May 6, 1920
Dear Miss Addams:
Mr. Woods has certainly been a glorified press agent for the life of Canon Barnett. He took the matter up with us in advance of the publishing of the volumes and we published an extensive review of them by himself at the time they were brought out. We also brought out an article by Miss McDowell on her return from London, in which she referred in generous vein to the biography.
We can't therefore publish another review even from you at this time; especially when we are cutting our magazine numbers in half because of the paper shortage. But we are always so anxious to get writings from you that I am very badly torn in my own mind in writing you as I do in this case.
I have read the review with a great deal of personal interest knowing what Canon Barnett's pioneering has meant to you; and the second half of it in which you leave the book behind and tell of personal incidents from your own experience fires me with a suggestion.
If you can, place the review as a whole elsewhere. But if not, it strikes me that you could take this second half and with slight changes make it into an article for publication in the Survey, at the time of Mrs. Barnett's visit to the country.
It strikes me that it would be quite possible to create a peg on which to hang it other than the book; although, of course, it would be entirely all right to refer to the volumes in the course, but not in the introduction, of the abbreviated article. [page 2]
There has been such a turbid wave of dull thinking and ingrowing emotionalism in this country under the head of "Americanization" that it behooves those who have been the especial custodians of our social obligation toward immigrants -- namely, the neighborhood workers -- to do two things: To voice a saner, ↑[illegible]↓ more socially constructive policy toward the immigrant -- the policy which has been worked out by years of experience and understanding; and to refresh their own spirits by going back to some of the early leaders who were our first neighborhood interpreters; and seeing if their old messages written in a different time cannot apply now. Canon Barnett was one of these.
Would it not be possible with an introduction cast along somewhat these lines, and eliminating the general biographical material, to salvage from one-half to one-third of your manuscript? We should like to have you try.
Sincerely,
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