Dined with the Swopes, it being Mrs. Swope’s birthday party.
I had a long talk with Barney Baruch who came in afterwards. I had
not seen him since that bewildering night when I first arrived,
and thought he was Mr. Brooke! I’ve never forgotten him, he has a
dominating personality, and a nose and a brow that I keep modelling in
my mind while I am talking to him. But he is “the king with two faces,”
he can look hard and Satanic one minute, kind and gentle the next. He
has a great love of Winston, and a loyalty to Wilson. His ideas about
life and the world in general are fine. He has the dynamic force of a
Revolutionary, but his idealism is to get the world straight sanely,
calmly and constructively, not violently, bitterly and destructively.
He believes in an ideal League of Nations, and in reasoning rather than
arming. The answer to all that is, that nothing gets done at all except
by force, bitterness and violence, and so Russia is the only one among
us who has gotten something done! Perhaps if there were more Barney
Baruchs in the world something might evolve, who knows. I don’t really
know enough about him and his life, and to what purpose he puts his
activities.
He talked to me a good deal about his father and mother, especially his
mother. He has that Jewish love of family. I always like to hear a man
eulogise his mother, it makes me realize my own responsibility towards
Dick. If a man can remember the things his mother said to him in early
life, then my talking to Dick is not as vain as it would seem.
Jews are wonderful parents, and wonderful children. Moreover they are
the cultured people in the world. They chiefly are our Art patrons.
It always amuses me in this country when people ask me if Russia is
entirely run by Jews. I didn’t meet half as many there as I have met
here!