Sunday, Nov. 11, will mark the centennial of the end of the First World War at the fabled 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, 1918. The “War to End All Wars” broke out in August, 1914 with the assassination of the future Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Sarajevo, Serbia. Austria quickly declared war on Serbia, and the conflict soon embroiled their respective allies, including Germany, Russia, France, Great Britain, Italy and Turkey. The United States under President Woodrow Wilson remained “neutral” until hostile actions by Germany finally provoked a U.S. declaration of war on April 6, 1917. (My father as a young artillery officer saved what he believed was the shell casing from the last shot fired in the war.) About 10 million on all sides died, many due to the horrors of 20th century warfare, including machine guns, poison gas and submarines. The map of Europe and the Middle East was transformed. The seeds of World War II were planted.
Last Nov. 11, a public forum at Edwards Church paid tribute to Jane Addams (1860-1935), the co-founder of Chicago’s Hull-House in 1889, and the nation’s leading pacifist. Under Addams’ direction, Hull-House grew into a 13-building complex that was world-renowned as a center of social service, education, the arts and intellectual ferment. Addams and her many allies fought for political and economic justice for women, children, factory workers, immigrants and the poor. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt invited “Saint Jane” to second his Progressive Party presidential nomination (even though women could not yet vote!). According to eyewitness William Allen White, her ovation lasted longer than Roosevelt’s!
In April 1915, with the war raging, 1,200 women from various nations convened at The Hague to try to end the slaughter. Jane Addams was selected to chair the convention. Under her guidance, a mediation plan evolved that she and a few associates personally delivered to the leaders of nine combatant and neutral powers, including President Wilson and the Pope. They were politely received, but the mediation plan went nowhere, although Wilson later incorporated some of its principles into his “Fourteen Points.”
On July 9, 1915, Addams summarized the Hague mediation proposal to a packed Carnegie Hall. The United States was still neutral but war fever was rising after a German submarine sank the Lusitania two months earlier. Like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. who denounced the Vietnam War at Riverside Church a half-century later, Addams committed the heresy of using her great moral authority to condemn warfare. Her statement that all sides provided “stimulants before men would engage in bayonet charges” outraged militarists like Richard Harding Davis who condemned her in The New York Times. Even Theodore Roosevelt dismissed her as a “Bull Mouse.” After the war, pacifists and feminists like Addams were demonized by “anti-Reds” as “the most dangerous women in America” (foreshadowing today).
Undaunted, Addams chaired a second women’s international conference in 1919 where the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom was formed. Her unstinting leadership in the League finally earned Jane Addams the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 (an honor also extended to her successor, Emily Greene Balch in 1946).
The New Deal proved amenable to the Hull-House social agenda, with two Addams allies appointed to the Cabinet by President Franklin D. Roosevelt: Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes.
But most important would be Jane’s role as “great mentor” to Eleanor Roosevelt (according to ER biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook). After Addams died in 1935, the First Lady assumed her mantle of leadership on civil rights, immigration and internationalism. ER struggled to help European refugees resettle in the United States and spearheaded the founding of the United Nations (to which she was twice appointed U. S. Ambassador, by Presidents Truman and Kennedy). Historian Allen F. Davis writes that Roosevelt also “replaced Addams as the most loved and most hated woman in America.”
Today, Jane Addams is neither loved nor hated; her name is chiefly familiar to motorists stuck on Chicago’s Addams Tollway. But she has never been more timely. As columnist David Brooks has observed: “Many of the social problems we face today — the fraying social fabric, widening inequality, anxieties over immigration, concentrated poverty, . . are the same problems she faced. . . ” (“The Jane Addams Model,” New York Times, April 25, 2017).
Jane Addams’s enduring power to mobilize and motivate social activists — as she did for Eleanor Roosevelt — was attested by the Addams Forum panelists on immigration, social justice and world peace last year. The entire program may be viewed at digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu.
The writer is Emeritus Professor of Geography, UMass Amherst and a resident of Florence.