American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  “Golden Rule” was an idealist, a utopian, a preacher who practiced what he preached. “In the ideal society that yet awaits us, in the co-operative commonwealth that is to be realized, in the kingdom of Heaven that is to be set up here on this earth,” he proclaimed, “there will be no patents, no railway passes, no reserved seats, no ‘free list,’ no franchises, or contracts or special privileges of any sort to enable a select few of the people to live off the toil of others.”

  In Cleveland, Tom L. Johnson, inventor, steel maker, street-railroad magnate, won election as mayor four times. During his eight years in office, he transformed the municipal government, but even more he transformed the people through a continuous educational campaign. In a circus tent big enough for 4,000 persons but small enough to be moved from neighborhood to neighborhood, he discussed public affairs and invited the audience to speak up and ask questions. Johnson too fought to limit utility franchises, urged city ownership of power and water, forced the trolley car fare down to three cents, expanded recreation areas and bathhouses, and protected prostitutes and madams against the police.

  “Only through municipal ownership,” Johnson said, “can the gulf which divides the community into a small dominant class on one side and the unorganized people on the other be bridged…. only by making men’s ambitions and pecuniary interests identical with the welfare of the city can civil warfare be ended.”

  These three leaders—and a few others like them but with less success—achieved not merely the reform of their cities but their reformation—their restoration as places of harmony and dignity for all the people, their rebirth as moral communities, their revitalization as forces for liberty and equality and fraternity. Why these three men of wealth and status should have ended up as radicals and socialists has long been a conundrum of history. They grew up in impoverished circumstances—but many a man had done so, only to grind down the poor in his own turn at the top. Perhaps their most remarkable common quality was their capacity to learn not only from experience and human contact but from reflection and reading. Pingree read Washington Gladden, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Albert Shaw, Richard T. Ely; Jones was deeply influenced by Tolstoy, Bellamy, and Whitman; Johnson happened on a copy of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty during a train trip and it launched him on his reform career. For these men, intellectual leadership and moral leadership were inseparable.

  In the final assessment of the leadership and reformation of the industrial cities, though, these men stand as exceptions, almost as curiosities. Nothing—not leadership nor morality nor beautification nor technology nor governmental reorganization—nothing stemmed for long the overpowering force of industrialization. Neither the political machines nor the welfare agencies, neither philanthropy nor radical leaders, could cope with the tide of economic and social and psychological misery that enveloped tens of millions of migrants and immigrants. Neither the organized government of politicians nor the private government of capitalists could plan ahead, raise enough money, act comprehensively and persistently enough to overcome deeply rooted urban malaise and disarray.

  The failure of the cities, however, dramatized the need for national action. And the ideas incubated in the city saloons and other forums, in universities and churches, in election contests and editorial chambers, would provide much of the content and controversy of the nationwide conflicts that would herald a new age of modernity in thought and progressivism in politics.

  Women: The Progressive Cadre

  The brilliant political leaders who attracted national attention during the progressive era tended to obscure the remarkable array of women who emerged around the turn of the century, a group committed to an expansive view of women’s social, economic, political, and sexual rights—and to action.

  Julia Lathrop, descendant of Illinois pioneers and a graduate of Vassar, accepted Governor Altgeld’s appointment in 1892 as the first woman member of the Illinois Board of Public Charities, and proceeded to visit the 102 county farms or almshouses to see the indigent, the epileptic, the insane, the delinquent children, and the rest of the unwanted, heaped together in those dreary and forlorn institutions. Florence Kelley, daughter of the famed William “Pig Iron” Kelley of Pennsylvania, graduated from Cornell, studied at the University of Zurich after being barred from pursuing law at the University of Pennsylvania because she was a woman, translated Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England. Returning home a socialist, she investigated tenement workshops as Altgeld’s chief Illinois factory inspector—the first woman to hold that post. Emma Goldman emigrated from Konigsberg, worked in a Rochester clothing plant and a New Haven corset factory, embraced anarchism after the trial of the Haymarket Square workingmen, helped her lover Alexander Berkman plan the attack upon Henry Frick, and spent a year in prison for inciting a riot. These and a host of other indomitable women would soon be followed by a new generation with many causes: Grace and Edith Abbott, Alice Hamilton, Margaret Sanger, among many others.

  Dazzling among even this galaxy of leaders was the incomparable Jane Addams. Daughter of a liberal-minded politician and businessman, she was broadly educated: Rockford Seminary, a term at the Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia, lengthy European travels that included prowls through the slums of East London and Naples and a visit to Toynbee Hall, a community of young Englishmen seeking to uplift the poor through benevolence and culture. Returning home, she and her Rockford classmate Ellen Gates Starr established their own settlement house amid the tenements and factories, the immigrant Irish and Germans and Russians and Italians and Polish Jews, the nine churches and 250 saloons in the 19th Ward surrounding Chicago’s South Halsted Street.

  The old mansion on Halsted, with its big drawing room, high ceilings, and fancy cornices, soon was ministering to the needs of the poor it had long excluded, providing relief, food, medical care, community kitchen, an employment bureau, day nurseries. But Addams and her friends sensed that the poor wanted much more, that as their basic needs were satisfied, they increasingly craved comradeship, group activities, discussions, books, art, music, theater. Hull-House had its Women’s Club, Community Kitchen, gymnasium, day nursery, Labor Museum, and the Hull-House Players, a pioneer in the Little Theatre movement. Upper and lower class were thrown intimately together. After the Women’s Club heard a Christian Scientist urge her listeners to think of the smell of pine trees amid the setting sun rather than the stink of garbage at a nearby nauseous river, a German woman who had lived close to the stream rose to exclaim: “Vell, all I can say is if dot woman say dot river smell good den dere must be something de matter with dot woman’s nose!”

  Hull-House soon became a center of intellectual controversy and excitement. Arguments raged over politics, architecture, art, religion. To its Plato Club came John Dewey to lead sessions on Greek philosophy. Governor Altgeld and the rising young attorney Clarence Darrow dropped by. Beatrice Webb, visiting the house with her husband Sidney, persuaded Jane Addams to try a cigarette for the first time; it was also the last. Hull-House was also a training institution for hosts of women who would move out into other settlement houses, into government, academe, philanthropy. Julia Lathrop worked at Hull-House, as did Alice Hamilton. Florence Kelley would never forget arriving at the house on a snowy December morning, her children around her, to be greeted by Addams holding the cook’s plump baby in her arms while keeping an eye on a lively Italian girl whose mother was working in a local sweatshop.

  Addams seemed to serve in every role—as intellectual leader, project developer, fund raiser, morale booster, “community relations” manager. Her most ticklish outside relationship was with local ward boss Alderman Johnny Powers, who at election time liked to drive his bandwagon to the polling places, including the one at Hull-House, while the band played “Nearer, My God to Thee” and the boss tossed cigars to the men and nickels to the children. A smooth broker of jobs, favors, permits, ordinances, and money, Powers could not understand why Addams, whom he could not but admire, refused t
o work with him, even to accept his proffered favors. “Miss Addams is always O.K. with me,” Powers would complain, “but I wish just once she’d ask me and not fight me all the time.” But Addams rivaled any boss in her readiness to help the desperate. When a young woman, ostracized by her neighbors because she was bearing a child out of wedlock, went into labor unattended as no one wanted to call a doctor and risk being stuck with the bill, Addams and Lathrop hurried to the tenement to serve as midwives.

  As Hull-House expanded to thirteen buildings and a staff of sixty-five, Addams seemed to expand intellectually as well, broadening her activities to encompass virtually the whole gamut of social and political reform. She was active in the National Child Labor Committee, the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, the National Playground Association, the National Consumers’ League, the American Association for Labor Legislation, the National Tuberculosis Association, and, not least, the National Women’s Trade Union League, as well as suffrage organizations and other reform efforts. Somehow she found time to write ten books and several hundred articles. She was a frequent and compelling public speaker, and although not an especially original thinker, she had, according to biographer Allen Davis, “the ability to see meaning and purpose in the confusing events of her day and to communicate that meaning to a wide audience.”

  In time, Addams became almost sanctified, evoking comparisons to Joan of Arc or the Virgin Mary, a humble woman serving the lowly and sharing their poverty. In fact, Addams remained an upper-middle-class woman who enjoyed good living, especially in her travels with her close companion Ellen Gates Starr, and happily accepted the lavish entertainment offered by her wealthy friends—though she usually took the opportunity to beg them for funds.

  Still, Addams was only the brightest star in that large galaxy, and it was the social enterprise and imagination of thousands of women leaders in hundreds of reform efforts that produced betterment across the nation, rivaling that of Hull-House. This leadership cadre had its roots in the intense social needs arising out of the economic malaise of the 1880s and early 1900s—especially urban conditions of unemployment, crowded tenements, low wages, high infant mortality, and increasing numbers of working women with small children. The leadership was shaped and stimulated by the sharpening ideologies of the nineties, the rising populist and progressive protest movements, the general quickening of political excitement. But the direct source of that leadership was a cadre of middle- and upper-class women who were typically college-educated, well read and traveled, and from a secular reform background.

  These women were often thwarted in their career aspirations, such as law—Julia Lathrop worked for ten years in her father’s law office—or business, were often unmarried and wanted to remain so, and usually had access to wealthy benefactors, such as Julius Rosenwald in Chicago. Since professionally trained women were generally excluded from the upper ranks of university faculties, in Joan Zimmerman’s view, they naturally turned to new areas where they could use their expertise. And many of these women shared middle-class feelings of morality and guilt about their privileged status compared to that of the urban masses. Hofstadter noted that as early as 1892 Jane Addams lectured on “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements,” explaining how “the sheltered and well-brought-up young Americans of her generation, reared on the ideal of social justice and on Protestant moral imperatives,” had become troubled over their own sincerity and usefulness.

  These forces lent a certain tone and thrust to women’s reform leadership. Settlement houses administered to a variety of human needs, not merely the economic, and they did so by seeking to satisfy them directly or “maternally,” rather than depending on the needy to conduct their own struggle for realization of their own hopes, expectations, and demands. Workers’ movements and organizations as such—especially trade unions—appealed directly to workers’ economic interests and assumed that this motive power would accelerate “labor’s demand for more.” This is not to say that women leaders opposed unions—what good progressive could do that?—or that unions were not also concerned with comradeship, education, and summer camps. Indeed, leaders like Florence Kelley and Jane Addams also invaded the political arena to work for laws protecting women and children especially. But there was, on their part, a womanly caring for all the material, social, aesthetic, and self-fulfillment needs of their “charges” that went beyond the merely economic.

  These broad concerns encouraged woman leaders to act in a diversity of fields. The settlement house idea itself spread to many cities. In the early nineties Lillian Wald, of an affluent Rochester family, moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan with a determination to use her training in nursing to serve especially the needs of immigrants. With financial aid from the Schiffs and Loebs and other wealthy clans, she established the Henry Street Settlement, a large nursing facility that also offered classes in cooking and sewing, art and dancing. Appointed to the Mayor’s Pushcart Commission, Wald extended her concerns to playgrounds, parks, housing, and the regulation of sweatshops as her social sympathies compelled her to embrace ever broader reform movements. But the central effort of the ‘ Henry Street Settlement remained nursing, in its broadest dimensions, as Wald and her colleagues pressed vigorously for the extension of public nursing into schools and homes.

  Another woman’s movement focused on a very specific threat to mothers and children—the saloon. Founded in 1874, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had grown rapidly during the next quarter century, reaching a membership of 300,000 by century’s end. It was the largest woman’s organization in the country, at least ten times larger than the suffrage organizations of the day, which were emerging from a political dry spell. The WCTU had not been concerned only with drunkards and their power to abuse their families and even grab the earnings of wife and children, without legal redress. Despite Carrie Nation’s notoriety as a “saloon-wrecker,” the women of the WCTU had studied and agitated on issues of labor reform, prostitution, health and hygiene, prison reform, needs of black women, drug use, international arbitration, and world peace. These broad interests were in part the product of the gifted leadership of Frances Willard, a onetime college president who moved into the temperance legions and governed with the inspired motto, “Do Everything.” With her death in 1898, the movement drifted back to its original emphasis on drinking.

  Margaret Sanger, the boldest of the women’s leaders, confronted the most intimate and controversial question of all—sexuality and reproduction. A number of influences combined to convert this slight, mild-looking young woman into a dauntless crusader: a marriage at nineteen that ended in divorce; her friendship with Emma Goldman and militant radicals in the Industrial Workers of the World; her association with Malthus-oriented French syndicalists during a Paris visit in 1913. Returning to the United States the next year, she established a monthly called the Woman Rebel, advocated “birth control” (a term she coined), and aroused her foes even more by allying with anarchists, woman liberationists, and assorted radicals. After the federal government indicted her and her journal under the Comstock anti-obscenity act of 1873, she fled to England for almost a year, fearlessly returned to open the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, and was arrested and jailed.

  Sanger would not be silenced. “The basic freedom of the world is woman’s freedom,” she wrote in Woman and the New Race. “A free race cannot be born of slave mothers. A woman enchained cannot choose but give a measure of that bondage to her sons and daughters. No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body.”

  As in the case of all strong leaders, these women divided potential followers as well as uniting them. Millions of low-income Americans, including hosts of women who desperately needed her counsels, feared and hated Margaret Sanger and all she stood for. Millions of American workers—including some women—who liked their beer and wine and the harder stuff, loathed the WCTU saloon closers. Many men—and a few women—opposed woman’s suffrage.
Few objected to the settlement houses, for they seemed caring and unthreatening, but some low-income women scorned the middle-class maternalists as members of what one woman trade unionist called the “mink brigade.”

  When would working women take matters into their own hands, build their own movement, choose their own leaders? At century’s end, unionization of women, after many setbacks, seemed poised for a takeoff. They were moving by the tens of thousands out of farm labor and domestic service into occupations far easier to unionize. Women employed in non-agricultural pursuits had more than doubled, from 2 million to 4.3 million, between 1880 and 1900. But hardly 3 percent of those women were unionized by century’s end. With populist and progressive winds blowing, surely women’s trade unionism would escalate during the decade ahead.

  It was not to be. Women’s efforts to join men’s unions or organize their own seemed to meet all the past furies, only redoubled. Trade unions themselves seemed weighted against women. Their leaders often held their meetings in saloons, amid the stench of cigar smoke and stale beer. They resented interference by women, suggesting they should stick to home and hearth. They charged high dues. They feared low-wage competition from women workers just off the farm or out of the kitchen. It seemed to some women workers that some unionists were organized as much against them as against the bosses.