With a curt gesture for the applause to stop, Jane Addams, the grand dame of the Chicago slums, told students of sociology from Iowa colleges last night that social workers are now on a professional parity with physicians and lawyers.
The [coeds] and collegians from Iowa City, Ames, Indianola, and other college towns, whose ambition it is to ameliorate the distress of the poor, had cheered her tumultuously with handclapping and with college yells. "What's the matter with Jane Addams?" they queried clamorously. "She's all right!" they answered in yells.
"We in America and Germany have perhaps carried social work forward furthest as an exact science," said Miss Addams. "But we must not assume that sociology elsewhere in the world is dormant.
"I traveled around the world recently, and was impressed profoundly by the keen interest in social work technique manifested in Ireland, in China, in [Czechoslovakia], and in India."
In India, Miss Addams found there is great bitterness toward the United States because the color line between Negroes and Caucasians has been so rigidly drawn.
"With no such line more than sketchily dividing the dark skinned Hindus and the British," she said, "they cannot understand why Americans have decided that the only practical solution of the race problem is to keep a chasm between the Negro and the white.
"Of course, they may not be aware that I, in common with some millions of other Americans, do not think the chasm is the right solution."
Miss Addams spoke jubilantly about the fact that [Czechoslovakia], a new and forward looking republic, established a legation at Washington with no military attaché, but a social worker attaché instead.
"That would naturally please me," said Miss Addams, who is a famed pacifist.
The sodded and thatched huts [page 2] of Ireland, beloved in song and story, are yielding to new houses being erected by the free state government, which is destroying the old farm domiciles as unhealthy.
"Any Irish tiller of the soil," she said, "can buy one of these government built houses and pay for it in anywhere from twelve to forty-two years. And they are tearing down the slums of Dublin."
Miss Addams told of the birth of social work in England, crediting it to an Oxford man and a group of college contemporaries who interested themselves in the poor of East London.
"Before they were through," she said, "they had forced journalists, politicians and writers to recognize that they must be familiar with the problems of the poor and work for their alleviation, or they would be crowded out of their callings by men who recognized their duty in this regard.
"Here in America, we take our democracy too much for granted. Our journalists and politicians, too, must learn the lesson this Oxford man taught England."
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