On an inspiring historic
figure and site that still have much to teach us.
Given that an especial emphasis of
my Hall of American Inspiration will be to highlight folks who have been
unjustly forgotten or elided from our national narratives, it might seem
strange that my next nominee was the first American woman (and only the sixth
American period) to win the
Nobel Peace Prize (in 1931). But despite that prestigious international
recognition, I believe that Jane
Addams (1860-1935) is indeed greatly under-rembered in our collective
memories and identity, and that her life and work remain as necessary and
inspiring in our 21st century moment as they were in her turn of the
20th century one.
Like her contemporary John
Dewey (who certainly will have his own plaque in the Hall), Addams
emblematizes the turn-of-the-20th-century Progressive movement, in
many ways but most overtly in the striking breadth and depth of her pursuits
and passions and achievements. She won the Nobel first and foremost for her
efforts on behalf of international peace, work she began during the early years
of World War I (including stints as both the national chairperson of the Women’s
Peace Party and the president of the Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom), continued even after the
United States had entered that war (which required no small measure of courage,
since it was during World War I that the kinds of criticisms of and attacks on
anti-war activists with which we are now very familiar truly began), and
expanded throughout the subsequent decades. But Addams was just as active on
the homefront, and for a wide variety of causes, from women’s suffrage and politics
(she helped found the Progressive
Party in 1912) to the needs of American children (including the dangers of
child labor and the benefits of playgrounds and early education) and the
development of the discipline of sociology (for which Addams did at least as
much as any other American philosopher and teacher).
But what makes Addams truly
inspirational is, to my mind, one unique and amazing American place: Hull House. Addams
and her life partner Ellen
Gates Starr co-founded Hull in Chicago in 1889 as the first “settlement
house,” a space in which Americans of different levels of class, education, and
opportunity could live together and come to know and understand (and hopefully
influence) each other more fully. Within a few years, and for many decades
thereafter, Hull’s identity and role had greatly expanded; it came to include,
among many other things, adult education courses (some of the very first
predecessors of modern night school), a kindergarten (in an era, as per the Dewey
post, when they were not at all common), a public kitchen, a library,
performance and exhibition spaces for art, drama, and music, and (at the height
of Hull’s expansion and influence) a playground and summer camp. Despite, or
rather alongside, this breadth of services, Hull and Addams likewise became
centrally focused on its neighborhood’s and city’s large and growing immigrant
communities; many of its courses and spaces were dedicated to the needs of
these newest Americans, and, in an era defined by anti-immigrant sentiment both
legal (such as the Chinese
Exclusion Act) and otherwise (such as the pervasive hostilities toward the
Jewish immigrants who comprised much of the waves of the 1880s), Hull and
Addams were entirely and genuinely inclusive and welcoming.
Addams’ memoir of Hull, Twenty Years at
Hull-House (1910), is, like the era’s Progressive moment overall, not
without its moments of condescension or paternalism toward some of these less
well-educated and prosperous fellow Americans. What’s striking, however, is not
the presence of such moments—they make Addams human—but rather how fully, and
in how many ways, Addams was able to transcend any and all of the weaknesses
that can divide and limit us, and in that transcending become and model the most
truly inspiring kind of American life and identity.
Last nominee tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Someone you’d nominate for the Hall?
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