Profiles in Character: Jane Addams Invigorates American Democracy

In 1887, twenty-seven-year-old Jane Addams watched a bullfight in Madrid, Spain.  Thankfully for American democracy, she was never the same.

Early in life she had resolved to serve the poor but, now on her second tour of European cultural sights, she had not acted on it.  Her friends left the bullring, aghast at the gory spectacle, but she stayed.  That night her guilt at ignoring such brutality and at failing to act on her life’s purpose overwhelmed her.  She told her traveling companion, Ellen Gates Starr, of her desire to start a settlement house in Chicago.  The two opened Hull House in 1889.

Her morality had been shaped by her father, who she recalled was “the uncompromising enemy of wrong and wrong doing.” He had been a conductor on the Underground Railroad and believed government should protect its citizens.  He emphasized being “honest with yourself.”  Not surprisingly, Jane vowed to “be for others” and became self-reflective and self-critical.  She was attracted to Tolstoy’s writings on the power of loving mankind and absorbed Giuseppe Mazzini’s argument that serving humanity was the highest goal.  She also subscribed to John Stuart Mill’s conclusion that women should be free to choose the work they wanted.   Perhaps the most profound influence, however, came from seeing the ill-fed and ill-clothed poor in London’s East End and in other European cities.

Impressed by Toynbee Hall, a settlement house she’d visited in London, she and Gates envisioned Hull House as a place where cultured people of her class would live and interact with poorer residents of the city.  Hull House residents would, she wrote, “confirm by the deed those dreams of sacrifice and unselfish devotion of which [their] heads were full.”

The initial focus was organizing classes and clubs in which Hull House residents, volunteers, and local people would learn together and interact. “We [would] hear about [their] experiences . . . sad and amusing, humbling and inspiring,” she said.  Hull House would respond to conditions associated with rapid industrialization and waves of immigrants. Yet it would aim at social improvement, not political action.  Hers was a theory of upper-class benevolence, as so well described in Jane Addams, a rich biography by Louise Knight.  As Knight put it, “Her larger vision was to create a place that would nurture universal and democratic fellowship among people of all classes.” 

But benevolence alone was unable to solve the problems of urban poverty.  It could not correct the dangers faced by men, women and children forced to work excessive hours in sweatshop conditions nor remove uncollected garbage that bred disease. Yet she clung to the belief that people on all sides of a problem could solve it in dialogue with each other.  

That belief died in the face of employer and governmental inaction.  So Hull House provided day care, set up a free health clinic, screened applicants for private charities, and even policed garbage collection.  Within a few years, she jettisoned the ethic of benevolence, as Knight puts it, as “selfish, arrogant and antidemocratic.”  “The cultivated person,” Addams said, is not one who enjoys life for himself but who “puts [himself] into the minds and experiences of other people.”  By listening to them, Hull House could become a force for a new, expanded concept of democracy, one that helped people help themselves.  “The creative power in the people . . . will come out if it only has a chance,” she said.

Addams blended listening with political action.  While women could not vote, they could do research, organize, lobby, petition, demonstrate and file lawsuits.  Those who were well-to-do needed what she called a “social conscience” and she pushed them to act on it.  By 1903 she had helped form the Women’s Trade Union League and became its national vice-president.  She walked the picket line and mediated Chicago’s Garment Strike in 1910-11.  She joined the board of the newly-formed NAACP and for years traveled the country campaigning for woman suffrage.  She joined the forerunner of the American Civil Liberties Union.  As a reporter quipped in 1910, “Jane Addams is a blend of the saint and the statesman.”

Hull House would eventually consist of 13 buildings, yet her actions transcended its walls and America itself as she championed international efforts to end and avoid war.  She served as national chairman of the Woman’s Peace Party and as president of the International League for Peace and Freedom, formed after World War I.  Her pacifism would lead the New York Times to write that “Jane Addams is a silly, vain, impertinent old maid . . . who is now meddling with matters beyond her capacity.”  Yet she would receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Patriotism, in Addams’s words, involved “loyalty to the highest achievements of which a nation is capable.”  That goal demanded that democracy give everyone a voice and vote.  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said Addams “understands more about the real people of the United States than anybody else does.”  Her humility might have rejected that accolade, not the least because it was an expectation she had for everyone.

Photo Credit: National Portrait Gallery, by George de Forest Brush