CATT, Carrie Chapman General Correspondence Kelly, Florence Mrs Florence Kelley Naskeag, Brooklin Maine Dear Mrs. Catt June 23-27 Have you seen Professional Patriots? I assume that you must know about it, as your name appears both as an endorser, and as one of the attacked. Is it to this book that you referred as "some investigations" which might reveal some astonishing things? This seems painfully familiar, horrid as all the wholesale lying certainly is! Or do you refer to some "investigations" otherwise inventions, threatened by the enemy? I fear readers of Professional Patriots may the select few who wish to know the truth. Whereas the ears of the voting mass have been long assailed with or without their assent by all that poison for their brains. I certainly do feel embarrassed to be participating in the preparation of an article in which you so super-kindly call me a "very great woman", even tho this will, of course, be taken as warrant to counterbalance the portrait of an abandoned vilain in which I have learned to recognize my character in caricature. I rejoice over the publication of Professional Patriots. And I am boundlessly thankful for your courage! Yours gratefully, Florence Kelley June 11, 1927 Mrs. Florence Kelley, Hotel Gramercy Park, 52 Gramercy Park North, New York City. My dear Mrs. Kelley: I am passing to Miss Roderick, the Editor of The Woman Citizen, the completed article-an open letter to the D.A.R. It must now go to the lawyer to see if there is anything libelous in what in what I said. I am enclosing all of the part which concerns you. If there is anything I have now said which is not absolutely reliable, let me know. I do not want any comeback if it can be avoided. I thank you most cordially for your cooperation in this matter. I shall return the precious printed sheets. I have not read them, but I have looked them over. Apparently, it is practically the same stuff as they used in the Congressional Reprint. Probably it is somewhat cut down and I notice some slight changes in phrasing. I think you should hold on to that paper with great care. Some investigations are being made and perhaps something quite surprising may be unearthed. Proof may be necessary. If anybody sends you clippings from newspapers in which you are made to be what you are not as a result of these statements, it is most important that you preserve such letters with great care. I should pronounce it an impossibility to make a real conservative understand a radical or even a liberal, but liberals understand each other and also understand radicals. What I am hoping to do is to stir the liberals inside of the D. A. R. to take some action. We may never know whether or not it has been taken, but I believe we shall find those pamphlets withdrawn eventually. When you pronounce the Record pamphlet old stuff, you are not aware that it is being actively circulated by the D. A. R. and probably others, all over the country. I think the aim may be to break up women's organizations or at least to break up the Washington lobby, and to discredit any influence they may have there. If this article is satisfactory as to facts, will you be so kind as to write or telephone Miss Wald, 171 Madison Avenue, Ashland 6770. If you wish to make any corrections or additions, kindly do so on the copy enclosed and return it at once. Very cordially, Dictated but not read. June 3, 1927 Mrs. Florence Kelley, Hotel Gramercy Park, 52 Gramercy Park North, New York City. My dear Mrs. Kelley: I am sorry you do want to be defended because there are reasons why I think you need it. As a matter of fact, the charge that you have been working a conspiracy all these years and that the rest of us are dupes is more important than you think for it looks to me as though the whole story hinges upon that pretty well. They had to have a goat and you are it. It is also rather difficult to prove that a person is honest when somebody else says he is not. I am enclosing the paragraphs concerning you merely for the purpose of confirming everything they contain. If there is anything you can add which will strength it, please do not hesitate to let me know in what way this may be done. Please remember that we are sending this to the D.A.R. I do not think for a minute that we shall convince them, but what we may do is to stop the circulation of some of these lies. You speak of this material as old. It is old, but it was compiled at great labor, apparently, and when I was in California, I found it widely circulated. There it had been put out in a different form than the plain reproduction of the record and the D.A.R. was circulating it. It was also the source from which statements and speeches were being drawn. The old pan of the suffrage campaign was to ignore everything the Antis did so far as it was possible. I think it proved a good policy, but it had not gone so far as it is now traveling. There was a near riot in Evanston on Memorial Day with a D.A.R. woman mixed up in it. I think, myself, that the manifestations are an indication that the peace movement is making rapid progress. I think, further, I am not a very good defender because I think I was called a Red before you were. I think I have never been as riled over anything as I have the treatment you and Jane Addams have received. I have not minded my own share in it because my feelings are copper plated, but I have cared about you two. Of course you are quite within your rights to be a Socialist, but that is no reason why you should be charged with being a Revolutionary Communist. Page 2 Will you be kind enough to return these paragraphs to me at the earliest possible moment. Very cordially, May 27, 1927. Mrs. Florence Kelley, c/o National Consumers League, 156 Fifth Avenue, New York City. My dear Mrs. Kelley: Apparently you and Jane Addams are the two persons most cruelly persecuted in the literature of the anti-Reds in circulation. I find that you have been engaged in conspiracy for many a year and I have also learned the interesting fact that I have been one of your colleagues, although I am supposed not to have brains enough to discover this fact. You are the brains and I am one of your tools. Will you please answer the questions on the enclosed sheet for my benefit only. I am proposing to take you and Miss Adams as examples of the persecution. I am taking you two because you are the hardest to defend. I propose to submit to you what I have written when it is done for confirmation of facts. This is to go into an open letter to the D.A.R. If you received any literature from any source whatsoever making very definite charges against you which you could lend me for a few days, I should like to have it. I shall surely return it and treat it as something very precious. While I should be happier to received something that the D.A.R. had circulated, I would be glad to have anything else that may be in hand. Very cordially yours, Quenstions. I wish to say if it is true that you are a Communist. In the Congressional reprint of the Congressional Record of July 3, 1926 on page 18, it is said you are a Revolutionary Communist, trained by Frederick Engels. In another place it is stated that you translated his book. Very likely this is true and I would like to know definitely. Did you translate his book? Were you trained by him? Are you a Communist? Are you a Revolutionist? In your conspiracies to undermine this country you are charged with having been the originator of the Women's Bureau. You originated the idea of the Women's Bureau, the Child Labor Amendment, and the Maternity Act. At any rate, if you did not originate the idea, you were the main force in putting these things through. Who did propose the Women's Bureau and who was the driving force in getting women to mobilize behind the proposal? Very likely it was you and I think the first body to adopt this idea was the Federation of Women's Clubs. It is stated that Lillian Wald really suggested the Bureau, but that you put it through. It is stated that you were the originator of the idea of a Child Labor Amendment - that you wrote it, and that you were the chief driving force to get it submitted. I think you did suggest. Did you not? Who wrote it? You were Chairman of the sub-Legislative Committee for the Maternity Act. Who suggested that? I suppose it came from the Children's Bureau. In this particular document you are not credited with having gone to Moscow nor with having received the document from Moscow. There is some improvement. It is stated that you are a a Revolutionary communist trained by Frederick Engels, I believe he died a good many years ago. When was it? National American Woman Suffrage Association Branch of International Woman Suffrage Alliance and of National Council of Women Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, President National Headquarters, 171 Madison Avenue Telephone, 4818 Murray Hill New York 1st Vice-President Mrs. Stanley McCormick, Mass. 2nd Vice-President Miss Mary Garrett Hay, New York 3rd Vice-President Mrs. Guilford Dudley, Tennessee 4th Vice-President Mrs. Raymond Brown, New York 5th Vice-President Mrs. Helen Gardener, Washington, D.C. Treasurer Mrs. Henry Wade Rogers, Connecticut Corresponding Secretary Mrs. Frank J. Shuler, New York Recording Secretary Mrs. Halsey W. Wilson, New York Directors Mrs. Charles H. Brooks, Kansas Mrs. J.C. Cantrill, Kentucky Mrs. Richard E. Edwards, Indiana Mrs. George Gellhorn, Missouri Mrs. Ben Hooper, Wisconsin Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton, Ohio Miss Ester G. Ogden, New York Mrs. George A. Piersol, Pennsylvania February 18, 1922. Mrs. Florence Kelley, National Consumers League, 44 East 23rd Street, New York City, N.Y. My dear Mrs. Kelley:- I wrote a little article for the Citizen, a copy of which I enclose, which stirred up a widespread commotion. On the one hand a lot of people wrote requesting that it might be put into a leaflet and heartily approving it. On the other hand, it stirred the Republican women, who were guilty or not guilty of having put up a conspiracy to have that luncheon pronounce against the League of Women Voters. I was recognizing the conflict between the League and this very small group of Republican women, who were once suffragists and so far as I know were friendly with leaders of the League of Women Voters whom they are now attacking. I never have understood what was the matter with them unless they promptly descended to the pit of narrow partisanship as soon as the time passed for working for higher principles. However, I have now convinced myself that all the hub-bub is a contest of personalities within a very small group that once was a part of the suffrage association. I thought it might be a good idea to smoke this fact out. It seems that I spilled some beans that I didn't take into consideration. For the moment I utterly forgot the other organizations that were working on the Maternity Bill, and it seems that some of them have made a protest whereupon Mrs. Park sends a letter in which she promptly gives all the credit there is to the Republican President, Mrs. Upton and all the organizations, and in that letter she announces that there was a sub-committee that had charge of that bill and that you were its chairman. If I ever knew this I had utterly forgotten it. -2- I do not think I owe an apology to anybody but you, and I am now writing to make it. Mrs. Park has gone on a western trip, and I cannot reach her so I am writing to ask you if you personally conducted the lobby for that bill in Washington? Did the organizations that were on the sub-committee all have lobbyists at work there, and if so how many of them were there? I want especially to know how many the Federation had, and how many the League of Women Voters had? I want to know very much just what the League of Women Voters did have to do with it? I was interested to know that you have been the chief of that sub-committee for no one, I think, appreciates more than I the splendid record of legislation you have achieved in various times and places, and I am very sorry that I did not recognize this fact and wish to do you full justice in the next week's issue, Mrs. Park's letter having arrived too late for this one. In your busy life, you cannot know all the details of other organizations, and so let me make one fact clear. I have no official connection with the League of Women Voters. When the League was erected out of the old suffrage association, it was my firm determination that a new and younger Board should be elected to carry it forward and that it should be thoroughly disconnected from the old Board and any traditions which might adhere to it. They foolishly made me honorary president, but I was so consistent with my desire to dis- connect the two that I have never voted upon a single proposition. I think two or three times, when I have been asked to give my judgment upon some small matter of administration, I have given it. I have been asked to go all over the country to speak for the League, and I have never accepted a single invitation outside of New York City. The Citizen is not the organ of the League and is a free speaking paper, desiring to represent the right and principle concerning all women's work and all women's organizations. I am the president of the Board of Directors; I am not the editor nor responsible in any way for its contents. I merely contribute when I feel like it. I am saying all this in order that you may know that I am in no sense directing the policy of the League nor any outside policy toward it. I wish to be just to the League and my sympathies are with it because it is being attacked by a narrow, subtarranean, hostile group who do not come out [and] boldly in the open and say what is the matter with them. I am hoping that you can give me some information which will help me to make the matter right. I did not like the idea of Mrs. Park giving up the whole thing and keeping no credit whatever for the League because it had been my impression, which I think is correct, that the League had been the propulsive force which had gotten the organizations together and had kept them at their task. If I am wrong, I want to know it. - 3 - Although I rarely see you may I add that I am always glad to know what you are doing and that I have for many years had an unswerving admiration for you and confidence in you. That hs never been shaken for many, many years. Yours very truly, President Transcribed and reviewed by volunteers participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.