This Week of All Weeks, Jane Addams Is Worth Thinking About

Jane Addams (1860-1931) isn’t famous these days. At one time, however, she was the most-admired woman in America and well-known throughout the world.

Wikipedia lists her occupation as “social and political activist, author and lecturer, community organizer, public intellectual”. Her tombstone in Cedarville, Illinois, describes her as a “humanitarian, feminist, social worker, reformer, educator, author, publicist, founder of Hull House, President [of the] Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom”. It also notes that she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Addams fought for women’s suffrage and is considered the founder of the social work profession in the United States. Sociologists view her as a social theorist. Philosophers place her in the school of philosophy known as Pragmatism.  At her death, some compared Jane Addams, who never sought political office, to her hero, Abraham Lincoln.

As this horrible week comes to a close, it may help us to consider Jane Addams as an example of, in Lincoln’s words, “the better angels of our nature”.

Today, Addams is best known as the principal founder of Hull House, the first “settlement house” in the United States. It opened its doors in Chicago in 1889 and continued to operate until 2012. Its initial goal was to help recent immigrants find their place in American society, because Addams’s purpose in life was to convert her progressive ideas into action.

Here is a passage from Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy by Jane Bethke Elshtain:

The statement of purpose in Hull-House’s charter read: “To provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago”; but this fails to capture the spirit and the manifold activities of Hull-House. Addams refined this statement over the years. It was a “place for enthusiasms”; it helped “give form to social life”; it offered “the warm welcome of an inn”; it was a place for mutual interpretation of the the social classes one to another; it responded to ethical demands and shared fellowship; it was a place for the life of the mind….

At the conclusion of her second autobiographical volume, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, Addams takes another stab at it: “It was the function of settlements to bring into the circle of knowledge and fuller life, men and women who might otherwise be left outside” [ p. 92].

The work of Hull House “gained expression in day nurseries, kindergarten classes, playgrounds, boys’ and girls’ clubs, a cooperative boardinghouse, theater workshops, music schools, language classes, reading groups, handicraft centers and eventually a Labor Museum” [p. 93].

In the early days, after Addams and a Hull House resident named Julia Lathrop came to the aid of a young woman, all alone, giving birth in a nearby tenement, Addams exclaimed:

“This doing things that we don’t know how to do is going too far. Why did we let ourselves be rushed into midwifery?” To which [Lathrop] replied: “If we have to begin to hew down to the line of our ignorance, for goodness’ sake don’t let us begin at the humanitarian end. To refuse to respond to a poor girl in the throes of childbirth would be a disgrace to us forevermore. If Hull-House does not have its roots in human kindness, it is no good at all” [p. 93].

We might say the same thing about the United States of America during the months and years ahead.

Organizing for the Future

A review at the London Review of Books caught my eye because the two books discussed both have the word “Postcapitalism” in their titles. Who doesn’t want to know what’s coming next?

The review didn’t convince me that anyone knows. Two possibilities are mentioned: Full Automation and Universal Basic Income. Presumably, “Full Automation” refers to automating as much as possible. More robots and smarter software should lead to fewer people having jobs. That might lead to everyone being guaranteed a basic income. Or it could lead to mass sterilization, with only lottery winners and good-looking people being allowed to reproduce.

What I found more interesting were some remarks about “austerity”, the recently popular attempt to stimulate world economies by reducing government spending:

In both books, the critical fronts are a total opposition to austerity and neoliberalism, and a focus on the possible consequences of increased automation, including the creation of a ‘surplus population’. The ‘real austerity project’, Mason argues, is ‘to drive down wages and living standards in the West for decades, until they meet those of the middle class in China and India on the way up’. As a result, ‘the next generation will be poorer than this one; the old economic model is broken and cannot revive growth.’ Those places which, in their different ways, have managed to insulate themselves – authoritarian China, Russia or Iran, residually social democratic northern Europe – will not be exempt: ‘By 2060, countries such as Sweden will have the levels of inequality currently seen in the USA.’

Further down in the article, there’s some practical discussion:

What the historical labour movement did, in Srnicek and Williams’s eyes, was set itself goals and demands – for pensions, social security, fewer working hours – and fight for them inside and outside the workplace. What they are really proposing … is that a new set of demands be agreed and doggedly insisted on, in the manner of the old left.

But how could enough of us agree and doggedly insist on a new set of demands? Maybe the authors of the books being reviewed have an answer, but the only way I can see that happening is through the creation of a mass movement like the labor movement of the 19th and 20th centuries. 

In his very good book The Age of Acquisition: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, Steve Fraser describes how organized labor contributed to the general welfare after the New Deal and World War 2:

…the labor movement of those years of uproar created – more than any other institution, public or private – a standard of living envied everywhere. In 1945, 40 percent of American families lived below the poverty line… By 1970, only 10 percent lived in poverty… Not only did the economy grow at an annual average of 4 percent during the postwar era, but that growth favored the poor more than the wealthy…it was the organized labor movement that compelled broad sectors of American industry still unwilling to engage in the new mechanisms of collective bargaining to nonetheless match the standards of living (wages, hours, vacations, holidays, pensions, health care and more) that unions were winning for their members….

An “American standard of living” and the forms of industrial democracy that made it possible … shattered the old order [196].

Perhaps globalization means that a race to the economic middle (or even the bottom) cannot be stopped. But it was organized labor and other progressive organizations that demanded and achieved progress in the past. I think it will have to be organized human beings, whether or not they have traditional jobs, who demand and achieve progress in the future.

Who’s On First? Private Property or Competition?






Getting back to Brin, he argues that:















Class In America

Nancy Isenberg, a history professor at Louisiana State, identifies five myths about class in America. Instead of listing the myths, I’ll turn them around and present the corresponding truths: 

  1. The working class isn’t mostly white and male
  2. Most Americans notice class differences
  3. America has less class mobility than other developed countries
  4. Talent and hard work make it easy to rise above your class
  5. Racial oppression is more serious than class oppression

My favorite paragraph:

Class power takes many forms. Its enduring force, its ability to project hatred toward the lower classes, was best summed up by two presidents 175 years apart. In 1790, then-Vice President John Adams argued that Americans not only scrambled to get ahead; they needed someone to disparage. “There must be one, indeed, who is the last and lowest of the human species,” he wrote. Lyndon Johnson came to the same conclusion in explaining the racism of poor whites: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Pro-Market or Pro-Big Business?

“Donald Trump, Crony Capitalist” is a nice little article by Luigi Zingales, a professor at the University of Chicago’s business school. He analyzes one aspect of Trump’s surprising presidential campaign: the fact that Trump presents himself as a critic of big business, even though he’s a long-standing member of “the pro-business establishment”.

One of the best parts of Zingales’s article is his explanation of the difference between big business and the free market. He says the Republican establishment has spent years obscuring that difference, claiming to be champions of the free market while serving as “big business’s mouthpiece”.

Supporting the market means being in favor of competition and against concentrated economic power. Zingales cites Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican President from a century ago. From Wikipedia:

One of Roosevelt’s first notable acts as president was to deliver a 20,000-word address to Congress asking it to curb the power of large corporations (called “trusts”). He also spoke in support of organized labor to further chagrin big business … For his aggressive use of United States antitrust law, he became known as the “trust-buster”. He brought 40 antitrust suits, and broke up major companies, such as the largest railroad and Standard Oil, the largest oil company.

Being pro-market means you’re against monopolies (in which one company controls a market) and oligopolies (in which a few companies do). It also means you’re in favor of government regulations and policies that help make markets competitive. A fair, properly functioning market requires that the playing field be level, not slanted to the advantage of insiders or the powerful.

Big business, however, is totally in favor of special advantages when it increases profits. As Zingales says, “business executives are only pro-market when they want to enter a new sector”. But:

[Once] they become established in a sector, they favor entry restrictions, excessive licensing, distortive regulation and corporate subsidies. Those policies are pro-business (in the sense that they favor existing businesses), but they are harmful and distort a competitive market economy.

Zingales points out, for example, how rare it is for Republican politicians to call for antitrust enforcement, the prosecution of white-collar criminals and pro-market policies like fostering competition in the market for prescription drugs. That’s because the men who run the Republican Party are in the business of protecting big business, not the market.

Many of his supporters think Trump is fervently pro-market, but:

As a businessman Mr. Trump has a longstanding habit of using his money and power aggressively to obtain special deals from the government… He is, in short, the essence of that commingling of big business and government that goes under the name of crony capitalism.

Anyway, it’s a good little article that’s worth reading even if you’re sick of hearing about the Republican freak show currently touring the country.

Parting thought:

The Bill of Rights would have been better if the Second Amendment, including its call for a properly-regulated militia, had never been written. In its place, we could have had an amendment like this:

A well-regulated Market, being necessary to the prosperity of a free State, the right of the people to enjoy the benefits of fair competition shall not be infringed except to benefit the Nation as a whole.