The New York Evening Post
Miss Jane Addams,
Hull House, 800 South Halsted street,
Chicago, Illinois.
Dear Miss Addams:-
Many thanks for your letter of December 8th, and the material for an interview. I enclose a clipping of the matter as we used it today. I trust you will not object to the slight liberties which we took, by making an introduction out of your letter to me. I intended to amplify it further, with certain additions from remarks of yours at the Henry street meeting, which would have been entirely fitting and I am sure unobjectionable from your point of view; but I was interrupted until too late to do it.
While, as I have said repeatedly to Paul Kellogg (I think he has forwarded the substance of my remarks to you), I am skeptical about the concrete value of "utterances" by anybody or any body of bodies, in the presence of the world calamity, I nevertheless recognize that no effort to find effective expression is entirely futile, and that nobody can tell at what moment some short-circuit, however inadvertent, may strike the right sort of spark. Therefore I am in favor of anything that may serve to focus the growing sense of horror and protest. I do not know whether I could personally attend the meeting in Washington or elsewhere of which you speak, but I cordially welcome any and every step that anybody can propose, and would do all I could to help the thing along.
Sincerely,
John P. Gavit [signed]
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