October 28, 1925.
My dear M. Rolland:
Could we perhaps get you to write, and send us within the next few weeks, an article treating the Moroccan situation from the coign of vantage of a Frenchman of your outlook? We, of course, feel that what has been transpiring reaches deep into the relations born by the Western and European powers toward backward peoples the world over -- our own attitude toward the Philippines, toward the republics around the Caribbean, toward Mexico which, as you know, our jingoes have twice since the new century began, want to "clean up."
With the sheerly political elements in such situations, the Survey Graphic is not concerned. But with the social and human we are.
Perhaps I should explain to you what the Survey Graphic is. It is a monthly periodical interpreting life and labor; brought out by Survey Associates, Inc., a cooperative publishing society made up of 1800 men and women of goodwill throughout the United States. Miss Jane Addams and Miss Lillian D. Wald are two of the members of our Board. Mrs. Ann Reed Brenner is secretary.
We are not a pacifist propaganda body by any means; but we have achieved a common program in which men and women, conservatives and radicals alike, find common service. Our effort is to "get behind the newspaper headlines," as we say in America, to the social, economic and psychological forces which riffle the surface of current events.
During the last four years we have brought out four special racial numbers which we believe have made for human understanding. One on Ireland at the threshold of the new Free State, to which I.E., James Stephens and Sir Horace Plunkett contributed. One on Russia after seven years revolution, to which Madame Lenin, and others contributed. One on Mexico, which our Mexican friends tell us is the best interpretation that has been made of the racial and cultural revival that underlies their years of civil war. And one last winter on Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, interpreting on a cultural plane the significance of [page 2] the northward migration of the black folk from countryside to city. I am sending you a copy of this Harlem number, and also of our last issue -- our October Graphic, with its articles on China, on our coal strike, on the move for disarmament in Denmark.
What I have in mind is an article of twenty-five to thirty-five hundred words, for which we could pay seventy-five or one hundred dollars. I hope very much that you will feel that you could write it for us, and need not add that its opportunities would be such enhanced if it could reach us within the next month or so.
Sincerely,
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