Category: Politics

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Hull House Has a Visitor…And the Rest is History by Terrence J. McDonald.

A sepia-toned portrait of a man with short hair and a thick mustache, wearing a suit and bow tie, looking slightly to his left.

Terrence J. McDonald is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan. He is the author of Nearly Neighbors: Jane Addams, Johnny Powers, and the Progressive Political Imagination (2026), published by the University of Chicago Press.

In early December 1893 Chicago’s Hull House had an important visitor. The minutes of the residents’ meeting for December 10 noted that “Miss Addams announced that she had been honored with a visit from Alderman Powers, who proposed giving some thousands of pounds of turkey and beef to the poor of the ward at Christmas, and desired Hull House to make the distribution.” The proposal from Nineteenth Ward Democratic Alderman John “Johnny” Powers set off a strenuous debate among the sixteen settlers at the meeting, with the minutes recording a “protest,” two motions, and an amendment. Finally, “by general consent it was agreed that the Chief [Addams] should write to Mr. Powers, as she had herself suggested, to the effect that Hull House had so much provender sent in at Christmas time that it would be well for him to distribute his turkeys through other agencies.”

So began what would become one of the most famous, complicated, and significant relationships between a “boss” and a “reformer” in American history. From then until the spring of 1898, Addams and her Hull House colleagues would steadfastly oppose Powers, first simply by attempting to clean up the ward without his permission, then by coordinating two attempts to defeat him for reelection to his aldermanic seat in 1896 and 1898. More important in the long run, Addams’s own reflections on this relationship would become among the most famous of her early writings and also a major source for thinking about the conflict between bosses and reformers and the possibilities for a kind of “social ethics” in the American city in twentieth-century America, in her own time and thereafter.

Book cover for Nearly Neighbors by Terrence J. McDonald, featuring black-and-white portraits of a mustached man in a suit and a woman in a high-collared dress seated in a decorative chair.

But my new  book, Nearly Neighbors: Jane Addams, Johnny Powers, and the Progressive Political Imagination is the first – ever – to attempt to write a contextualized history of this encounter,  embedding it in the social and political culture and structures of Chicago and the Nineteenth Ward in the 1890s and using that context to understand both how Powers and Addams operated politically and how her – definitely important – writings about this experience portrayed it.   

By 1896 Addams began lecturing on the way that ward bosses prospered politically, and by 1897 she had written a talk that was often entitled “Ethical Survivals in City Immorality.” A much revised and lengthened version of this lecture was published in the International Journal of Ethics in 1898 under the title “Ethical Survivals in Municipal Corruption,” and then a shortened form appeared in The Outlook, where it received the more popular title “Why the Ward Boss Rules.” A version of the long version of this essay became the stirring last chapter of her 1902 book, Democracy and Social Ethics, and formed the core of her remarks at the 1904 World’s Fair, which were published as “Problems in Municipal Administration” in the American Journal of Sociology in 1905.

Addams set out in these writings humanely to reject the reigning conception among some reformers that municipal corruption stemmed from “ignorant foreigners” driven to the polls by devious politicians. She wrote that the “simple people” of the ward were cultureless, bound together only by their “basic human nature.” But importantly they were also bundles of genuine economic need. Her argument was that it was perfectly rational for “needy” immigrants to vote for corrupt politicians, and furthermore, that satisfaction of those immigrant economic needs that were legitimate by an expanded local state was the pathway to “social democracy.”

In recognizing these needs, she argued – for a job, bail money, legal “pull,” rent money, presents at weddings, help with funeral expenses, etc. — the ward bosses, corrupt as they were, at least noticed them. Reformers, meanwhile, spent their time complaining about this state of affairs rather than humanely recognizing the needs of the immigrants.  Addams’s ringing conclusion was this: “If we discover that men of low ideals and corrupt practice are forming popular political standards simply because such men stand by and for and with the people, then nothing remains but to obtain a like sense of identification before we can hope to modify ethical standards.”

A woman in a Victorian-era dress with puffed sleeves sits on an ornate chair with carved griffins, looking slightly to the side. The photo is black and white, with a formal, historical atmosphere.
Jane Addams, ca. 1898

Addams’s views were powerful because of her position: not only was she living among the immigrant poor since 1889, but, unlike many others in the settlement movement she had bravely challenged the political “boss” of the ward.  But to make this argument Addams completely mis-characterized the ward population.  Her starting assumption that immigrants were “cultureless” was her rationale for the work of the settlers which was, after all, to bring the “correct” culture to the immigrants.  But this led her to ignore the dense markers of ethnic culture in the ward and, in particular, to leave out the fact that Hull House was surrounded by five ethnic Catholic parishes and their schools, including the largest English-speaking Catholic church in Chicago, Holy Family – home of the Irish – whose steeples were clearly visible from Hull House. These churches and schools had been in operation for decades before Hull House opened but the word “Catholic” would only casually appear in any version of her writings, and the word “Irish” would play no significant causal role. 

Moreover, her account ignored the event that galvanized an ethnic Catholic political identity, a ferocious statewide 1892 battle over a new compulsory education law that gave public school boards the power to qualify all parochial schools – Catholic, Protestant, or other — for meeting the law. Although Hull House resident Florence Kelley was more vociferous in her support for the law Addams, too, sided with the reformers against her ethnic neighbors.  And although neither of them was a nativist, the campaign on behalf of retaining the law was riddled with nativist arguments.

This battle has been mis-characterized by those around Hull House including pioneering scholars Edith Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge — as a fight over teaching in foreign languages.  But this meant nothing to the Irish, all of whose clergy and schools used perfect English.  The issue for all sponsors of parochial schools was control of the curriculum and, yes, the ethnic recognition that the Irish and Germans, in particular, demanded but that Addams, Kelley and the reform coalition refused to deliver. The schools were a remarkable testimony to the belief of hard-pressed immigrants, many of whom were illiterate, in the power of education for their children.  But this reality seemed lost on the upper-class reformers in favor of the law including those at Hull House.  And this failure of recognition eliminated the possibility of an alliance among both reformers and immigrants on behalf of education.

Condemned by Catholic and Protestant clergy alike, the law was quickly repealed after the election of Democratic governor John Peter Altgeld and Democratic majorities in both houses of the Illinois legislature.  Because municipal elections in Chicago occurred in the spring and state elections in the fall, this battle did not involve Powers directly at first. Powers had immigrated to Chicago in the 1870s and thanks to the pioneering work of an uncle and Powers’s future wife had become the owner of both a bar and a grocery store in the ward.  He was a practicing Catholic, sent his children to the Catholic schools, and belonged to the relevant Irish associations.  But in a ward where every elected official was the same there was little need to stress his background for most of the years after his first election in 1888. For most of that time, too, he simply ignored Hull House in his campaigns. 

A sepia-toned portrait of a man with short hair and a thick mustache, wearing a suit and bow tie, looking slightly to his left.
Johnny Powers

But the political persistence of Addams led Powers to shift to a completely identity-based campaign in 1898. Its symbolic and real climax was a parade on the Saturday night before the election that local reports said involved 3,000 marchers and thousands of spectators and formed up about a block away from Hull House.  The parade itself was based on the periodic parades for first communions and holy days at Holy Family and the Holy Family youth temperance band (funded by Powers) – the St. Matthew’s Cadets — led it off.  Of special interest were the Ladies Auxiliary of the Nineteenth ward Democratic Club and the Nineteenth ward Businessmen’s Club.

Neither the St. Matthew’s Cadets nor the Ladies Auxiliary or Businessmen’s Clubs had been seen in ward politics before.  Powers had funded the first, and his campaign clearly organized the second and third. The Cadets were named after the famous Irish temperance advocate Father Theobold Matthew and proved that although Powers was Irish and a bar owner, he was comfortable with personal temperance efforts, including those of Holy Family parish itself. The Ladies Auxiliary and Businessmen’s Club carried heavier water, the former to show that the “local” women supported him – unlike those at Hull House – and that latter that the “calumnies” in the speeches and writings of the settlers and their candidates damaged the economic interest of the ward. 

But the key thing about this parade and the campaign more generally was the ability of Powers to identify himself as a member of the ward based ethnic, religious, and political culture defending its interests against the “downtown” elites displayed in the Hull House campaign.  Unable to respond carefully to this neighborhood appeal the reform forces disastrously invited as their keynote speaker against Powers an “uptown” city council member who was the son of a United States supreme court justice and graduate of Princeton who emphasized that Powers was the “Prince of Boodlers” on City Council. Powers took 72 percent of the votes in this election and would remain on the council until 1923.

Although the settlers promised to keep up the fight, Hull House withdrew from ward politics just before the municipal election of 1900. In explanation Addams claimed that it was because, given his “wealth and political methods he could easily defeat any honest man.”  But this had little to do with his victory.  He was certainly rich and he may very well have been corrupt but had won in 1898 because – partially out of desperation – he had found a way to endorse and celebrate the identity of the ward against the “downtown” interests and “hectoring” reformers – most of whom had publicly supported the controversial school law that Addams herself never condemned.

It was an article of faith among progressive era intellectuals and reformers – originating with the young John Dewey — that an “unidentified” political subject and thus emerging citizen existed.  In her important 1902 essay “Friendship in Politics,” the New York settlement worker Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch—clearly influenced by Addams — wrote that progress toward that goal was actually being made. “That is the hopeful thing about democracy,” she wrote, “it is slow but thorough.  A common consciousness is arising. The man is becoming the citizen.” This emerging “common consciousness” was a consciousness of shared human needs, not of differing—and sometimes conflicting—cultures. And it was founded on and ratified by the all-important experience of the settlement workers on the urban front lines who defined their mission as bringing culture to the immigrants, not necessarily discovering the role of immigrant cultures in political mobilization.

But as historian Richad Oestreicher pointed out in a classic essay about class and politics in the American city it is the process of political mobilization that helps create political consciousness and not the other way around. And that initial mobilization leaves a mark.  This process was repeated in Chicago through the next decades with the rise of the United Societies for Local Self-Government as the bane of reformers and the foundation for the election of the city’s first foreign born mayor, Anton Cermak. 

 Addams’s wise – if misdirected — words ring down through the centuries: “If we discover that men of low ideals and corrupt practice are forming popular political standards simply because such men stand by and for and with the people, then nothing remains but to obtain a like sense of identification before we can hope to modify ethical standards.”  But identify with what? The immigrants around Hull House were bearers of culture and not just bundles of economic needs. Their enrollment in what has come to be called “identity” politics was a foundational historical reality rather than an obstacle to historical development based on some other criterion, such as class, mobility, assimilation, etc. And the failure of otherwise brave and self-less settlers to understand this has impeded the development of a positive theory of a multicultural society down through the twentieth century.

Selected Sources:

Jane Addams, “Residents’ Meeting of December 10, 1893,” in The Jane Addams Papers, 1860–1960, ed. Mary Lynn McCree Bryan (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1984).

Jane Addams, “Ethical Survivals in Municipal Corruption,” International Journal of Ethics 8, no. 3 (April 1898): 273–91; “Why the Ward Boss Rules,” The Outlook 58, no. 14 (April 2, 1898): 879–82; “Political Reform,” in Democracy and Social Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 221–77; “Problems in Municipal Administration,” American Journal of Sociology 10, no. 4 (January 1905): 425–44. Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes (New York: Macmillan, 1910).

Abbott, Edith, and Sophonisba P. Breckinridge. Truancy and Non-Attendance in the Chicago Schools: A Study of the Social Aspects of the Compulsory Education and Child Labor Legislation of Illinois. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917.

Hamilton, Alice. Alice Hamilton to Agnes Hamilton, April 3, 1898. In Barbara Sicherman, Alice Hamilton: A Life in Hamilton Letters, 120–22. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Dewey, John. The Ethics of Democracy. Ann Arbor, MI: Andrews, 1888.

Simkhovitch, Mary Kingsbury. “Friendship and Politics.” Political Science Quarterly 17, no. 2 (1902): 189-205.

Oestreicher, Richard. “Urban Working-Class Political Behavior and Theories of American Electoral Politics, 1870–1940.” Journal of American History 74, no. 4 (March 1, 1988).

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Women’s Activism Before the Second Wave: The Case of Florence Scala’s Leadership in the Working Class Neighborhood of Hull-House

A woman in a striped dress and headscarf speaks into a microphone while holding papers, addressing an audience in a formal setting. People are seated in the background, listening attentively.

By Rima Lunin Schultz

A woman in a striped dress and headscarf speaks into a microphone while holding papers, addressing an audience in a formal setting. People are seated in the background, listening attentively.
Florence Scala speaking at City Hall in 1961 (Chicago Tribune).

In 1963, as Ann Keating recounted in her prior blog, Florence Scala had already been engaged as a social activist for several decades in the neighborhood made famous by Jane Addams. She had participated as a leader in the grassroots organization of her community on the Near West Side, had brought the various groups of people together in her  working-class neighborhood to develop a plan to improve the community and remain residents.  This challenged the pattern of urban renewal that had emerged after World War II in American cities, where working-class residents were being moved or were moving themselves into suburban locations  away from their original neighborhoods close to the central city and the cultural and social institutions that they as immigrants had built. Here was a different attempt to live in urban space in an integrating and economically and socially mixed community that supported working-class culture.  Scala’s neighborhood was not characterized as a strong hold of feminist militancy.  Rather it was a place filled with religious and cultural institutions, ethnic shops

Florence had run for political office by 1963, twice. She hadn’t succeeded in winning, but she had given the city political  organization, the political machine in Chicago, a scare. They had noticed her and worried about the spread of the democratic ideas and self-governing philosophy represented by her campaigns and her leadership.

When we look at the Scala’s story, it differs from the idea of a narrative of retreat, flight, and private life depicted by middle-class feminists of the second wave, when they began to develop a narrative of the origins of what they believed was a new and unique social movement of women who were being awakened from a kind of passivity and even apolitical consumerism as homemakers separated from the public events and public issues of the 40s and 50s and even early 60s. Remember 1963 is the publication date of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.   Florence Scala and the women of the near west side who joined her in the Harrison Halstead Street community group were not passive. They were not living private lives, disconnected from public issues. They were not separated from the challenges of urban life. Their narrative is very different.

Historians have begun the reclaiming or rediscovery of the working-class history in neighborhoods of urban America from the 1930s through the 1970s, and have begun to understand more fully that one of the major themes of the second half of the 20th century has been the transformation of cities by the intentional breakup of working-class neighborhoods. This was accomplished by the clearance of working class neighborhoods and the construction of upper and middle class housing in their place.

These working-class neighborhoods we have found in our research were never considered final or permanent parts of American urban life by the social reformers who cared deeply for the well-being of individual families, children, women, and men of the working classes but did not see the answer in working-class culture itself but only in the transformation of that working-class culture into something that resembled the middle class. It is not an accident then that we have failed to write the history of social activism of women of the working class.

We haven’t paid enough attention to the activities, daily life, and resistance and resilience of neighborhoods, the mixture of people and ideas that made up the social fabric of these neighborhoods and the value that the heterogeneity of these neighborhoods held for American democracy. Florence’s story becomes even more significant when we link it to the activities and efforts in cities across industrial America and when we begin to gather the biographies of women whose efforts to construct solutions for their communities brought them into public life alongside the men in the community just as they had joined the workforce at the beginning of the 20th century, even earlier, and had been visibly part of public life in working-class neighborhoods all along. They were never absent.

They were never isolated. They were connected and they were part of the social fabric of these communities. More than being part of the social fabric, they were builders of that social fabric along with male leadership and of course they had disabilities because of their sex.

How much credit should we  give for Scala’s activism  to Jane Addams and women of Hull-House? Florence is our best guide in evaluating the factors influencing her formation as a civic minded and ethically engaged community leader.

Jane Addams sits outdoors surrounded by a group of children, attentively listening to her. The scene appears historical, with everyone dressed in early 20th-century clothing.
Jane Addams and children on the steps of terrace in front of the resident’s dining hall. (University of Illinois, Chicago , Jane Addams Memorial Collection).

What Florence tells us in her talk to the teachers at Andrew Jackson Elementary School in 1994 is an important message. She tells the teachers how meaningful their role was in the neighborhood. They were guides and models of some of the best things about being American. Florence tells us something additionally about them. She says, they were able to understand us, meaning the children of immigrants, because they were themselves the children of immigrants.

These Irish American school teachers who taught Florence and her brothers at the Andrew Jackson School were themselves the products of this experience of becoming American. They modeled a kind of civic life, a public life, as educated women whose standing in the community at that time was important. They were respected and they were leaders.

Five people in tattered clothing make dramatic, animated facial expressions and gestures, with arms raised and eyes wide, conveying intense emotion against a plain background. The photo is black and white.
Hull-House production of a Tale of Two Cities. Florence Scala is second from left. (Wallace Kirkland. University of Illinois at Chicago).

In an interview Florence recounted that the Irish American teachers were catalytic in bridging her family to the Social Settlement.  Florence remembered that her parents were not that eager to let their children go to Hull-House as they were wary of  sending her away from their gaze, their supervision. We can speculate further about the complicated social fabric of the neighborhood and the various opportunities for social growth.  Many of the first and second generation American teachers had been educated in the Roman Catholic schools in working class neighborhoods.

But Florence’s parents listened to the school teachers and she went to Hull-House, where women like  Jane Addams and Julia Lathrop, stood out as exemplars of women who supported educational opportunities for immigrant and working class children.

A group of people, mostly young adults, pose cheerfully on a large wooden playground structure in a park, smiling and waving. The structure is pyramid-shaped, and some people are sitting while others are standing or climbing.
Hull-House resident Edith de Nancrede (bottom left) and her social drama club. (University of Illinois at Chicago)

More than offering classes in the arts and in practical subjects, as well as history and civics, through clubs and summer camp Hull-House infused the working class children with a belief in their own value.  Scala explored her own interests and she realized there were possibilities for her own growth.  Florence made that connection and these women at Hull-House became models, models of independent, educated leadership of womanhood that could have a career, that could change the world. Florence was especially interested in dramatics.

Black and white portrait of a Julia Lathrop wiith dark hair styled up, wearing a high-necked, long-sleeve light-colored blouse with ruffles and lace details, looking slightly to the side with a neutral expression.
Julia C. Lathrop, Hull-House resident and director of the Federal Children’s Bureau from 1912-1921. (Twenty Years at Hull-House).

The neighbors knew that Jane Addams  traveled abroad, that she spoke with important leaders in other countries, that she was for peace and opposed war, that she was for certain kinds of reforms in the United States. They had this idea of her and she was a model and she was real to them in the sense of showing, demonstrating how you could be a leader, a force in the public arena, a person of influence, who could encourage presidents and prime ministers to adopt certain programs. Julia Lathrop, went to Washington, D.C., to head the Children’s Bureau.  They were women who modeled women of service.

But it was not just Hull-House that demonstrated social activism and women participation in the social fabric of life. The women religious, who were the teaching sisters in the Roman Catholic schools in the neighborhood,  the women who were part of the congregational life of the parish churches, they had a degree of autonomy and agency that belies the fact that they were part of a religious institutional structure that was hierarchical, patriarchal, and in many ways conservative, and certainly not feminist. Yet, in the context of parish life and of the parochial schools that were set up and run independently of the male diocesan hierarchy, they had independence to some degree.

They were outspoken, independent women religious, like the guardian angel woman religious, Sister Filibert (Spizirri), who was a major supporter for the work that Florence and her activist women were doing in the neighborhood. Again, demonstrating a model of womanhood in a working class community that defied the stereotype of an obedient and passive nun who was under the thumb of the male clergy. Beyond this, or even before this, Florence had her mother and a grandmother and other mothers and grandmothers in the neighborhood who were part of the entrepreneurial journey that had taken them from Europe to America, to Chicago, to the neighborhood where they had found a way to own a store, a bit of property, to have made their way into the comfortable working class that lived in this near west side neighborhood of very mixed economic outcomes.

Sepia photo of an old-fashioned grocery store with shelves of cans and goods. A woman stands behind the counter, another woman holds a child in front. Various products and sacks are visible throughout the cozy shop.
Genarosa Napolitano and Mary Marinello holding Rose Marinello at 13 months old, in the family grocery store on Polk Street. (Courtesy of Father Steven Giovangelo).

 

Property ownership, home ownership, retail proprietorship flourished and we can see how women worked outside the home in these family businesses, holding their babies with them. These were family businesses and the community supported this kind of entrepreneurship. They worked alongside their husbands.

One of the things we learn about the Giovangelo family is that Florence’s mother worked alongside her father in the tailor shop. She ironed, she worked alongside his craft as a tailor.  The household was integrated into an economic unit that allowed the children to be near their mother and father, to have the mother and father have a partnership that sustained the family business.

So women were working. Then of course there were the women in the neighborhood who were working in factories, were taking homework back to their apartments and  toiling,  on night shifts, were part of the trade unions.  They also were out on strike, were part of the picket lines. This was the working class neighborhood that Florence Scala inhabited.

There was no lack of female models of womanhood that projected engagement with the real world, engagement with public life, engagement with the economic realities of daily life and of the cultural and social institutions that made up the religious and cultural and ethnic activities of the neighborhood.  Florence and other working class women could readily see themselves in these women and dream of getting more education, of following new pathways and making decisions about their lives. What is interesting about the middle class version of working class life, which is the story of the men and women in the neighborhood that Jane Addams tells us, in her famous Twenty years at Hull-House and in other writings that she did in her lifetime, is how different her narrative about immigrant women in the neighborhood is from the one that I am describing. In the beginning, Jane Addams did not understand the immigrant women in her neighborhood very well. She thought of them as being isolated, disconnected, not just from the life of the city itself, but disconnected even from their own children who were going to become Americans very fast, very rapidly.

She saw that the Italian women, the Jewish women, Greek women, were not able to have the same relationships with their children that they had had prior to moving to America. They were disconnected, isolated. She tells a number of stories in Twenty Years at Hull-House that identify this situation (Jane Addams, “First Days At Hull-House,” Chapter 5 in Twenty Years  at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 110-111).

Women who don’t know much more than what they can learn from the small place they live in, the block they live in. They don’t know about the world outside. They can’t connect.

She sees them as she worries about them, she cares about them, but she does not see them as a source of strength, a source of activism. She does not see them as participating in a social life, she says they have no social life (Jane Addams, “Foreign-Born Children in the Primary Grades,” National Educational Association Journal of Proceeding and Addresses of the Thirty-Sixth Annual Meeting Held at Milwaukee, Wis., July 6-9, 1897 (University of Chicago Press, 1897), 106).

She means not that they don’t go to parties and that kind of social life. She means they have no relationship to the social structure in society. This is a sociological observation on her part, that they’re not connected and even if they could vote at that time, they have no relationship to a public opinion.

A sense of civic-mindedness has to develop.  She would not look to them necessarily as being capable of developing the kind of leadership role in the community of a Florence Scala. It’s not surprising to me when I read how the director of Hull-House at the time of Florence’s major leadership in the neighborhood, a man by the name of Russell Ballard, is happy for what Florence is doing in her political life, but would not have imagined her doing anything like that or being capable because he has his perspective, like Jane Addams’, even though he has worked closely, as Jane Addams did, with the neighbors.

Ballard has even worked more closely with neighbors, in the 1950s when he was director, was involved with the Near West Side Planning Board. He has seen the capacity of the neighbors to be their own leaders and organizers. He still retains this stereotype of working-class life and of working-class women and is hard-pressed to see Florence as something more than an energetic and well-intentioned housewife.

Addams later developed a deeper understanding of what the women in the neighborhood were really all about and she began to see that their activities, which she could not have defined initially as being a form of social activism, were indeed examples of a challenge to the conditions of life and to the patriarchy. They were a form of resilience, resistance, and in many ways a kind of feminist consciousness that she had missed in her descriptions done earlier. This realization that the women were part of a social movement that had more in common with radical feminism than she had understood before was the revelation that she writes about in The Long Road of Women’s Memory in 1916, an important book that deserves more attention (Jane Addams, The Long Road of Woman’s Memory (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002). In this, she began to understand that the working class women in the neighborhood were engaged in challenges to the system that oppressed them and their families at the same time that they were community builders developing cultural and social space for themselves and their group in very positive leadership roles.

By the 1940s, women in working-class neighborhoods were participating in movements to improve the schools, to deal with race relations, to provide daycare and healthcare for children, and to develop affordable housing. They were standing up for their rights and the rights of minorities in the state legislature and they were fighting for representation in the unions of the AFL that were traditionally resistant to women’s participation and the empowerment of women trade unionists. This was happening at the same time that other women were developing community life in suburbia, creating new religious institutions, joining PTAs, developing school boards, working for bond issues to pay for libraries, beginning to attack the major polluters who were poisoning the air and the food supply, worrying about nuclear war.

All of this was going on in this period and when we begin to examine working-class life in more complicated gendered ways and in the context of resistance to urban renewal as a form of social activism that was more than simply a reaction to the migration of blacks to northern cities, but had to do with a more complicated set of issues stemming from the failure of social reform to accept and value heterogeneous working-class districts as permanent parts of urban America.

Working class women were on a different timetable then their middle class sisters. Working class women continued to navigate family businesses, low paying jobs, and maintain  devotional and cultural affiliations and kinship relations locally and internationally.  This differed from the stereotype of the American suburban housewife after World War II.  This paper cannot begin to dislodge that stereotype.  Here we are focusing on the social activism of a working class woman and her allies in a period in which women’s activism had been considered minimal.

Rima Lunin Schultz is an academic historian who has written articles and books on Jane Addams, Chicago women in Catholic and Protestant faith traditions and the culture of urban elites. She serves as a member of the Project’s Advisory Board. 

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Jane Addams and the Presidential Election of 1932

Three women and one man pose together in formal attire at an indoor event, with elegant drapes in the background. The women stand in the foreground; the man is partially visible between them. The image is in black and white.

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 and professionals struggled. When the country went to the polls in November 1932, the city of Chicago, for example, owed its public-school teachers more than five months of back pay. Even charitable organizations experienced hardships, pressed to exhaustion and financial collapse in their efforts to provide relief for the constituencies that were increasingly reliant upon them for survival. It was a time of great desperation for the Hull-House neighborhood made up mostly of poor immigrants.

For Jane Addams it was a time of great highs and lows. In December 1931, she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She learned the news of the award from her bed at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where she had surgery to remove an ovarian cyst a few days later. In February and April of 1932, she suffered two devastating personal losses in her inner circle, when Florence Kelley and Julia Lathrop died. In the month between their deaths, Addams published her tenth book. The Excellent Becomes The Permanent was a lovingly curated collection of memorials to some of the most inspirational people in her life and to her life’s work.

Relief efforts in Chicago and an intellectual focus on world peace kept Jane Addams moving, despite grief and poor health. Hull-House was “swamped with unemployment needs,” and Addams and her fellow settlement workers could think of little else. Addams drew a direct line between the economy and her ideals of world peace. In a radio interview in Chicago on June 5, 1932, she said:

“During 1931 the world spent five billion dollars on useless armaments. In that very year half the governments were bankrupt, millions of men and women were unemployed, with myriads of children under-nourished. It will be increasingly difficult to defend such folly, not only to those who are facing starvation but to every one of us.”

In the summer, both the Republican and Democratic parties held their conventions in Chicago. On June 14, Addams rode in a peace parade that ended at the venue of the Republican National Convention, where she delivered remarks on foreign relations and world trade. She offered similar remarks at the Democratic National Convention two weeks later. To both parties, she argued:

“Perhaps what the world needs more than anything else at this moment is an outbreak of goodwill and human understanding to overwhelm the suspicion and mistrust which has paralyzed trade and poisoned every relationship. Nothing could achieve this so quickly and so powerfully as a statement by the United States that war debts are being considered generously and impartially.”

Franklin Roosevelt sits at a large desk covered with papers, writing with a pen. He is in a wood-paneled room decorated with framed pictures and a lamp, appearing focused on his work.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, c. 1932-1933 (Library of Congress)

On behalf of the peace organizations she represented in her remarks, she urged political leaders that the cancellation of war debts, tax relief, reduction of military spending, and U.S. membership in the World Court were necessary for a brighter, more prosperous future for humanity.

On July 18, Addams left for the East Coast and a long and quiet summer vacation in Maine. She was in frail health and grieving and could make no plans for political stumping even if she had an inkling to do so. Addams’s surviving letters from the summer give no strong clues about her political thinking, but I suspect she simply lacked the physical and emotional stamina that had fueled her political engagement in previous campaigns. She would be 72 years old when she voted in the 1932 Presidential Election between the embattled incumbent Herbert Hoover, a Republican, and the Democratic challenger Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Addams might have also been somewhat disillusioned with politics—many Americans were disillusioned with politics during the Great Depression.

A man in a suit and a woman in a dark dress sit on wicker chairs outdoors. The woman holds a wide-brimmed hat on her lap, and both are looking toward the camera. There are flowers and bushes in the background.
President Hoover and First Lady Lou Henry Hoover (Library of Congress)

Addams did no political stumping for either national candidate when she returned to Chicago in early October. However, she was enthusiastic about one political candidate. Henry Horner, a Chicago probate judge, was the Democratic candidate for governor. He was running against Len Small, the notoriously corrupt former Illinois governor (indicted and acquitted for embezzlement and money laundering while serving as the state’s treasurer, eight jurors in the case later receiving state jobs). Addams was well acquainted with Henry Horner and had previously disavowed Small. It was more than personal connection and character, however. There was a vigor in Addams’s support for Horner, particularly in the context of the current economic crisis and the question regarding government’s role to address it. In an afternoon radio address on WMAQ Chicago on November 6, two days before the election, Addams endorsed Horner:

“I believe that Judge Horner, if elected Governor of Illinois, will lead us out of the indifference and false conceptions of government itself, which at the present time characterizes our people. Perhaps what we need now more than anything else is an outbreak of good will and human understanding, so genuine and so powerful, that it may change the direction of our political life, that we may remember that after all government may be tested by its reaction upon the humblest of us.”

A man in a suit and hat stands outside a building, petting three dogs—a Dalmatian, a poodle, and a small dog. The scene is set in a garden area with bushes and a stone wall.
Henry Horner, n.d. (Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library)

I have not yet made a close study of Addams in 1932. We are only now getting all the 1932 documents into the Jane Addams Digital Edition, still transcribing, proofing, and editing them. However, I think by the time of the election, Addams had lost faith in Hoover’s policies to address the devastating economic depression. She was critical of his administration in an article published in A Century of Progress, a collection of essays edited by historian Charles Beard, in the summer of 1932. Two of Addams’s biographers assert (with no sources) that Addams voted for Hoover in 1932. Maybe she did vote for Hoover, and her very quick support of Roosevelt after his inauguration was just classic Jane Addams pragmatism. Or maybe she voted for Horner and Roosevelt on November 8, 1932. Maybe in Roosevelt’s campaign promises of a “New Deal” the wise Jane Addams saw ideas that would put the country back on the road to prosperity. Certainly, many of the New Deal policies would at their core sound very familiar to Jane Addams.

Regardless of Jane Addams’s vote, it was a landslide victory for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. Hoover won Pennsylvania and its thirty-six electoral votes but only won five other (small) states. Illinois went for Roosevelt and elected Henry Horner as the state’s first Jewish governor (interestingly, at least to this former Lincoln scholar, Horner was a great collector of Lincoln documents and memorabilia, which today is the cornerstone of collections at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois).

I wish we knew for whom Jane Addams voted in the Presidential Election of 1932. Alas, we enjoy secret ballot in the United States and may never know for sure. Perhaps we will find the document that answers the question as we finish editing her papers. For now, I am leaning toward Roosevelt. I like the symmetry of it. Addams started her national political engagement with Theodore in 1912 and cast her last presidential vote for Franklin 1932.

Stacy Lynn
Associate Editor

Presidential Election: November 8, 1932

Franklin Delano Roosevelt
(Democrat)
Popular Vote: 22.8 million
Electoral College: 472

Herbert Hoover
(Republican)
Popular Vote: 15.8 million
Electoral College: 59

Sources: Paul F. Boller Jr., Presidential Campaigns: From George Washington to George W. Bush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 231-39; Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 287-88; Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 16-17; Louise W. Knight, Jane Addams: Spirit in Action (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 256-59; “Great Depression, Encyclopedia of Chicago; “Jane Addams Operated on at Johns Hopkins,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 13, 1931, 3 ; “Peace Parade of Women to Be Held Today,” Chicago Tribune, June 14, 1932, p. 8; Jane Addams Calendar, June 14-Oct. 2, 1932, Jane Addams Papers Microfilm, 30:817-21; Jane Addams to Jeanette Rankin, Apr.12, 1932; Jane Addams to Mabel Vernon, Apr. 13, 1932; Interview with William Hard, June 5, 1932; Address to the Resolutions Committee of the 1932 Democratic National Convention, June 14, 1932; Address of Miss Jane Addams before Resolutions Committee, Democratic National Convention, June 24, 1932; Comments on the Republican Party Platform, June 24, 1932; Address on Welfare and Relief Mobilization, Oct. 30, 1932; Address on Henry Horner, Nov. 6, 1932; The Process of Social Transformation, 1932 (in Charles A. Beard, ed., A Century of Progress [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932], 233-52), all in Jane Addams Digital Edition; see also Democratic and Republican Party Platforms, The American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara.

Three women and one man pose together in formal attire at an indoor event, with elegant drapes in the background. The women stand in the foreground; the man is partially visible between them. The image is in black and white.
Jane Addams (center) with Eleanor Roosevelt (left), in May 1935, just two weeks before her death. (Library of Congress)

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Jane Addams and the Presidential Election of 1928

Jane Addams in a light dress, shawl, and necklace stands indoors near a staircase and potted palm trees, holding a small handbag. The setting appears elegant and vintage.

Jane Addams in a light dress, shawl, and necklace stands indoors near a staircase and potted palm trees, holding a small handbag. The setting appears elegant and vintage.
Addams in Honolulu, Hawaii, at the Pan Pacific Conference, where she first publicly endorsed Herbert Hoover for President. (Swarthmore College)

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.  However, his international humanitarian efforts during World War I were inspirational to folks like Addams. So, let’s back up in time for a minute.

When the war began in 1914, Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer based in London, led a private effort (with the support of the Wilson Administration) to aid Americans in war-torn Europe. After the German invasion of Belgium, Hoover, as chairman of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, distributed its privately funded resources. Hoover was not a soldier, but he became an American hero. In one two-week period, for example, Hoover and his commission distributed over two million tons of food to nine million war victims. When the United States entered the war in 1917, President Wilson appointed Hoover as head of the new U.S. Food Administration, an independent agency charged with the conservation and distribution of the nation’s food supply. Hoover’s role in European relief efforts was widely applauded and in this new post  he earned additional respect.

A black-and-white portrait of a Herbert Hoover in a suit and tie, seated and facing slightly to the left, with a neutral expression and his right arm resting on a surface.

Jane Addams was against American involvement in the war in Europe and had been a strong voice for American neutrality. In 1915, she became the founding leader of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and peace was a central focus of her work. In 1917, with the United States at war and the establishment of the U.S. Food Administration, Addams saw her opportunity to be a patriot and a help without violating her principles of peace. When Herbert Hoover asked Addams to be a prominent spokesperson for food conservation, she accepted his offer. As she wrote him on August 17: “It gives me much pleasure to be of any service in the great effort for food conservation so ably [led] by yourself.”

During World War I, Hoover’s name was synonymous with good works and patriotism. To conserve food for the war effort was to “Hooverize.”

Addams delivered her first food conservation speech in Traverse City, Michigan, on October 16, 1917. In that speech she expressed the daunting task at hand:

“Mr. Hoover thus defines the task which is set before America; to provide the Allies with at least 132,000,000 bushels of wheat above our apparent surplus, with twice as much meat as we think we can spare, with three times as much fat as seems available.”

Over the next two years Addams delivered at least thirty-five speeches—what she called “Hooverizing”—on behalf of the Food Administration in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC. As she later wrote in Peace and Bread in Time of War, she felt a “great sense of relief when Congress finally established a Department of Food Administration for the United States and when Mr. Hoover, who had spent two and half years in Europe in intimate contact with the backwash of war, made his first appeal to his fellow countrymen in the name of the food shortage in the entire world, insisting that ‘the situation is more than war, it is a problem of humanity.’”

In 1928, after President Calvin Coolidge declined to stand for reelection, Herbert Hoover was the obvious candidate of the Republican Party. “Who but Hoover?” was the convention delegates’ refrain. Hoover, the humanitarian with a Quaker upbringing, made sense to Jane Addams, too. Addams’s  decision to support Hoover and not the Democratic Party candidate Alfred E. Smith vexed her old Progressive Party friend Harold Ickes. He wrote Addams in October: “There seem to me to be so many reasons why Smith should be the preference of progressive and socially minded people and yet the preeminently progressive and socially minded person in all the world has declared for Hoover.” To which Addams replied: ” I may have been too much influenced by my personal acquaintance with Mr. Hoover during my various visits in Europe immediately after the War.”

Lillian Wald, one of Addams’s oldest and closest friends, was also “very much for Al Smith.” Still, Hoover made perfect sense to a wide range of reformers, as he did to Jane Addams. Addams had confidently endorsed Hoover in early August; and she remained firm in mid-October, writing in a lengthy public endorsement:

“It is significant that Herbert Hoover, the one American identified with the World War to be nominated to the Presidency, should have been distinguished not for his military prowess but for his conservation of tender lives menaced by war’s starvation. This is the more remarkable because the American people after [each] of their other great wars — the Revolution, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish War — have elected to the presidency a military hero whom they identified with victory. … Hoover’s restoration in Europe implied not only a knowledge of the world’s food material and an unparalleled skill in the use of all available transportation but even more a grasp of man’s moral resources. He dramatically utilized that sense of responsibility for the preservation of human life which brought to his gigantic undertakings a world wide response, from the governmental subsidies voted by hard-boiled politicians to the hot pennies carried in the fists of little children. He brought us in those dark years of war a moment of “release” from its chaos and horror and led our minds back to the familiar folk ways of patient nurture and protection.”

A typed letter dated October 13, 1928, addressed to Jane Addams, 800 S. Halsted Street, Chicago. The letter politely declines endorsing her candidacy for the presidency and is signed “Yours faithfully, Herbert Hoover.”.

The humanitarian angle was important to Addams, but she was also acquainted with Hoover.  For her politics had always been personal. Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, Woodrow Wilson in 1916, Bob La Follette in 1924 were well-known to her, all men with whom she had a personal relationship. Al Smith had sent a nice tribute to her for a civic dinner in her honor, and she publicly acknowledged that his candidacy for President was “a great boon for the country” because it demonstrated increased religious tolerance among the electorate. However, Addams had no such relationship with Al Smith.

Much of the Presidential Campaign of 1928 was a contest of opposites. Al Smith, an Irish Catholic city boy from New York, was down-to-earth and wise-cracking. Herbert Hoover, a Protestant Midwestern farm boy, was serious and humorless. Hoover’s Republican platform called for maintenance of the economic status quo and enforcement of prohibition. Smith’s Democratic platform proposed tariff and farm relief and criticized Republican failures. Depending upon your economic status at this time, it was either the Roaring Twenties or an era of disillusionment. Wealth and glamour, technology and innovation, music and the movies dominated American culture, but gross income inequality kept many Americans from the benefits of the American economy. However, a majority of voters had enjoyed American prosperity under Coolidge.

Al Smith sits at a desk with papers, speaking into a candlestick telephone. He appears to be in an office with a tall-backed chair and a lamp in the background.
Al Smith, 1928 (Library of Congress)

The incumbent Republican Party held an advantage. Anti-Catholic prejudice did not help the Democratic challenger. One popular slogan was “A Vote for Al Smith is a Vote for the Pope.” Radio had become the most important medium in political campaigns. Smith was better in person and off the cuff, but Hoover brilliantly employed radio to reach voters.” In the November 6 Election, Hoover and his running mate Charles Curtis (U.S. Senator from Kansas) won easily, earning nearly 60 percent of the popular vote. Smith and his running mate Joseph T. Robinson (U.S. Senator from Arkansas) carried only 8 states, losing five southern states in which anti-Catholic Democrats (some cross-burning members of the Ku Klux Klan) turned against their party.

Addams supported Hoover in 1928 in good part because she knew him and trusted his heart in humanitarian concerns. She believed he was America’s “best bet.” Of course, we cannot know how a President Al Smith would have reacted to the stock market crash and America’s descent into a horrific depression. Perhaps Hoover was the best bet. Maybe no one person or policy could have mitigated the devastating reality just beyond the horizon.

Stacy Lynn,
Associate Editor

Presidential Election: November 6, 1928

Herbert Hoover (Republican)
Popular Vote: 21.4 million
Electoral College: 444

Al Smith (Democrat)
Popular Vote: 15 million
Electoral College: 87

Sources: Herbert Clark Hoover (1874-1964); Alfred E. Smith (1873–1944), both in American National Biography; Paul F. Boller Jr., Presidential Campaigns: From George Washington to George W. Bush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 223-231; American National Biography; “Jane Addams, in Honolulu, Says She Is for Hoover,” Freeport (IL) Journal-Standard, Aug. 6, 1928, p. 2; “Hoover Greets Bert Hassell, Jane Addams,” Baltimore Sun, Oct. 17, 1928, p. 3; “Jane Addams, 27 Social Workers Indorce Hoover,” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 1, 1928, p. 15; Jane Addams, Peace and Bread in Time of War (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 25, 74-75; Petition for Belgian Food Relief, November 22, 1914; Jane Addams to Herbert Clark Hoover, August 17, 1917; Food Conservation, October 16, 1917; Jane Addams to Stanley Ross Linn, December 3, 1917; Alfred Emanuel Smith to Jane Addams, January 20, 1927; Statement on Al Smith, April 25, 1927; Lillian D. Wald to Mary Rozet Smith, September 14, 1928; Jane Addams to Julia Clifford Lathrop, October 12, 1928; Statement Endorsing Herbert Hoover for President, c. October 13, 1928; Herbert Clark Hoover to Jane Addams, October 13, 1928; Hoover Indorsed by Jane Addams, October 17, 1928; Jane Addams, Graham Taylor, Julia Clifford Lathrop, et al. to Herbert Clark Hoover, October 23, 1928; Harold LeClair Ickes to Jane Addams, October 22, 1928; Jane Addams to Harold LeClair Ickes, October 26, 1928, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

Side Note: The American Presidency Project at University of California Santa Barbara provides free access to documents of American political campaigns and the presidency. This useful archive includes, among other resources, State of the Union addresses, convention speeches, Presidential proclamations, and party platforms (such as the 1928 Republican and Democratic party platforms).

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Jane Addams and the Presidential Campaign of 1924

Black and white photo of an Jane Addams wearing a wide-brimmed hat decorated with a large, layered flower or bow on top. She has a neutral expression and is dressed in formal clothing.

Black-and-white newspaper photo of Jane Addams wearing a dark hat with a large decorative flower and a coat. The headline above reads Jane Addams Boosts La Follette. Text describes her speaking in Des Moines.
Des Moines (IA) Register, Oct. 26, 1924, p. 11.

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 Robert La Follette, former governor and sitting U.S. senator from Wisconsin. Twenty days after Roosevelt penned her letter, Addams joined the Progressive Party’s national campaign for La Follette, whom she described as a strong and wonderful man, “the real leader of the Progressive Party.”

Theodore Roosevelt would have argued with Addams about that final assertion. But he was dead. And as far a Progressive Era leaders go, Robert M. La Follette Sr., known popularly as “Fighting Bob,” was an important one. As a Republican, La Follette, a lawyer, served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1885-1891), as Governor of Wisconsin (1901-1906), and in the U.S. Senate (1906-1925). He began his political career as a loyal Republican, but he emerged as a leader of the new progressive reform movement in the mid-1890s. Biographer David Thelen described La Follette as “perhaps the most popular and respected radical in modern American history.”

La Follette appealed to Jane Addams for a number of reasons, but perhaps none more obvious than his intellectual capacity. La Follette thoughtfully considered the social and economic problems facing Americans and the ways in which government could be deployed to address those problems. As a politician, he embraced the idea of utilizing academic expertise in the drafting of legislation, coming under the influence of economists and sociologists at his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin. Men like Professor Richard Ely, Jane Addams’s book editor and close friend, inspired La Follette’s critical thinking and evolution over time. The philosophical world views of Addams and La Follette overlapped and their paths began to cross in 1905, their relationship deepening in 1906 through Addams’s lobbying efforts in Washington on an immigration bill and her full entry into the woman suffrage movement in which she became a close colleague of La Follett’s wife, suffragist Belle Case La Follette.

Addams would not be as fully engaged in the 1924 Presidential Campaign as she had been in 1912 for Theodore Roosevelt. She did not attend the Progressive Party convention in Cleveland in July and she did not write a large body of campaign literature to disseminate the party’s platform as she had done for Roosevelt. However, when she returned in September to Chicago from her summer vacation in Maine, she jumped into the campaign. She raised campaign funds in Illinois (her partner Mary Rozet Smith made a $25 donation), she did a little campaign writing and a few interviews; and in October and November she delivered speeches across the Midwest.

Robert M. La Follette, 1924 (Library of Congress)

When Robert La Follette campaigned in Chicago, Jane Addams presided at a rally of 11,000 supporters. When she introduced the candidate, she said:

Thousands of women in Chicago bid him welcome and assure him of their convinced and unwavering adherence. They remember him as a pioneer advocate of woman suffrage, as the author of the extension of the eight hour law to governmental employees of which so large a portion are women, and of many another far reaching provision to protect women both in industry and in the home, and to make possible their fuller participation in governmental affairs. … It is for his courage in such matters, for his unblemished record of public service, for his rousing patriotism, and for his devotion to the interests of the common people that we gladly welcome him to this group of his enthusiastic followers, and pledge him our cooperation.

Addams delivered additional speeches for La Follette in Chicago, and she traveled to Grand Rapids and Detroit, Michigan; Des Moines, Iowa; and Cincinnati, Ohio. She believed in La Follette’s political approach to reform, she supported his Progressive Party’s platform, which included a plank for “Peace on Earth,” and she also favored a third-party presence in American political campaigns. Addams seems to have enjoyed her campaign work for La Follette. He was not as big a character as Theodore Roosevelt had been, but he was a charismatic fellow, especially in comparison to the Republican candidate Calvin Coolidge who was well-liked but terribly boring. Coolidge, who had been President since August 1923 when Warren Harding died of a heart attack, was the comfortable incumbent. His campaign slogan “Keep Cool with Coolidge” did not mean cool as in swell (or hip, in more modern parlance) but rather it conveyed calm and conservative and conventional.

Jane Addams reserved her political energy for politicians who wanted to shake things up and enact change, despite their poor chances to win the presidency. Politicians like Theodore Roosevelt and “Fighting Bob” La Follette. Not “Silent Cal” or the Democratic candidate nominated on the 103rd ballot whom nobody now remembers, John W. Davis, a New York lawyer whom nobody in 1924 knew, either, a man who did not have a snowball’s chance in hell to beat Coolidge. As for Robert La Follette, he was no Theodore Roosevelt—who had beaten the Republican candidate and come in respectable second place in 1912. Like Davis, La Follette had very little chance of winning the presidency.

In Bob La Follette, however, Jane Addams saw a principled man and a dedicated reform politician who was easy to support. Real change required bold leaders. Jane Addams respected innovate thinkers and courageous politicians. It is also clear that Addams believed that La Follette represented the type of modern leader necessary in an increasingly global world. Local and national reform was important, but an informed international outlook was equally critical in the modern world. In a New Republic article, published on September 10, 1924, Addams explained her reasons for supporting La Follette:

All America is familiar with Senator La Follette’s career … It was quite logical that the voters of Wisconsin should by an overwhelming majority send their Governor to the United States Senate, if only because so many of his policies required federal action for their consummation. Personally, I believe in time he will find the same necessity for action through an international body, both because of his sound political philosophy and because of his understanding of the far-flung problems of modern life. I once attended the meetings of a commission held in Geneva under the auspices of the International Labor Bureau connected with the League of Nations, when the matter under prolonged discussion was the protection of the seamen, who for many weeks every year find themselves remote from consular offices and courts of justice. The most successful protection ever offered to these men, the one achievement constantly quoted, was embodied in the La Follette Seamen’s Act, which because of its intrinsic worth, and because of the eloquent speeches made by its author when urging its passage on the floor of the United States Senate, has made the name of Robert La Follette beloved literally around the world.

Some of us who recall almost with a lump in the throat, the precious planks so enthusiastically put into a Progressive platform in 1912—many of these propositions are actually operative as laws at the present moment—rejoice in an opportunity to work for “progressive political action” under a leader who has, since 1898, successfully led a progressive moment inevitably expanding through a quarter of a century. At this moment under his trained leadership, is taking place for the first time in the United States … a welding together of the forward-looking voters, whether they have called themselves Socialists or liberals, proletarians or agriculturists. They all have many experiences to report with reasons for success or failure. They hope under the leadership of this wise man—who combines so remarkably the abilities of the expert with those of the statesman—to integrate their cooperating experiences into a progressively efficient political activity.

Addams did her part in the campaign, but she lost another election. And so did Robert La Follette, coming in a disappointing third. Coolidge earned more popular votes than both of his opponents combined. It was an easy, breezy reelection for Coolidge, and America roared onward.

Four days after the election, Addams wrote Belle La Follette:

You and Senator La Follette have been in my mind so constantly during the past months that I feel as if I must write to tell you what a pleasure and inspiration it has been and to send to both of you an assurance of my unwavering devotion and affectionate regard. Hoping to see you next winter in Washington, I am always devotedly yours Jane Addams.

Jane Addams had already dusted off her hems from the campaign trail and gotten back to work.

Stacy Lynn
Associate Editor

Presidential Election: November 4, 1924

Calvin Coolidge (Republican)
Popular Vote: 15.7 million
Electoral College: 382

John W. Davis
(Democrat)
Popular Vote: 8.4 million
Electoral College: 136

Robert M. La Follette
(Progressive)
Popular Vote: 4.8 million
Electoral College: 13

Sources: Robert Marion La Follette (1855-1925), Richard Theodore Ely (1854-1943), Belle Case La Follette (1859-1931), all in American National Biography; Paul F. Boller Jr., Presidential Campaigns: From George Washington to George W. Bush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 218-22; David P. Thelen, Robert M. La Follette and the Insurgent Spirit (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 184-85; “La Follette to 11,000 People; Stirs Campaign,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 12, 1924, p. 1; Progressive Party Platform of 1924, The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara; Jane Addams Calendar, Oct. 11-Nov. 2, 1924, Jane Addams Papers Microfilm, Reel 30:730-31; Jane Addams to George Platt Brett Sr., December 12, 1906; Belle Case La Follette to Jane Addams, June 26, 1911; Eleanor Roosevelt to Jane Addams, May 20, 1924; Jane Addams to Ada Lois James, June 11, 1924, Jane Addams to Emily Greene Balch, June 21, 1924; Comments in Toronto on International Affairs, June 23, 1924; Why I Shall Vote for La Follette, September 10, 1924; Jane Addams to Belle Case La Follette, September 18, 1924; Illinois La Follette-Wheeler Campaign Committee to Jane Addams, et. al., October 8, 1924; Introduction for Robert M. La Follette, October 11, 1924; Address on La Follette Campaign, October 20, 1924; Declaration of Support for Robert La Follette, ca. October 24, 1924; Herman Louis Ekern to Mary Rozet Smith, October 25, 1924; Interview with the Newspaper Enterprise Association, November 1, 1924; Speech to La Follette-Wheeler Meeting, November 2, 1924; all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

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Jane Addams and the Presidential Campaign of 1920

A sepia-toned photograph of Jane Addams in profile, wearing a dark dress with a white collar, sitting indoors near a softly-lit window, appearing thoughtful and contemplative.

Spoiler alert: Jane Addams was not impressed with the Presidential Election of 1920, and neither am I.

A black-and-white photo of Jane Addams in profile, seated and holding an open book. She has light hair, wears a dark dress with a white collar, and appears to be reading or deep in thought. The background is softly blurred.
Jane Addams, ca. 1920-1923 (Swarthmore College Peace Collection)

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 begun at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, was the one bright side of a rather lackluster campaign season.

President Woodrow Wilson, whom Jane Addams had supported in 1916, had suffered a stroke in October 1919 and was not well enough to seek a third term. Just as well, probably, because a lot of Americans (and a big chunk of Congress) were sick of him and angry about his foreign policy to make the United States a force for democracy across the globe. Addams had agreed with Wilson’s support of the League of Nations, but she was disappointed with some domestic policies, particularly racial segregation in his administration. It is unclear if she would have supported his candidacy in 1920.

Jane Addams worked to get women to the polls in 1920, but she was underwhelmed by the candidates and refused to publicly support any of them. I wonder why. Let’s see:

Franklin Roosevelt and other men dressed in early 20th-century suits and hats pose together, smiling and standing closely; some hold straw hats, and one man in a light suit stands out at the front right.
The Democratic ticket of James M. Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1920 (Library of Congress)

To replace Wilson, the Democratic Party considered fifteen candidates at their convention in San Francisco and selected James M. Cox, the sitting governor of Ohio, on the forty-fourth ballot. Cox was a likable chap, supported woman suffrage, and had been a reformer-ish governor. He was a smart enough fellow and campaigned hard, covering some 22,000 miles, but he failed to garner much enthusiasm in the party or with the electorate. The most interesting fact of his candidacy was his selection of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as his running mate (but, of course, no one then knew what we know now about FDR). In the summer, Cox wrote to Addams seeking her advice on a speech. She wrote back from Colorado Springs where she was vacationing with Mary Smith:

“Your letter of July 21st was forwarded several times and finally reached me here ↑unfortunately↓ so late that it was impossible to avail myself of the suggestion which you so kindly made. May I thank you for your courtesy and will you permit me to express every good wish for a successful campaign.”

Warren Harding in a pinstripe suit, patterned tie, and straw boater hat stands outside near a building, looking slightly downwards with a neutral expression.
Republican candidate Warren G. Harding (Library of Congress)

At its convention, the Republican Party nominated Warren Harding on the tenth ballot. Harding, a U.S. Senator from Ohio, was a compromise candidate of the Progressive and conservative wings of the party. Harding was a cigar-chomping, hard drinking (this was Prohibition times, remember), and a notorious womanizer. Even some of his supporters called him a party hack, and he basically refused to campaign, assuming he had the election in the bag, which it turned out he did. He would win in a landslide.

Eugene Debs was running again on the Socialist ticket, from prison, where he was serving a ten-year sentence for sedition (giving socialist speeches).

The remaining candidates were:

Parley P. Christensen of the Farmer-Labor Party, a former Illinois Progressive.

Aaron S. Watkins of the Prohibition Party. He would get 188,709 votes, which I suspect represented the only people left in America who didn’t need a drink.

James E. Ferguson of the American Party (his own little racist party) was a former Texas governor, former because after he was indicted (and later found guilty) for the misappropriation of funds and impeached in 1917 he resigned. Interestingly, he served as the first First Gentleman of Texas when his wife Miriam “Ma” Ferguson served as governor (1925-1927, 1933-1935).

William Wesley Cox of the Socialist-Labor Party, who received 30,594 votes.

Robert Colvin Macauley, the one-issue, single-tax candidate, who received only 5,750 votes.

Too bad Theodore Roosevelt was dead.

It was an uninspiring slate of candidates and an uninspiring campaign.

In 1920, the United States was a little bit of a lost soul. Americans helped win a war, and then the country retreated into itself. They were still processing the horrific Flu Pandemic of 1918-1920. The population was politically divided. America was, as one presidential historian describes it, “seething with discontents.” Isolationists clashed with internationalists. Working people raged against the high cost of living and high unemployment. Industrialists and business people raged against government regulation. Progressives were frustrated by stalled reforms. Conservatives were mad about too much reform. All American women were now voting , and not everyone was happy about it. Racism was rampant in the north as well as the south, and immigrants from almost everywhere and Irish Americans, too, were blamed for America’s problems. People were, basically, at each other’s throats. Given the environment, the presidential campaign was mostly dull, although at one point opponents falsely accused Harding of having “Negro blood.” He brushed it off, probably with a shot of whiskey, and it didn’t make a difference at the polls. Harding suggested a return to normality (whatever that meant), and he gave some speeches in which he talked about normality, but he pronounced it normalty, which reporters changed to normalcy, so the campaign adopted the slogan “Back to Normalcy.” Some of the other campaign slogans that year were: “Down with Wilson,” “Convict No. 9653 for President,” and “America First.”

Some of this seems worlds away from now, and some of it sounds a bit too familiar. But no wonder Jane Addams kept her distance from the campaign. She had a settlement house and an international women’s peace organization to run. She decided that the best use of her power was to get women to exercise their right to vote. When asked about immigrant women and the vote, she offered this retort:

“There has been enough stirring up of political societies and prominent organizations interested in civic life. Stirring up more enthusiasm among these women leaders is not going to solve the problem of getting Chicago’s 600,000 eligible woman voters to the polls. The greatest number of Chicago women ever registered were 306,920 in the 1919 mayoralty election. We want the other 300,000 to show up at the polls.”

Jane Addams did not endorse a candidate in 1920. She did not campaign. But she made a plan to vote, and she voted (I’m guessing for Cox). And she helped get out the woman vote, too. We don’t always get the candidates we want. Sometimes the choices are lackluster. Sometimes distasteful. Sometimes the choice is crystal clear. ALWAYS, however, it matters that we exercise our right to vote in EVERY election.

Text reading Tues. Nov. 2, 1920 appears at the top, with a handwritten or cursive signature or note underneath enclosed in parentheses.
Jane Addams’s Calendar

By Stacy Lynn
Associate Editor

Presidential Election: November 2, 1920

Warren G. Harding
(Republican)
Popular Vote: 16.2 million
Electoral College: 404

 James M. Cox
(Democrat)
Popular Vote: 9.1 million
Electoral College: 127		 Eugene V. Debs
(Socialist)
Popular Vote: 914,191
Electoral College: 0

Sources: Paul F. Boller Jr., Presidential Campaigns: From George Washington to George W. Bush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 212-17; Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 279; American National Biography; Harding and Cox, both in Biographical Directory of the United States Congress; James Middleton Cox to Jane Addams, July 21, 1920; Statement on the Foreign Women’s Vote, May 24, 1920; Jane Addams to James Middleton Cox, August 22, 1920, both in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

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Jane Addams and the Presidential Election of 1916

A group of men in suits gather outside a grand building, listening to Jane Addams and Lillian Wald, one of whom is wearing a hat with feathers, as they stand near a large column and ornate window.

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 platforms as the Progressives had done. Jane Addams was also a member of the Progressive Party because it was pledged to social and industrial reform. When Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated on March 4, 1913, Addams was chair of the Department of Social and Industrial Justice of the Progressive National Service, an organization established to further the reform planks of the Party’s 1912 platform.

President Woodrow Wilson’s policies almost immediately rankled progressive reformers. For example, federal departments instigated segregationist policies that threatened the established civil service system which had employed Black Americans since reconstruction. Racial justice activists, organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and social justice advocates like Jane Addams were watching. Just five months into Wilson’s administration, Addams headlined a small group of Chicago NAACP members protesting “against the adoption or extension of a segregation policy in the treatment of United States civil service appointees.”

A group of men in suits gather outside a grand building, listening to Jane Addams and Lillian Wald, one of whom is wearing a hat with feathers, as they stand near a large column and ornate window.
Jane Addams (with Lillian Wald to her left) speaking with journalists (Image courtesy Library of Congress).

During the next four years, Addams would frequently challenge the policies of the Wilson Administration. She protested the deportation of famed British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, took Wilson to task for his refusal to support woman suffrage, and urged him to meet with striking workers. Jane Addams had earned a national reputation as a leading thinker in America, her opinions held widespread sway, and she had impressive power to influence politicians. Her role in the Progressive Party presidential campaign of 1912 had enhanced that influence, particularly in American politics, and Wilson was wise to keep his door open to Addams, through correspondence and face-to-face meetings.

In January 1915, Addams praised Wilson for his veto of a harsh immigration bill. She commended his early commitment to maintain U.S. neutrality, at one point calling him “a splendid man.” As the war in Europe escalated, Addams continue to urge the President to keep the United States out of the conflict and to negotiate for peace. Her establishment of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in the spring of 1915 at The Hague gave her an international platform for her ideas about democracy, humanitarianism, war, and peace. And she used that pulpit to press her claims. When she requested a meeting with the President in March 1915, Wilson wrote:

“I need not tell you how glad I shall be to consider any suggestion with regard to a peace that you may care to submit to me, but I literally dare not seek an interview such as you suggest because I think I do not exaggerate when I say that requests of a similar sort come from different quarters at least every week and I should have to draw some distinctions which would become invidious before I get through with them, unless I granted interviews to all who applied for them in this matter. You will understand the delicacy this situation places me in. I should welcome a memorandum from you with all my heart.”

A vintage document titled Women Granted Right to Vote For Certain Officers, Etc. describes an Illinois law from 1913 granting women the right to vote in specific elections and outlines related procedures.
Laws of the State of Illinois (1912), 333.

In the spring and summer of 1916, as Republicans and Progressives considered strategies to defeat Wilson in the upcoming President Election, Jane Addams was convalescing (from an operation to remove a kidney) in Chicago and later in Bar Harbor, Maine. There would be no Progressive Party candidate for president, which likely dampened her appetite for the extensive campaigning she had done in 1912. But Addams would cast her first vote for president in the November election, as Illinois had granted women suffrage rights in June 1913. She would have to choose between Wilson, with whom she disagreed on a variety of issues, and Charles Evans Hughes, the compromise candidate of the progressive and conservative members of the Republican Party. Hughes was a former New York Governor (1907-1910), and President Taft appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1910. He was a moderate and would make few of the social reform promises Theodore Roosevelt had made in the 1912 presidential campaign.

Many progressive reformers and friends of Addams, including Louise de Koven Bowen whose home in which Addams was recuperating, planned to vote for Hughes. Theodore Roosevelt also supported Hughes, although his endorsement was decidedly lukewarm. President Wilson had supported some progressive measures and had sent Addams sixty long-stemmed American Beauty roses and get-well greetings. Still, Addams was always guided by her own conscience (and not a woman to be bribed by flowers, not even roses!). Jane Addams was a pragmatist. She carefully considered the two candidates. Like we often have in our modern elections, there were two imperfect options. Like we often have to do in our modern elections, Addams had to chose the lesser of two evils or the best of the middling.

On October 4, 1915, she made a public statement: “I am ill and not able to do any political work. I do not think I shall make any statement formally declaring myself. When I am asked the direct question about my vote I reply that I shall vote for Wilson.” Upon hearing of her support, Wilson sent Addams another impressive bouquet of flowers!

In the end, Jane Addams answered public pressure for a more verbose statement. And on the eve of the election, she explained herself in an article published in newspapers across the country. Introducing her declaration for Wilson, the Cincinnati Post wrote: “Jane Addams, Hull House, Chicago, is one of the world’s greatest women. In 1912 she was one of the most enthusiastic delegates to the Progressive Convention that nominated Roosevelt, and she supported him with all her ardor. That Jane Addams, whose sincerity and disinterestedness in the cause of the plain people are beyond question, gives her approval of the progressive laws enacted during the Wilson administration is of great significance.”

In her typical, clear-headed fashion, Addams explained herself:

“In 1912 many of us became members of the Progressive Party, not only because we believed that the correction of abuses inevitably developed by an uncontrolled industrialism should become a vital issue in federal politics, but also because we were convinced this modern type of remedial legislation could be accomplished only [through] a new party.

“Because of this belief I, at least, was quite unprepared for the distinctive period in American politics developed under the brilliant party leadership of President Wilson, when important federal measures were constantly passed for the national adjustment of nationwide problems.

“The present administration comes before the country with a social program that carries assurance because of a record of pledges fulfilled and a series of legislative achievements not equaled by any other administration. Prominent among its contributions to social and industrial justice are these:

“It has been established as a matter of law that labor is not to be considered a mere commodity or article of commerce.

“The seamen have been made free men and have been given the right, previously denied, to leave their employment when conditions become intolerable.

“The products of child labor have been excluded from interstate commerce.

“The most liberal workmen’s compensation law in the world has been enacted, affecting 400,000 federal [employees].

“The principle of the eight-hour day has been recognized.

“The rural credits bill and the Federal Reserve Act are contributions to the welfare of the entire country.

“This administration has made certain distinct advances toward more rational international relations:

“(a) Treaties with 30 nations have been signed which provide for a year’s delay and investigation of matters at issue before diplomatic relations are severed.

“(b) The repeal of the toll exemptions for American ships in the Panama Canal was a recognition of the principle of fair dealing among nations, which may be a first tentative step toward the internationalization of such highways of the sea as the Dardanelles, the Panama, Suez and Kiel canals.

“(c) Determination, in spite of almost insuperable difficulties and obvious blunders, to permit the Mexicans to work their way to self-government without recourse to the old imperialistic method of sending soldiers into a weaker nation, first to police property and then to become an army of occupation.

“(d) During the past four years the Pan-American Union has been strengthened and made more genuine. The importance of this is not merely local, for this union has seemed to distressed and bewildered students of internationalism in Europe to offer an example of the kind of machinery for international action which is not inconsistent with a sound nationalism.”

After the election, Wilson wrote Addams: “I wish I felt more worthy of the great trust imposed in me.”

Addams would stay the Wilson course, at least for a while. In just five months the United States would enter the war in Europe and test her support. On April 10, 1917, ten days after the United States declared war on Germany, she signed a petition to the President to demand his promise to uphold free speech and democratic values for all Americans during the war:

“We are deeply concerned lest America, having declared a state of war, should sacrifice certain safeguards fundamental to the life of her democracy.

“Several bills are now before Congress, or may come before it, seeking to punish those who designedly use military information for the benefit of foreign governments.

“With this purpose we, of course, are entirely sympathetic, but the administration of such laws, purposely made comprehensive, so as to include a wide range of possible offenders, may easily lend itself to the suppression of free speech, free assemblage, popular discussion and criticism.

“We believe that you would deem it essential, perhaps more at this time than at any other, that the truth should not be withheld, or concealed from the American people whose interests after all are the most vital consideration.

“Even by this time, we have seen evidence of the breaking down of immemorial rights and privileges. Halls have been refused for public discussion; meetings have been broken up; speakers have been arrested and censorship exercised, not to prevent the transmission of information to enemy countries, but to prevent the free discussion by American citizens of our own problems and policies. As we go on, the inevitable psychology of war will manifest itself with increasing danger, not only to individuals but to our cherished institutions. It is possible that the moral damage to our democracy in this war may become more serious than the physical or national losses incurred.

“What we ask of you, Mr. President, whose utterances at this time must command the earnest attention of the country, is to make an impressive statement that will reach, not only the officials of the federal government scattered throughout the union, but the officials of the several states and of the cities, towns and villages of the country, reminding them of the peculiar obligation devolving upon all Americans in this war to uphold in every way our constitutional rights and liberties. This will give assurance that in attempting to administer war-time laws, the spirit of democracy will not be broken. Such a statement sent throughout the country would reinforce your declaration that this is a war for democracy and liberty. It is only because this matter seems of paramount public importance that we venture to bring it to you at this time for your attention.”

Jane Addams was still watching, and she would keep on watching. She did not vote and forget about it. She stayed informed. She held her leaders accountable. She did not take her vote nor her political power for granted.

Presidential Election: November 7, 1916

Woodrow Wilson (Democrat)
Popular Vote: 9.1 million
Electoral College: 277

Charles Evans Hughes (Republican)
Popular Vote: 8.5 million
Electoral College: 254

Black and white portrait of Jeanette Rankin wearing a wide-brimmed hat with flowers, a light blouse, and a subtle smile. Below the image is the handwritten name Miss Jeannette Rankin.
Jeannette Rankin, 1916

One resounding victory for women in 1916 was the election of Jane Addams’s friend Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973) of Montana to be the first woman to serve in the U. S. Congress.

Addams sent this telegram to Rankin: “Heartiest congratulations on your election and appreciation of what it means to all American women.” Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress; Congratulatory Telegram for Jeannette Rankin, November 12, 1916, Jane Addams Digital Edition.

Sources: Louise W. Knight, Jane Addams: Spirit in Action (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 189-223; Neil Lanctot, The Approaching Storm: Roosevelt, Wilson, Addams and Their Clash over America’s Future (New York: Riverhead Books, 2021), 206-10, 243-46, 485-87, 562-63; American National Biography. Jane Addams et al. to Woodrow Wilson, August 26, 1913; Jane Addams et al. to Woodrow Wilson, October 18, 1913; Summary of Jane Addams et al. to Woodrow Wilson, October 19, 1913; Statements on Wilson Administration, December 16, 1913; Jane Addams to Woodrow Wilson, May 20, 1914; Jane Addams to Woodrow Wilson, January 29, 1915; Jane Addams and John A. Aylward to Woodrow Wilson, March 4, 1915; Frances Alice Kellor to Jane Addams, February 5, 1913; Woodrow Wilson to Jane Addams, March 8, 1915; Report of Department of Social Service and Industrial Justice, Progressive Service Committee, April 23, 1913; Comments on President Wilson, May 12, 1915; Statement on Addams’s Tuberculosis Diagnosis, April 6, 1916; Harriet Park Thomas to Jane Addams, August 8, 1916; Woodrow Wilson is Good Enough for Jane Addams, October 4, 1916; Manifesto Issued by International Congress of Women Envoys, October 15, 1915; Jane Addams to Woodrow Wilson, October 26, 1915; Jane Addams Sees Progressive Aims Attained Thru President, November 3, 1916; Woodrow Wilson to Jane Addams, November 23, 1916; Jane Addams et al. to Woodrow Wilson, April 16, 1917, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

For an in depth analysis of Jane Addams’s ideas about peace in juxtaposition with those of Roosevelt and Wilson, see Neil Lanctot, The Approaching Storm: Roosevelt, Wilson, Addams, and Their Class over America’s Future and his Jane Addams Papers Project blog post, “Jane Addams and the Great War.”

Note: This post is the second in a six-part series discussing Jane Addams’s political alliances and engagement in presidential elections from 1912 to 1932.

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Jane Addams and the Presidential Election of 1912

Political cartoon of a man and a woman labeled Jane Addams shaking hands; the woman stands with a child labeled Child Labor while a group labeled Old Age and Poverty watches in the background.

Political cartoon of a man and a woman labeled Jane Addams shaking hands; the woman stands with a child labeled Child Labor while a group labeled Old Age and Poverty watches in the background.
TR and JA Enlisted for the Great Battle. Philadelphia Times, Aug. 8, 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, and her stumping for and writing of a series of articles in support of the Progressive Party ticket and its platform was historic. It was a bold move for Addams. It raised many eyebrows. And although there is no evidence that it jeopardized Hull-House’s patronage, it went decidedly against the general philosophy of reform and charitable organizations whose livelihoods depended upon support from across the political spectrum.

When she stood on the stage of the Coliseum in Chicago at the Progressive Party Convention on August 7, 1912, Jane Addams explained to the cheering crowd why she supported Roosevelt and the Progressive Party:

I rise to second the nomination, stirred by the splendid platform adopted by this convention.

Cartoon drawing of Jane Addams standing on a platform decorated with stars and stripes, gesturing forward as if speaking; caption reads, Character sketch of Jane Addams on platform.
Pensacola (FL) News Journal, Aug. 13, 1912.

“Measures of industrial amelioration, demands for social justice, long discussed by small groups in charity conferences and economic associations, have here been considered in a great national convention and are at last thrust into the stern arena of political action.

A great party has pledged itself to the protection of children, to the care of the aged, to the relief of overworked girls, to the safeguarding of burdened men. Committed to these humane undertakings, it is inevitable that such a party should appeal to women, should seek to draw upon the great reservoir of their moral energy so long undesired and unutilized in practical politics—one the corollary of the other; a program of human welfare, the necessity for women’s participation.

We ratify this platform not only because it represents our earnest convictions and formulates our high hopes, but because it pulls upon our faculties and calls us to definite action. We find it a prophecy that democracy shall not be actually realized until no group of our people—certainly not 10,000,000 so sadly in need of reassurance—shall fail to bear the responsibilities of self-government and that no class of evils shall lie beyond redress.

The new party has become the American exponent of a world-wide movement toward juster social conditions, a movement which the United States, lagging behind other great nations, has been unaccountably slow to embody in political action.

I second the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt because he is one of the few men in our public life who has been responsive to the social appeal and who has caught the significance of the modern movement. Because of that, because the program will require a leader of invincible courage, of open mind, of democratic sympathies, one endowed with power to interpret the common man and to identify himself with the common lot, I heartily second the nomination.”

The following day, Roosevelt sent a long telegram to Addams:

“I wished to see you in person to thank you for seconding me. I do it now instead. I prized your action not only because of what you are and stand for, but because of what it symbolized for the new movement. In this great national convention starting the new party women have thereby been shown to have their place to fill precisely as men have, and on an absolute equality. It is idle now to argue whether women can play their part in politics, because in this convention we saw the accomplished fact and more-over the women who have actively participated in this work of launching the new party represent all that we are most proud to associate with American womanhood. …”

The week was a whirlwind, but Addams was, perhaps surprisingly, enjoying herself. She was all in on the campaign, writing her sister Alice Haldeman on August 9:

“You may have seen by the papers that I have become a full fledged ‘bull moose’ and this morning accepted a place on the National Committee. I am sending you a copy of speech of acceptance which really explains my attitude better than anything else does.”

On the surface, Jane Addams’s quick jump into partisan politics made a great deal of sense. The Progressive Party’s Platform was in alignment with her reform work and her values. In a series of syndicated articles she published in the fall campaign, she explained in great detail to the American public why the Progressive Party was right for women, workers, immigrants, and Black Americans. In one of those articles, Addams attempted to explain her conversion to partisan politics:

“When I try to write down the steps by which I became a Progressive, I am inclined to trace them first to the gradual discovery that philanthropic effort everywhere, is merging into civic effort. In fact the line between philanthropy and politics is so constantly changing that it is very difficult to know when the given step has been taken, which carried one from the first field into the second.”

Addams had come to understand that philanthropic work was, indeed, political work. By necessity, real reform required legislative force. Her alliance with the Progressive Party was rooted in that belief and, in her eyes, this new national political party stood soundly upon a foundation of reform. However, could Addams have supported the Progressive Party’s platform without jumping in with both feet? What made her go all in on Roosevelt, a man she had just two months prior called “wabbly” on woman suffrage? She had never before been involved in a presidential campaign. What was different in August 1912?

I cannot get into Jane Addams’s head, but I believe that the extensive woman suffrage campaigning Addams had done all spring in Kansas and Wisconsin inspired her decision to become a “Bull Moose.” She was frustrated and losing patience. As she wrote in an article in The Survey on June 1, 1912:

“The comfortable citizen possessing a vote won for him in a previous generation, who is so often profoundly disturbed by the cry of ‘Votes for Women,’ seldom connects the present attempt to extend the franchise with those former efforts, as the results of which, he himself became a member of the enfranchised class. Still less does the average voter reflect that in order to make self-government a great instrument in the hands of those who crave social justice, it must ever be built up anew in relation to changing experiences, and that unless this readjustment constantly takes place self-government itself is placed in jeopardy.”

It is true that when Theodore Roosevelt agreed to support an equal suffrage plank in the Progressive Party Platform and to personally support woman suffrage, Addams was willing to lend her reputation, her writing talent, and her valuable time to the presidential campaign. She recognized this historic opportunity to be part of a new reformed-minded national party that had a chance to win the election. Behind a seasoned politician like Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party would put the issues she cared about most deeply on the national stage. The party platform included fifteen distinct social justice issues that Addams had championed, from the prohibition of child labor to support for the eight-hour workday to the favor of labor organization. Most critically, however, was the Progressive Party’s pledge: “to the task of securing equal suffrage to men and women alike.” For Addams, the plank of equal suffrage was more than icing on the cake, it was the imperative to ensure all the rest of the party’s aims. And so, even as she could not vote, she became a political animal, a dedicated Bull Moose for the presidential campaign of 1912.

A newspaper clipping titled Plank on Equal Suffrage states the Progressive Party supports equal political rights and suffrage for men and women, pledging to secure this equality regardless of sex.
Progressive Party Suffrage Plank, 1912

It is also true that Addams surprised herself by the excitement the campaign roused for her.  A day at Progressive Party headquarters in New York City in late September, making campaign telephone calls, was particularly fun for her. To put ala Teddy, Addams was deee-lighted to be a Bull Moose. En route to Indianapolis for a campaign speech, she wrote her sister on October 14: “I am quite enjoying my campaigning and especially my trip [to] N.Y.”

A black-and-white, grainy photo of a Jane Addams on a telephone
New-York Tribune, Sep. 26, 1912.

In addition to spending her summer vacation in Maine writing campaign articles, Addams served as chair of a Progressive party women’s committee in Chicago and as a member of the Cook County Progressive Committee.  She delivered speeches and attended campaign rallies in Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wisconsin. She wrapped up a western campaign swing in Kansas City on November 4 and was back home at Hull-House for election day.

On the night of the election, when the results were in, Roosevelt wrote Addams from Oyster Bay:

“Now, my dear Miss Addams, I wish to tell you how very much your support in this campaign has meant to me personally. We have fought a good fight; we have kept the faith; we have gone down in disaster. Yet I certainly feel that it would have been wrong for us not to have fought exactly as we did. At any rate, you may be sure of one thing: I shall conscientiously do my best so to act in the future that you shall not feel regret that you supported me in this campaign.”

Jane Addams had no regrets. She wrote Roosevelt on November 20 that she hoped to see him the following week at a Progressive Party Meeting in New York City:

“Perhaps I may have an opportunity to tell you then the tremendous impulse the campaign has given to social reform measures in which I have been interested for many years, but which have never before seemed to become so possible of fulfilment as at the present moment. I had never dared hope that within my lifetime thousands of people would so eagerly participate in their discussion. I am sure you have been in a large measure responsible for this outcome, and I shall hope to have a moment to discuss the subject with you in New York.”

Theodore Roosevelt had lost the election, but Jane Addams had had one hell of a ride.

Results of the Presidential Election: November 5, 1912

Woodrow Wilson
(Democrat)
Popular Vote: 6.3 million
Electoral College: 435

Theodore Roosevelt
(Progressive)
Popular Vote: 4.1 million
Electoral College: 88

William Howard Taft
(Republican)
Popular Vote: 3.5 million
Electoral College: 8

Eugene V. Debs
(Socialist)
Popular Vote: 901,551
Electoral College: 0

Progressive Party Campaign Articles by Jane Addams (all available in the Jane Addams Digital Edition):

The Progressive Party and Safeguards for Working Girls, August-September, 1912

The Progressive Party and the Protection of Immigrants, August-September 1912

The Progressive Party and Woman Suffrage, September 1912

The Progressive Party and Organized Labor, September 1912

The Progressive Party and the Disinherited, August-September, 1912

The Progressive Party and the Negro, November 1912

The Steps by Which I Became a Progressive, September-October 1912

My Experiences as a Progressive Delegate, November 1912

Be like Jane Addams, phonebank for your candidate. Get informed. Get involved. And don’t miss out on the opportunity Jane Addams did not have in 1912, VOTE!

Other Sources: Lewis L. Gould, Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008); Sidney M. Milkis, Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009); “‘Lady Moose’ Ready for Real Campaign,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago), Aug. 13, 1912, p. 4; “Progressive Women Campaigners in Town; Miss Jane Addams at Bull Moose Headquarters,” New-York Tribune, Sep. 26, 1912, 7; Jane Addams Diary,  Statement on Theodore Roosevelt, May 11, 1912; Votes for Women and Other Votes, June 1, 1912; Progressive Party Pamphlet, ca. August 5, 1912; Nominating Speech for Theodore Roosevelt, August 7, 1912 (version published in the Congressional Record, 62nd Cong., 2nd sess. (Appendix), vol. 48, pt. 12, 564-65); Theodore Roosevelt to Jane Addams, August 8, 1912; Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, August 9, 1912; Theodore Roosevelt to Jane Addams, August 9, 1912; Jane Addams to Harold LeClair Ickes, September 27, 1912; Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, October 14, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt to Jane Addams, November 5, 1912; all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

Note: This post is the first in a six-part series discussing Jane Addams’s political alliances and engagement in presidential elections from 1912 to 1932.

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Leading by Example: Hull-House, Jane Addams, and Social Change: Addams as a Political Woman

This post was written by Rima Lunin Schultz on July 17, 2020.

One of the major pieces of legislation that would forever change the landscape of workers’ lives in the United States was the Social Security Act of 1935, passed just months after Jane Addams’s death.  The U.S. was a latecomer among industrial nations in developing a system of social insurance and Jane Addams had advocated for such a system from the 1890s. This story I am going to tell you about her connection to the bill’s passage reveals much about her theory and practice of democracy. In the spirit of Addams, it is an optimistic story about the arc of social change. It is the story of how the head of General Electric, Gerard Swope led a small minority of businessmen to provide crucial support for the passage of social security. Swope was a protégé of Jane Addams.

Sometime in the 1890s Gerard Swope, the son of well-to-do German Jews who owned a manufacturing plant in St. Louis, Missouri, was working his way up in management at the Western Electric plant in Chicago. Enos Barton, Western Electric’s chairman had developed a close relationship with Jane Addams which shouldn’t surprise us. He was one of the local industrialists Addams had made it her business to bring into her social circle at the settlement.

Living close also to the heart of Chicago’s garment industry, Hull-House threw itself into the then raging anti-sweatshop fight and welcomed the embryonic clothing workers’ unions to the settlement. The liberal reform Governor of Illinois John Peter Altgeld, who had pardoned the Haymarket martyrs, had just appointed Hull-House resident Florence Kelley the Illinois Chief Factory Inspector.  Kelley had studied in Germany and London where she had developed a friendship with Frederick Engels whose book on the English working class she had just translated from the German. Her familiarity with Marxist theory could be seen in her analysis of the sweatshop system in her Hull-House Maps & Papers chapters.

 Western Electric’s Barton found the atmosphere stimulating and encouraged his “most promising young men” from the company to live at Hull-House as residents and sent Gerard Swope there.  “Let them see all they can of all kinds of people and of their requirements,” Barton told Addams. “It would be the best possible preparation in this business of electricity which is pushing out so rapidly into so many new fields in response to the incredible variety of human needs.”[1]

Swope, a graduate of M.I.T., taught arithmetic and English at Hull-House in the evenings, paid his room and board, as Hull-House residency required, and entered fully into the communal activities of the group of residents. Swope soon became a mentor to an ambitious Russian Jewish immigrant, Philip Davis, later a labor leader sympathetic to the kind of mediation of labor conflicts Addams favored. Davis wanted help with his English. “Up to the time that I met [Gerard] Swope, I had associated only with workers and trade-unionists,” Davis explained. “Their doctrine that all bosses were evil men and, by inference, that all trade-unionists were righteous, appeared absurd when I saw what sort of individual Swope was.” [2]

In a few years Swope was given the responsibility of reorganizing Western Electric’s factory.[3] When a strike threatened, Swope consulted with his Hull-House colleagues and took their advice to negotiate honestly with his workers.[4]

Moving up in the industry, as head of General Electric, Swope employed Dr. Alice Hamilton, who had done her earliest studies of industrial toxins while living at Hull-House, to oversee the environment of the GE factories. He began experimenting with stock options for his employees, another idea discussed at Hull-House. [5] 

Meanwhile Addams had become an advocate of more business and labor cooperation.[6] She even looked with hopeful anticipation of the globalization of American business.  Visiting General Electric plants in China and Japan she reported positively on the workers whose standard of living was being improved.[7]

 Swope privately unveiled his GE unemployment plan for employees to Addams in a letter that acknowledged her influence.[8]

And now to the end of the story of Swope and Social Security. In 1935 the National Chamber of Commerce voted to deny support for FDR’s programs, including unemployment insurance and other aspects of the proposed social security legislation. Swope and a handful of industrialists broke with the Chamber, formed a subcommittee that voiced a minority opinion and offered their support to President Roosevelt. Swope’s advocacy of Social Security was, perhaps, the highest example of the kind of enlightened industrial relations Addams had envisioned and worked to achieve starting with her efforts in the 1890s when Hull-House had been the incubator of a new social citizenship.

Is the cup half empty or half full? Addams voiced her own misgivings and doubts in 1929 about her work and its results:

“We go on doing what we can in various ways in our Settlements, and some of the things have certainly proved their social utility. But there are moments when our hearts are covered with great doubt as to the basic thing itself as to what we might do as Settlement people to change perhaps the attitude towards immigrants, or towards poverty itself; towards industrial relations, towards dozens of things concerning which we are unhappy. And that, I imagine, is the mood that will at moments urge us all to the end of the chapter. And when we no longer have these moments I doubt whether we are fitted to go on, because, after all, it is our salvation, is it not, that we are continually filled with a holy discontent?” [9]

This is the Jane Addams less known. Almost seventy years old, she is self-reflective; besieged by critics for her wartime pacifism, and surveilled by the FBI in the postwar Red Scare for her defense of civil liberties and her support of international causes, she had not yet been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.

Personal defeats were not as important to Addams as the loss of the reform spirit and the attacks on liberal policies and progressive social programs. Undaunted, an aging Addams rallied her allies to expand their work rather than retreat and the founding of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom was built by women who had participated in domestic social justice initiatives for decades; now they awakened to a global perspective.

Addams feared that postwar social and political conditions were planting seeds for the next conflict. Rebuked by an increasingly hostile press, Addams challenged the rise of militarism, the KKK, government suppression of free speech, immigration quotas and the deportation of thousands. She called out the hypocrisy of the justice system that protected Jim Crow violence: “Our own States Attorney” Addams wrote in a letter to the Chicago Tribune in February 1920,  “ who …made numerous arrests [of radicals and aliens] … never caused to be arrested nor indicted a single person connected with the throwing of twenty bombs in Chicago during the last eight months, bombs which had been planted in order to destroy the homes of colored people or of white men who had rented houses to colored people.” [10]  

Much of what Addams hoped to achieve remains unfinished. But pathways were laid out by 1935 the year she died.

She had argued that what was missing in democracy was the social expression of democratic living—and to get beyond the antiquated notion of politics imbedded in a limited, unrepresentative and corrupt system, she and others had to get back to the people and redefine social relations; she also realized that the pressures of a cosmopolitan neighborhood seemed to be the simple and inevitable foundations for an international order.  She had transcended boundaries of class, gender, nationalities, religions in the expression of a new social citizenship expressed by Swope.

Yet she lived in a segregated world and neighborhood no matter how much she was able, from time to time, to construct interracial space and promote interracial social intercourse. In the postwar era when she failed in her own eyes to prioritize racism, a failure to which she admitted in The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, it was in large part a failure of her not finding ways to overcome the cultural, social, and political segregation in which all Americans lived and to a large extent still do.  

She went into the hospital for the last time in May 1935, knowing the deteriorating situation in Europe. At home she was working on a deal with her old friend and ally Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to locate one of the first public housing projects in her Hull-House neighborhood, finally she believed, dealing with the slums she had mapped more than forty years before. And she knew there was a good chance that social security was about to be realized.

Returning finally to Addams as Political Woman writ large, her skill in redefining the roles of men and women in her reform circles was undogmatic and liberating for both sexes. It made her unique among leaders of the woman’s suffrage movement, and often controversial, especially in her view of how to be nonpartisan.  Addams made waves when she seconded Theodore Roosevelt’s nomination as the presidential candidate of the Progressive “Bull Moose” Party in 1912 and simultaneously remained vice president of the suffrage association pledged to nonpartisanship. Her undogmatic, nonideological decision to risk support of the imperfect candidacy of TR related to her understanding of social progress. He was a racist, a militarist, an imperialist. Yet Addams’s social settlement and suffrage networks converged to become a dominant influence in the Progressive Party platform. She saw the opportunity for dissemination of social policy ideas nationally. From our standpoint, and from hers—as she looked back, Addams fell short, however, in her goal of fully democratizing the social policy discourse in which she did her political work.  She had not been able to bring Blacks fully into the social circle and into full political empowerment. This is a message to us. It reminds us how hard the struggle to live democratically was for Jane Addams and is for us today. And it calls us to ask who has not yet been brought into the circle.

[1] Jane Addams, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930), 394.

[2] Philip Davis, And Crown Thy Good (New York: Philosophical Library, 1952), 89-90.

[3] Ellis W. Hawley, “Swope, Gerard,” Dictionary of American Biography, John A. Garraty, editor (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), Supplement Six, 614.

[4] David Loth, Swope of G.E. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958), 58-59.

[5] “Employes [sic]to Help Manage Business of Electric Co.” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 17, 1923, pg. 16; “Financial Notes.” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 5, 1923, pg. A10.

[6] Ibid.. 391.

[7] Ibid., 396.

[8] Gerard Swope to Jane Addams, December 10, 1930, Swarthmore College Peace Collection,  Jane Addams Papers, Series 1 in JAMC (reel 21-1443-1447), Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago.

[9] “The Settlement as a Way of Life.” Addresses by Jane Addams, Mary E. McDowell, Graham Taylor. Neighborhood 2, no. 3 (July 1929), 145-146. [Bold added.]

[10] Jane Addams wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Chicago Tribune protesting “against the flagrant misrepresentation in the report of my address as given in this morning’s Tribune [Feb. 23]” and this letter appeared on Feb. 24,, 1920 in the paper under the column, “Voice of the People.”

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The Social Gospel of Ellen Gates Starr, 1880-1920

This post was written by Dr. Rima Lunin Schultz in June 1997, and presented at the Episcopal Church and Archives Conference, “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: Anglican Visions of Apocalypse and Hope.”

Hull-House, the social settlement Jane Addams founded with Ellen Gates  Starr in 1889, has come to symbolize one of the most successful and creative responses to the problems of industrial society ever undertaken. Much of what happened there is credited to Addams’ leadership and she remains a figure of national and international importance in the fields of social reform and peace.  In comparison, Ellen Gates Starr remains a supporting character whose claim to fame is that she was there at the beginning. Indeed, for Starr, the settlement was only the start of a lifelong journey to translate her radical idealism into everyday practice; it was the first of many initiatives Starr tried out in her quest to make her professed faith in Christianity a living, breathing organic part of her existence. The following is the story of the way in which Starr’s religious convictions formed her radical consciousness and emboldened her to take great risks for her ideals.

Ellen Gates Starr was born in 1859 to an abolitionist family from New England, who had settled in Illinois.  As a young girl her father’s involvement with the local grange and his advocacy of a cooperative system over the vicious competition in America sensitized her to view the individual in the social context. Intellectual freedom prevailed in the household as well as strong support of women’s equality; her sister Mary became an artist, her brother William a sculptor; two cousins were art photographers and another cousin, Beatrice Starr Jenkins, became an architect in Chicago. (1)

Her father’s sister, Eliza Allen Starr, had a profound influence also.  A New England Unitarian spinster who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1854 and became the leading exponent of Catholic Art and literature in the Midwest, her art studio near the Cathedral church in downtown Chicago, was one of the few places where books and reproductions of medieval and renaissance religious art were available. Eliza Starr advocated the social purpose of art in modern society fearing that the human spirit was at risk in the industrial environment. Supporting herself as a writer and lecturer on art and religion, she ran an art school. (2)

Thus Starr already had an appreciation and sympathy for catholic liturgy and art when she arrived at Rockford Seminary where she was required to attend daily chapel services and weekly prayer meetings in preparation for a traditional Protestant conversion experience. Immediately Starr knew this was not her route to religion. With family resources limited, Starr remained at Rockford for only one year, planning to reenter another college later.  She began teaching school, first in a small country town near her family home and in 1879, in Chicago. The next four years were difficult ones; she grappled with her religious feelings, in 1881 attempted to prepare for the Harvard Annex (Radcliffe College), and that same summer,  suffered a nervous breakdown that forced her into inactivity for several weeks.  This was a period of experimentation with visits to a variety of churches, wide reading in English literature (Dickens and George Eliot), history and philosophy (Carlyle and Ruskin), and studies in Anglicanism including Maurice and Kingsley. In 1883 Starr joined the Episcopal Church with some hesitancy but profoundly desirous of getting on with her life. (3) She looked to her friend, Jane Addams, to sort out what that future might hold.

Ellen Starr had met Jane Addams the year she studied at Rockford College. The friendship continued largely through letters in which the two discussed politics, literature, religion and what was the major preoccupation of them both, the quest for useful, morally significant work. This quest for a vocation, not just employment, was fraught with a variety of concerns.  Both women were in their mid-to-late twenties; they were not interested in marriage.  Well-read, consumed by intellectual ideas about life rather than by experience, they formed a bond with each other in their desire to chart a new, unconventional course. (4)

In 1887 Addams invited Starr to accompany her to Europe and Ellen accepted Addams’ offer to pay her expenses. (5) An intense experience, Starr loved European art and traveled to religious shrines including Monte Cassino and Assisi. She was inspired by what she observed about the Benedictine Rule when she visited Monte Cassino. The idea of work as prayer captured her attention as dramatically as Jane Addams’ attention was captured when she visited Toynbee Hall settlement in the East London slum. After their return from Europe the two women began to plan a similar venture in Chicago. The two saw Toynbee as the answer to both personal and reform goals: they could create a “home” for themselves and also do meaningful work. “Jane’s idea which she puts very much to the front and on no account will give up,” Starr wrote, “is that it is more for the benefit of the people who do it [settlement work] than for the other class [the poor in the slums].  She has worked that out of her own experience and ill health.” (6)

While Starr and Addams agreed that they both “needed” the settlement as much or more than the people in the neighborhood “needed” such a place, it is not clear whether or not they held the same vision about what the settlement would actually do.  Or, perhaps at this early stage neither one had a clear sense. At age thirty-one Starr was already more preoccupied with working out the message of the social gospel she embraced in her desire to be a good Christian. In her mind the settlement would be a place where a religiously grounded fellowship addressed her concern for social as well as personal holiness. This difference in motivation was significant and within three years it was clear to both women that they had different goals for the settlement and themselves. As a practical matter, the two divided up the work of the settlement with Starr devoting herself to art, literature, and crafts, a result of her interest in Ruskin and Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement and Addams became the public spokesperson for the idea of the settlement as well as its fund-raiser.

On the personal level Starr and Addams distanced themselves from the emotional bond they had initially forged. How much their clash over Starr’s emphasis on the religious aspects of the settlement idea brought about this wedge is difficult to measure. Addams’ friendship with Mary Rozet Smith, who assumed the role of Jane’s closest and most intimate friend signaled the change that had taken place on the personal level. (7)

With the arrival of Julia Lathrop in 1890 and Florence Kelley in December 1891, Hull-House embarked on the road of social science. (8) Jane Addams and Julia Lathrop were already exploring this direction and Kelley’s knowledge of European Marxism and her university training in economics fostered a turn away from the Christian socialism expressed in Starr’s approach. Kelley and trade union leader Alzina Parsons Stevens began to collect statistics for the Illinois Bureau of Labor on the sweatshops that proliferated in the Hull-House neighborhood. (9) The factory inspection act passed in 1893 gave credibility to the investigative approach, although in the long run it would take decades before the courts outlawed sweatshops.

Lathrop and Kelley constructed moral arguments on behalf of less privileged social groups, immigrants, workers exposed to industrial hazards, women and men working more than ten hours a day, poor families generally, and child laborers, and they appealed to the State to become more activist in the protection of these groups. (10) Hull-House Maps and Papers, published in 1895 exemplified the way in which the new science of human relations was used by Hull-House women reformers with articles reporting research results on sweatshop labor, child labor, and labor organizations for working women.

Starr’s contribution, “Art and Labor” was a contrast: anti-capitalist and anti-modernist, Starr warned that it was not enough to fight for wages, you had also to fight for the soul of man against the commercial and industrial world that was crushing him. Her writing is starkly different than what develops as a maternalist-social science argument for the State assuming the protection of those who are weak.  Starr, unlike the majority of women progressive reformers, did not base her social justice arguments on maternalist reasoning.  She neither singled women out for special protection nor did she believe that women’s differences came out of essential nurturing qualities that, when expanded to societal problems, enhanced their capacity to bring about social transformation. (11)

In contrast to the others, she was searching for something close to a sacramental community that men and women settlement workers and poor people would share together, but both the church and the settlement were neglecting the religious function in modern society: the settlement in its increasing secularism; and the church in its neglect of “social holiness” in favor of “personal holiness.” (12)

Remaining a resident at Hull-House, Starr carved out her own space and developed a support system in Chicago and elsewhere to sustain her sense of a community of social holiness. (13) Even her room at Hull-House was more like a monastic cell than a bedroom in a Victorian home. She rose early every morning and either attended religious services at a neighborhood Catholic church or had private prayer and meditation. (14) Jane Addams, Starr reported, had accused her of “running after strange doctrines.”(15) She had her local chapter of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, (SCHC) a lay order of Episcopal women dedicated to social justice. It provided a corporate intellectual and spiritual life, a sisterhood, that included her friend Vida Scudder and others.  Starr missed this at Hull House where, by the 1890s, the earlier custom of group prayer inaugurated by Starr had been replaced by a women’s political culture that had little place for corporate forms of worship and barely tolerated Starr’s religious activities.

Starr was drawn to Vida Scudder and her writings on St. Francis. Starr and Scudder became leading exponents of a self-consciously and openly religious approach to reform. They saw the settlement as a model for an alternative value system which spurned the material rewards of American society for a new ‘Franciscanism.’ Starr, Scudder, Social Gospel theologian George Herron, Episcopalian priests W. D. P. Bliss, R. Heber Newton, and James O. S. Huntington believed that a reordering of society had to take place and those who controlled wealth and property had to recognize their sins of greed and selfishness.  They had to see that their luxury depended on the misery and privation of oppressed workers. (16)

By the 1890s Starr had found solace and support at Denison House in Boston with Scudder and Helen Dudley and spent time in Boston away from Hull-House affairs.  The Denison group was influenced by Huntington, whose spiritual counsel could be seen in the development of the Companions and in the maturation of Starr’s religious ideas. (17) Huntington was a frequent guest at Hull-House prior to 1892 when the direction of the settlement was still malleable, although Starr’s request for his appearances met resistance from the more secular residents.  What was missing, obviously, was the cross-class alliance: a community of believers that was not class segregated. (18)

Reality and the opportunity to create this community of believers entered Hull-House with the arrival of neighborhood garment workers who were encouraged by the settlement residents to use the meeting rooms for union meetings. Trade unionist Mary Kenney became a resident.  In 1896 Starr participated in her first garment workers’ strike. Immediately demonstrating her desire to identify with the strikers, Starr organized relief for the workers and with Mary Kenney rushed ahead to St. Louis, Missouri, to meet a train headed for Chicago with scabs brought in to break the strike.  Starr and Kenney boarded the train in the middle of the night and at breakfast lectured the men on the conditions that led to the strike.  Persuaded, the men joined the union and offered their support.  The strike was lost and Starr turned her attention to relocating blacklisted strikers and exhorting tailors to keep the union intact despite their losses. (19)

This was her first real engagement with the violence of labor disputes.  Frazzled and exhausted, she left for New York for a prolonged period. She had operated so differently from Jane Addams who had been approached by the Chicago Civic Federation to call for arbitration for the strike. (20) This was the beginning of a lifelong pattern for Starr: she rejected roles of arbitrator, mediator, or negotiator between the classes just as she had rejected the role of social science observer and institutional bureaucrat. Her radical idealism interpreted the social gospel message rather literally.  She determined that her fate would be with the oppressed and the downtrodden. Starr had no trouble identifying which side to join and she did so with religious zeal.

These involvements, however were exhausting and somewhat artificial. Starr not only identified with the cause of the worker, she wanted to be a artisan herself. In the summer of 1898 Starr sailed to England for a fifteen-month apprenticeship with Arts and Crafts bookbinder Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson. (21) She had decided to become a worker and teacher, to identify more closely with the poor by taking up manual labor, and to teach others to find joy and  dignity in the simple life of a craftsman.  This way she would protest the economic arrangements of modern industrial capital.  When she returned wealthy Hull-House patron Mary Wilmarth provided Starr with funds to set up a bindery. Unfortunately, only two or three students a year were able to study, the materials were costly, and Starr was forced to work on commissions for wealthy patrons. (22) It was a terrible irony not missed by Starr.

Starr turned to what appeared a more fruitful agenda: organizing women for the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL).  Other non-workingclass reformers and settlement residents had searched for ways to help American workingwomen.  The traditional male craft unions were reluctant to organize women, assuming that they were unreliable, transitory workers who would leave work to marry.  In addition, immigrant women had filled the sweatshops and, in the eyes of the male artisans, had contributed to the deskilling of the garment industry. (23) Young women, on the other hand, found it difficult to enter the world of male trade unionism because of the masculine culture of the union hall; often meeting rooms were above saloons.  Ellen Starr and other settlement reformers saw a need to come to the aid of working-class girls who they knew were exploited at work and ignored by the labor movement. The WTUL was organized in 1903 to assist in the organization of women wage workers into trade unions.  With the cooperation of Samuel Gompers and the AFL, the organization was permitted and actually encouraged, membership of non-wage-earners.  WTUL branch chapters agreed to affiliate with AFL central labor committees. The first slate of officers in 1903 included: Mary Morton Kehew, a socially Bostonian, president; Jane Addams, vice-president; Mary Kenney (O’Sullivan), secretary. (24) In Chicago the local chapter of the WTUL organized at Hull-House. (25) Tensions between the wealthy and middle-class allies and the trade union women existed from the beginning. The allies advocated investigation of factory conditions, legislative lobbying, and educational classes, activities many trade union women considered derivative from a focus on direct organizing.  On the national level, Gompers’ ambivalence about the role of non-workers in the union continued to plague the allies in the WTUL. (26)

Starr continued to work through the Episcopal Church for social change in these years, primarily with the Companions. Among the mainline denominations, the Episcopal Church was the most visionary in its rethinking of the conventional economic theories of laissez-faire capitalism and the application of Jesus’ social gospel to the contemporary wage labor system was a radical departure, even when conceived in the context of a non-violent system of mediation between labor and capital rather than a revolutionary end to private property.  Yet the church continued to be an exclusive community of wealthy parishioners whose connections to the ruling class were undeniable.  Here was a church able not only to produce James Huntington and Vida Scudder and, in its capacity to allow differences to flourish, gave these Christian Socialists the space to grow.  But the church was also one of the major institutional strongholds of private property.  It represented wealth and the power wealth had to shape the society.

Ellen Starr heard Charles Palmerston Anderson, bishop of Chicago during the garment workers’ strikes, tell propertied Episcopalians that when men used the might of money to stand out against organized and disorganized women and children over the principle of collective bargaining, they were taking a position not endorsed by the Christian church. “I believe in God,” he told his flock, “therefore I believe in the right of bargaining.” (27) The same Bishop Anderson was adept at businessmen back to Christian activism and encouraging them to join the Laymen’s Missionary Movement; at home in Chicago he set the tone for an activist, red-blooded and masculine Christianity by incorporating the leading capitalists who were members of Episcopal congregations in decision-making at the highest diocesan-wide level. Anderson, like social gospelers Walter Rausenbusch and Washington Gladden, had not called revolution or the end to private property.  They had accepted the need to include associations of workers at the table with capitalists and, along general Christian ethical principles, negotiate from within the system to benefit labor and capital alike. (28)

For Starr this was too conservative an answer. “How can we tolerate it that life should go on so–all the suffering of little children, all the waste and squalor and brutality and misery of a system which might be changed,” she wrote a friend. “Nothing is worth thinking of at all in comparison to that.” (29)

Mainline Protestants were in general agreement by 1900 that the church and religion were about “here and now.”  “We are beginning to realize,” wrote an Episcopal churchman in the diocesan newspaper, “that the Church and religion are concerned chiefly with men and women in this life, with their daily duties and obligations; that if we live as God would have us live in this world we need not be anxious about the world to come.” (30)

What continued to depress Ellen Starr, however, was the failure of the social gospel message to ignite a radical transformation inside the churches and, without that, there was little hope for change in society as a whole. Most laborers worked in oppressive conditions and lived substandard housing.  With seasonal layoffs and economic depressions children and women as well as men worked to survive. The churches were doing enough because their members, the wealthy and powerful, were not motivated to change the way the economy actually worked. When Starr returned from the Society for the Companions of the Holy Cross summer conference in 1909 she felt the gap between the words that were spoken at the highest levels of ecclesiastical institutions and the conditions of the poor.  Attending services with other Episcopalians became increasingly difficult as she felt surrounded by privilege and social pretension.  She had written earlier, “The Ancient Egyptian priests had one religion for themselves and another for the people, and how like them we often are.” (31) It hurt her the way civil rights activists were hurt and resented the segregated churches they attended, especially when lip service was given to the movement for racial equality.

Starr began to attend Catholic parish churches in the Hull-House neighborhood because she identified with the poor. (32) Now she decided to look closely at what Roman Catholicism might offer her.  In her case, this transition was not out of character; she was drawn to the ceremony, the mystery, the symbolism of Catholicism.  In 1907 she collapsed from nervous exhaustion and spent a month in a sanitarium followed by weeks of recuperation.  Struggling with depression, she was disappointed in her failure to expand the bindery at Hull-House into a successful employment venture. At age forty-nine having had her application rejected for residence in a communitarian experiment in Tennessee run by Huntington’s Order of the Holy Cross, she went abroad to live in relative isolation on a farm in Ireland. She came back to the States in 1909 to begin a new life. “I… went to pieces and decided I was a failure.  But I did have the vitality left to ask God to give me another chance–an eleventh hour chance to serve.” (33) But she continued to wander from church group to labor union, from Socialist Party politics to private tutoring from a Roman Catholic priest who gently, persistently, patiently counseled her and deflected her abusive criticism of the Roman Catholic hierarchy until she was ready to convert.  (34)

In all this, Starr continued to actively participate in the labor struggle. In 1910 when a group of courageous women walked out of their shop at Hart, Schaffner & Marx in Chicago, they ignited the spark caused the unorganized workers in Chicago’s male-dominated establishments to rise in rebellion against their employers.  Starr, as a member of the WTUL picket committee, promptly joined strikers on the picket lines, patrolled the streets, and served as a witness in court for strikers arrested without due cause. (35) As the strike dragged on Starr appealed everywhere for support of the strike, including the Christian evangelical community where she successfully obtained endorsement for the strike from the Laymen’s Evangelistic Council. The Episcopal Diocese of Chicago also endorsed the strike. (36)

Shortly after the Garment Workers’ Strike Starr joined the Party, and while it was a far cry from the genteel utopian visions of William Morris or the Fabians, Ellen Starr had come a long way from the inexperienced dreamer who had begun Hull-House in 1889.  Starr fit in with the Marxist, hard-line, predominantly immigrant organization and although middle-class social workers were discouraged from joining, by 1915 she was serving on the Cook County Socialist Party’s executive committee. (37) She was able to do this even while deepening her commitment to Christianity. For Starr, her labor union radicalism seemed to draw her more deeply into her faith, or perhaps, the arduous task of standing up for the workers, against the wealthy and powerful, could only be endured by her through the strength of her religious convictions. It was her vision of the implementation of the social gospel here on earth that continued to inspire and sustain her as much as the realities of oppressive conditions stirred her rebellion. When she ran for alderman of the Nineteenth Ward as a socialist she explained her credo: “I became a Socialist because I was a Christian.  The Christian religion teaches that all men are to be regarded as brothers, that no one should wish to profit by the loss or disadvantages of others…that none should enjoy ‘two coats’ while others are coatless. Civilized life is in grotesque contrast to all this.  Only socialism promised to put down the mighty from their seats and to exalt the humble and meek; to fill the hungry with good things and to send the rich, if not quite ’empty away,’ at least relieved of some of their unnecessary and arrogant fulness [sic].” (38)

In the textile strike of 1913, Starr battled the manufacturers to help the workers secure sixty percent of their demands. It was her first successful strike and buoyed her for her next foray into the eye of the storm.  On March 6, 1914, at age fifty-five, Starr was brought to trial on a charge of disorderly conduct stemming from her behavior on the picket line at a waitresses’ strike in Chicago. She had shouted at the police, who had unjustly  arrested three waitresses on picket duty, “I am a citizen and as such protest this arrest.”  The crowd became excited and it was reported that they shouted “Kill the police.”  Bail was provided by Mary Wilmarth longtime friend and patron of Starr and Hull-House; her son-in-law, Harold Ickes, served as Starr’s trial attorney and, after eight hours deliberation at its conclusion, a jury found her innocent. (39) Within a few months of her trial she sailed to Europe to make another tour of the medieval shrines, revisiting Assisi and the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino.

The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) strike of 1915 was a different experience, and placed Ellen Starr in the difficult position of disagreeing with almost everyone but the strikers themselves and a few radical friends. This strike, unlike earlier ones, did not receive the support of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) or the American Federation of Labor (AFL), two of the strongest labor organizations in the nation and, in times past, allies with Starr.  AFL president Samuel Gompers urged his followers not to support the garment strikers led by Sidney Hillman’s ACWA because it had seceded from the AFL-affiliated United Garment Workers 1914. Gompers argued that Hillman’s defection threatened union unity. During the course of the strike, from October to December, over 1,700 strikers were arrested and two were killed.  Starr herself was arrested several times for “inciting a riot” and insisted on a jury trial to bring the facts to the public. (40)

In the end neither side won a decisive victory. The manufacturers’ association created to oppose the ACWA signed no agreements and refused to submit its differences with the strikers to arbitration.  The centrist head of the American Federation of Labor and one of, if not the most powerful, labor leaders in the United States, Samuel Gompers, debated Ellen Starr in the pages of the New Republic. Distrustful of middle-class allies whose interests could never be the same as the working class, and increasingly hostile to socialists, he told Starr to stay out of labor’s business. Starr blamed the loss on the “heavy hand of Mr. Gompers.”  Without AFL support the strikers had to depend upon middle-class allies. (41)

The strike had been a failure but out of it, radical union leaders of the two leading garment unions, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America had won control from conservative union officials. The new union leaders, as well as the rank and file, demanded that their union reflect their own special vision of society, a cooperative commonwealth in which justice and equal opportunity provided the guiding principles.  Women union leaders especially called for programs to expand the cultural, intellectual, and social horizons of their members.  Starr, praised by its president, Sidney Hillman, was made an honorary member of the ACWA for her role in the union’s success. (42)

Ellen Starr’s battle with the Episcopal Church most likely was more difficult that going against Samuel Gompers.  In some ways Gompers, who did well with the conservative social gospel churchmen, (43) was more like the propertied leadership than the rank and file strikers she had met on the picket lines.  At any rate, tired and reluctant to attend General Convention in 1919, she had been persuaded by her longtime friend Vida Scudder to attend. Nineteen-nineteen was the year the church launched its nation-wide campaign as part of its organizational restructuring.  In the 1880s Christians hoped to apply the Golden Rule to the social problems of industrial America to save society.  In the 1920s, business methods were brought to the church to save Christianity.  Like other corporations, the church had become nationalized; social gospel work was now coordinated in a department of social service. A fund was created to operate the new bureaucracy. (44)

Starr was sixty-one at the time of her conversion to Roman Catholicism. Becoming part of a Catholic intellectual community in Chicago, she joined a circle of educated Catholics who shared her interest including Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, both in residence at the University of Chicago, hardly the common folk in the parish churches, but in many ways the closest intellectual relatives to the Anglo-Catholics of her youth.  Always the maverick, she defended Lenin and the Russian Revolution, read Gerard Manley Hopkins, and made appeals for Sacco and Vanzetti’s commutation from their death sentences.  Increasingly, ill health and simple old age kept Ellen Starr from more activist involvements

She affiliated herself, finally, with a Benedictine monastery and became an oblate in the third order of St. Benedict. (45) She died in Suffern, New York in 1940.

By 1920, a conservative, non-socialist “social gospel” had been incorporated into mainstream Protestantism as the institutions of Christianity began to take on the organizational structure of the business corporation itself.  The “social gospel” of the twentieth-century church recognized religion’s social service responsibility to a broad public but no longer pitted itself against the social injustices of industrialism.  In essence, the social gospel had become a generalized acceptance of institutional religion’s connection with the social life of the nation. By 1920 Ellen Starr saw little hope in organized religion’s revolutionary potential.

Starr was uncompromising, self-critical, and ultimately, a minority voice who saw in the successes of progressive social reform the death of the revolutionary gospel spirit that had awakened her conscience and whole generation of idealists in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1892, only three years after its opening, Starr accused Hull-House of being merely “an excuse for the things we ought to do and be and don’t and aren’t.” (46)

“We” was not a figure of speech; Starr was self-critical and uncompromising in the demands she made of herself.  She was also prophetic.  Few of her generation remained true to the radical idealism inherent in the social gospel message; the majority became convinced that social legislation, collective bargaining and the expansion of political rights could make the economic system more democratic and alleviate the worst abuses of industrial capitalism.  Theirs was a quest for a social ethic that would mediate between the classes, not end the class structure; would negotiate among the competitive elements in society, not end competition; and would apply a secularized social gospel message as a civic platform.

Starr held fast to the conviction that a fundamental reordering society must take place. This reordering could not come without a spiritual renewal of the individual leading to the restructuring of society to a collectivist and religious social ethic. Starr found all the institutional structures to which she gave her devotion and commitment ultimately incapable of bringing about this reordering–neither the settlement house, the Socialist Party, the labor movement, or the Episcopal Church were able to give the kind of leadership and support Starr had hoped to find.

Endnotes:

(1) Polly H. Ullrich, “Women in the Arts and Crafts Movement of Chicago: 1877-1915,” M.A. Thesis, Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1994.

(2) Archibald J. Byrne, “Eliza Allen Starr,” Notable American Women 1607-1950. A Biographical Dictionary. Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer, editors. Harvard University Press, 1971, vol. III, 350-351; the Rev. James McGovern, The Life and Letters of Eliza Allen Starr. 1904.

(3) Elizabeth Palmer Carrell, “Reflections in a Mirror: The Progressive Woman and the Settlement Experience,” Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 1981, 92, 100-101.

(4) Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House. New York: Macmillan, 1910. See Starr-Addams Correspondence in Ellen Gates Starr Papers, Sophia Smith Collection (EGS/SSC), Smith College. See: Jennifer Lynne Bosch, “The Life of Ellen Gates Starr, 1859-1940,” Ph.D. dissertation, Miami University of Ohio, 1990.

(5) Carrell, 109.

(6) Ellen Starr to Mary Blaisdell, Feb. 23, 1889, EGS/SSC.

(7) Jennifer Bosch, “The Life of Ellen Gates Starr,” 76; Carrell, diss., 177-178.

(8) Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Hull-House Maps and Papers: Social Science as Women’s Work in the 1890s” in Martin Bulmer, Kevin Bales, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., The Social Survey in Historical Perspective 1880-1940. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

(9) Carolyn Daniel McCreesh, Women in the Campaign to Organize Garment Workers, 1880-1917. Garland Publishing, 1985, 65; Residents of Hull-House, Hull-House Maps and Papers. Arno Press & The New York Times, 1970 reprint.

(10) Sklar, 117-118.

(11) I come to this conclusion because the absence of writings or activities between 1880 and 1920 on the part of Starr in relation to women’s organizations or the suffrage question.  Addams takes on major leadership roles in the suffrage battle after 1900 and writes important popular arguments in the maternalist vein in favor of women voting. Starr appears not to have been involved. Female social gospelers such as Frances E. Willard, a Christian Socialist and the president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, linked their arguments for the coming kingdom on earth with a special role for morally superior women.  Starr makes no arguments of this nature.

(12) Ellen Starr, “Settlement Life,” 1896, Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross. She describes an almost mystical relationship in which settlement workers enter into the life of the community.

(13) Looking at “List of Members,” S.C.H.C., in 1884, 1887, 1888, 1890, 1892, 1894, Ellen Gates Starr is listed for the first time in 1894.

(14) Carrell, 134-135; Mary Prentice Lillie Barrows, “God and My Mother,” mss., 312, Box 3, Frances Crane Lillie Papers, Chicago Historical Society.

(15) Ellen Starr to Mary Allen, c. 1894/95, EGS/SSC, Box VII.

(16) Vida Scudder, On Journey. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1937, 240-241; Carrell, 3; Ellen Starr, “A Bypath into the Great Roadway,” Catholic World vol. 119, May 1924, 179.

(17) Ellen Starr, “A Bypath into the Great Roadway,” 179.

(18) Huntington had great difficulty balancing the demands of his contemplative life with settlement work. In 1892 the Order of the Holy Cross left the East Side of New York and settled in rural Maryland. D.G. Paz, “Monasticism and Social Reform,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, vol. XLVIII, #1, March 1979, pp. 56-57.

(19) Carrell, 233-234.

(20) Ibid.

(21) See Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.

(22) Carrell, 301-305.

(23) Elizabeth Payne, Reform, Labor, and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robins and the Women’s Trade Union League, University of Illinois, 1988. This book discusses the Chicago league and its relationship to Hull-House residents.

(24) McCreesh, Women in the Campaign to Organize Garment Workers, 86-88.

(25) Payne.

(26) McCreesh, 66-67; 125-127.

(27) Charles L. Street quoting Bishop Charles P. Anderson, Memorial Sermon, The Diocese of Chicago, 1936.

(28) Rima Lunin Schultz, “The Making of An American Church: Cathedral Ideal and Parish Realities. The Episcopal Church in Illinois, 1834-1946,” unpublished mss., 1986. Archives, Episcopal Diocese of Chicago. See especially chapters eight and nine.

(29) Carrell, 343.

(30) The Diocese of Chicago, April 1910, 10.

(31) “Chicago’s Hull-House,” Report on the Address by Ellen Starr, 1895, Hull-House Scrapbook, III, JAMC.

(32) Carrell, 344.

(33) Starr to Wager, Hull-House, February 12, 1917, EGS/SSC, Box VIII.

(34) Carrell, 398-400.

(35) Women’s Trade Union League of Chicago, Official Report of the Strike Committee, 10.

(36) Official Report of the Strike Committee, Garment Workers’ Strike, Oct. 29, 1910-February 1911, Women’s Trade Union League, Microfilm, Chicago Historical Society.  Thekla Ellen Caldwell, “Women, Men, and Revival: The Third Awakening in Chicago,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1991.

(37) Carrell, 357.

(38) Clipping, “Why I am A Socialist: Miss Starr to Stick in Race,” February 10, 1916, Ellen Gates Starr Biographical File, Chicago History Museum.

(39) Carrell, 357-358.

(40) McCreesh, 218-220. The exchange of letters between Gompers and Starr were published in the New Republic January 1916- March 1916.

(41) Ibid.

(42) Carrell, 364.

(43) Elizabeth and Kenneth Fones-Wolf, “Trade-Union Evangelism: Religion and the AFL in the Labor Forward Movement, 1912-1916” in Working-Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society. Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds., University of Illinois Press, 1983.

(44) Schultz, “Making of An American Church,” 561-562.

(45) Carrell, 412-413.

(46) Carrell, 30.