by John Kaag
Carol and I tucked ourselves under the eaves and inspected the lower shelves. Just as Jennifer had promised: a pile of first editions of every book Jane Addams had ever published, each flyleaf bearing a personal dedication to the author’s benefactor. News clippings from the opening of Hull House and Addams’s interactions with luminaries from Leo Tolstoy to Teddy Roosevelt were neatly stacked around the books, interspersed by inventories, letters, and settlement house contracts—a hidden shrine to what philosophy had once been able to accomplish. Addams had been living proof that freedom could be far-reaching and should be exercised in responsible, loving ways.
Addams opened Hull House at the age of twenty-nine and did most of her philanthropic work and writing after she turned forty. She was prolific, writing ten books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of letters. In 1908 The Ladies’ Home Journal named her “America’s First Woman.” Five years later the New York Twilight Club (a literary club founded by Twain and Emerson, among others) sent three thousand ballots to representative Americans asking them who they thought was the “most socially useful American.” Addams won by a landslide, handily beating out Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Edison. She went on in 1931, at the age of seventy, to become the first American woman, and the only American philosopher, to win the Nobel Prize.
I’d learned most of what I knew about Addams from my friend Marilyn Fischer, a professor at the University of Dayton and a careful scholar, fastidious in all the right ways, who insisted that one needed to know the history and culture of a time in order to understand its philosophy. And she knew the history of American philosophy. “Of all the American thinkers you like to talk about, John,” Marilyn once observed, “Jane Addams has the strongest claim to national and even international superstar status.” But today Addams remains only slightly more famous than Fanny Parnell. Both women ended up in the attic at West Wind.
Born in 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois, Addams started off doing what most young women born in tiny midwestern towns did, which is to say not much. She contracted tuberculosis when she was four, and it twisted her spine in all sorts of unnatural ways. Despite this difficulty, she had great expectations for her life, primarily constructed from the Dickensian fiction that she devoured. For most of her childhood, however, these expectations remained the stuff of fantasy. Addams was bright enough to aspire to attending Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, but her father, John Addams, a wealthy agricultural businessman who thought that women should stay close to home, didn’t like that idea at all. So his daughter went to Rockford Female Seminary, right down the road. This, an evangelical training ground for overseas missionaries that didn’t even award proper college degrees, wasn’t the place for Addams. She initially hoped that her stellar grades would convince her father that the seminary was too easy for her, that she was ready for a real education in the East. These hopes were promptly dashed, and Jane was left to her own devices at Rockford, where she struggled to convince her teachers to act as if they were at a respectable college. But in 1881, after she completed her course work at Rockford, Addams’s father died. Jane worshipped her father, but his death meant an inheritance of $50,000 and her freedom. She, along with the rest of her family, left Illinois at once. In Philadelphia, at the Women’s Medical College, Addams pursued her dream of going into medicine, a profession that appealed because it would let her live among the poor. Although she’d objected to the missionary mentality of Rockford—overbearing, insensitive, proselytizing—its ethos of self-sacrifice was deeply ingrained in her psyche. Her studies went extremely well, but she grew increasingly dissatisfied with the process of dissecting life in order to make it better. She realized that many of the problems of modern medicine had nothing to do with biology and much to do with the social and psychological conditions of patients that many doctors of her time had failed to understand.
In 1882 Addams slipped down a path charted by Thoreau, O’Reilly, James, and Royce by having a serious mental breakdown. It was bad enough that she spent time at Weir Mitchell’s hospital in Philadelphia. Mitchell was famous—some might say infamous—for the “rest cure” he prescribed to late-Victorian women to treat their “hysteria,” a catchall diagnosis that ranged from a mild case of being “uppity” all the way to full-blown schizophrenia. But the treatment was always the same: relax, put your mind at ease, do as little as humanly possible. The “rest cure” was somewhat effective for some overworked women, but most middle-class neuroses were not the effects of hard labor, but rather a result of repression and oppression. Rest was the last thing in the world that bright, ambitious women such as Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (who resided at Hull House for a time, and whose “The Yellow Wallpaper” documented the absurdity of this supposed “cure”) needed. They wanted, more than anything, to have something meaningful to do. When Mitchell’s treatment didn’t work for Addams, she returned to Illinois, acting on the prevalent but often mistaken belief that being closer to home can settle the nerves. When that didn’t work, she left for Europe. Again, to get some more rest.
By the time Addams reached London in 1883, she was desperate to escape the mind-numbing pleasantness of relaxation; and the plight of London’s workers—“pestilence-stricken multitudes”—gave this midwesterner something to do. At first, according to Addams, she “went about London almost furtively, afraid to look down narrow streets and alleys lest they disclose again this hideous human need.” But she eventually conquered her fears and realized—in a way that many philosophers never do—that the things that frighten us the most are usually the ones that deserve our greatest attention. Addams’s was not an academic interest in the general character of urban poverty, but an ongoing response to its concrete and horrible particularities. She quickly came to the opinion that “the first generation of college women had … developed too exclusively the power of acquiring knowledge and of merely receiving impressions; that somewhere in the process of ‘being educated’ they had lost that simple and almost automatic response to the human appeal, that old healthful reaction resulting in activity from the mere presence of suffering or of helplessness.”
This was a very early articulation of what the pragmatist John Dewey, a close friend of Addams’s, would later term the “philosopher’s fallacy,” a pernicious case of overintellectualization. Abstractions and generalizations were inappropriately substituted for the flesh-and-blood realities of individuals and their communities. For Addams, London wasn’t the place for sentimental abstraction but for moral activity and social activism. There was no better place to do that kind of work than at the newly opened Toynbee Hall, the first of many settlement houses in London. Toynbee Hall served the working poor of London’s East End and was meant to provide some much-needed guidance to a community that was on the verge of being irretrievably lost. Addams’s frequent visits gave her an understanding of the settlement movement, and she began to envision how it might take shape in an American context. First of all, it would have to lose its Christian trappings. It also wouldn’t be formed strictly around working men. Masculine hierarchies were largely responsible for the economic inequality and political violence of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so a solution to injustice would have to be found elsewhere. As an alternative, she founded a relatively egalitarian community where men and women worked and lived side by side.
Hull House opened its doors in Chicago in 1889 and immediately became a testing ground for social progressives of the nineteenth century, a place where diverse urban populations could not just live in proximity, but also cohabitate and thrive. Addams’s house would turn into the intellectual and political epicenter of the Windy City. Today, activists and social workers are occasionally invited to give lectures at distinguished universities, but in the 1890s, faculty from the University of Chicago were invited to come to speak at Hull House. John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, two of the most famous members of the Chicago school of pragmatism, were regular visitors to Addams’s community. Both of these men, following Plato,
took education as the starting place for political reform. Education was not something that you “get,” the way one gets a diploma or a jelly doughnut. It is something you experience, a process you live through—spring training for the rest of your life. Dewey, Mead, and William James came to think of Addams’s reform movement as pragmatism in action.
Hull House was built at the crossroads between theory and practice, a place where ideas could be implemented and tested by a diverse set of individuals facing common problems. Throughout the 1890s Addams led open philosophical discussions with residents of Hull House, most of them women. One of these seminars had centered on Royce’s The Religious Aspect of Philosophy. Royce had spent his entire career talking about the need for loyal and reverent communities, but Addams worked tirelessly to actually maintain one. By the turn of the century she was widely regarded as one of the best academic sociologists in the United States, and she used sociological hypotheses to negotiate the interpersonal dynamics of Hull House. She was empirical and experimental and, above all, sensitive to the situation of her fellow community members. James, who shared this intellectual sensibility at least in principle, read Addams’s first book, Democracy and Social Ethics, with “deep satisfaction” and claimed that “[i]t seems to me one of the great books of our time.” Dewey’s Democracy and Education, which argued for the vital link between a free society and education, stemmed from his time at Hull House, and his Liberalism and Social Action was dedicated “to the memory of Jane Addams.” Dewey’s daughter, Jane, was named after her.
In the fallout of my divorce I’d reached out to my friend Marilyn—who’d helped me understand Hull House—for a bit of moral support. Appropriately for someone who’d dedicated her life to reading Addams, Marilyn listened to me patiently for months, her empathy embodying Addams’s belief that “sympathetic knowledge is the only way of approach to any human problem.” I whined and sniveled and went on and on about the frustrations of being alive and the inescapable hellishness of living with others. After too many days of my Sartrean bellyaching, Marilyn wrote me a little note, two quick lines that made all the difference: “Not long after my first child was born I knew in my bones that I could not die, that my daughter’s life depended on my being responsible every single minute. Existential angst turned into a luxury item enjoyed by those who did not have ground-level responsibility for others’ lives.” And that was the end of my whining. At first it sparked into righteous indignation but soon died down into acceptance and finally admiration. Maybe I didn’t have to have kids—that still seemed like a total impossibility—but perhaps my life would be more bearable if I didn’t go it alone, if I was willing to be responsible for others.
Addams’s books—from Twenty Years at Hull-House to Newer Ideals of Peace—should never have been packed away and separated from the rest of the history of philosophy. Carol and I, without even saying a word to each other, packed them up and prepared to do something that the Hockings had avoided for a century—take them downstairs and put them with the rest of “Grandfather’s books.”
I KNEW A PHOENIX
By the time we lugged the last of the books to the first floor, the sun was directly overhead, so we broke for lunch. Afterward Carol packed her things to go for a walk, and I headed up the stairs one last time.
There was one more woman in the attic: Agnes Hocking. I wanted to think that Agnes’s books had once been intermingled with Ernest’s, but even if they had, by the time I came across them, stuffed haphazardly in Budweiser boxes at the far end of the attic, they’d been forsaken for many years. Her jottings and letters were upstairs as well, and although I thought that she’d been the one to initially organize the attic, she’d taken great care with all the family’s papers except her own.
I remembered Jill’s remark that growing up at West Wind, surrounded by her grandfather’s treasures, she’d always been interested in philosophy but had never felt at liberty to pursue it. Apparently it simply wasn’t considered an option for the “gentler sex.” In the 1980s Jill’s father, Richard, had carefully copied and collated Ernest’s letters, eventually paying Harvard no small amount of money to house the collection. I imagined Richard visiting the archivists at Harvard, pronouncing “Father” with the same strange mix of reverence and terror that the granddaughters said “Grandfather.” Saving Ernest’s papers was, for Richard, a monumental act of filial piety.
In a telling act of self-effacement (or humility), Richard, himself a proficient philosopher who’d had a long career at Emory University, placed his own books in the lower barn in the field below the library. This was the real place where things came to perish. If the scat was any indication, it was home to generations of mice, raccoons, and porcupines. A structure at once enormous and rickety, it was supported by hulking wooden beams that were in turn secured by a massive reinforcing chain. The chain wrapped around the rafters, and the internal supports appeared to be the only thing holding the barn together. Inside the building was a rusted-out Model-T, dilapidated farm equipment, and enough waterlogged antique furniture to furnish another West Wind. Plus seven thousand of Richard’s moldy books. The hierarchy was clear: William Ernest Hocking’s books were in the library, Richard’s were in the barn, and Agnes’s were in the attic.
Had Agnes had a library of her own, it would have been full of poetry and fairy tales. When Plato, in The Republic, says that the poet is a “light and winged and holy thing,” he may as well be describing Agnes Hocking. By many accounts, Agnes was quite eccentric—the woman actually believed in fairies—but she was also absolutely steadfast in her personal loyalties and intellectual commitments. She was, from beginning to end, an educator.
In 1916, when the Hockings “could find no suitable instruction for their young children” in the schools of Cambridge and Boston, she founded Shady Hill School. I rummaged through the attic debris: clippings and invitations and long notes and grocery lists—the sorts of things my own grandmother had kept in troves in her house. Agnes and my grandmother, Hazel, were pack rats, brought up in an age when nothing—not even the trash—was wasted.
Under the wreckage was a set of Atlantic magazines carefully wrapped in newspaper and bound up in twine. A dozen copies of the same issue from December 1955. Someone had taken great care in wrapping these, so I took equal care in unwrapping them. This wasn’t a first edition of Hobbes or Descartes, but it had been precious to someone. I settled down on a crate to read the article on page 63: “Creating a School” by Agnes and Ernest Hocking. Ernest had churned out hundreds of publications over his professional career (294, to be exact), but this was, I imagined, one of Agnes’s cherished few.
“Cambridge is a school bearing town,” the couple explained, “and justly proud of it.” But in 1915 the Agassiz School, which had for decades educated the children of Harvard professors, planned to close its doors. Agnes and Ernest recounted, “Our eight-year-old son, Richard, began to bring home caustic teacher’s reports; long division was getting him down. What could a parent do?… [T]his was no moment for us to start a school … but if circumstances required, one of us was ready to meet the challenge.”
More specifically, Agnes was ready to meet the challenge. At first it didn’t look like much—just twenty kids gathered Montessori-style on the back porch of the Hockings’ home at 16 Quincy Street in Cambridge. But this was the start of the “Cooperative Open Air School,” which would become Shady Hill School, a model of the “experience curriculum” of twentieth-century education. Enrollment grew steadily, and soon the fledgling school had outgrown the porch. Agnes and Ernest floated the idea of establishing an experimental school at Harvard (modeled after John Dewey’s school at the University of Chicago), but this plan was quickly abandoned. The Hockings would have to go it alone with the financial backing of Richard Cabot, Paul Sachs (of Goldman Sachs), and Mrs. Edward Forbes (of Forbes magazine).
In the summer of 1916 Agnes had raised $9,750 (which may not sound like much, but is in fact the equivalent of about a quarter
of a million dollars today) and purchased land for the new school from the old Charles Eliot Norton estate, Shady Hill. This was the next best thing to being affiliated with Harvard—and no small plot for a midwestern couple to lay claim to. The Norton estate was the heart and soul of Harvard, and its owner was widely regarded as the most cultivated man in America. Before 1874, when he was appointed professor of the history of the fine arts at Harvard, Charles Eliot Norton acquired a reputation as a Dante scholar, one matched only by James Russell Lowell. Norton had followed Emerson in translating La Vita Nuova in 1859, and his prose version of the Divine Comedy remained in wide circulation after the turn of the century. Shady Hill was the place where classicists, Transcendentalists, and up-and-coming pragmatists would gather: Emerson, Lowell, Agassiz, Chauncey Wright, Henry and William James, Royce, and Santayana. And now Agnes and Ernest Hocking.
The Shady Hill School might have looked a bit like a Montessori school, offering the type of progressive education that encouraged students to pursue their own interests instead of following a strict curriculum, but looks could be deceiving. Yes, Agnes had a “constitutional aversion to textbooks,” but this did not translate into pedagogical laxity or an educational free-for-all. Agnes Hocking believed that bringing young children into contact with original literary sources—Homer, Shakespeare, Dante—would go a long way in cultivating mature and sustaining intellectual interests. (Shady Hillers still read The Iliad and The Odyssey in fourth grade.) The Hockings wrote that they
were often classified as progressive—chiefly, I suspect, on the ground of a certain informality in our procedures, which led to the supposition that, like the typical progressive school, we were consulting and catering to the existing “interests” of children. Our principle was the exact reverse of this. Interest was of course of first importance, and we secured it; but not by bending our work to what was on the surface of children’s minds. We expect children to take an interest in what was worthy of their interest; and with teachers who cared for their subjects, they did so.