MAY 4   RECD

HOUSE ON CEDAR STREET 535 CEDAR STREET, N.W. WASHINGTON 12, D. C. Telephone: GEorgia 1507

May 2,1948 

Dear Albert Einstein,

  The statement of the Emergency Committee has been received with appreciation.  A check for $5 is enclosed to help the good work.

  We have been having groups of 12 or 15 high school and college students come to our house for three or four days at a time to study government.   It is alarming to see how completely they have accepted the idea of war as inevitable. 

  Isn't it because our mores are so much hitched up in that direction, - the Ride of Paul Revere, and the like, which fix us emotionally so that the pattern of flying to arms is deeply ingrained.  Appeals like yours help,  but they touch only the mind,  and are not enough. 

  I wish it were possible for all of you to change your appeal so that it would get under folks' vests.  The cost to you would for a while be heavy, but according to your own account,  you face that anyway,  and linked with futility. 

  Suppose you were to declare unitedly that you have so little faith in war that you would go to prison rather than cooperate with another.  The reaction then would be,  "If they care that much, there must be something in it". 

 Link this with an effort to meet the threat of totalitarian Russia with ideas.  What else, since you prove conclusively that it cannot be met with war?  The Quaker-demonstrated goodwill might work.   Anything but this apparently crazy ignoring of facts as we pump up a war spirit. 

  It is presumptious to suggest what I have,  but it is probable that were you to take some such course of taking the suffering upon yourselves, a la Gandhi,  generations to come would call you blessed. 

            Sincerely, 
              Frank Olmstead
                     Director