JANE ADDAMS

JANE ADDAMS 

#1 in the 100 Heroes Project

“…the voices of the chorus are lost in the unity of purpose

and in the fact that they are all human voices

lifted by a high motive…” ~ Jane Addams

Introduction to the Project

Along with millions of other Americans, I watched in fascinated horror, turning to tearful amazement and relief, as an entire planeload of passengers huddled on the wings of a sinking Airbus waiting for rescuers to ferry them to safety on the shores of the Hudson – and were saved. On the anniversary of this “miracle on the Hudson” I began to feel the stirrings of deeper reflections on the idea of heroism in the American mind. Captain Sullenberger has certainly been a gracious, articulate figure and deserving of the praise that’s been heaped upon him. Yet, there is something too Andy Warhol-ish about this being our ideal of heroism. It plays well on the news but lacks the long-term, rootedness, the long-playing symphony of the heroic life, not just the heroic moment. Where is our knowledge of and appreciation for the long term choices that build toward a lifetime of genuinely heroic contribution?

I decided then and there, on the anniversary of the Hudson River Miracle, to address myself to the task of re-discovering one hundred heroes of American life, and exploring in some detail the qualities of mind, heart and hand that make them heroic. The focus then is not so much on what they did, but the inner qualities or, to use an old fashioned word, the virtues that are manifest through their works. Other than once-a-month, the only other parameters for my project are that the heroes must be American, for my driving purpose is to try to understand something more about the “American experiment” – the deeper reason behind the grand, grueling enterprise which is the United States of America.

For my first hero I did not hesitate in selecting a woman and a Chicagoan. Whenever I am asked to name someone who serves in my imagination to stir the coals of courage, my reply is swift: Jane Addams of Hull House! For those who are only dimly aware of her accomplishments and are, perhaps, dubious about her placement here at the head of my list of One Hundred Heroes, let me give you a very brief overview of this remarkable lady:

· founder of Hull House, the first “settlement house” in Chicago

· created the first juvenile court in the nation

· successfully lobbied for federal child labor laws

· created first public playground in Chicago and the nation

· was appointed to Chicago's Board of Education

· became chairman of School Management Committee

· considered the creator of modern social work

· first woman elected to the National Conference of Social Work

· helped found Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy

· first woman president of National Conference of Charities and Corrections

· founding member of the American Sociological Society

· author of twenty books and hundreds of articles

· received first honorary degree given to a woman by Yale University

· organized the Women's Peace Party and the International Congress of Women

· first president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

· founding member of the NAACP

· founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union

· founding member of the American Association of University Women

· second woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

· called a friend by luminaries such as John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Senator Paul Douglas, President Teddy Roosevelt, and W.E.B. Du Bois

Jane Addams lived just under 75 years (1860 – 1935) and she needed every single one of them. The sheer volume and diversity of her accomplishments is what is particularly striking, and it is that diversity with which I want to begin our analysis. We have become very caught up with the notion of specialization in our era, mastering more and more about less and less. Jane Addams moved in a different direction, mastering the idea of being a generalist – that is finding the connections between disparate areas of human activities in urban community. But to call her a generalist does not quite get to the heart of her genius. There is another quality without which this capacity to generalize and perceive patterns, a meta-view if you will, could quickly deteriorate to something facile or shallow. Jane’s key virtue, I believe, is her capacity for discernment, the virtue which grounds and anchors the wider view; the lens that makes the patterns in the large picture reveal themselves in such a way that one knows how a single action will impact the rest. Without this virtue of discernment, one could be easily overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of political and social rancor, human misery, natural disaster and economic needs of the global village.

I liken this virtue of discernment to the skill of the master geophysicist who, after years of careful analysis of the soil and rocks and flora and fauna and weather patterns, etc. can describe the workings of a natural ecosystem – how each part is interdependent upon the others. In just such a way I believe Jane Addams to be the first scientific doctor of the democratic ecosystem.

In one of her first explications of the motivating factors behind the establishment of Hull House, Jane writes: “It (the settlement house) should demand of its residents a scientific patience in the accumulation of facts and the steady holding of their sympathies as one of the best instruments for that accumulation… They are bound to see the needs of their neighborhood as a whole… bound to regard the entire life of their city as organic, to make an effort to unify it, and to protest against its over-differentiation…” (from “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements”)

This demand that the mind and heart must continually work together and that even then they were useless if not augmented by the actual hands-on experience of doing, runs like a leit motif through Jane’s writings. Her fierce criticism of theories of charity divorced from the practice of living as equals among those one hoped to “serve” underscores that her philosophy was driven by lived experience, that for her intuitions were as valid as arguments and that the cycle of insight, action and reflection drove her mission. This combination of philosophical foundation, emotion born of experience and conviction resulting from insight is rarely pushed to such heights as in the life of Jane Addams. This holistic modus operandi is at the very core of her heroism.

In an essay entitled “The Subtle Problem of Charity” Jane unfolds a nuanced understanding which helped her make sense of the opposing views of the kindness-driven charity workers, motivated by the desire to immediately alleviate suffering at the individual level, and the intellectually-driven, long-range social planners to whom individuals were mere data bits. Seeing that these two groups often disagreed vehemently over policy, Jane suggested that both sides “may have to share these perplexities before they feel themselves within the grasp of a principle of growth, working outward from within; before they can gain the exhilaration and uplift which come when the individual sympathy and intelligence are caught in the forward, intuitive movement of the mass.” This ‘principle of growth’ is one of those gems of insight that only comes when one has been working deep in the ecosystem of democracy for a very long time. I think it is this very same principle to which Jane is alluding in her astonishing and much-discussed conversation with John Dewey over the Pullman strike of 1894.

John Dewey was working at the University of Chicago during the time of the Pullman strike and having had many discussions with Jane about the deplorable conditions of the workers in Chicago assumed that Jane would be in complete sympathy with Eugene Debs, the strike organizer. He was astounded, therefore, when Jane criticized the strategy of the labor movement as well as the factory owners and pronounced: “The antagonism of institutions is always unreal.” Rejecting this apparently illogical statement, Dewey demanded that Jane explain herself, so she proceeded by saying that antagonisms never arose from real objective differences “but from a person’s mixing in his own personal reactions—the extra emphasis he gave the truth, the enjoyment he took in doing a thing because it was unpalatable to others, or the feeling that one must show his own colors.” Dewey was still mystified. They argued into the evening about the necessity of class struggle and the emancipation of the worker and the role of the capitalist owner within the Hegelian principle of dialectics. The next day, Dewey had an epiphany about which he wrote to his wife, Alice:

“Her (Jane’s) argument was the most magnificent exhibition of intellectual and moral faith I ever saw…When you think that Miss Addams does not think of this as a philosophy, but believes it in all her senses and muscles-- Great God... I guess I'll have to give it up and start over again… I can see that I have always been interpreting dialectic wrong end up, the unity as the reconciliation of opposites, instead of the opposites as the unity in its growth, and thus translated the physical tension into a moral thing... it seems so natural and commonplace now, but I never had anything take hold of me so."

The key phrase is, of course, “the unity as the reconciliation of opposites, instead of the opposites as the unity in its growth” and refers back to this “principle of growth” which Jane had uncovered in her work at Hull House. It is of particular note that Jane doesn’t say that antagonisms are “wrong” or “ineffective” or “evil” but rather that they are “unreal.” This suggests an understanding of reality that is at odds with most views of the world, but which clearly serves as the basis for all her lifework. The “principle of growth” is at the heart of that understanding.

Jane gave her own deeper interpretation of this principle when she was asked to give a talk about the Pullman Strike to the Chicago Woman’s Club in which she used, for analogy, the great Shakespearean tragedy of King Lear to represent the forces at work in the strike. George Pullman is cast in the role of the obstinate King and Eugene Debs (representing the workers) as daughter Cordelia. Against both of them she levels the charge that they “had lost the faculty of affectionate interpretation” and this loss had made them incapable of seeing their common ground. “Were not both so absorbed in carrying out a personal plan of improvement that they failed to catch the great moral lesson which their times offered them? This is the crucial point to the tragedies…” These are the “personal reactions” and the flaunting of one’s own colors that Jane was referring to when she spoke with Dewey. This is the identification by the individual with only one side of the dialectic and the posing of the dialectic as a moral rather than as a physical force whose task it is to resolve the apparent differences into a new synthesis of accord. Jane sees the story of the Pullman strike as akin to the struggle within a family when the new values of a younger generation come into apparent conflict with the values of the elders:

“The virtues of one generation are not sufficient for the next, any more than the accumulations of knowledge possessed by one age are adequate to the needs of another. Of the virtues received from our fathers we can afford to lose none. We accept as a precious trust those principles and precepts which the race has worked out for its highest safeguard and protection. But merely to preserve those is not enough. A task is laid upon each generation to enlarge their application, to ennoble their conception, and, above all, to apply and adapt them to the peculiar problems presented to it for solution.” (All of the above quotes are from “A Modern Lear” by Jane Addams)

Here is the evolutionary energy which carries the dialectic momentum. To lose sight of the fact that it is the unfolding of the human race, and not the supremacy of one faction or another, which drives the story of the world, is where unreality sets in, for once it is perceived that this entire roiling, raving madness of human struggle is about the single enterprise of becoming human, that singularity of purpose gathers all discords up into an unassailable unity. It is this underlying unity of being which is, for Jane, foundation, conviction and intuited sense of the real.

“It is always easy to make all philosophy point to one particular moral and all history adorn one particular tale; but I may be forgiven the reminder that the best speculative philosophy sets forth the solidarity of the human race; that the highest moralists have taught that without the advance and improvement of the whole, no man can hope for any lasting improvement in his own moral or material individual condition; and that the subjective necessity for Social Settlements is therefore identical with that necessity, which urges us on toward social and individual salvation.” (“The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements” by Jane Addams)

To return now to my task of laying out to view a particular virtue that I consider heroic, I would say that it is the holistic discernment, or the discernment that leads to holism, which is the most potent heroic characteristic of Jane Addams. It is also the characteristic which seems to lie at the heart of the democratic experiment, for with the dispersal of power among the many, it is imperative that the many begin from a standpoint of unity. If they do not, if they mistakenly hold to opposing sides, as if it is the antagonistic attitude that drives the dialectic (as so many political people believe today!) rather than the oppositional force being that growth principle which drives the forward momentum toward a higher resolution, then the project is doomed. Then the “personal plans of improvement,” the desire to be right, to show off one’s colors – as Jane suggested – will overtake the deeper inclination toward progress and pride of position will bring the momentum to a standstill. Does this not describe the current state of American politics?

Joseph Campbell, whose name is so closely associated with the idea of the hero in our generation, had a surprisingly dark statement to close his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He said,

“It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shared the supreme ordeal – carries the cross of the redeemer - not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of personal despair.”

Here Campbell is echoing Jane Addams’s insistence that collective salvation is not to be found outside of individual salvation, but that they are one and the same, and the way towards it is always through the individual. I don’t believe she ever gave in to despair, though she often came close, but I love the photos of her in her last years, where the weight of wisdom and care has given her face the gravitas of wave-tossed stone. If the spirit of democracy requires the living breath of those who truly understand and believe in it, then Jane Addams filled its sail during her long and heroic struggle to bring us all a little closer toward a new synthesis of harmonious fellowship.

To my fellow citizens of all nations on this fragile planet 
Especially my friend and fellow progressive artist, Peggy Lipschutz ~
I dedicate this Hundred Heroes Project

~ Rebecca Armstrong

January 24, 2010