Emily Greene Balch to Helen Katherine Hoy Greeley, April 11, 1922

JAPM-14-1267.jpeg
JAPM-14-1268.jpeg
April 11, 1922.
Mrs. Helen [Hoy] Greeley,
717 Woodward Building,

Dear Mrs. Greeley,

I meant to have written to you earlier to thank you for the splendid work that you have done in the Austrian credit matter.

I cannot tell you how pleased I am that you are Legislative Chairman of the American Section. I hope that you will have adequate support and be able to do work of the finest and most effective quality. Your letter interested me enormously as a picture of the developed methods in use in the United States in pushing legislation and I want to show it to some of our friends here as interesting in this sense. It will be understood that it is of a confidential nature.

I am very much interested at present in two pieces of political work. One is the Genoa Conference. My plan of a memorial signed by our officers has fallen through from the usual difficulties of getting a number of people to accept precisely the same text. I now propose that each National Section should memorialize the Genoa Conference following as much the lines of Mrs. Swanwick’s draft (copy sent herewith) as they may find good, but adding certainly a paragraph as to the recognition of Russia which by a strange oversight was omitted in our text. People seem to think the Genoa Conference will last two months or so so that you still have time. It is not so important who signs a memorial from the point of view of the effect that it produces. There must of course be no hocus pocus in the way of claiming that a paper represents more than it truly does. But something signed simply by yourself as Legislative Chairman or by two or three persons simply as members of the United States Section would be useful. It should go in duplicate to the American Observer at Genoa, to the Secretary of the Conference and to me to make use of as I may be able to.

The second matter is the question of the protection of minorities under the new arrangement by which Asia Minor and parts of the European mainland are given back to Turkey. I am seeing the people concerned with this matter in the Secretariat of the League of Nations and hope to send out fairly specific suggestions to our Sections. It seems to be held that publicity is dangerous in acting as a [stimulus] to Turkish outrages. The line therefore would seem to be to bring political pressure to bear on the governments to do something [page 2] real and [effective] in the matter of guaranties of the rights of minorities. We are those pushing along the line of least resistance as the powers have already promised to take such action.

I have [forgotten] to thank you for the [check] of $25.-- kindly returned. As I have once been [pried] loose from it I will turn it over to the administration funds of the Nansen Russian Relief as Miss Marshall and I took it upon ourselves to guarantee $50 a month on behalf of this League for that purpose.

I return Mr. Short’s letter herewith.