May 21/24
Dear Miss Johnson
Miss Addams minutes are so terribly full just now that she is sending some of her correspondence to me to acknowledge. So in this way I have had the pleasure of also reading your very interesting letter of May 15th.
You are certainly right we need to go out and get to the "common people," the ordinary right-meaning preoccupied rather uninformed man and woman. I always think the end of war will come by a scissor-like action of two converging movements -- on wh. the [constructive?] statesmanlike efforts to create [organizations] making creating alternatives to war (courts, L. of Nations etc) and meeting the growing repudiation of war by populations to whom participation in it has [page 2] become impossible. I cannot tell you how happy I am over the peace [heaven] that is working so powerfully in the churches and especially in the Methodist church.
I think your songs are admirable. Do go in on that line, write more and above all find ways to get them out. I wish we any of us knew enough about the [church?] problem to help you. I want at least to present the matter at our Board meeting June 14. Can you let me have some more copies. It is interesting to remember how much "I didn't raise my boy to be a solider" [focused] attention. Did you know that there was opposition to the appearance [on?] our program of "Ain't going to study war no more."
I think cartoons, stray paragraphs, stories, pictures, etc serve to "plant seeds" [minimally] but I do see a good many of the right sort as well as so many of the wrong. [page 3]
I also agree heartily with the glorification of women your feeling about women's self-glorification, it is a sort of sex patriotism and equally narrow. Of course it is understandable as a reaction from the old "inferiority-complex."
I think we need in our peace work [on?] appropriate ways & places, both things -- the analytical constructive intelligence applied to the concrete problems which are as real and as difficult as the engineering of Brooklyn bridge and the great dynamic of right and powerful feeling, [illegible] sometimes and love always.
Yours very sincerely
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