Jane Addams tried to stop World War I. She chartered a ship to The Netherlands to negotiate peace with the first International Congress of Women. Governments laughed, then murdered 20 million people.
At Hull-House in Chicago she spent her life with immigrants studying poverty, watching for ways to enhance their assimilation through art, vocational training, simple shared presence. “Residence, research, and reform,” she said. “The new must be dovetailed into the old as it were—if it were to endure.”
She made a pilgrimage to Russia to meet her hero, Tolstoy, whose take on Christianity inspired all her work: love your neighbor in as practical a means as possible. When they came face to face, he reached out and pulled the bunched fabric at her sleeve to its full extravagant length, clucking disapprovingly that it alone could clothe a little girl. Addams was crushed. She went back to Chicago, simplified her wardrobe, started baking bread in the Hull-House bakery every day, and eventually, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
On a pilgrimage to Hull-House, I learned that her career began just after college as she toured Europe, when she watched, stunned, the violence at a bullfight in Spain. “It was suddenly made quite clear to me that I was lulling my conscience by a dreamer’s scheme, that a mere paper reform had become a defense for continued idleness, and that I was making it a raison d’être for going on indefinitely with study and travel. It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep, and I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come.” She went back to Chicago and founded Hull-House.
I keep searching for what might wake me.
