Jane Addams,
the eighth child of a successful businessman, was born in Cedarville,
Illinois on 6th September, 1860. Jane's mother died when she was only
three years old but she was deeply influenced by her father who held
strong Quaker views.
Addams graduated from Rockford Female Seminary in 1881. She then attended
the Women's Medical College in Philadelphia,
but was forced to abandon her studies after undergoing a serious spinal
operation.
In 1888, while on a European tour, Addams and Ellen
Starr, visited the university settlement, Toynbee
Hall in the East End ofLondon. Named
after the social reformer, Arnold Toynbee,
the settlement was run by Samuel Augustus
Barnett, canon of St. Jude's Church.
Situated in Commercial Street, Whitechapel, Toynbee
Hall was Britain's first university settlement. The idea was to
create a place where students from Oxford University
and Cambridge University could work
among, and improve the lives of the poor during their summer holidays.
The settlement also served as a base for Charles
Booth and his group of researchers working on the Life
and Labour of the People in London.
When Addams and Ellen Starr returned to
Chicago in 1889, they decided to start
a similar project in Chicago. Helen Culver agreed to rent them Hull
House for $60 a month. This large, abandoned mansion had been
built by the wealthy businessman, Charles J. Hull, in 1856. Situated
in Halstead Street, most of the people living in the area were recently
arrived immigrants from Italy and Germany.
Addams and Ellen Starr moved in to Hull
House on 18th September, 1889. They began by inviting people living
in the area to hear reading of George Eliot's Romola and to
look at slides of Florentine art. After talking to the people who
visited the house, it soon became clear that the women had a desperate
need for a place where they could bring their young children. Addams
and Starr decided to start a kindergarten and provide a room where
the mothers could sit and talk. Jenny Dow, who lived in an expensive
part of Chicago, agreed to come to Hull House to run the nursery school.
Within three weeks the kindergarten had enrolled twenty-four children
with 70 more on the waiting list.
Other activities soon followed. Addams ran a club for teenage boys.
Whereas Ellen Starr provided lessons in
cooking and sewing for young girls. Local university teachers and
students were also recruited to provide free lectures on a wide variety
of different topics.
Inspired by the ideas of William Morris
and John Ruskin, the women decided to turn
Hull House into an art gallery. While in Europe the two women had
collected reproductions of paintings and these were now hung in the
various rooms of the house. Ellen Starr
organized art classes and exhibitions as well as developing a scheme
where people could borrow art reproductions to hang in their own homes.
Italian and German evenings were also organized at Hull
House. Local people presented songs, dances, games and food associated
with the countries from where they used to live. This was probably
the most successful of their early ventures as it provided an opportunity
for local people to make their own contribution to the venture. As
Addams later recalled, it soon became clear that the object of the
settlement program should be to "help the foreign-born conserve
and keep whatever of value their past life contained and to bring
them into contact with a better class of Americans."
In 1890 Addams and Ellen Gates Starr were
joined at Hull House by Julia
Lathrop. All three women had been students at Rockford Seminary
together in the 1980s. Lathrop, who had been trained as a lawyer by
her father, the United States senator, William
Lathrop, was an excellent organizer, and took over the day to
day running of the settlement.
Addams, Ellen Gates Starr and Julia
Lathrop gradually became more involved in the community where
they were living. They were shocked by the poor housing, the overcrowding
and the poverty that the people were having to endure. Addams wrote
to her step-brother that she was "overpowered by the misery and
narrow lives" of these people.
In the early days of Hull House, the three women were influenced by
the Christian Socialism that had inspired
the creation of Toynbee Hall. This
was reinforced by the arrival in 1891 of Florence
Kelley at Hull House. A member of the Socialist
Labor Party, Kelley had considerable experience of political and
trade union activity. It was Kelley who was mainly responsible for
turning Hull House into a centre of
social reform.
The presence of Florence Kelley in Hull
House attracted other social reformers to the settlement. This included
Edith Abbott, Grace
Abbott, Alice Hamilton, Mary
McDowell, Charles Beard, Mary
Kenney, Charlotte Perkins, Alzina
Stevens and Sophonisba Breckinridge.
Working-class women, such as Kenney and Stevens, who had developed
an interest in social reform as a result of their trade
union work, played an important role in the education of the middle-class
residents at Hull House. They in turn influenced the working-class
women. As Kenney was later to say, they "gave my life new meaning
and hope".
Florence Kelley and several other women
based at Hull House carried out research
into the sweating trade in Chicago and this led to the passing of
the pioneering Illinois Factory Act (1893). Kelley was recruited
by the state's new governor, John Peter Altgeld,
as the chief factory inspector, and two other women involved in the
research, Alzina Stevens and Mary
Kenney, became inspectors in Illinois.
Helen Culver, who owned Hull House,
also gave the women other adjacent property. Wealthy people in Chicago
contributed money, including Louise Bowen who provided three quarters
of a million dollars. This enabled the group to expand its activities.
An art gallery was added in 1891, a coffee house and gymnasium in
1893, a club house in 1898 and a theatre in 1899.
In 1903 several women associated with Hull House, including Addams,
Mary Kenney, Mary
McDowell, Florence Kelley and Sophonisba
Breckinridge, were involved in establishing the Women's
Trade Union League. Union meetings were often held at Hull House
and members of the settlement helped support workers during industrial
disputes. This resulted in some wealthy people withdrawing their support
for Hull House. One businessman wrote that Hill House had "been
so thoroughly unionized that it has lost its usefulness and has become
a detriment and harm to the community as a whole."
The Hull House complex was not completed
until 1907. The settlement now had thirteen buildings spread over
a large city block. There were around 70 people living in Hull House
and it cost the settlement over $26,500 to run the house and its programs.
Rents and sales raised $12,000 but the rest had to come from donations.
In 1909 Addams was a founder member of the National
Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. The following
year she became the first woman president of the National Conference
of Social Work and in 1911 she helped establish the National
Federation of Settlements.
A strong supporter of women's suffrage,
Addams was vice-president of the National
American Women's Suffrage Association (1911-14). Addams controversially
supported Theodore Roosevelt and the
Progressive Party in the 1912 presidential
elections. Some of the her friends were highly critical of his aggressive
foreign policy and his unwillingness to openly support African American
civil rights.
On the outbreak of the First World War, Addams
and a group of women pacifists in the
United States, began talking about the need to form an organization
to help bring it to an end. On the 10th January, 1915, over 3,000
women attended a meeting in the ballroom of the New Willard Hotel
in Washington and formed the Woman's Peace
Party. Addams was elected chairman and other women involved in
the organization included Mary McDowell,
Florence Kelley, Alice
Hamilton, Anna Howard Shaw, Belle
La Follette, Fanny Garrison Villard,
Emily Balch, Jeanette
Rankin, Lillian Wald, Edith
Abbott, Grace Abbott, Mary
Heaton Vorse, Freda
Kirchwey,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Crystal
Eastman, Carrie Chapman Catt, Emily
Bach, and Sophonisba Breckinridge.
In April 1915, Arletta Jacobs, a suffragist
in Holland, invited members of the Woman's
Peace Party to an International Congress of Women in the
Hague. Addams was asked to chair the meeting and Alice
Hamilton, Mary Heaton Vorse, Julia
Lathrop, Leonora O'Reilly, Sophonisba
Breckinridge, Grace Abbott and Emily
Bach went as delegates from the United States. Others who went
to the Hague included Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence,
Emily Hobhouse, (England); Chrystal
Macmillan (Scotland) and Rosika Schwimmer
(Hungary). Afterwards, Addams, Jacobs, Macmillan, Schwimmer and Balch
went to London, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Rome, Berne and Paris to
speak with members of the various governments in Europe.
The women were attacked in the press by Theodore
Roosevelt who described them as "hysterical pacifists"
and called their proposals "both silly and base". Addams
was selected for particular criticism. One man wrote in the Rochester
Herald, "In the true sense of the word, she is apparently
without education. She knows no more of the discipline and methods
of modern warfare than she does of its meaning. If the woman conceded
by her sisters to be the ablest of her sex, is so readily duped, so
little informed, men wonder what degree of intelligence is to be secured
by adding the female vote to the electorate."
On the outbreak of the First World War in Europe,
Henry Ford, the wealthy American businessman,
soon made it clear he opposed the war and supported the decision of
the Woman's Peace Party to organize a
peace conference in Holland. After the conference Addams, Oswald
Garrison Villard, and Paul Kellogg,
met with Ford and suggested he should sponsor an international conference
in Stockholm to discuss ways that the conflict could be brought to
an end.
Henry Ford came up with the idea of sending
a boat of pacifists to Europe to see
if they could negotiate an agreement that would end the war. He chartered
the ship Oskar II, and it sailed from Hoboken, New Jersey on
4th December, 1915. Addams planned to be on the ship but three days
before it was due to leave she became seriously ill with tuberculosis
of the kidneys. The Ford Peace Ship reached
Stockholm in January, 1916, and a conference was organized with representatives
from Denmark, Holland, Norway, Sweden and the United States. However,
unable to persuade representatives from the warring nations to take
part, the conference was unable to negotiate an Armistice.
In 1918 Herbert Hoover recruited Addams
to his Department of Food Administration. She toured the country making
speeches encouraging the people of America to help conserve and increase
production of food. This upset some pacifists
who felt that any support of the war effort was morally wrong. However,
she was praised by some of her former critics. The editor of the
Los Angeles Times wrote: "now she is seeing clearly
again, and her service is with the country, with the administration,
with the Allies, wholehearted and whole-souled."
Addams was again criticised in April 1919 when she lead the American
delegation to the Women's International League
for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) conference in Zurich. Among the
delegates were Florence Kelley, Alice
Hamilton, Emily Balch, Jeanette
Rankin and Lillian Wald. At the conference
Addams was elected president of the WILPF and Balch became secretary-treasurer.
In 1919 Woodrow Wilson appointed A.
Mitchell Palmeras his attorney general. Palmer had previously
been associated with the progressive wing of the party and had supported
women's suffrage and
trade union rights. However, once in power, Palmer's views on
civil rights changed dramatically. Worried by the revolution that
had taken place in Russia, Palmer became convinced that Communist
agents were planning to overthrow the American government. Palmer
recruited John Edgar Hoover as his special
assistant and together they used the Espionage
Act (1917) and the Sedition Act
(1918) to launch a campaign against radicals and left-wing organizations.
On 7th November, 1919, the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution,
over 10,000 suspected communists and anarchists were arrested in what
became known as the Palmer Raids. Palmer
and Hoover found no evidence of a proposed revolution but large number
of these suspects were held without trial for a long time. The vast
majority were eventually released but Emma
Goldman and 247 other people, were deported to Russia.
In January, 1920, another 6,000 were arrested and held without trial.
Palmer and Hoover found no evidence of a proposed revolution but a
large number of these suspects, many of them members of the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW), continued to be held without trial.
When Palmer announced that the communist revolution was likely to
take place on 1st May, mass panic took place. In New York, five elected
Socialists were expelled from the legislature.
Addams was appalled by the way people were being persecuted for their
political beliefs and in 1920 joined with Roger
Baldwin, Norman Thomas, Chrystal
Eastman, Paul Kellogg, Clarence
Darrow, John Dewey, Abraham
Muste, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Upton
Sinclair to form the American Civil Liberties
Union.
During her life Addams wrote articles about social problems in a variety
of magazines including American Magazine,
McClures, Crisis,
and Ladies Home Journal. Addams
also wrote several books including, Democracy
and Social Ethics (1902), Newer
Ideals of Peace (1907), Spirit
of Youth (1909), Twenty Years
at Hull House (1910), A New Conscience
and an Ancient Evil (1912), Peace
and Bread in Time of War (1922) and The
Second Twenty Years at Hull House (1930).
In 1927 Addams joined with John Dos Passos,
Alice Hamilton, Jane
Addams, Upton Sinclair, Dorothy
Parker, Ben Shahn, Edna
St. Vincent Millay, Floyd Dell, George
Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells in an effort
to prevent the execution of Nicola Sacco
and Bertolomeo Vanzetti. Although Webster
Thayer, the original judge, was officially criticised for his conduct
at the trial, the execution went ahead on 23rd August 1927.
Even when Addams was in her seventies right-wing figures continued
to attack her as the "most dangerous woman" in the United
States. In 1934 Elizabeth Dilling wrote in her book, The
Red Network, that: "Jane Addams has been able to do
more probably than any other living woman to popularize pacifism and
to introduce radicalism into colleges, settlements, and respectable
circles. The influence of her radical proteges, who consider Hull
House their home center, reaches out all over the world."
Jane Addams, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, remained
president of the Women's International League
for Peace and Freedom until her death on 21st May, 1935.
(1)
In his book, The American Earthquake, published
in 1958, Edmund Wilson included a section
on Jane Addams (1958)
A little girl with curvature of the spine, whose mother had
died when she was a baby, she abjectly admired her father, a man of
consequence in frontier Illinois, a friend of Lincoln and a member
of the state legislature, who had a floor mill and a lumber mill on
his place. Whenever there were strangers at Sunday school, she would
try to walk out with her uncle so that her father should not be disgraced
by people's knowing that such a fine man had a daughter with a crooked
spine.
When he took her one day to a mill which was surrounded by horrid
little houses and explained to her, in answer to her questions, that
the reason people lived in such houses was that they couldn't afford
anything better, she told her father that, when she grew up, she should
herself continue to live in a big house but it should stand among
the houses of poor people.
(2) In her book Twenty Years at Hull
House, Jane Addams described how an
unemployed shipping clerk had arrived in 1893 at Hull House asking
for help.
I told him of the opportunity for work on the drainage canal and
intimated that if any employment were obtainable, he ought to exhaust
that possibility before asking for help. The man replied that he had
always worked indoors and that he could not endure outside work in
winter. He did not come again for relief, but worked for two days
digging on the canal, where he contracted pneumonia and died a week
later. I have never lost trace of the two little children he left
behind him, although I cannot see them without a bitter consciousness
that it was at their expense I learned that life cannot be administered
by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a man's
difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits
as a whole; and that to treat an isolated episode is almost sure to
invite blundering.
(3) Mary
White Ovington, Reminiscences (1932)
I knew Jane Addams and have never forgotten her piece of advice
to me: "If you want to be surrounded by second-rate ability,
you will dominate your settlement. If you want the best ability, you
must allow great liberty of action among your residents." Jane
Addams's name today is among the most famous in the world. But perhaps
few people realize the incalculable good she has done in helping others
to enlarge and glorify their own work. Many people can build their
fortune by using others. Few can encourage ability without dominating
it.
(4) The Indianapolis Journal (28
February,1896)
Jane Addams is a woman of indomitable energy and persistence,
of enthusiasm and adaptability; intellectually she is strong and possesses
a keen sense of a humour. She is a slender, delicate, pink-cheeked
woman with a face as fine as a cameo and a manner unassuming and attractive.
(5) Jane Addams wrote about lynching
for the Independent Magazine (January, 1901)
To those who say that most of these hideous and terrorizing acts
have been committed in the name of chivalry, in order to make the
lives and honor of women safe, perhaps it is women themselves who
can best reply that bloodshed and arson and ungoverned anger have
never yet controlled lust. On the contrary, that lust has always been
the handmaid of these, and is prone to be found where they exist;
that the suppression of the bestial cannot be accomplished by the
counter exhibition of the brutal only. Perhaps it is woman who can
best testify that the honor of women is only secure in those nations
and those localities where law and order prevail; that the sight of
human blood and the burning of human flesh has historically been the
signal for lust; that an attempt to allay and control it by scenes
such as those is as ignorant as it is futile and childish.
(6) Emily Bach
was one of the women who attended the International Peace Conference
in the Hague. In her journal she recorded her impression of Jane Addams
(April, 1915)
Miss Addams shines, so respectful of everyone's views, so eager to
understand and sympathize, so patient of anarchy and even ego, yet
always there, strong, wise and in the lead. No 'managing', no keeping
dark and bringing things subtly to pass, just a radiating wisdom and
power of judgement.
(7) Jane
Addams, Trade Unions and Public Duty (1899)
Let us put ourselves in the position of the striking men who have
fallen upon workmen who have taken their places. The strikers have
for years belonged to an organization devoted to securing better wages
and a higher standard of living, not only for themselves, but for
all men in their trade. They honestly believe, whether they are right
or wrong, that their position is exactly the same which a nation,
in time of war, takes towards a traitor who has deserted his country's
camp for the enemy. We regard the treatment accorded to the deserter
with much less horror than the same treatment when it is accorded
to the 'scab', largely because in one instance we are citizens are
participants, and in the other we allow ourselves to stand aside.
(8) Jane
Addams, Ladies Home Journal
(January, 1910)
Women who live in the country sweep their own dooryards and may either
feed the refuse of the table to a flock of chickens or allow it innocently
to decay in the open air and sunshine. In a crowded city quarter,
however, if the street is not cleaned by the city authorities no amount
of private sweeping will keep the tenement free from grime; if the
garbage is not properly collected and destroyed a tenement house may
see her children sicken and die of diseases from which she alone is
powerless to shield them, although her tenderness and devotion are
unbounded. In short, if women would keep on with her old business
of caring for her house and rearing her children she will have to
have some conscience in regard to public affairs lying quite outside
of her immediate household. The individual conscience and devotion
are no longer effective. The statement is sometimes made that the
franchise for women would be valuable only so far as the educated
women exercised it. This statement totally disregards the fact those
those matters in which women's judgement is most needed are far too
primitive and basic to be largely influenced by what we call education.
(9) Jane
Addams, speech at Carnegie Hall (9th July, 1915)
The first thing which was striking is this, that the same causes and
reasons for the war were heard everywhere. Each warring nation solemnly
assured you it is fighting under the impulse of self-defense.
Another thing which we found very striking was that in practically
all of the foreign offices the men said that a nation at war cannot
make negotiations and that a nation at war cannot even express willingness
to receive negotiations, for if it does either, the enemy will at
once construe it as a symptom of weakness.
Generally speaking, we heard everywhere that this war was an old man's
war; that the young men who were dying, the young men who were doing
the fighting, were not the men who wanted the war, and were not the
men who believed in the war; that someone in church and state, somewhere
in the high places of society, the elderly people, the middle-aged
people, had established themselves and had convinced themselves that
this was a righteous war, that this war must be fought out, and the
young men must do the fighting.
(10) In her speech at Carnegie Hall Jane
Addams claimed that soldiers were provided with alcohol before
making bayonet charges. The journalist, Richard
Harding Davis, wrote a letter of complaint about her speech to
the New York Times (13th July,
1915)
In this war the French or English soldier
who had been killed in a bayonet charge gave his life to protect his
home and country. For his supreme exit he had prepared himself by
months of discipline. Through the winter in the trenches he had endured
shells, disease, snow and ice. For months he had been separated from
his wife, children, friends - all those he most loved. When the order
to charge came it was for them he gave his life, that against those
who destroyed Belgium they might preserve their home, might live to
enjoy peace.
Miss Addams denies him the credit of his sacrifice. She strips him
of honor and courage. She tells his children, "Your father did
not die for France, or for England, or for you; he died because he
was drunk."
In my opinion, since the war began, no statement has been so unworthy
or so untrue and ridiculous. The contempt it shows for the memory
of the dead is appalling; the crudity and ignorance it displays are
inconceivable.
(11) Pittsfield
Journal (3rd July, 1915)
The time was when Miss Jane Addams of Hull House, Chicago held a warm
place in the hearts of the American people but she is vast losing
the esteem, with her earlier efforts seem to merit. Her dabbling in
politics, her suffrage activity and her ill-advised methods of working
for peace have very materially lowered her in the esteem of hundreds
of former admirers.
(12) Rochester Herald (15th July,
1915)
In the true sense of the word, she (Jane Addams) is apparently without
education. She knows no more of the discipline and methods of modern
warfare than she does of its meaning. If the woman conceded by her
sisters to be the ablest of her sex, is so readily duped, so little
informed, men wonder what degree of intelligence is to be secured
by adding the female vote to the electorate.
(13) Jane
Addams, Patriotism and Pacifist in War Time (16th June, 1917)
This world crisis should be utilized for the creation of an international
government to secure without war, those high ends which they now gallantly
seek to obtain upon the battlefield. With such a creed can the pacifists
of today be accused of selfishness when they urge upon the United
States no isolation, not indifference to moral issues and to the fate
of liberty and democracy, but a strenuous endeavor to lead all nations
of the earth into an organized international life worthy of civilized
men.
(14) Fort
Wayne News (18th June, 1917)
For three of four years past Jane Addams has gone to bizarre extremes
in her advocacy of weird measures and her championship of impossible
people, apparently capitalizing a reputation honestly won in a worthy
work, to keep herself constantly in the headlines. She has sacrificed
fame for notoriety and a place in the public heart for a place in
the spotlight.
(15) Los
Angeles Times (20th March, 1918)
It will not be for her chairmanship of the Woman's Pace Party and
its earnest but mistaken activities that Jane Addams will reign in
the hearts of men. And now she is seeing clearly again, and her service
is with the country, with the administration, with the Allies, wholehearted
and whole-souled."
(16) Jane
Addams, speech in Chicago (28th November, 1919)
Hundreds of poor laboring men and women are being thrown into jails
and police stations because of their political beliefs. In fact, an
attempt is being made to deport an entire political party.
These men and women, who in some respects are more American in ideals
than the agents of the government who are tracking them down, are
thrust into cells so crowded they cannot lie down.
And what is it these radicals seek? It is the right of free speech
and free thought; nothing more than is guaranteed to them under the
Constitution of the United States, but repudiated because of the war.
It is a dangerous situation we face at the present time, with the
rule of the few overcoming the voice of the many. It is doubly dangerous
because we are trying to suppress something upon which our very country
was founded - liberty.
The cure for the spirit of unrest in this country is conciliation
and education - not hysteria. Free speech is the greatest safety valve
of our United States. Let us give these people a chance to explain
their beliefs and desires. Let us end this suppression and spirit
of intolerance which is making of America another autocracy.
(17) Thomas Bayard of Delaware, speech
in Congress (1926)
It is of the utmost significance that practically all the radicalism
started among women in the United States centers about Hull House,
Chicago, and the Children's Bureau at Washington, with a dynasty of
Hull House graduates in charge of it since its creation.
It has been shown that both the legislative program and the economic
program - "social-welfare" legislation and "bread and
peace" propaganda for internationalism of the food, farms, and
raw materials of the world for their chief expression in persons,
organizations, and bureaus connected with Hull House.
And Hull House has been able to cover its tracks quite effectively
under the nationally advertised reputation of Miss Jane Addams as
a social worker - who has often been painted by magazine and newspaper
writers as a sort of modern Saint of the Slums - that both she and
Hull House can campaign for the most radical movements, with hardly
a breath of public suspicion.
(18) Louise Bowen, letter to a friend
about the death of Jane Addams (27th May,
1035)
Miss Jane Addams went to Passavant Hospital on the 18th May. The
operation was performed on her that day but it was found that she
had an incurable disease. On the 20th she sank into unconsciousness,
and she died very quietly on the evening of the 21st.
May 22nd and 23rd Miss Addams lay in state in Bowen Hall at Hull House.
She looked very lovely and very natural, and during the twenty-four
hours she was there thousands of people passed through the Hall. The
Hull House Women's Club formed a guard of honor and stood on either
side of the hall, while the older boys and girls in the Clubs with
white ribbons tied around their arms acted as ushers and everything
was conducted in a most orderly way.
She lay in a casket with a loose light blue robe around her, her hair
pushed back from her forehead as she always wore it. On either side
of the casket were bright colored tulips, so that it looked as though
she was resting on a bed of flowers. The hall was opened at five o'clock
in the morning, and working men on their way to their jobs came in
with lunch boxes in their hands, many of them kneeling on a little
stool in front of the casket and saying a prayer.
The morning of the funeral - and it was a beautiful day - she was
taken from Bowen Hall and placed upon the terrace in Hull House Court.
This Court is surrounded by the various Hull House buildings. The
funeral was at 2.30 in the afternoon. As early as ten o'clock in the
morning the Court Yard was crowded with people, one or two thousand
standing there all day in order to be present at the services.
When the funeral began, the music for which was furnished by the Hull
House Music School, every window in the Court was filled with people,
there were flowers in every window and wreaths hanging below the windows,
while the terrace was banked with lilacs and apple blossoms with bright
colored tulips around the edges. It was a most touching and democratic
gathering. Strong men and women with children in their arms all stood
weeping for the friend they had lost.
Jane Addams' funeral in the Hull House courtyard.
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