THE LEGACY OF JANE ADDAMS

...She found comfort and strength in her associations with small groups of like-minded people—the newly formed Fellowship of Reconciliation, the American Friends Service Committee, and the peace organization to which she was giving leadership...

...Her reach finally encompassed the whole world as she strove to achieve an internationalism founded upon the meeting of universal human needs...

...In 1913 she attended a meeting in Europe of the International Women's Suffrage Alliance and thus became known personally to women in Europe...

...Above all, she left to the entire world that most precious of gifts—witness to a great conviction...

...Its first task was to act on a resolution presented by Rosika Schwimmer which urged the calling of a conference of neutral nations to offer continuous mediation to the nations at war...

...Jane Addams was a witness to the ancient American faith that a democracy can be noble and that serenity and pity and understanding . . . can pervade the spirit of a strong and of a proud people...

...She moved on to work for national political action which would "give corporate expression to sentiments of compassion and social justice...

...It is of value to our day, however, to recall the principles and convictions which guided her during those dark years...

...She was never a victim of that illusion...

...If she achieved the serenity that her pictures, the style of her writing, and the impressions of her friends would indicate, it was because she saw life whole, felt the interrelationship of events and knew their place in history...

...Jane Addams worked with a variety of movements to achieve such a League, but primarily with the organization set up at the Hague Congress, known since 1919 as the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom...

...This creative act is an important piece of history...

...The resolution was presented personally to fourteen European nations by two groups of envoys, one led by Jane Addams, the other by Rosika Schwimmer...

...She comforted herself with the realization that "as all other forms of growth begin with a variation from the mass, so the moral changes in human affairs may also begin with a differing group or individual, sometimes the one who at best is designated as a crank or a freak and in sterner moments is imprisoned as an atheist or a traitor...

...Nevertheless she developed a "hideous sensitiveness," and was assailed by misgivings and doubts, suffering intensely from the pain of being outside the mainstream of human effort...

...It seems at moments," she wrote, "as if we were about to extend indefinitely what we call our public, and that, unless it were stretched to world dimensions, the most significant messages of our time might easily escape us...

...In addition to calling on foreign ministers and heads of state, she visited soldiers in the hospitals, and gathered heartbreaking documented records of interviews with servicemen and nurses...

...There were conscientious objectors among her friends...

...It is significant that she subtitled her book, The Second Twenty Years at Hull House, "The Record of a Growing World Consciousness...

...From this meeting in 1915 emerged the organization later known as the Women's International League for Peace and Free dom, of which Jane Addams was president for the rest of her life...

...Now, on the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Jane Addams, it is only to renew faith in the possibility of such a society, and to renew commitment to its fulfillment that a Centennial observance can be justified...

...To Hull House, which to her was always home, she remains a symbol of the compassion and understanding which can lift a neighborhood to noble tasks...

...Her knowledge of what starvation meant as she had seen it in Europe, in the drawn faces and claw-like hands of her friends and in the distorted bodies of little children, was an overpowering impulse for action...

...In her searching analysis of President Woodrow Wilson's policies, Jane Addams wrote: "It seemed to us at moments as if the President were imprisoned in his own spacious intellectuality, and had forgotten the overwhelming value of the deed...

...Hull House was threatened with loss of support because she felt she must try to interpret the Pullman Company workers' strike against a "good employer...

...From her intimate knowledge of their lives grew her work for child labor legislation, for psychiatric services for children, for justice and mercy for the immigrant, for trade union organization, for interracial understanding, for women's suffrage, for reform in city government, for civil liberties...

...The endless desire of men would at last assert itself, that desire which torments them almost like an unappeased thirst, not to be kept apart but to come to terms with another...

...In the dark days of her isolation as a pacifist in wartime, she had written: "It therefore came about that ability to hold out against mass suggestion, to honestly differ from the convictions and enthusiasms of one's best friends did in moments of crisis come to depend upon the categorical belief that a man's allegiance is to his vision of the truth and that he is under obligation to affirm it...

...International morality, Jane Addams was convinced, must be incorporated into an international organization...

...There were the various programs ministering to the needs and enhancing the self-respect of her Hull House neighbors in Chicago's south side slums...

...True to her own insights, she questioned whether it was not his own limited experience which led him to put his trust in treaties "above his trust in the instincts of humble people, in whose hearts the desire for peace had at last taken sanctuary...

...From her experience living in a crowded, dirty, exploited, working-class neighborhood in Chicago, among people drawn from the ghettos and villages of the often-warring nations of Europe, Jane Addams drew her faith in the naturalness and, therefore, the inevitability of peace...

...Jane Addams accepted an invitation to attend and preside...

...People generally remember only her deeds of mercy and the gentleness of her ways, but have forgotten her championship of unpopular causes—many of which are accepted and even cherished today...

...It was not, as she said, that her neighbors were "shouting for peace...

...To such Jane Addams is indeed a witness and an example...

...Her peace activities therefore included arousing and organizing public opinion for a League of Nations founded upon the realities of the world's needs...

...At moments," she wrote, "there seems to be no spot upon which to rest one's mind with a sense of well-being...

...She knew what it meant to be ostracized and to be the subject of attack by "patriotic" organizations, for she was finally a protagonist of "that most unpopular of causes—peace in time of war...

...Despite suspicion and sometimes ostracism, one service she was free to perform, and she threw herself into it —the feeding of a hungry world...

...A new internationalism," she wrote in The Second Twenty Years, "I believed was arising in the cosmopolitan centers of America, a sturdy and unprecedented international understanding which in time would be too profound to lend itself to war...

...Underlying her work for the feeding of a starving world, for an international organization in which men's needs could be met and their longing for brotherhood expressed, for freedom of conscience, and the many other causes to which she devoted herself, was her loyalty to the conviction that war is wrong...

...The Legacy of Jane Addams by LUCY P. CARNER When Jane Addams died in May, 1935, at the age of 74, Walter Lippmann wrote of her: "It is to renew men's faith, so hard to hold, so easy to lose, that saints are born as witnesses and as examples...

...It was rather that the struggle of the unsuccessful for their very existence drew them together in mutual helpfulness, and the old quarrels of Europe faded into insignificance under the pressures of the new world...

...The great dinner in Washington in May, 1935, celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, brought her the tribute of a grateful world...

...Although favorably considered by both warring and neutral nations in Europe, and although a conference was actually held in Stockholm, the resolution's effectiveness was nullified by the refusal of the President of the United States to assume leadership...

...Meeting in Zurich at the time of the Peace Conference at Versailles, the women urged a peace and a League, based not upon vengeance, but upon the principles advocated at the Hague to which Jane Addams had given such eloquent expression...

...Fortified with the truths of human experience, she returned to her own country...

...She was frequently accused of meddling in politics instead of sticking to her service to the poor...

...Jane Addams knew in her own country victims of war whose civil rights she assiduously defended...

...It was with profound sadness that Jane Addams found herself gradually separated from the great majority of her friends, who supported the war in the belief that out of it good would come...

...To carry forward in our day Jane Addams' unfinished business of peace means, then, not only devotion to the concrete tasks which must go into its making, but also loyalty to that same firmly held conviction that war and the methods of war must be repudiated and risks taken for the methods of peace...

...The poignant record of her inward struggle, in the chapter in Peace and Bread entitled "Personal Reactions During War," is a reminder of the cost of pacifism, and is of special value to those not easily given to absolutes and who, uneasy in extreme positions, find their pacifist faith "so hard to hold, so easy to lose...

...In 1913 she became chairman of the Woman's Peace Party, thus identifying herself formally with the organized peace movement...

...She is also a member of the board of the American Friends Service Committee...

...The story of Jane Addams is highlighted throughout by her wide outreach and her broad interests...

...She spent 15 years on the staff of the Chicago Council of Social Agencies and taught for a time in the department of social work of Bryn Mawr...

...In the first month of the war Rosika Schwimmer of Hungary outlined a scheme for a conference of neutrals for mediation, and came to the United States to enlist help for the undertaking...

...The record of those years, from 1915 to 1921, Jane Addams has left to us in Peace and Bread, a legacy of her mind and spirit which is impossible to convey second hand...

...It would be difficult to find a worthy cause in the United States from 1890 through the first two decades of the Twentieth Century which she did not champion...

...she believed profoundly "that it is a natural tendency of men to come into friendly relationships with ever larger and larger groups, and to live constantly a more extended life...

...But these activities do not repre sent separate compartments in the life of Jane Addams...

...When a few months later women of the Alliance were able to meet together in Holland, they issued a call to a Congress at the Hague inviting women from both warring and neutral countries...

...A few weeks later she died...

...There were the men from Hull House whom she had encouraged to become citizens, but whom she was now powerless to help, while they were conscripted into the army of the United States as their fathers had been conscripted into the armies of the "old country...

...Her faith as a lonely pacifist was buttressed by her belief that war is not a natural activity...

...Before the end of her life, Jane Addams again found herself in the mainstream of human affairs, and was admired and loved as have been few leaders in this country...

...She was convinced that it was the old men, set in old ways, who had brought on this war, "so irrevocable for the young" who were fighting bravely but often without conviction that the sacrifice was necessary...

...To her comrades and successors in the peace movement she bequeathed faith that compassion and understanding can ennoble international life...

...struggles for justice to the poor and oppressed have been to a large degree incorporated into our common life, I would emphasize her contribution to the making of international peace —perhaps the largest item in the agenda of her unfinished business...

...She believed social and political organizations necessary, for she was not of those prophets or geniuses who scorn organized effort...

...Even though immediate hope for peace was shattered by World War I, Jane Addams never relinquished her faith in "those ideals of the humble which all religious teachers unite in declaring to be the foundations of a sincere moral life...

...The visit to the warring countries of Europe brought to Jane Addams another experience of the horrors of war...

...One immediate result of the Congress was the formation of an International Committee for Permanent Peace...

...the idea itself has never been allowed to die...

...She felt also a new heroism connected with labor and the "nourishing of human life" as an important contribution to that "moral equivalent of war" which, she agreed with William James, must be discovered and used...

...and because she found in her daily experiences with people nurture for her spirit...

...Because the contribution of Jane Addams to Hull House and to the whole settlement movement is a familiar story, and the results of her LUCY P. CARNER is a member of the national board of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and president of the Pennsylvania branch...

...She had identified herself also with the international movement for woman's suffrage, which was to her a natural development of her belief that women had something valuable to contribute to government out of their own life experience...

...There she found herself misunderstood, and felt directly the distortion of truth and the deliberate stirring up of hatred which are the companions of war...