Jane Addams Makes a Point
Miss Jane Addams packed a volume into a paragraph when at the meeting of the National Federation of Social Settlements she said:
"Fifteen years ago those of us who felt that child labor, for instance, could be better controlled by the federal government than by the states simply went about saying so, and nobody questioned our sincerity. But if you say it now you are a Bolshevik."
Miss Addams, in spite of a record for self-denying social service that has earned for her the respect and the gratitude of multiudes, has experienced in her own career precisely what she alludes to in that little statement.
What she is today she has been for a third of a century. What she was when she began her famous work in Hull House that is she today. Yet what she then said she may not say today without being made the target of abuse and criticism. The charge has not been in Miss Addams. Those who fear their interests might be hurt by her words and deeds have seized upon the epithets which the Russian revolution has provided and used them against her. Ideas that before the world war nobody considered "dangerous" or "revolutionary" are [labeled] "bolshevistic" and some of the mud sticks. That is the whole truth about a considerable amount of the recent propaganda against Jane Addams, and this probably is true of some other Americans who today are suspect, and yet are not conscious themselves of any shift in their own aims or ideals.
Comments