What Jane Addams Knew

Digital-age democrats have a new old friend. She lives at 808 S. Halsted St., Chicago.

One hundred years ago you knew Jane Addams. You knew her because she was well on her way to being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931—the first American woman to receive the honor. 

You knew her because she wrote books like The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909) and said things like “without the advance and improvement of the whole, no man can hope for any lasting improvement in his own moral or material individual condition.” 

You knew her because she, a single woman of some means, spent her inheritance to found in 1889, alongside a few friends, Hull House, on S. Halsted Street, Chicago, where 70,000 human beings lived within a six-block radius, most in extreme poverty. At Hull House she and her companions became pioneers in the “settlement house” movement—the kind of settling that most needed to happen in Gilded Age America, where gold was plentiful for the settled thousands on high only at the expense of the unsettled millions below. 

Addams envisioned another form of wealth and Hull House became its hub, a Wall Street for the people, nine thousand passing through its doors each week. Many made costly deposits. Dozens took up residence, organizing and administrating and agitating and teaching and taking care. They led reading circles, trash removal brigades, child-care classes, neighborhood dances, construction projects, reform campaigns. Eventually Hull House grew to thirteen buildings that housed, among other things, a theater, apartments for working women, a nursery, a gymnasium, a coffeehouse, and a labor museum. 

Addams lived at Hull House as “head resident” until her death in 1935. It became her base of operations, activity that was local and global and everywhere in between. She was named America’s foremost living woman by Ladies’ Home Journal in 1908. Who could possibly have beaten her out for such an honor?

So what did Jane Addams know?

She knew that the humanitarian labor for which she was so highly regarded was, however intrinsically valuable, also part of a larger moral endeavor: the fortifying of American democracy. 

She knew that democracies require fortifying, that their fragility, not their strength, must be assumed. She knew this because she knew the catastrophe of “the Great War” (as they called the Civil War). 

She knew this because she studied Abraham Lincoln, who had been a friend of her father’s. Lincoln had, in Addams’ judgment, “cleared the title to our democracy,” ensuring that it would continue on, at least for a time, as “the most valuable contribution America has made to the moral life of the world.”

Jane Addams knew, in sum, that the discrete and the local always participate in the whole—and that the ever-crucial question becomes, in turn, Is the participation harmonic? Does the broader political frame inspire acts of mercy and justice? Or does it impede them? Is life on the ground—in the shanties and alleys and schoolyards—fostered by a grander movement toward broadly shared goods? Or is it being pressed into more degraded forms by forces at ease with poverty and, in fact, intent on exploiting it?

Addams understood the necessary harmony between part and whole because she, as a very particular human being, knew its existential absence. In her 1910 memoir Twenty Years at Hull House, published as she was turning fifty, she remembered her decision, finally, to become a member of a Presbyterian congregation in the years just before she and her friends launched Hull House. While even at that moment she could give no firm assent to considerable swaths of Christian doctrine, she “had been brought to the conclusion that ‘sincerely to give up one’s conceit or hope of being good in one’s own right is the only door to the Universe’s deeper reaches’” (quoting William James). She could not deny that she needed “an outward symbol of fellowship, some bond of peace, some blessed spot where unity of spirit might claim right of way over all differences.” 

When Addams looked around, she saw this harmonic ideal being honored, however much in the breach, in little assemblies around the country. “Who was I,” she asked, “with my dreams of universal fellowship, that I did not identify myself with the institutional statement of this belief, as it stood in the little village in which I was born . . .?” In her reading of history, at least some epochs and places had featured churches that had battled “the accepted moral belief that the well-being of a privileged few might justly be built upon the ignorance and sacrifice of the many.” She thought of such counter-testimony as “the faith of the fisherman and the slave” and suggested that without this “testimony in each remote hamlet of Christendom it would be so easy for the world to slip back into the doctrines of selection and aristocracy.” 

It has, alas, so slipped, the ongoing presence of thousands of congregations notwithstanding. But can there possibly be any doubt that we yet need—that we yet require—distinct embodiments of this harmonic vision today? Isn’t this simply what a century of ecological study—echoing millennia of cosmological inquiry—has shown? We—whether as persons, communities, economies, or nations—have no life apart from the life of the whole. Just ask any Ukrainian. Just ask any polar ice cap.

Perhaps the severity of our present fracturing is such that we’ve lost the capacity to imagine wholeness, here in our present gilded age. We do not remember wholeness. We dismember it.

Even so, there are ways back and ways forward. If Addams doesn’t quite know us and what we’ve become in the fraught decades since her death, she surely knows enough about us to offer aid—something she was, it seems, in the habit of doing. Her own life prefigures many of our culture war fissures. But it also thrusts testimony of healing toward us. Jane Addams knew a thing or two. If we stop by Hull House, we’ll see just what.

Eric Miller is Professor of History and the Humanities at Geneva College, where he directs the honors program. His books include Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch, and Brazilian Evangelicalism in the Twenty-First Century: An Inside and Outside Look (co-edited with Ronald J. Morgan). He is the Editor of Current.