I tried to feel and think my way into the matter because it had I thought some relation to my own problem which as you will remember was to try to find footing for myself, a basis of self-criticism. I wanted, as all men do, to belong. To what? To an America alive, an America that was no longer a despised cultural foster child of Europe, with unpleasant questions always being asked about its parentage, to an America that had begun to be conscious of itself as a living home-making folk, to an America that had at last given up the notion that anything worth while could ever be got by being in a hurry, by being dollar rich, by being merely big and able to lick some smaller nation with one hand tied behind its broad national back. As for the men of Jewish blood, so many of whom I found quick and eager to meet me half way, my heart went out to them in gratitude. They were wanting love and understanding, had in their natures many impulses that were destructive. Was there a sense of being outlaws? They did not want their own secret sense of separateness from the life about them commented upon but it existed. They themselves kept it alive and I thought they were not unwise in doing so. I watched them eagerly. Did they have, in their very race feeling, the bit of ground under their feet it was so hard for an Ohio man to get in Cleveland Cincinnati or Chicago or New York? The man of Jewish blood, in an American city, could at any rate feel no more separateness from the life about him than the advertising writer in a Chicago advertising agency who had within him a love of the craft of words. The Jewish race had made itself felt in the arts for ages and even our later middle-western anti-Jewish crusader Henry Ford had no doubt as a child been taught to read the Bible written by old Jewish word-fellows. As far as I myself could understand, the feeling of separateness from the life about was common to all Americans. It explained the everlasting get-together movements always going on among business men and as for race prejudices, they also were common. There was the South with its concern about the Negroes, the Far West and its orientals, the whole country a little later with its sudden hatred of the Germans and in the Middle West all sorts of little cross-currents of race hatreds as the factory hands came into the towns from all over Europe. No American ever met another American without drawing a little back. There was a question in the soul. “What are your people? Where did they come from?” “What kind of blood flows in your veins?” Could it not very well be that the men of Jewish blood who had given themselves to the crafts in America could look at life a bit more impersonally, go out more quickly and warmly to individuals, throw up out of the body of the race more individuals who could give themselves wholeheartedly to the cultural life because of the very fact of a race history behind them?