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CONFIDENTIAL

1349 Washington Avenue, Springfield 2, Missouri
29 June 1951

Copy for Germain Seligmann

Francis H. Taylor, Director
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Fifth Avenue & 82nd Street
New York 28

Dear Francis:

Because it was you who introduced me to the museum profession, I want to ask your advice about my continuing in it. The only thing I really know how to do is to run a small art museum, but it has become a question whether I shall be allowed to do that again.

As you probably know, Anna and I after having protested our income taxes for ten or a dozen years because so much of them went for war and promoting future war, decided last year that protest was no longer adequate, and we began refusing to pay that percentage of tax which corresponds to the portion of the federal budget spent on war and war preparations. The immediate upshot of this was that I was asked to resign my museum post and my college teaching post here. The later upshot was that Internal Revenue came very quietly and lifted the refused portion of our tax from our bank account. In the course of the doings we discovered how many friends we had. For that reason we felt like staying here. It is a pleasant place to live, and the girls have taken root to a good extent.

When I am not gainfully employed, the Ames family eats and gets on OK, but Papa doesn't buy any works of art. That is understood, and all right. But one works for recognition as much as for money. I am now going about putting my respectability -- what there is of it -- to the test. Obviously Anna and I have set our hands to the plow so far as civil disobedience is concerned. Therefore we shall never be any more respectable than we now are. I am not interested in being a professional pacifist and neither of us enjoys sticking the neck out at all. Neither, however, do I enjoy the thought that I may never again be employable either as a small-museum director or as a specialist in drawings. It is my intention to complete the Meder translation of which you saw long ago the earlier chapters; and I am applying for a Fulbright for 1952-53 for a certain Victorian investigation that should be valuable; but these are not long-term employments.

Therefore I am asking you and some others in the field whether in your opinion I am actually employable. I am not asking anyone for a job now, and I don't know whether you have one or know of one. In other words, this is an abstract (though also very practical) question. I shall be grateful for your answer.

Regards from all of us to Pamela and your young.

Faithfully yours,

Winslow
Winslow Ames