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Dear Miss Addams:
The care which I know is always so deeply in your heart about what becomes of our mankind must be my apology for intruding upon you at this time, knowing that you are not very well according to what I hear from Miss Balch, and knowing how over-occupied you are.
Let me say in advance that there are only two people in America to whom I would make such an appeal, yourself and Mr. John W. Davis, in whom I have such great confidence through my personal contact with him, the last months of the war and during the Peace Conference. To you and to him I am making a similar appeal.
It concerns the future of the League of Nations. I feel about this matter deeply for several reasons. First of all, of course, is my care as to what becomes of our present humanity, whether we are going back into the melting-pot or not, or whether there is still a way to renew the present world. In the next place, in the days when I was much in the President's confidence, and when my relation to him was a very confidential one, unknown even to Col. House and the others about him, I probably had more to do with getting him to start with the League of Nations than anyone else. I was also responsible for getting the League to Geneva. You will see that Mr. White refers to this in two or three places in his Life of Woodrow Wilson, especially on pages 364 and 431.
Now the reason for my appealing to you to know if anything can be done is the extremely perilous position in which the League now is. There is at Washington, though it is not generally known, a pretty solid determination to destroy the League -- with the idea that [America] can thus take a world leadership and more especially President Coolidge lead the leadership. Of course, the whole idea is grotesque and is based on utter ignorance of the present world. There is also an equal determination in [Poincaré's] France at least to reduce the League to impotence. That is also what is in the mind of the present reactionary government in England.
Now the politicians and diplomats do not seem to have the least understanding of what the League really means to the peoples of the world. It is not a question of its small fulfillments and large futilities. It is simply that the League, in the minds of the peoples, is the one symbol of hope for the human future. This is universally so. I know this more and more because my house is a sort of international part of the world, largely because of the activities I carried on for the President behind the scenes during the war, and largely because of the legend that has grown up in Europe about my relations to him. So that, as a result of it all, there is one thing I know and know absolutely. And that is, that if the League should be destroyed [illegible] or dissolved, or even reduced to a mere secretariat, the faith of the peoples in the human future would receive its final death-blow. I know that here in Europe, and even in Asia and the better part of Africa, there is no one thing that would produce such complete and instantaneous despair, there is no one thing that would so quickly tend toward [page 2] the creation of universal chaos, there is no one thing that would so utterly destroy the last confidence of the peoples in the possibility of good as to have the League of Nations brought to naught. I assure you that I know whereof I am speaking when I say that this would be the final catastrophe that would ensure the dissolution of our Western [civilization].
And that is just what we are in danger of seeing happen. This is the end to which the diplomats and politicians, as well as certain groups of financers, are working. And this last appalling fatality to mankind is even now in sight.
And the men in places in power who are more or less secretly, more or less opening, working in this end, are so blind, even to their own self-interests.
I appeal to you, dear Miss Addams, to know if you think there is anything at all could be done about it in America. I appeal to you because -- let me speak quite candidly and very sincerely -- if you cannot see anything to be done, nobody can. But if nothing can be done in America, you may be sure that [America] will not be able to go alone, independent of what happens to the world, but will be dragged into the pit, and that into the very bottom of it, along with the rest of the world.
I wonder if there is anything even I can do. Last autumn I had it in mind that I might come to America and very quietly and in the most unnoticed way possible go from man to man -- I mean to such men as I could gain access to -- and personally state the whole situation, and try to arouse those men to do something. I have talked this over with some serious Americans who have come to see me from time to time. I mean that I had it in mind to go to such men as Borah, for instance, or to such financiers as Mr. George Reynolds, President of the Commercial Continental group of banks in Chicago, and to others who are in places of one kind of power and another, and try to personally make clear the whole position and what America's responsibility is and what America might do. I know the very idea of trying to do something in this very quiet and unobserved way seems almost grotesque; yet had it not been for the precarious state of my health because of my breakdown in Geneva, two years after the war, and as a result of the six years of service I had put in trying to get the world out of its scrape, I really would have tried it. So I gave up my rather Quaker-like adventure.
And yet, in view of the peril and almost certain perdition that awaits our Western world if the League of Nations goes to pieces, I am moved to appeal to you as to whether you think anything can be done in America by yourself and those associated with you, or by anyone else, to avert this peril and this perdition. Is there anything at all that could be done to awaken America from her ignorance and to a sense of her responsibility? Or do you think that even yet I could do anything in the way of personal appeal by going from man to man, taking time to it in such a way as I suggested? [page 3]
I do not think I need to apologize to you for coming in upon your time with these appeals and suggestions, for I know that you care about what happens to the world; and I believe that you at bottom believe that eventually there will be a fulfillment upon the earth of that kingdom of heaven which Christ stood for, and which his professed followers so little understand, and which I am sure must be your reason for being also.
Faithfully yours,
(Signed) George D. Herron
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