Jane Addams revised. - book review

Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy
Jean Bethke Elshtain
Basic Books, $28, 328 pp.

She wore a full-length black dress almost every day of her adult life, with puffy sleeves extending to her wrists. A bored, wealthy young woman, she had a nervous breakdown in 1882. After founding the social settlement, Hull House, in 1889, she never invited a neighborhood resident to live with her (a privilege reserved for like-minded volunteers). She did, however, solemnly encourage her Sicilian neighbors to substitute the thoroughly cooked vegetables of the "New England kitchen" for their native cuisine.

Sketched from this angle, Jane Addams seems a caricature of the intrusive social worker. Her latest biographer, University of Chicago Divinity School ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain, knows better. Elshtain recognizes that skepticism about the ability of affluent white volunteers to "help" the poor can disguise a corrosive cynicism, and that Addams's occasional displays of cultural insensitivity should not be given undue weight. Elshtain's Addams, as displayed in Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy, is more Vaclav Havel than Lady Bountiful, more daring philosopher of democracy than charitable grandee.

The story is remarkable. Born in 1860 in the small town of Cedarville, Illinois, Addams grew up as a beloved daughter of the town's leading citizen, John Addams. For four years beginning in 1877, she attended Rockford Female Seminary in Rockford, Illinois, a sort of prairie Mount Holyoke, although she recoiled from the faculty presumption that students should have a "conversion experience" and consider careers as missionaries. (Later, she would join a Presbyterian church, but only because she identified Jesus as standing with "the many" as opposed to the "privileged few.") Instead, Addams immersed herself in the school's apparently rigorous academic life--during one summer vacation she prepared for the fall term by plowing through Plutarch, John Ruskin, Washington Irving, and Gibbons's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. She confided to a classmate her enthusiasm about the "splendid" prospect of throwing "ourselves into the tide of affairs, feeling ourselves swamped by the great flood of human action."

But how? What Addams called the "snare of preparation" soon enveloped her. Intrigued by the problem of urban poverty, keenly interested in politics (her father had befriended a young Abraham Lincoln in the 1850s), Addams struggled to find something more challenging for a well-educated young woman than a ceaseless round of music lessons and social calls. Her most important anchor, her father, died six weeks after her graduation. She made a halfhearted stab at medical school, and quickly withdrew. She deflected several suitors, preferring the companionship of female friends. (This has led, inevitably, to speculation about Addams's sexual orientation, which Elshtain brushes aside as more revealing about our own time than Addams's.)

Her lack of direction explains her bouts of nervous exhaustion in the 1880s. What remains surprising is the persistence of her curiosity about the wider world. Her first trip to Europe was grim. Enduring the complaints of a hypochondriac stepmother who doubled as chaperone, she jotted in her notebook a fragment from Victorian sage Matthew Arnold, "Weary of myself and sick of asking / What I am and what I ought to be."

But she went back. And on her second European trip she visited the first British settlement house, Toynbee Hall. Here were Oxford and Cambridge graduates living in London's East End and assisting their working-class neighbors. Here was a Christian spirit, with no denominational proselytizing.

Addams immediately persuaded friends and, eventually, wealthy Chicago benefactors, to start a similar enterprise in Chicago. And soon Hull House opened its doors, in an immigrant neighborhood on the city's near West Side that contained seventy thousand residents within a six-block radius. (In a given week, remarkably, nine thousand of those residents would pass through the settlement's doors.) She and her colleagues began with a library, a modest art gallery, and courses in the great books. (Elshtain is rightly dismissive of later commentators who see in such programs only cultural imperialism.) The popularity of these initial efforts induced Addams to develop classes in American government, cooking, and sewing. Eventually, the women of Hull House ran a daycare center, built the city's first playground, sponsored sport teams, gave music lessons, and operated a theater where neighborhood children and adults took the leading roles. Evening lecturers, including John Dewey and W.E.B. DuBois, gave the center an unusual intellectual cachet.

Addams, herself, although she lived at Hull House until her death in 1935, spent most of each day at her writing desk. A signal virtue of Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy is Elshtain's perception that Addams deserves recognition as one of America's most important public philosophers, a figure as important, in her way, to the early twentieth century as Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson. That Addams wrote in parables drawn from her experience in her Chicago neighborhood, that she wrote so well, has lulled readers into pigeonholing her as a warm-hearted raconteur.