Add One to the List: Greatest Americans: Jane Addams

Six years ago, I started my list of greatest Americans for reasons you can read at the prior link. At the time I picked Abigail Adams for knowing that you cannot cut taxes in wartime and her general spunkiness during a time when women were supposed to keep quite, Upton Sinclair known as the father of modern consumer activism, W. E. B. DuBois for recognizing and writing about how the wealthy and powerful feed racial tensions for wealth and power and how it hurts everyone else of all races, and Gaylord Nelson for doing something about what we're doing to our environment. You can read the detail here (scroll down and read bottom up).

Today, I'm adding a new name because we're going to need someone like her soon, if we don't already:

Jane Addams

Jane Addams was born on September 6, 1869, just before the election of Abraham Lincoln, the succession of southern states and the Civil War. She was raised by her father because her mother died when she was only 2 years old. Addams father was an early Republican party activistt and avid Lincoln supporter. He involved her in political discussion early on. In those days Republicans were quite a bit different then the wealth worshiping batch we have now. Addams wrote that as a child of 7 she had (as she presumed other children had) "a curious sense of responsibility for carrying on the world's affairs." Addams goes on to explain that she used to dream that everyone in the world died, except her, and it was her task to reinvent the wagon wheel.

That sense of responsibility grew in Addams when she attended Rockford Female Seminary, basically a missionary school for women that later became certified as a college and became Rockford college. A year or so after her graduation, she and her classmates went back to the college to collect their newly "official" diplomas. Addams almost went to medical school, but her health prevented it. She had been born healthy, but contracted Potts's disease at 4 years old. That left her with a severe curvature of her spine and she struggled with health problems, a lack of self esteem and depression much of her life.

Almost a little relieved that she was not to attend med school and very relieved to have done with some back surgery that helped straighten her up, Addams left for Europe in 1883 and went back again in 1885. Addams was struck by two specific sights in Europe. First, the poverty of London's East End and second, the Catacombs of Rome. Addams found London's poverty overwhelming and it in fact overwhelmed most of her first trip to Europe. The sights started her thinking about the available yet misdirected energies of young college educated women at home and action demanded of her religion. Addams was not particularly religious, but she was very happy to see that in her day religious conscience was pointing the faithful toward service.

When she returned from Rome, Addams took to the lecture circuit talking about the early interpretation of Christianity "fellowship of common purpose". It was then that she decided it might be a good idea to rant a house in a poor section of the city of Chicago where she and her friends could put their education to work and provide socializing and education to the community. Addams was influenced in this pursuit from her experiences at Toynbee Hall in East London, the very first Settlement House with the mission of bringing rich and poor together into one community in the hope that mutual education would improve society.

Addams and her friend Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House in 1889 on Halsted St. at Polk St.. It was moved to the UIC campus in the 1960s. They took people in, opened a kindergarten and later boys and girls clubs (the first child care for working mothers), taught classes for recent immigrants, provided medical services for women left out of the system, and without getting bogged down in candidate politics, became politically influential, taking part in the supporting the reform legislation of the Progressive Era such as child labor laws, workers compensation, unemployment compensation, women's suffrage. Locally, they helped establish the juvenile court system taking children out of the adult system, got new public schools opened and improved city sanitation. They fought against corrupt ward politics and we could probably use some of that now.

Of her creation, Addams said in 1892:

The Settlement, then, is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of a city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other; but it assumes that this overaccumulation and destitution is most sorely felt in  the things that pertain to social and educational advantages. From its very nature it can stand for no political or social propaganda. It must, in a sense, give the warm welcome of an inn to all such propaganda, if perchance one of them be found an angel. The other thing to be dreaded in the Settlement is that it lose it flexibility, its power of quick adaptation, its readiness to change its methods as its environment may demand. It must be open to conviction and must have a deep and abiding sense of tolerance. It must be hospitable and ready  for experiment.

Addams saw Hull House and the Settlement Movement in general as a way to address the ills of a birfurcated society on both sides, recognizing that the wealthy loose something by their own isolation from the rest of society. She was very practical in her approach, understanding that no dogma, religious or political, would meet her goals, but she found the best in both religion and politics to make advances for her charges living at Hull House and the community in general.

For her spirit of taking her rather sad early personal life and turning it into a model for all people, her recognition that institutions, including the government, should become involved in providing fairness lacking in our basic economic system, and her agile practicality, Jane Addams is added to my list of Greatest Americans.

Happy Independence Day and here's hoping that we soon figure out that poverty does not bring freedom and freedom for corporations is not exactly the same thing as freedom for real flesh and blood people.