Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy

8. The Conceptual Scaffolding of Newer Ideals of Peace

8 the Conceptual scaffolding of Newer Ideals of Peace marilyn fischer How can we make sense of Newer Ideals of Peace? Even a number of Addams’s closest associates questioned the extent to which her 1907 book was in fact a book about peace. Florence Kelley, Addams’s longtime colleague at Hull-House, wrote in her review, “The title of Miss Addams’s volume is not altogether a happy one. The book is . . . ‘a curious commentary on the fact that we have not yet attained self-government.’” Allen Davis, in his 1973 biography of Addams, advanced the same critique. “Much of the book was not about war and peace, but about the plight of the cities—the immigrants, the working women and children.” In an otherwise appreciative review, George Herbert Mead wrote, “One does not feel, in reading Miss Addams, the advance of an argument with measured tread. I think in logical organization this book suffers more than her earlier writing.”1 In contrast to such critics, I will argue that the book is fundamentally and throughout a book about peace, and that the chapters on domestic reform function as essential parts of Addams’s argument. The underlying structure of the book and the role of these chapters become clear when we approach the book as Addams’s response to the dominant peace advocates of the time. I will argue that although Addams and these peace advocates shared the conceptual paradigm and vocabulary of nineteenth-century social evolutionary thought, particularly that of Herbert Spencer, in Newer Ideals Addams uses these conceptual tools to argue against the conclusions of Spencer and the peace advocates. This task is less straightforward than it may appear. To her editor’s request to include more citations in Newer Ideals, Addams replied she had assumed Fischer_Addams_text.indd 165 10/29/08 10:26:22 AM “that the book was to be kept popular and colloquial in style rather than exact and scholarly.”2 She does not name Spencer or many of the theorists or theories with which she works; she refers to the advocates of peace fleetingly and rarely. In proposing the following construction of her argument, I interpret what she says in light of contemporary historical events and the people and texts with which she was acquainted. This approach will enable us to read Newer Ideals of Peace as giving a sustained, unified argument regarding peace. the Practical Peace Advocates Addams sets the terms of the debate in the book’s first sentence: “The following pages present the claims of the newer, more aggressive ideals of peace, as over against the older dovelike ideal.”3 The book is an analysis of the deficiencies of older ideals that peace advocates had advanced in a number of ways, along with Addams’s own proposal of “newer, more aggressive ideals.” Although she rarely names them in the book, Addams met many of these peace advocates at the Thirteenth Universal Peace Congress, held in Boston in October 1904.4 A number of these peace advocates, members of the Universal Peace Union and the Peace Association of Friends, emphasized nonresistance. However, the dominant voices at the congress offered more “practical” approaches to peace. These were elite representatives of international law and commerce to whom international peace was fully consistent with political, economic, and social conservatism and with full national sovereignty.5 Theinternationallawyers,ledbymensuchasNicholasMurrayButler,president of Columbia University, and Elihu Root, secretary of war under William McKinleyandsecretaryofstateunderTheodoreRoosevelt,focusedtheirpractical activity on developing international legal institutions, ranging from arbitration treaties to a formal, permanent world court.6 They claimed they wanted to “convert international conflicts into cases,”7 and thus defined international conflicts as legal disputes, rather than as embedded in social, economic, or political contexts. At the Universal Peace Congress, a number of the speakers describedtheireffortswithrhetoricalflourish.PointingatthePermanentCourt of International Arbitration recently established at The Hague, Oscar Straus, a member of the court from the United States, called it “the most enduring humanitarian achievement of the ages,” the “Magna Charta of International Law,” and “an International Covenant on the Mount.”8 Business leaders such as industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, publisher Edwin Ginn, and banker George Foster Peabody stressed how wasteful and disruptive war 166 . marilyn fischer Fischer_Addams_text.indd 166 10/29/08 10:26:23 AM was to international commerce and how international commerce created and sustained fruitful interdependence among nations.9 At the congress John Lund of Norway likened...