Good morning, it's Tuesday, the day after Labor Day. If they weren't already, most students are back in school. In the old days, this would also be the unofficial beginning of the general campaign season. Truth be told, no one ever stops campaigning now, but we are in the stretch run for 2022 midterms that will determine control of Congress for the next two years.
For loyal readers who've grown accustomed to my twice-a-week history homilies, my mind wandered today back to the formation of the Republican Party, and a girl born on this date in 1860. Her father, John H. Addams, a banker and Illinois state legislator, was one of the founders of the political party devoted to ending slavery on these shores. His daughter Jane would become a passionate social reformer in her own right, surpassing her father's legacy while expanding Americans' understanding of compassion and commitment.
In the 20th century, Jane Addams was nominated repeatedly for the Nobel Peace Prize, which she finally won in 1931, sharing it with Columbia University president Murray Butler). Addams became the second woman to win the peace prize (the first was a friend of Alfred Nobel) and she and Butler became the sixth and seventh Americans to win, meaning that the United States now ranked first among peace prize winners.
This was fitting, as Halvdan Koht, a member of the award committee saw it. A Norwegian historian, Koht said the U.S. wielded more influence over war and peace than any nation on earth. "All who yearn for a lasting peace," he said, "look to America for help."
In the 1930s, a "lasting peace" is what the world longed for -- but not what it would get. None of this was Jane Addams' fault. Her great cause was the poor.
She'd been born in Cedarville, Illinois, on September 6, 1860. Her birth came during the stretch run of the most momentous election year in U.S. history, and in a precipitous location as well: Her father was not only a charter member of the Republican Party, he was also a confidant of the man destined to become the first Republican president. John Addams deeply admired Abraham Lincoln, and the respect was evidently mutual. For his part, Abe Lincoln was the kind of man who would notice an extra letter in a friend's name, and comment on it good-naturedly.
"My father always spoke of the martyred President as ‘Mr. Lincoln,' and I never heard the great name without a thrill," Jane Addams wrote in her autobiography. "I remember the day … when at my request my father took out of his desk a thin packet marked ‘Mr. Lincoln's Letters,' the shortest one of which bore unmistakable traces of that remarkable personality. These letters began ‘My Dear Double D-‘ed Addams,' and to the inquiry as to how the person thus addressed was about to vote on a certain measure then before the Legislature was added the assurance that he knew this Addams ‘would vote according to his conscience.'"
Jane, the eighth of Addams' nine children, was made of similar stuff. In 1889, she co-founded America's first "settlement house," as such havens for the underprivileged were known. This was in Chicago and the place was called Hull House. Inspired by Toynbee Hall in London's East End, which Addams visited earlier in the 1880s, Hull House spawned many others; it spawned a movement, really, one that eventually altered this country's sensibilities about feeding and educating the needy.
She lived in Hull House herself, and used Chicago as a base of operations for investigations that led to reforms in areas as disparate as the milk supply, child labor, unemployment insurance, and the city's sanitary conditions. She was a proponent of women's suffrage, needless to say, and a vocal opponent of U.S. involvement in the First World War. A co-founder of the Women's Peace Party, she braved German U-Boats to sail across the Atlantic in 1915 to a women's international peace congress held in Holland.
After the U.S. entered World War I, Addams' reputation suffered at home when public opinion, as it usually does, rallied around the commander in chief and the armed forces. After the war, some disillusionment set in, however, and she enjoyed a kind of organic rehabilitation. In his introductory speech, Halvdan Koht noted that Addams was only the second woman to win the award -- and suggested she certainly wouldn't be the last.
"In honoring Jane Addams," he said, "we also pay tribute to the work which women can do for peace and fraternity among nations.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
