Jane Addams: spirit in action

Abstract

Jane Addams: Spirit in Action. By Louise E. Knight. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. Pp. xv, 334, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $28.95.) Jane Addams speaks to our times. In the last decade, after nearly a quarter century of neglect, biographers and philosophers have been turning to the founder of Hull House often in the belief that by exploring her works and words we may understand modern American democracy and the search for a just and peaceful world. Louise Knighfs biography tells us why we are attending to Addams. It offers a skillfully integrated story that weaves childhood, settlement house activism, progressive reform, feminism, and international peacemaking into a sensitive synthesis that presents a creative intellectual who learned from labor leaders and taught philosophers. Knight gives us a life in motion. As she follows Addams from her youth in small-town Illinois to Chicago, she sensitively recounts inner struggles with inherited privilege and the liberal Republican values of her esteemed father. This is a story of character as well as intellectual growth that continued from the Gilded Age to the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Elements of the story - the struggle with conventions regarding woman's place in society and the awakening to a role in the public sphere - are well known. Knight enriches the account by following Addams' gradual reconsideration of a broad range of absolute, unquestioned verities. While living with the poor and listening to radical friends such as Florence Kelley and to labor union organizers, she laid aside conventional views of poverty and came to understand that its roots lay within a political economic system. As she reconsidered marketplace economics, she awakened to the possibilities of government addressing social justice. Thus, she spoke against vicious intolerance against minorities, against campaigns often led by people from backgrounds like hers to deport Eastern European immigrants simply for their political opinions, against lynching and the disfranchisement of African Americans. At times she stumbled, as in her attempt to understand the national disgrace of lynching. Yet she continued to move beyond the confines of white privilege and eventually sat on the founding board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Knight reveals a mind in motion and establishes Addams as an intellectual who assisted in refashioning modern democratic thought. Newer Ideals of Peace (1907), so often overshadowed by Twenty Years at Hull House (1910), became a milestone in this development. This book reveals the distance Addams had moved from her father's world. Like other progressives, including her associate John Dewey, she invited her generation to reexamine the designs of the Founding Fathers that she interpreted as the embodiment of militarism. By militarism she meant a spirit of distrust, a predisposition to anticipate enemies before they appeared, and an ingrained reliance on power. …