To John Hall Wheelock
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. January 23, 1951.
Dear Mr. Wheelock,
I believe Cory cabled to you last night answering “Yes” to your question whether we agreed to correct inaccuracies in my text about matters of fact, such as that “all” colonists in America were British and “all” Protestants. I wish you had noted other phrases which might irritate my readers uselessly; because, as you know, I am not writing with statistics and books of reference before my eyes, but only evoking the dramatic and moral aspects that things seem to have or to have had. Of course, I knew that even within the United States there had been French Catholics (Acadians & Evangeline, and also in Louisiana) and British Catholics in Maryland; but I was thinking of New England in my boyhood where, in spite of crowds of Irish, it seemed to the stranger that the whole life of the country was Protestant and Anglosaxon. In any case, it led the new comers to drop or hide their peculiarities and plunge into the inescapable current. The Jews do the same, and even sometimes take the reins into their own hands, as if they were purer or more absolute Americans than anybody else. I should have preferred the Puritan purity, if it made room, in other circles, for manners and feelings of other kinds
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Eight, 1948-1952. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ