| Description | Leonard Elmhirst's records relating to the United States, including an alphabetical file of correspondence with Americans, records of lecture tours by the Elmhirsts in America during the early years of World War II, correspondence and reports of editors of magazines controlled by Editorial Publications Inc, and records of association with American foundations and societies.
Leonard Elmhirst's American correspondence file includes correspondence with many Cornell University faculty, administrators, and fellow students, dating from 1920. Cornell professors represented include Cornelius Betten, Liberty Hyde Bailey, and George Lincoln Burr among many others. There is correspondence with agricultural and home economists, several of whom were brought to Dartington Hall as advisers. An interesting file records Mrs Stan (Constance) Harding's libel action against Victor Gollancz over the British publication of the memoirs of American spy Marguerite Harrison. The file includes letters of Elmhirst, Bertrand Russell, and H N Brailsford who were advising Harding.
'Official' correspondence includes letters from both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Among the records are transcripts of Leonard's diaries. There is a diary account of a day spent with Israel Sieff and the Roosevelt family at Hyde Park, New York, on the eve of the 1940 US election. As an agriculturalist, Leonard Elmhirst met and corresponded with Secretary of Agriculture and wartime Vice President Henry A Wallace. After the War, Wallace became an editor of The New Republic magazine from 1946 to 1947.
Records relating to the Elmhirsts' lecture tours record their tours of 40 state land grant colleges and universities in 1941 and 1942, speaking at the request of M L Wilson director of the USDA Extension Service. Correspondence at this time with American economists and historians reflects Leonard's interest in extending PEP methods in America, through the organisation (with Israel Sieff and others) of the National Planning Association. An undercurrent theme is an attempt to form an Anglo-American postwar planning association. Material includes texts of the Elmhirsts' lectures on the War and British agriculture and life in wartime.
Editorial Publications correspondence records the Elmhirsts' involvement with the editors in chief and contributing writers of The New Republic magazine from 1925. This material includes extensive correspondence (1929-1974) through the period of the New Deal and World War II with chief editor Bruce Bliven, treasurer Daniel Mebane, and contributing editors and writers including George Soule, Stark Young and Edmund Wilson. There is also extensive correspondence with Louis D Froelick and Richard Walsh, editors of ASIA magazine (and letters of Pearl S Buck, Walsh's wife). Other editors represented include Homer Eaton Keyes of the Magazine Antiques; Edith J R Isaacs and Ashley Dukes of Theatre Arts Monthly.
Foundation and society records include correspondence with Edward Meade Earle of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, often concerning the National Economic and Social Planning Association (NESPA) and its successor, the National Planning Association. There are also two folders of correspondence with NPA associates including Bjarne Braatoy and E Johnston Coil. |