Jane Addams, pragmatism and cultural policy

Abstract

This article examines the American social reformer Jane Addams (1860–1935), not so much as an intellectual in her own right, but rather as somebody who embodied certain contradictions regarding the cultural idealism of the intellectual class in the late nineteenth century. Addams’ principal achievement was to co‐found a “settlement house” in Chicago in 1889. Settlement houses were residential communities established by universities among the urban poor, where idealistic young graduates would engage their neighbours in improving cultural and educational activities. Like other nineteenth‐century institutions such as museums and libraries, settlement houses represented a middle‐class attempt at cultural outreach and democratization. Addams analyzed the motives for establishing such an institution and the cultural contradictions it embodied. Her habitual self‐doubt steered her towards a pragmatic multiculturalism at odds with her contemporaries, and eventually towards an emphasis on art and education as catalysts for cultural diversity. Addams was responsible for transforming the settlement house from an instrument of cultural reform into a prototype community offering a public sphere based on tolerance and diversity. Her autobiography reveals the guilt, self‐disgust and doubt which lie behind nineteenth‐century cultural idealism and twentieth‐century cultural democratization.

KEYWORDS:

• Jane Addams
• cultural democratization
• pragmatism
• multiculturalism
• arts education
• John Dewey
• settlement house
• civilizing mission
• Americanization

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to the participants at the “Intellectuals and Cultural Policy” conference and to two anonymous reviewers for help in developing this paper.

Notes

1. More recently Addams’ intellectual legacy as a Progressive thinker and a leading figure in the peace movement has been re‐evaluated (see, e.g., Fischer & Whipps 2003; Seigfreid 1996). From a feminist perspective, Addams’ contribution to the intellectual reputations of male contemporaries such as John Dewey (a friend and a board member at Hull House) has been underestimated. According to Christopher Lasch (1965b, p. 176), “it is difficult to say whether Dewey influenced Jane Addams or Jane Addams influenced Dewey. They influenced each other and generously acknowledge their mutual obligations.”

2. This intention was made explicit not only by Addams, but also by Samuel Barnett, the founder of Britain’s first settlement house, Toynbee Hall, in 1882.

3. Toynbee Hall was the inspiration and practical model for most of the settlement houses which followed, including Hull House. The settlement took its name from Arnold Toynbee, an idealistic young graduate of Balliol College, where the Master, Benjamin Jowett, inspired many of his students with ideals of social responsibility. Most of the early British settlements were affiliated to one or other of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges; American settlement houses were more reliant on private benefactors and recruited from a broader range of graduates.

4. For example, Mina Carson (1990, p. 198) describes the settlement houses as “powerful conduits of Victorian social thought into the twentieth century”; see also Garrison (1979).

5. She completed her studies in 1881, but was awarded her BA the following year when Rockford Seminary became Rockford College. She then enrolled in medical school, but was too ill (and perhaps too emotionally and intellectually depleted) to continue.

6. Reproduced in its entirety in Twenty Years at Hull House (c. 1910), but first delivered as a lecture in 1892 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on the theme of “Philanthropy and Social Progress”.

7. Other examples of community arts centres which began as settlement houses include Henry Street Settlement in New York and Oxford House in London.

8. Meacham, however, also points out that Beveridge’s claimed “distrust” of culture needs to be taken in context in a letter to his parents reassuring them of his “practical” future career plans.

9. Addams read Ruskin, Arnold and Carlyle at Rockford Seminary. Although the language and rhetoric of her writing suggest a familiarity with these intellectual traditions, she brusquely denied any link between her reading and her “philosophy” (Addams 1990 [1910], p. 36).

10. Toynbee Hall was committed to saving the “worthy poor” among its neighbours (Barnett 1888, pp. 48–49). In the United States, the man who would eventually succeed Addams as the leading figure in the settlement movement, Robert Woods, saw the settlement as an experiment in social engineering, a means of “shielding the better grades of labor from the disastrous competition” of the underclass while writing off the “residuum” of the extremely poor who were “characterised by some chronic form of dependence or degeneracy” (Woods 1902, pp. 370–372; see also Huggins 1971, p. 77).

11. “The Regimentation of the Free” was the title of Robert Woods’ 1918 chapter on wartime immigration policy quoted in the next paragraph (Woods 1970 [1923], pp. 207–219).

12. There is no evidence that Addams knew of Freud’s work on these themes, or vice versa. Where Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents applies a psychoanalytic model to a sick society, Addams approaches the problem in reverse, applying social theory and sociological observations to individual psychology.