August 8, 1921
Dear Miss Addams:
I have just cabled you as follows:
"Eagerly awaiting chapters or articles from you Survey Graphic."
Of course it is rather a [presumptuous] cable, but condensation is the despair of courtesy and it does represent my hopes if not my expectations.
In the spring you had thought that perhaps there might be chapters in your forthcoming book which might lend themselves to Survey publication. Just before sailing you said that the manuscript needed entire overhauling and no doubt you have been badly driven since. Yet I remember other years when you have in the midst of your greatest activity done an immense amount of pen work and it may be that that has been true of this summer too. At all events, I wanted you to know that we are very eager to have a chance at some of those chapters -- or at anything else you may have been saying or writing this summer.
Our plans for the Survey Graphic have gone ahead. I am afraid I made a very stupid presentation of it at that luncheon before you sailed. Let me tell you of one development -- altogether confidentially -- in which I took a leaf out of your suggestions. One of the younger men here in New York, whose name I best not put on paper, as he has still some barriers to cross, is on the ocean en route to Ireland, where he is to gather a sheaf of articles for a special number of the Survey Graphic to be brought out about the first of the year. The articles will be on the New Ireland -- on what the Irish want or will do with Ireland, [page 2] once they come into their own. So far as I know, this is a new approach. There he plans to get the cooperation of ↑A.E.,↓ Sir Horace Plunkett and others in developing it. Just as during the war, most people talked of merely winning the war and not at all of reconstruction -- so most people talk of dominion rule and independence, etc. for Ireland. What are the dreams the Irish have for their own commonwealth in terms of human life? It will be different from what would have been the case in Cromwell's time or in 1776 or fifty years ago -- but what? This may not be as fresh an approach to the Irish situation oversees as it is here, but it is intrinsically an approach which fits the Survey and will, I hope, enable us to go a long way in the direction you indicated when you were here -- in following the gleam of social aspiration -- the things that are tugging at whole peoples.
We have also the chance of publishing very revealing material from the forthcoming administrative volume on the whole Hoover work in Europe. The work is being done by Dr. Dickinson. The chapter on the blockade, for example, is tremendously illuminating.
If it is quite impossible for you to write anything for us for these special numbers, I hope that you may at least carry a pad about with you for a day or so and scratch down on it suggestions which you think we might well follow-up. It has been three years now since I was overseas and you on the other hand have been making wonderful soundings. It would mean so much if you would share them with us.
Mr. Lasker is in Europe and can be reached in care of Max Lasker, 47A Moltkestr., Hamburg. He is planning to be in Switzerland part of the time.
Sincerely,
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