Moreover, Bok wished to say good-by to his public before it decided, for some reason or other, to say good-by to him.  He had no desire to outstay his welcome.  That public had been wonderfully indulgent toward his shortcomings, lenient with his errors, and tremendously inspiring to his best endeavor.  He would not ask too much of it.  Thirty years was a long tenure of office, one of the longest, in point of consecutively active editorship, in the history of American magazines.

He had helped to create and to put into the life of the American home a magazine of peculiar distinction.  From its beginning it had been unlike any other periodical; it had always retained its individuality as a magazine apart from the others.  It had sought to be something more than a mere assemblage of stories and articles.  It had consistently stood for ideals; and, save in one or two instances, it had carried through what it undertook to achieve.  It had a record of worthy accomplishment; a more fruitful record than many imagined.  It had become a national institution such as no other magazine had ever been.  It was indisputably accepted by the public and by business interests alike as the recognized avenue of approach to the intelligent homes of America.

Edward Bok was content to leave it at this point.

He explained all this in December, 1918, to the Board of Directors, and asked that his resignation be considered.  It was understood that he was to serve out his thirty years, thus remaining with the magazine for the best part of another year.

In the material which The Journal now included in its contents, it began to point the way to the problems which would face women during the reconstruction period.  Bok scanned the rather crowded field of thought very carefully, and selected for discussion in the magazine such questions as seemed to him most important for the public to understand in order to face and solve its impending problems.  The outstanding question he saw which would immediately face men and women of the country was the problem of Americanization.  The war and its after-effects had clearly demonstrated this to be the most vital need in the life of the nation, not only for the foreign-born but for the American as well.

The more one studied the problem the clearer it became that the vast majority of American-born needed a refreshing, and, in many cases, a new conception of American ideals as much as did the foreign-born, and that the latter could never be taught what America and its institutions stood for until they were more clearly defined in the mind of the men and women of American birth.

Bok went to Washington, consulted with Franklin K. Lane, secretary of the interior, of whose department the Government Bureau of Americanization was a part.  A comprehensive series of articles was outlined; the most expert writer, Esther Everett Lape, who had several years of actual experience in Americanization work, was selected; Secretary Lane agreed personally to read and pass upon the material, and to assume the responsibility for its publication.