P.O. BOX 181
Los Angeles.

Dec. 15, 1931.

Dear Hutch:

Thanks for your kind letter in regard to the
play. Since you know how much I respect your
artistic ability as well as sincerity you can
judge for yourself whether your letter is as pleasing
to me as it might be. I was afraid that Cook, for
all his enthusiasm by mail was not as fully outfitted
with interpretive talent as he might be--I mean as to
actors. I am only sorry that the play cannot be
cast as it should be. I should like to see it really well done.

Despite the sunshine and the flowers and the blue
mountains of this favored land I miss the sombre common
places of the village and the faces and forms of mental
strugglers whose dispairs and passions as well as
enthusiasms and fol-de-rols I can honestly respect.
I grow so weary of those whom a placid fortune has
blessed with an urbane mediocrity. And I wish for our
land that there were a thousand Hapgoods or his ilk,
where now there is one..

Dreiser.

Will I come back? I may,--even this winter, for a time
How is Neith Boyce. There is another spirit acceptable
to mine.

THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR

[10/10/33]

Dear Hapgood:

Your letter to The Editors of The American Spectator, although answered by Boyd, has been turned over to me.

Liberality has always had a dubious standing in my
mental court. It is so easy to be liberal when there
is nothing to be liberal about, but, on the other hand,
it is so easy to pose a few problems to the liberals
which will cause him no end of trouble.

Let us say that it is necessary to sustain a liberal
attitude toward sectarianism. Well, a mild form of
religious sectarianism would not work much harm
and might be liberally treated. Supposing your
liberalism were faced by a rising tide of Mohamedism
in the United States as it is actually faced by a
rising tide of Catholicism and before it all,
not only a little, but all of what you deemed true
liberalism would be certain to go down. What
about liberalism in that instance?

Or, let us take, for instance, the rising tide of
color. I like the Negro as much as anyone in the
world, I believe he is honest, I think he is in-
dustrious and I think he has gifts which, particularly
in the matters of vitality, humor, if not romance,
which the white race lacks. It is entirely possible
that a blend is not only possible but desirable and
even unescapable. But if the people of England --
I am not speaking of South Africa, which does not con-
cern me very much, or Australia, or any of her out-
lying provinces -- if the people of England, I say,
were faced by a rising tide of color, how do you
suppose the English liberal would feel about it
and, if he opposed it, would there be any justification
for it? It would be interesting to know. His
temperament and the institutions which are the
result of it reflect one very interesting state of
historic life. The occupation of England by
Negroes would certainly result in an entirely different

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it, and I think it is a fair criticism because I believe that
ideals are not garden weeds. They do not just take care of
themselves; they are inspirational and have to be maintained by
enthusiasm and by sacrifice. It is the same way with social
organization; it has to be maintained against these invasions, or
there will be no organization. If the liberals say not to bother,
but to let his other organization come in if it would, well and
good, only that does not seem to be reasonable and certainly
not admirable nor desirable.

In this particular symposium, I did not say anything which should
cause an interligent Jew to quarrel with my position. I imply
said that I saw no reason why a race as gifted, as definite, as
religious in its predilections should not be willing to occupy
a country of its own, and what is wrong with that argument, I still
fail to see. The Jew insists that when he invades Italy or France
or America or what you will, be becomes a native of that country --
a full blooded native of that country. You know yourself, if
you know anything, that that is not true. He has been in Germany
now for all of a thousand years, if not longer, and he is still
a Jew. He has been in America all of two hundred years, and he
has not faded into a pure American by any means, and he will not.
As I said before, he maintains his religious dogmas, and his
racial sympathies, race characteristics and race cohesion as
against all the types or nationalities surrounding him whereso ever.

For that reason, I maintain that it is the hour in which laissez-
faire liberalism might be willing to step aside at least to the
extent of suggesting to or even advising the Jew to undertake a
land of his own. I say this because I am for nationalism as
opposed to internationalism. I think that differences in population
in the world will always exist, and that it is interesting and
better that there should be differences, if for no more than the
matter of entertainment and of developing new characteristics
through the various mediums which differences invariably give
rise to.

So what?

Dreiser

P. S. It just occurs to me that the Jewish artist who was made
so conscious of his Judaism is very likely the same artist who
expressed the opinions which I quoted. I am not sure, but I
think so. If it is so, it is very interesting.

To Dreiser' letter I replied as follows:

Winchester, Route 3,
New Hampshire,
October 18th, 1933

380

Dear Dreiser--

I have your letter of October 10th; and to say that I am surprised and disappointed is to put it mildly. I thought, as you know, that the original symposium about the Jews, in the American Spectator, was unfortunate in its probable results. But I did not think that what you wrote there amounted to definite anti-semitism.

This letter of yours, however, is a clear expression not only of anti-semitism but of intense nationalism in general, If you hadn't signed the letter I might have thought that it was written by a member of the Ku Klux Klan or a representative of Hitler.

It makes no fixk difference whether you attach value to the Jews or not, and you evidently do attach value to them. It makes no difference whether you like the Negroes or not, and you apparently do like them. It makes no difference whether you like the Catholics or not. It makes no difference whether you like the Mohammedans or not.

But it does make a difference, as an indication of your state of mind, what you want to have done about these nations, races and sects. I will not discuss the Mohammedans or the Negroes; they seem to me at present too remote for any useful discussion. And for the sake of simplicity, I will leave out the Catholics, for the time; although I think it is safe to say that the differences of religious opinion can be handled only by thought and cultural experience.

The Jews are the subject of our discussion. Your statements about the Jews are far from being true. If your statement about the Jewish population in the United States were true, there would be more Jews in the United States than there are in the whole world, including the United States.

You say that the Jews " do not represent the day-laborers of the world, but are by preference lawyers, bankers, brokers, merchants, money-lenders and middlemen".

But as a matter of fact the very great majority of Jews in the United States are laborers. They constitute a very large majority of the needle-workers and the sweat-shop workers here. The poor Jews in New York throw into complete shadow the wealthy Jews, so far as numbers are concerned. It is equally true also that the non-Jews are, "by preference lawyers, bankers, merchants, money-lenders, brokers and middlemen."

381

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The non-Jews are not by preference Day-laborers, needle-
workers, nor sweat-shop workers.

Again you say, "If you listen to Jews discuss Jews, you
will find that they are money-minded, very pagan, very sharp in
practise...and usually have a single objective, of plenty of
money."

Of how many non-Jews, I will ask, are these things also
true? Meanness, stupidity and sharp practise, are as universal as
the more sympathetic qualities, and equally distributed among the
nations and races. These things are individual characteristics,
not national or racial.

You also state that the Jews keep their religion and
racial characteristics. On the contrary, one of the most marked
things about the Jews is that they drop their religion in the
second generation after reaching America, and that they would be
more than willing to drop their race, if the non-Jews allowed them
to do so. The "race", whatever that may be, has been kept alive
by the unfriendly attentions of the non-Jews. Certainly the Jews
would have been much more nearly assimilated, were it not for the
fact that for a great many years they were penned up together in
ghettos, and were the object of fanatical outrages, which of course
helped still more to keep them together.

Now by the attitude that you express in your letter,
which is a frank statement that you would like if possible to have
the Jews removed from America, you do something which would streng-
then their racial and national consciousness.

However, if all you say in your letter were true--
which is far from being the case--your attitude is, in the real
sense of the word, barbarous. You go back on our cherished civil-
ization, on what has been painfully attained during hundreds of
years. A part of our culture is the recognition of the evil of
religious and racial intolerance and persecution, and no man who
is a part of our civilization can safely ignore it, otherwise he
is either ignorant or an agent provocateur, and therefore a danger
to the peace of the community, for, in a time like this it is easy
to stir up trouble. And for you, who ought to be a leader in our
civilization, to take this barbarous attitude, is to me inexplicable
on any decent ground. Ignorance, as I have said, is the only toler-
able excuse, and even that is hardly tolerable.

It is true that barbarism lies only a little way
beneath the surface of civilization. As Freud said in a little
book which I think he called War and Death, man in his barbaric con-
dition hates everything not himself and wants to kill it. No matter
how civilized he becomes, the instinct to kill the stranger, the
foreigner, the Jew and so forth, persists, and when civilized man
restraints are removed, bursts out again with terrible violence.

2

no anti-Semites who by their intolerance and cruelty retard this
process of natural union; not entire union, for civilization would
not be furthered by identification, but enough union for social
and economic adjustment.

You suggest a very strange and inconsistent reason
for recommending the blending of the Jews with the Americans. You
write that "the Germans, English, French, Italians, Poles, Hungar-
ians, Russians, Swedes, Chinese, and others...have slowly and surely
been absorbed in that strange and perhaps worthless people, the
dub American." If the result of this American blend is "dub",
and perhaps "worthless", why undertake the task of blending the Jews
into this "dub and perhaps worthless" American? Why not leave them
as they are, since you find many fine qualities to bestow upon them?

And, by the way, Dreiser, why are you so ungrateful
to the good Americans who have made you rich by buying your novels?
Do they, by any chance, buy them because they are "dubs"?

Hutslineus Hapgood

THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR

Dear Hapgood:

Or, let us take, for instance, the rising tide of
color. I like the Negro as much as anyone in the
world, I believe he is honest. I think he is in-
dustrious and I think he has gifts which, particularly
in the matters of vitality, humor, if not romance,
which the white race lacks. It is entirely possible
that a blend is not only possible but desirable and
even unescapable. But if the people of England --
I am not speaking of South Africa, which does not con-
cern me very much, or Australia, or any of her out-
lying provinces -- if the people of England, I say,
were faced by a rising tide of color, how do you
suppose the English liberal would feel about it
and, if he opposed it, would there be any justification
for it? It would be interesting to know. His
temperament and the institutions which are the
result of it reflect one very interesting state of
historic life. The occupation of England by
Negroes would certainly result in an entirely different

-2-

state of affairs. Sould the one, without argument, and for the sake of liberality, be abandoned for the other? It makes an interesting problem.

Let us take the divine right of kings, and its final smash. According to your theory of liberalism, the divine right of kings should never have been disturbed and, by the same token, should be flourishing in whatever philosophic or tyrannical form it might have assumed, until this hour. It is really overthrown by illiberalism, as the divine right individualist saw it. It would be interesting to know what liberalism would say to that.

In the same line, you can tkae the Jewish question. Liberalism, in the case of the Jew, means internationalism. He is to wander where he pleases and retain, as he does, his religion and race- characteristics without change. In America, Jewish temples are multiplying about as rapidly as Catholic Churches and, thank God, they are a little more artistic. The Jews, despite all argument to the contrary, are multiplying in number. It is admitted now that there are at least 2,400,000 in New York City. In other cities, they bear the same ratio to the population. They do not, in spite of all discussion of the matter, enter upon farming, they are rarely mechanics, they are not the day laborer of the world -- pick and shovel -- they are by preference, lawyers, bankers, merchants, mondy lenders and brokers and middlemen. If you listen to Jews discuss Jews, you will find that they are money-minded, very pagan, very sharp in practice and, usually, in so far as the rest is concerned, they have the single objective of plenty of money out of which they build a fairly material surrounding.

The profession of the law is today seriously considering, in such states as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Oregon, limiting the number of Jewish lawyers and, as they see it, for a very definite reason. The Jews lack, if I read the Pennsylvania Bar Association correctly, they lack the fine integrity which at least is endorsed and, to a degree, followed by the lawyers of other nationalities. At least, that is the charge. Left to sheer liberalism as you interpret it, they could possess America by sheer numbers, their cohesion, their race tastes and, as in the case of the Negro in South Africa, really overrun the land.

Well, if liberalism means that you are to accept that change without thought, without opposition, how to whatever is coming without trying to stay it or keep what you have, well and good. There is no reason for anybody saying anything. But if that is not to be done, then some consideration by at least someone must be given to what befalls a given state and also whether anything can be done to maintain one type of civilization or life, or racial life, as against another type of civilization or racial life. If the liberal says that is not the thing to do, there are many who would still consider themselves fairly liberal who say it would have been better to preserve Greece against the Romans or barbarians than to stand by and see it overrun by Rome and, actually, even later by barbarians. If these are fair examples of true liberalism, I decline to end

-3-

In this particular symposium, I did not say anything which should
cause an interligent Jew to quarrel with my position. I imply
said that I saw no reason why a race as gifted, as definite, as
religious in its predilections should not be willing to occupy
a country of its own, and what is wrong with that argument, I still
fail to see. The Jew insists that when he invades Italy or France
or America or what you will, be becomes a native of that country --
a full blooded native of that country. You know yourself, if
you know anything, that that is not true. He has been in Germany
now for all of a thousand years, if no longer, and he is still
a Jew. He has been in America all of two hundred years, and he
has not faded into a pure American by any means, and he will not.
As I said before, he maintains his religious dogmas, and his
racial sympathies, race characteristics and race cohesion as
against all the types or nationalities surrounding him whereso ever.

So what?

Dreiser