Dear Miss Addams:
It was wonderfully good to have you here at our Board meeting; and I only regret that so much of our time was taken up with finances. We have been winding up the clock this year; and I hope will have things in shape by next fall so that our concern as a group will not be absorbed in our engine room, but in how to navigate this cooperative craft of ours so as to make it a real explorer and pusher back of horizons.
There was one comment of yours which I have thought over several times since. You visualized how the fear of Russia was sort of a red herring drawn across the nascent forces in American life; just as the fear of France balked things in England during the first decades of the last century. You cited how the suppression of the slave trade was delayed, for instance, because everyone who espoused such a cause was denounced as a “red," or its equivalent a century back.
It seems to me that if we were ↑are to↓ release things, and recapture some of the spirit of quest which was true before the war, then keen and outspoken analysis of some of the situations and forces which baffle us, would help. It has been sometime since I have pressed for an article from you; you have understood, I hope, that we are always eager for them. But I have hesitated to add to your load by any urgency from us. And, of course, the major periodicals are eager also for things from your pen; and can not only pay you roundly for what you write, but can give you the sense of reaching so many more readers.
Yet it seems to me there is a great hungriness among folk who are up to their elbows in work for their communities, and who would prize word from you at this time. More than that, there are things which we on The Survey would like you to write about, and which would not fit into the general periodicals.
Is not the fear of bolshevism, as something which short-circuits American social action, one of them? Would it be possible [page 2] for you to write on that during the early summer so that we could print the article in the fall? We should prize it. It would seem to me that with your English analogy, with your sensitiveness to how this recurrent dread comes up in concrete situations here, you would have the materials for an article which would be at once as revealing as it would be opportune. And there is no one whose courageous handling of the theme would count for more.
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