Category: Politics

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

By Rima Lunin Schultz

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.”

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.

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

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.

Herbert Hoover, 1928 (Library of Congress)

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.”

Herbert Hoover to Jane Addams, October 13, 1928 (Jane Addams Digital Edition)

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, 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 decent 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

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

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

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:

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.”

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.

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

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.”

Jane Addams (with Lillian Wald to her right) speaking with journalists in Washington, D.C., in 1916. (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.”

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
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

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.

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.

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.”

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.