Mary Van Kleeck and Social-Economic Planning

Abstract

“We are, most of us,” Mary Van Kleeck said in November 1957, “getting too old to talk.” Near the end of more than two hours of interrogation by officials of the State Department's Passport Office, Van Kleeck tried to impress upon her questioners the commitment to social research and to social justice that underlay her career. The Passport Office, however, was more concerned about her Communist front and party affiliations, and she was in their offices that Thursday morning appealing their refusal to renew her passport. She was seventy-three years old and retired from public life. She wanted to travel, as had been her practice, to Holland, her ancestral home and the home of her closest friends. “I date way back of you young people,” she told her two interrogators. “I think the work of my generation and our attitudes in international affairs is one of sympathy … to developments in other countries.” But, she continued, “I don't think you people who don't know the period prior to the First World War can possibly see how deep our concern is.”