To Horace Meyer Kallen
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123 Pall Mall, London
Oxford, England. [Dated by G.S.: June 13, 1915]
Dear Kallen,
Your address on Nationality, for which I am much obliged, seems to put its finger on the right spot. Nationality seems to be behind the restlessness, ambition, and obduracy that brought the war about, behind the endurance and zeal of the combatants, and also before their eyes (in every camp) in so far as they see anything at all before them to aim at. But in a popular address you naturally couldn’t broach the questions that arise in the analytic mind on such a subject. If ninetenths of a man’s individuality are his nationality, nationality must cover a good deal that is common to all men, and much that is common to very few. And I hardly see how nationality, in this moral and inward sense, is to find political expression.
Such national movements as the Italian, Balkan, or Irish are movements to establish what you call nationhood; so is Zionism, I suppose. Yet you hardly look to seeing the various nationalities in the U.S. establish special governments; I am not sure (I am so ignorant) whether the Pale is a district so preponderantly Jewish that a Jewish local government could be hoped for there. In these cases Nationality would have to be a voluntary and hazy thing: the degree to which anyone possessed it, the intensity and scope of his nationalism would be impossible to fix. And surely there is an American nationality as definite and potent as any other, and on the same plane as the Irish, German, Jewish, etc. Every hyphenated American will therefore have two nationalities: and I don’t understand exactly what you think should be the relation between them. In other words, aren’t you hesitating between the idea of a universal government with all nationalities free under it, and the idea of one nationality one government? It is the difficulty of realizing either of these ideals that seems to me to make nationality a problem rather than a solution.
There is no change in my life since I last described it to you.
Yours sincerely, G Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York NY