Page 4. It's very good to find you remembering my part in putting together the results of our conferences. But it's only fair to point out that
"Towards the Peace that Shall Last" drew on sources outside our group: it was a mosaic of some of the challenging things what had been said by men and women of good will everywhere. I remember lifting clauses bodily from Rolland, [Hauptmann], several of the English pacifists to say nothing of Tolstoy, Lincoln and Moses!
Page 18. Do you want to use the phrase, "if the Press could be controlled". Wasn't it the propaganda and other perversions of the press, too much controlled by officialdom, etc. that was the unhealthy thing?
Page 22. "Ran breathlessly until stopped by the Caspian Sea" -- a bit overdrawn. Could the verb be changed?
22. 40 million in arms?
Page 24. Might it not be in point to note that when the war shifted, and the allied powers had the military advantage, a fresh cup ↑crop↓ of reasons were advanced; such as that the pacifists' only concern was to save the Germans from punishment?
Page 31. Thomas A. Edison
Page 32. "Applicants" -- no doubt there were applicants of the sort you speak of; but Ford's whole plan was to get a "popular" boat load: Lochner etc. sent off hundreds of invitations right and left. They were hungry for suggestions of names -- incidentally they borrowed our Who's Who and Charities Directory and never returned them! It was in part because of this helter skelter inviting that Mrs. Spencer withdrew. And as I recall it, but with passages which verge on that difficult ground of motive which you [page 2] [missing text?] it had been also the subject of your protest. Instead of getting a nucleus of first rate people and building around that they ran amuck. My remembrance is that you said they took each of these steps against your counsel, but that you felt, as the powerful of the earth would not respond to your appeal for action, you did not feel like quitting a man who [nested?] -- even if his way was not yours. You "were never cock sure your own way was the best."
page 23. The "people in New York" -- this may ↑be↓ read by some as meaning a New York group. It certainly was not that you meant the promoting group I guess.
page 47. When was the president's speech before the senate -- December 1915 (?)
Perhaps in reading this chapter, it might be well if you would make sure that your reader is following your chronology right. You see you have carried the narrative into 1917 in the chapter preceding. Perhaps it would overcome any confusion by indicating very obviously in the first page that you are going back to the events of 1916.
Has Tumulty's series -- published here in the New York Times -- come to your hand? It may make clear whether in the mind of his secretary he was really fooling the Pacifists throughout; or carrying water on both shoulders; or of two minds. I could perhaps get them for you.
I wish you would get someone like Lovejoy or Miss Wald whose friendship and understanding you could absolutely count on, but who would come at your manuscript objectively to read the sections on Wilson, Ford, Baker, etc. You will not satisfy those who are keen for revelations. On the other hand you do not limit yourself to a discussion of public acts. You lift the curtain a bit, but I am not sure that you give enough circumstantial evidence to fortify some of your criticisms. Yet those are of a sort which will rouse some of their friends to hectic rejoinder.
My query has to do not with your main argument of contentions but with passages which verge on that difficult ground of motive which you [page 3] especially disclaim entering upon so far as others are concerned in your preface. Perhaps it is because personal censure is so out of character in you that I feel this way -- that you are not brutal and specific enough to lightly fill the role of prosecutor; and on the other hand that you bend toward it at certain points just far enough to shadow your clear picture of keeping faith with certain great principles in the face of difficulties or ↑and↓ disparagements -- principles which of a right, you apply penetratingly in measuring nations and men and policies.
But my uncertainty is uncertain; it is merely enough to make me urge you to get such counsel as I suggest.
page 98. "absolutely necessary" --?
Or "held to be [absolutely necessary] "↑necessary"↓
page 110. Your censure of the inconsistency of Baker is, I believe, well founded.
But, when read by say, Judge Mack, wouldn't these passages seem fairer if you indicated the steps taken ↑he took↓ to ameliorate the treatment of the "C.O.'s["] -- the federal board that endeavored to undo some of the injustices of the camps and to work out a system which however vulnerable was removed from whim or spite.
Also, to indicate the pressure the civilian head of the war department was under -- from the military and from the extremists like the National Security League, the Stevensons, the Easely's, etc. I recall Baker gave out a courageous disavowal when Stephenson published his list of traitors -- how Baker cited you as a useful citizen in denouncing the list.
On the other hand it's in point to point out the Wilson Baker administration went out of office with scores of these political prisoners still in jail! [page 4]
Page 121. Hague Congress?
123. "gallantly"?
My recollection was that you address made it clear -- that it was not so much because the young fellows flinched at the risk of death but because they had to be inflamed to do the brutal work of the [bayonet], disemboweling etc., against which their better natures recoiled. It does not seem to me you have made this clear here.
Also, as this is your final defense against those malignant attacks, and you take it up to bury the ghost once for all, I should strongly recommend that you add, at least in a footnote, the testimony which later came out in various military and medical quarters and was, as I recall it, gotten together by Dr. Hamilton, amply confirming all that you were attacked for saying.
Page 132. Again I question the "necessity" of news manipulation.
Page 147. Do retain those prophetic paragraphs?
149. Why not salvage the last 5 trenchant lines of the resolution? They are so very much in point.
151. Emily [Greene] Balch? Was Miss Balch a professor at Wellesley at this time? Would you care to mention that she is author of that study of immigration (Our Slavic Fellow Citizens) which is at once the most scholarly and readable and [illegible] ↑marked↓ with greatest wealth of social insight.
174. Agent provocateurs:
"We were told that they were employed at Gary by the secret service department of the government itself." [page 5]
How specific and reliable is your authority "we were told". This is a statement you may be challenged to prove.
Page 176. Last paragraph. Are "unknown and [subhuman] forces" defined clearly enough to convey your meaning?
179. Here you leave the Woman's Peace organizations and speak quite specifically of one general body ↑[the League] to Enforce Peace↓. Did you refer at corresponding points to the Emergency Peace body and especially the American Union Against Militarism, etc. And what of the League of Free Nations Association (now the Foreign Policy Association) which was organized by liberals when the League to Enforce Peace would not touch the question of democratic war arms with a ten-foot pole? When peace making was going forward at Versailles, it was equally cautious, while the younger group struck at vulnerable points in the drafts at cost of being denounced as pro-German.
221. I am sorry you crossed out your concrete illustrations. Do let them stand if you can.
226. Is "combinations" your best word? It has unfortunate connotations.
It seems to me that your book bears the ear marks of its conception and first drafting last spring and summer. Can this be overcome in a January publication? While it would be a mistake, no doubt, to try to cover the developments of this fall in any detail, I wonder if you could ↑not↓ transcend the difficulty by projecting it more rigorously into the future. It is largely history of course but history in the making. And it would be a rare service if you could leave your readers with a more specific challenge of things to be [page 6] striven for in the time ahead. In my letter to you as to Chapter X I suggested emphasizing your food theme as a subject for any economic conference following the disarmament meetings. You have brought out the hopes and difficulties centering in the existing League of Nations. In various conferences here in New York recently, there was a general feeling that the American public was not yet ready to accept the League. They must ↑and that it was a mistake to give too much [discussion] [that?] the public↓ mistrusted it as a step toward European entanglements and war. They may come to see it, not as an end but as a stepping stone on the way to be abolition of war. But the whole tenor of your book is to get beneath, ↑[illegible]↓ machinery to primary needs and the "endless desire of men not to be kept apart but to come to terms with one another." If you could perhaps cast your net wider than Geneva, and show eager Americans how with every fresh opportunity and manifestation of that tendency they can press ahead -- the more specific the things to press for the better -- it would be food for hungry folk. Your history has been worth telling, you make articulate the yearnings and troubled hearts of countless folk. You have sad ↑well↓ what they cannot voice: you bring healing words. But I feel that in your food theme you have struck at once the most desperate, the most hopeful note put before us at this time. It is that that will make your book a constructive force. It is there that I would urge you to draw, if you will, more generously on your rare gift of prophesy.
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