your readers who do the action -- other than send money to the Friends. That is well as far as it goes -- but certainly there is more that we can urge people to do as a nation. At several points in the manuscript I read the sentences you had crossed out which show how ignorance, lethargy and distance -- to put out the most favorable excuses -- have let us complacently go on while conditions have been worse since the armistice than before. So far as the Survey goes we shall be very glad to leave these passages in -- or perhaps it would be better to have a separate article by Dr. Hamilton rather than you in case your official relations should be considered. We have only such scraps and conflicting bits of testimony. Mrs. Kelley when she came back rightly said the embargo on information was as bad as the embargo on food and Professor Taylor has written us a long letter of protest in regard to some paragraphs made up from information that she and Miss Wald gave us. Yet he seems to place the whole blame for the failure to get food into Germany on the new German government; which I find difficult to reconcile with the points raised in Lloyd George's belated protest at one of the Paris conferences against the French tactics which held it up for practical arrangements -- a scene which Mr. Lamont says was one of the most dramatic which [occurred] at Paris; or to reconcile it with General [Plumer's] statement.
What have been the effects of the embargo; what have been the various interferences which drag things along so many months; why did not the Allies make good their promises to the armies; why are they not made good now; what of the shutting down of the fisheries in the North Sea -- the removal of herds, the crippling of transportation; what has been the part of the relief administration -- the Red Cross -- as well as the Friends. What is the present situation, what is there, therefore, for Americans to do either in the matter of getting action by the United States or international action. These are some of the questions which press thick and fast on reading the article. [page 2]
I hope Dr. Hamilton will feel that she can attempt it for us.
If she felt she did not want to sign the article we can publish it unsigned.
We are getting your article at once into proof for publication in the September magazine number which will go to press the latter part of next week. So that we probably should not attempt to get such a supplementary article into the same issue. It would be a thing which you would not want to draft in a hurry. But I should like to add an editorial note to the conclusion of your article saying that it would be followed in an early issue by such a supplementary article. Or we could, if you cared to write them, add on two or three paragraphs to the conclusion of this article and let it go at that. But I would incline to the former plan.
We are planning to send out advance proofs of your article to quite a large group of newspapers since I feel it should have the widest audience possible.
Looking forward to seeing you soon and assuring you how much we feel we are in your debt for this article,
Sincerely,
Comments