MISS ADDAMS: When I was asked to speak on this club motto, Madam Chairman, and Ladies and Gentlemen, I felt that it was quite safe to accept, because, of course, I could say anything and ramble anywhere I pleased and no one could hold me up.
But it is true that those early founders, of whom we are so proud and so happy to have them with us, at least tonight, were nearer to a devout belief, I think, in this motto of ours, that "Nothing human is alien to me," than any of us are now.
In the first place, they were nearer to the [page 2] great liberal movements of the nineteenth century. Their own fathers and mothers, and in some cases, they themselves, had helped in the uprooting of that great evil of chattel slavery, and they were rather "heady" about it afterwards, as they well might be, getting rid of something as old as the history of the human race.
They were also in that period of pride in the public schools which followed in the third or fourth decade after their organization a belief that if the republic was to endure the electorate must be educated and people took up the whole question of wider education, of an education for everybody, men, women, and children, with a certain enthusiasm which perhaps the world had never seen before.
They were also earlier in that movement to which Mrs. Morrisson has referred, which in those days we called "women’s rights," and they had the suspicion that the status of women was changing, and whether she got the vote or not, she was going to be quite a different factor in society from that which she had ever been before, and that whole period had something very youthful about it.
It liked to adopt mottos and it liked to talk about them, and it did more or less act upon them. There was a certain naivete, if you please, which I suspect we might well envy.
Now as one goes over the achievements of that [page 3] Woman's Club of ours, one realizes that the medium into which they threw their efforts was quite as important as the enthusiasm of the actors themselves, and this social feeling, this enthusiastic hope which moved over all of the new cities, especially in America, was theirs, and they made the best of it.
I made out a little list this afternoon of what they did in the public schools, and it is so long I am going to read it.
"In connection with the Public Schools of Chicago they insisted upon women members for the Board of Education, they initiated kindergartens, manual training and domestic science, penny lunches, vacation schools, and high school libraries. They secured the first compulsory education law," and they were very eager for its enforcement. I remember some of the rounds we used to have.
They helped establish the School Children's Aid Society and the Public School Art Society. They got shoes for the children, and the other gave them something good to look at. They promoted the first night classes, the earliest use of a [public] school as a social center, the first visiting teacher, and the establishment of the John Worthy school for delinquent boys.
Under the departments of philanthropy and reform almost as a test of the sincerity of their motto they [page 4] secured night matrons in police stations, a jail school for boys, the appointment of women physicians in the state hospitals for the insane, a psychotic director in the Bridewell. The Woman's Club got hold of it about ten years ago.
They founded the Protective Agency for Women and Children; they opened work rooms in a lodging house for women after the World's Fair, which has since grown to be the Sarah Hackett lodging house, and they did the same work on a larger scale during the World War. They bore a lion's share in the establishment of the Juvenile Court, and in the care and probation of its wards during the first ten years of its existence. They aided in the establishment of Glenwood, and in the reorganization of the Industrial School and Park Ridge, and so on, indefinitely.
I am not going to only talk about the reform and philanthropic things, because under the various departments from the very beginning there has been serious study of what is covered by the terms of Philosophy (always beginning with a capital P), Literature and Art, and among the earliest lecturers were John Fiske and Thomas Davidson.
I remember the first time I ever heard Thomas Davidson. I was told all about him by a member of the Club, and the things she said he was teaching seemed to be too good to be true. He did teach them and he found no such docile pupils anywhere outside of a few he said he found in St. Louis. [page 5]
A sustained interest was maintained in the Egypt Research Committee, and they gave actual money for excavations in Egypt twenty-five years ago, and they later made a collection which they presented to the Haskell Museum.
In a list of donations made throughout the fifty years, [totaling] almost half a million dollars, goodly sums have gone for the mural decoration of the McKinley High School and Art Institute Scholarships.
Some of the most distinguished authors of the nation and of England have spoken before the Club, and have been responsible for continuous classes in cultured themes and for establishing scholarships in the universities.
I could go indefinitely out of my own mind. I recall once when I was very much put to it to recite all of these things. I was acting as a juror in social economics at the World Exposition in Paris in the department of Social Economy. It was a very charming little building put by the Trades Unions of Paris, without any contractor. The Trades Union were very proud of the building, and we forgave some few inconveniences, because we, too, were very proud. I tried very hard to get a grand prix, or at least a gold medal for the Chicago Woman's Club. The honor of my sex was involved, and so I would tell to this rather bewildered committee of Frenchmen, Russians, Belgians, Germans, and one Italian, as best I could, the things which the Woman's Club had done, but [page 6] the more I told the more bewildered they became. Finally, in the very best Latin I could muster I repeated the motto and let it go at that.
If I should turn a minute from the history, I would like to suggest this: That it is inspiring, but it is of the past, and if we look about us to see in what direction the Club can next exert its interpretive skill and unfailing human interest, I suppose the most obvious thing would be an understanding of our last Constitutional Amendment. It has among other things, decentralized a huge industry and brought about a reversal of the ordinary processes of industrial growth which naturally proceed from the domestic hearth to the factory.
I believe, myself, if we could analyze the situation, and Chicago is a wonderful laboratory in which an analysis might be made, that something could be done to separate the impossible from the possible, and perhaps clarify the situation. At any rate, it puts the Woman's Club upon its mettle.
Much the same competition is now going on between small rival stills as was at one time found between small rival wells in the Pennsylvania oil fields. For instance, there is displayed much the same type of ruthlessness resulting in destruction of machinery, in terrorism, and even in murder. [page 7]
A machine industry by going back into its domestic beginnings has naturally fallen into the hands of those who had never gotten very far from the simpler domestic type. Industry has also attached to itself, unhappily, shrewd business men trained in an age of complicated commercialism with its inevitable demand for protection.
We have grown accustomed during the last decades to the idea that great vested interests connected with the manufacturing of alcoholic drinks bought to bear continuous pressure on Congress and very often on the State Legislatures as well. We at one time had our own "whiskey ring" here in Illinois, as we all remember, but the pressure formerly brought to bear on Washington and Springfield has now been transferred to the simplest unit of government -- the patrolman on his beat. Special officers detailed to enforce an unpopular law are subjected to temptations of the most flagrant corruption, -- the entire law, apparently, and again we are reminded of a Nineteenth Century situation for many of the freed slaves found themselves in a midst of a population of former slaves, who, theoretically, were scarcely less free than they had been before. Many of them were gradually deprived of the franchise given them for their own defense, yet no one could say the emancipation was not to the great advantage of the human conscience nor that the two generations even under pseudo-freedom have not had an enormous advantage [page 8] over their forebears.
In addition to the decentralization of the industry business opportunities of an unprecedented scale have been opened. Simple peasants have an opportunity to make money such as they had never even dreamed of before. It is not difficult to understand the frail barrier which the mere fact of illegality interposes and sometimes breaks down, the spirit of adventure which is evoked and is in a sense repaid.
We had an example the other day of a lad of sixteen who had made $6,000 driving what he called a "booze wagon" between Joliet and Chicago, and he has now taken his adventurous money and is going to go to a university. (Laughter)
All sorts of things are involved in the situation. Now I feel that for the Chicago Woman's Club this is no more complicated, no more difficult to understand than many other things they have attempted to understand and attempted to analyze, and I beg of them, before they join one party or the other party in relation to it, and in relation to its future, that they make some sort of an attempt and analysis of this situation and perhaps we will be of some service once more to this loved city of ours.
I remember, Madam Chairman, the first address I ever made before the Chicago Woman's Club. It was a little more than thirty-seven years ago. It was thirty-eight, I think, to be accurate, and I talked about Toynbee Hall in London and [page 9] the hopes that we had of establishing something similar in Chicago, and I said in that lingo which was then so new, and has since become rather tiresome, I am afraid, "We are going to live in a quarter of the city and do what we can for the inhabitants there, elevation by contact," and some of those things we said which we can hardly repeat any more, they are so old and worn out, and when I had finished, one of the beloved founders, Mrs. Harvey, arose and said she would like to tell a little story: That when she was a little girl she had been playing in her grandmother's garden and at one end of the garden she found a large, ugly toad, all by himself, and as she went on playing during the day she finally found at the other end of the garden a very small, little toad looking quite lonesome, all by himself, and so she procured a stick, and by dint of much poking, and some persuading, she finally got the small toad into the vicinity of the large toad, when to her horror and surprise, the large toad opened his mouth and swallowed the little toad.
Now she predicted -- she didn’t make any comments on this story, but her prediction was quite obvious, and it was very good for us. It was very good for us in the beginning, and it had been wholesome all the way along for many of the philanthropies of Chicago to have had a good sound set of women to whom they would repair, before whom they could lay their little plans and from whom they could sometimes receive [page 10] a little castigation, or at least a little something that was not altogether flattery in its attitude, and that bittersweet tang to the Club, that willingness to see life as it is in spite of its somewhat overwhelming and overpowering motto, I hope, Madam President, is going to remain with us during the next fifty years, for the next thirty-eight years, as the case may be, and I wish to speak only as one member out of many who have found help and refreshment from the Club during many years when I say that it has meant to us the sense of home, and home where the reception was not only warm and kindly, but also discriminating. (Applause)
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