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to the Jane Addams Papers Project
The Jane Addams Papers is a scholarly editing project publishing the correspondence and writings of Jane Addams from 1901-1935 in a freely accessible digital edition and in a selected print edition. The site has been built by editors, working with students at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
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Jane Addams and the Presidential Election of 1932
In 1932, a great economic depression gripped America and the world, and from her homebase at Hull-House Jane Addams witnessed the devastation first hand. Chicago, a manufacturing city, was one of the hardest hit areas in the United States, and by 1933 half of the city’s factory workforce of 1927 was unemployed. Even white-collar workers …
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Jane Addams and the Presidential Election of 1928
Of all the presidential candidates Jane Addams ever supported, perhaps no other was more obvious to her than Herbert Hoover in 1928. Yes, Herbert Hoover. It is true that Herbert Hoover ranks very low among American presidents because the Great Depression happened on his watch and his administration’s policies were insufficient to address the crisis. …
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Jane Addams and the Presidential Campaign of 1924
On behalf of the Democratic Party, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to Jane Addams on May 20, 1924. As chair of the party’s committee for platform planks of interest to women, she hoped to secure the action and support of the nation’s best-known woman. Jane Addams, however, had likely already decided to support her old friend, Progressive …
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Jane Addams and the Presidential Campaign of 1920
Spoiler alert: Jane Addams was not impressed with the Presidential Election of 1920, and neither am I. With the summer passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, all American women had the right to vote in the Presidential Election of 1920. This historic moment for women after a seventy-two-year fight for equal citizenship, which had …
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Jane Addams and the Presidential Election of 1916
What a difference four years and a world war made in the political opinions of Jane Addams. In the Presidential Election of 1912, Jane Addams had supported Theodore Roosevelt and the new Progressive Party, in part because Democrat Woodrow Wilson and Republican William Howard Taft refused to add a plank for woman suffrage to their …
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Jane Addams and the Presidential Election of 1912
One of the most fascinating decisions Jane Addams ever made was to enter the fray of partisan politics and back Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party bid for the Presidency in 1912. She had endorsed political candidates before, but her participation as a delegate to the Progressive Party Convention in Chicago, her role in seconding Roosevelt’s nomination, …
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I always tell [children] they are going to limit themselves tremendously if they make up their minds they are only going to know people of a certain class, certain economic standing, certain race, certain this or that, that life is going to be very much less interesting, because there are whole fields of it they will never know anything about, and they are going to choose a narrow path instead of having a nice wide range over which to roam, and they do respond to that more or less.
Jane Addams, Roundtable on Children’s Social Attitudes and Character, February 16, 1928.
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