Sometime ago, I noticed in one of our daily papers, an item that the Jane Addams Triangle, of Worley School, held its first meeting Thursday evening and that my daughter, Miss Berenice Darling Converse, was elected reporter.
As Miss Addams was an old friend of mine, in Chicago, where we had worked together in mission and settlement work, I mailed her the clipping and advised her that Miss Berenice was my daughter and asked if she had anything to say or offer to the “Jane Addams Triangle” of Canton, Ohio. In reply, she sent me a pleasant letter and her picture to be presented to the club, which I showed to Professor Weeks, of Worley and Miss Reifsynder, who at once invited and urged me to give the club a talk regarding Miss Addams, because I know her so well.
Now, in place of the informal talk, which I had intended to give, I have reduced what I have to say to this written form, thinking that the members of the club might want a copy, which would be sort of a biography of Miss Addams, to be placed in their archives as their club carries the name of this most illustrious woman. [page 3]
Miss Jane Addams or as the Chicagoans like to refer to her, (and she has well earned her right to this title,)
“Chicago's Most Useful Citizen”
was born at Cedarville, Illinois, September 6, 1860.
Received her A.B. at Rockford College, Rockford Ill., 1881.
Spent two years in Europe, 1863-5.
Studied in Philadelphia, 1888.
Opened Hull House, jointly with Miss Ellen Gates Starr, in 1889.
Has ever since been head resident at Hull House, Chicago.
Inspector of streets and alleys in neighborhood of Hull House three years.
LL. D., University of Wisconsin, 1904.
President of National Conference of Charities and Corrections, 1909.
A.M., Yale University 1910.
Vice President of National Women's Suffrage Association, 1912.
Past Chairman of Women’s Peace Party.
Delegate to Peace Convention at The Hague, 1915.
President of the Women's International League For Peace and Freedom since it’s organization in 1915.
Delegate to Peace Convention, Zurich, 1917; Vienna, 1921; The Hague, 1922.
Started January 12, 1923, on a [six months’] tour of the world in interest of world peace. [page 4]
I first met Miss Addams in 1888, while connected with Armour Mission, Chicago, at that time or a little later, the largest Sunday School in the United States, save that of John Wanamaker, at Philadelphia. She worked with us at the Mission and later some of the officers of the Mission including the speaker assisted her in the work at Hull House which she and Miss Starr opened a year later.
Miss Addams’ early life was spent at Rockford, Ill. where she was one of quite a large family of children, and her early life was [molded] largely by her father who was a Quaker, her mother having died when she was a baby, and her father's second marriage did not occur until her eighth year. No one can study the life and character of Jane Addams without gaining an understanding, better than any mere editorial interpretation could ever give, or the high moral courage, the unswerving devotion to duty, the passion for self-sacrifice for the good of others that served to make this frail woman elect to pass her life in an unsavory quarter of a [huge] industrial city and to spend the inheritance which would have maintained her in comfortable idleness amid the beautiful things she loved in ministering to the needy of that district.
She tells the following incidents, which gave her, her first impression regarding poverty and people living in squalor. “I recall an incident which must have occurred before I was seven years old, for the mill in which my father transacted his business that day was closed in 1887. The mill stood in a neighboring town adjacent to its poorest quarter. Before then I had always seen the little city of ten thousand people with the admiring eyes of a country child, and it had never occurred to me that all its streets were not as bewilderingly attractive as the one which contained the glittering [toy shop] and the confectioner.
On that day I had my first sight of the poverty which implies squalor, and felt the curious distinction between the ruddy poverty of the country and that which even a small city presents in its shabbiest streets. I remember launching at my father the pertinent inquiry why people lived there in such horrid little houses so close together, and that after receiving his explanation, I declared with much firmness that when I grew up I should, of course, have a large house, but it would not be built among the other large houses, but right in the midst of horrid little houses like these.
“That curious sense of responsibility for carrying on the world's affair which little children often exhibit because “the old man clogs our earliest years,” I remember in myself in a very absurd manifestation. I dreamed night after night that every one in the world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the responsibility of making a wagon wheel. The village street remained as usual, the village blacksmith shop was “all there,” even a glowing fire upon the forge and the anvil in its customary place near the door, but no human being was within sight. They had all gone around the edge of the hill to the village cemetery, and I alone remained alive in the deserted world. I always stood in the same spot in the blacksmith shop, darkly pondering as to how to begin, and never once did I know how, although I fully realized that the affairs of the world [could] not be resumed until at least one wheel should be made and something started.
Every victim of nightmare is, I imagine, overwhelmed by an excessive sense of responsibility and consciousness of a fearful handicap in the effort to perform what is required; but perhaps never were the odds more heavily against “a [wonder] of the world” than in these reiterated dreams of mine, doubtless compounded in equal parts of a childish version of “Robinson Crusoe” and of the end-of-the-world predictions of the Second Adventists, a few of whom were found in the village.
The next morning would often find me, a delicate girl of six, with the further disability of a curved spine, standing in the doorway of the village blacksmith shop, anxiously watching the burly, red-shirted figure at work. I would store my mind with such details of the process of making wheels as I could observe, and sometimes I plucked up courage to ask for more. “Do you always have to sizzle the iron in water?” I would ask, thinking how horrid it would be to do. “Sure,” the good- natured blacksmith would reply “that makes the iron hard.” I would sigh heavily and walk away, bearing my responsibility as best I could, and this, of course, I confided to no one, for there is something too mysterious in the burden of “the winds that come from the fields of sleep” to be communicated, although it is at the same time too heavy a burden to be borne alone. [page 5]
My great veneration and pride in my father manifested itself in curious ways. On several Sundays, doubtless occurring in two and three different years, the Union Sunday School of the village was visited by strangers, some of those “strange people” who live outside a child’s realm, yet constantly thrill it by their close approach. My father taught the large Bible class in the left-hand [corner] of the church next to the pulpit, and to my eyes at least, was a most imposing figure in his Sunday frock coat, his fine head rising high above all the others. I imagined that the strangers were filled with admiration for this dignified person, and I prayed with all my heart that the ugly, pigeon-toed little girl, who’s crooked back obliged her to walk with her head held very much upon one side, would never be pointed out to these visitors as the daughter of this fine man. In order to lessen the possibility of a connection being made, on these particular Sundays I did not walk beside by father, although this walk was the great event of the week, but attached myself firmly to the side of my Uncle James Addams, in the hope that I should be mistaken for his child, or at least that I should not remain so conspicuously unattached that troublesome questions might identify an “Ugly Duckling” with her imposing parent.
“I do not know” she says, “that I commonly dwelt much upon my personal appearance, save as it thrust itself as an incongruity into my father's life, and in spite of unending evidence to the contrary, there were even black [moments] when I allowed myself to speculate as to whether he might not share the feeling. Happily, however, this specter was laid before it had time to grow into a morbid familiar by a very trifling incident. One day I met my father coming out of his bank on the main street of the neighboring city which seemed to me a veritable whirlpool of society and commerce. With a playful touch of exaggeration, he lifted his high and shining silk hat and made me an imposing bow. This distinguished public recognition, this totally unnecessary identification among a mass of “strange people” who couldn’t possibly know unless he himself made the sign, suddenly filled me with a sense of the absurdity of the entire feeling. It may not even then have seemed as absurd as it really was, but at least it seemed enough so to collapse or to pass into the limbo of forgotten specters."
Miss Addams also tells us that she remembers an admonition on one occasion, however, when, as a little girl of eight years, arrayed in a new cloak, gorgeous beyond anything she had ever worn before, she stood before her father for his approval, and was much chagrined by his remark that it was a very pretty cloak -- in fact so much prettier than any cloak the other little girls in the Sunday School had, that he would advise her to wear her old cloak, which would keep her quite as warm, with the added advantage of not making the other little girls feel badly. She complied with the request but I fear without inner consent, and certainly was quite without the joy of self-sacrifice as she walked soberly through the village street by the side of her counselor. She states her mind was busy, however, with the old question eternally suggested by the inequalities of the human lot. Only as we neared the church door did she venture to ask her father what could be done about it, receiving the reply that it might never be righted as far as clothes, the affairs of education and religion for instance, which we attended to when we went to school and church, and that it was very stupid to wear the sort of clothes that made it harder to have equality even there.
On another occasion, Miss Addams tells us of a conversation with her father upon the doctrine of [foreordination] which at one time very much perplexed her childish mind. After setting the difficulty before him and complaining that she could not make it out, although her best friend “understood it perfectly,” she settled down to hear his argument, having no doubt that he could make it quite clear. To her delighted surprise, for any intimation that their minds were on an equality lifted her high indeed, he said that he feared that he and she did not have the kind of mind that would ever understand [foreordination] very well and advised her not to give too much time to it; but he then proceeded to say other things of which the final impression left upon her mind was, that it did not matter much whether one understood [foreordination] or not, but that it was very important not to pretend to understand what you didn’t understand and that you must always be honest with yourself inside, whatever happened. Perhaps on the whole as valuable a lesson as the [Shorter] Catechism itself contains. [page 6]
She also tells us the following incident in her early life. "We erected an alter besides the stream, to which we for several years we brought all the snakes we killed during our excursions, not matter how long the toilsome journey which we had to make with a limp snake dangling between two sticks. I remember rather vaguely the ceremonial performed upon this altar one autumn day, when we brought as further tribute one out of every hundred black walnuts which we had rathered, and then poured over the whole a pitcherful of cider, fresh from the cider mill on the barn floor. I think we had also burned a favorite book or two upon this pyre of stones. The entire affair carried on with such solemnity was probably the result of one of those imperative impulses under whose compulsion children seek a ceremonial which shall express their sense of identification with man’s primitive life and their familiar kinship with the remotest past.
“I recall with great distinctness my first direct contact with death when I was fifteen years old: Polly was an old nurse who had taken care of my mother and had followed her to frontier Illinois to help rear a second generation of children. She had always lived in our house, but made annual visits to her cousins on a farm a few miles north of the village. During one of these visits, word came to us one Sunday evening that Polly was dying, and for a number of reasons I was the only person able to go to her.
I left the lamp-lit, warm house to be driven four miles through a blinding storm which every minute added more snow to the already high drifts, with a sense of [parting] upon a fateful errand. An hour after my arrival all of the cousin's family went downstairs to supper, and I was left alone to watch with Polly. One square, old-fashioned chamber in the lonely farmhouse was very cold and still, with nothing to be heard but the storm outside. Suddenly the great change [came]. I heard a feeble call of “Sarah,” my mother‘s name, as the dying eyes were turned upon me, followed by a curious breathing and in place of the fact familiar from my earliest childhood and associated with lonely household cares, there lay upon the pillow strange, august features, stern and withdrawn from all small affairs of life. That sense of solitude, of being unsheltered in a wide world of relentless and elemental forces which is at the basis of childhood's timidity and which is far from outgrown at fifteen seized irresistibly before I could reach the narrow stairs and summon the family from below.”
And she was driven here in the winter storm, the wind through the trees seemed laden with a passing soul and the riddle of life and death pressed hard; once to be young, to grow old and to die, everything came to that, and then a mysterious journey out into the Unknown. Did she mind faring forth alone? Would the journey perhaps end in something as familiar and natural to the aged and dying as life is to the young and living? Through all the drive and indeed throughout the night these thoughts are pierced by sharp worry, a sense of faithlessness because she had forgotten the text Polly had confided to her long before as the one from which she wished her funeral sermon to be preached. Her comfort as usual finally came from her father, who pointed out what was essential and what was of little avail even in such a moment as this, and while he was too wise to grow dogmatic upon the great theme of death, she felt a new fellowship with him because they had discussed it together.
At one time she recorded her protest against the efforts, so often made, to shield children and young people from all that has to do with death and sorrow, to give them a good time at all hazards on the assumption that the ills of life will come soon enough. Young people themselves often resent this attitude on the part of their elders; they feel set aside and belittled as if they were denied the common human experience. They too wish to climb steep stairs and to “eat their bread with tears” and they imagine that the problems of existence which is pressed upon them in pensive moments would be less insoluble in the light of these great happenings. [page 7]
She once related the following regarding her father who was no ordinary man. "An incident which stands out clearly in my mind as an exciting suggestion of the great world of moral enterprise and serious undertakings must have occurred earlier than this, for in 1872, when I was not yet 12 years old, I came into my father's room one morning to find him sitting beside the fire with [a newspaper] in his hand, [looking] very solemn; and upon my eager inquiry what had happened he told me that Joseph Mazzini was dead. I had never even heard Mazzini's name, and after being told about him I was inclined to grow argumentative, asserting that my father did not know him, that he was not an American, and that I could not understand why we should be expected to feel badly about him. It is impossible to recall the conversation with the complete breakdown of my cheap argument, but in the end I obtained that which I have ever regarded as a valuable possession, a sense of the genuine relationship which may exist between men who share large hopes and like desires, even though they differ in nationality, language, and creed; that those things count for absolutely nothing between groups of men who are trying to abolish slavery in America or to throw off Habsburg oppression in Italy. At any rate, I was heartily ashamed of my meager notion of patriotism, and I came out of the room exhilarated with the consciousness that impersonal and international relations are actual facts and not mere phrases. I was filled with pride that I knew a man who held converse with the great minds and who really sorrowed and rejoiced over happenings across the sea.
Miss Addams recalls the influence of Lincoln in her early life and says, “I suppose all the children who were born about the time of the Civil War have recollections quite unlike those of the children who are living now. Although I was but four and a half years old when Lincoln died, I distinctly remember the day when I found on our two white gate posts American flags companioned with black. I tumbled down on the harsh gravel walk in my eager rush into the house to inquire what they were “there for.” To my amazement I found my father in tears, something that I had never seen before, having assumed, as all children do, that grown-up people never cried.
The two flags, my father's tears and his impressive statement that the greatest man in the world had died, constituted my initiation, my baptism, as it were, into the thrilling and solemn [interests] of a world lying quite outside the two white gate posts. The great war touched children in many ways.
I recall a time of great perplexity in the summer of 1894, when Chicago was filled with federal [troops] sent there by the President of the United States, and their presence was resented by the governor of the state, that I walked the wearisome way from Hull-House to Lincoln Park -- for no cars were running regular at that moment of sympathetic strikes -- in order to look at and gain magnanimous counsel, if I might, from the marvelous St. Gaudens statue which had been but recently placed at the entrance of the park. Some of the Lincoln’s immortal words were cut into the stone at his feet, and never did a distracted town more sorely need the healing of “with charity towards all” then did Chicago at that moment, and the tolerance of the man who had won charity for those on both sides of “an [irrepressible] conflict.”
Of the many things written of my father in that sad August in 1881, when he died, the one I cared for most was written by an old political [friend] of his who was then editor of a great Chicago daily. He wrote that while there were doubtless many members of the Illinois legislature who during the great contracts of the war time and the demoralizing reconstruction days that followed, had never accepted a bribe, he wished to hear testimony that he personally had known but this one man who had never been offered a bribe because bad men were instinctively afraid of him.
I feel now the hot chagrin with which I recalled this statement during those early efforts of Illinois in which Hull-House joined, to secure the passage of the first factory legislation. I was told by the representatives of an informal association of manufacturers that if the residents of Hull-House would drop this nonsense about a sweat shop bill, of which they knew nothing, certain business men would agree to give fifty thousand dollars within two years to be used for any of the the philanthropy activities of the settlements. As the fact broken upon me that I was being offered a bribe, the shame was enormously increased by the memory of this statement. [page 8]
What had befallen the daughter of my father that such a thing could happen to her? The salutary reflections that it could not have occurred unless a weakness in myself had permitted it, withheld me at least from an heroic display of indignation before the two men making the offer, and I explained as gently as I could that we had no ambition to make Hull-House “the largest institution on the West Side,” but that we were much concerned that our neighbors should be protected from untoward conditions of work, and -- so much heroics, youth must permit itself -- if to accomplish this the destruction of Hull-House was necessary, that we would cheerfully sing a Te Deum on its ruins.
The good friend who had invited me to lunch at the Union League Club to meet two of his friend who wanted to talk over the sweat shop bill here kindly intervened, and we all hastened to cover over the awkward situation by that scurrying away from ugly morality which seems to be an obligation of social intercourse.
Regarding Hull-House which as we have noted, Miss Addams with her friend Miss Starr established and opened in 1889 and as President and Head Resident she has since remained.
Concerning Hull-House, it’s work and enterprises, I refer you to the Hull-House Year Book with its numerous illustrations and articles regarding its more than one hundred different Classes, Clubs and enterprises, which accompanies a copy of this address and which I believe, each of you would be profitably engaged in looking through, simply stating as you will note in your personal of the book that Hull-House was one of the first American Settlements (and now the largest with fine buildings, occupying more than an entire City block) was established in September, 1889. The original two residents, as they then stated, believed that the mere foothold of a house easily accessible, ample in space, hospitable and tolerant in spirit, situated in the midst of the large foreign colonies which so easily isolate themselves in American cities, would be in itself a serviceable thing for Chicago.
There was no legal organization for the first five years, but at the end of that time Hull-House was incorporated with a board of seven trustees. The objective of Hull-House, as stated in its charter, is as follows:
To provide a center for a higher civic and social life, to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago.
There is very much more that might be properly said and related regarding this many sided, broad-minded, sincerely active and really wonderful woman who is nationally and internationally known, but time will not permit.
Thus the Jane Addams Triangle Club honors itself in its name and its acceptance of Miss Addams letter and picture and her acknowledgement of and interest in this Club as “one of her family.”
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