Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy

2. The Courage of One’s Convictions or the Conviction of One’s Courage? Jane Addams’s Principled Compromises

2 the Courage of one’s Convictions or the Conviction of one’s Courage? Jane Addams’s Principled Compromises charlene haddock seigfried Self-righteousness has perhaps been responsible for more cruelty from the strong to the weak, from the good to the erring than any other human trait.1 Jane Addams would be just as controversial today as she was in her ownlifetime,idolizedbysomeandreviledbyothers.Ideologically,sheissomething of a Rorschach test. For upholders of the status quo, she was branded a revolutionary, a socialist, and a tool of labor, while for ideological radicals she was too reformist and willing to compromise on principles and work within instead of against the system.2 For the general public, Addams’s positions were most often praised when they seemed to conform to a conventional feminine model of good works and attacked when she publicly supported unpopular causes. After raising her to the status of urban saint for her reform efforts to helptheimmigrant poorandcleanupcorruptpoliticsinChicago,forexample, they then reviled her as a traitor for remaining a pacifist after the United States entered the First World War. Although it is not unusual for social activists to elicit such contradictory assessments depending on the perspective of the viewer, in Addams’s case, her pragmatist aversion to ideology, to favoring a particular social, political, or religious orthodoxy to the exclusion of all others, was guaranteed to alienate her from those who solicited her allegiance.3 It continues to provoke those who evaluate her theories and actions by how well they conform to some preconceived notion of what a radical theorist or reform activist ought to be Fischer_Addams_text.indd 40 10/29/08 10:25:56 AM or to have done. From the perspective of absolute truth and moral certainty that ignores the development of beliefs over time, anything less than complete assent to what is indubitably true and good is either an intellectual or moral failure. But as evidence mounts that human beings must struggle time and again to overcome the limitations of nature and culture to attain better, if not the absolute best, beliefs about the world, and that the moral judgments of one time and place are often questioned and deplored in other times and places, it could well be that conciliation and compromise in view of a more inclusive outcome is both the wiser and the better approach. In this essay, I will examine Addams’s antipathy to dogmatism and her willingness to compromise as key components of her philosophic outlook and as evidence of a principled stance, rather than as an expression of indecisiveness or moral relativism that it might otherwise seem to be.4 Affirming Multiple Perspectives In Twenty Years at Hull-House, Addams presented her resistance while at Rockford seminary to making a religious profession of faith as foreshadowing her resistance during the first decade of the Hull-House settlement to proclaiming herself a socialist. In both cases, she was being pressed to accept a particular version of what constituted the true (religious or political) faith, instead of being left free to “to select what seemed reasonable from this wilderness of dogma.”5 No one denomination or socialist party, which are essentially partial perspectives, could lay claim to the whole truth without distorting or denying other perspectives or aspects of truth. Rather than beginning with the assumption that one already has the truth or knows the good, pragmatists believe that particular truths and particular goods emerge from intelligent transactions between organisms and their natural and social environments. Addams’s concern that this experiential learning not be distorted by assumptions of one-sided expertise or moral authority finds expression in her central antielitist principle of reciprocity. She developed this principle of reciprocity in two papers given at the School of Applied Ethics in 1892 on the subjective and objective necessity for social settlements.6 The miserable conditions in which the working-class immigrant poor lived and worked, and the obstacles they faced in trying to better their condition, made the activities of the Hull-House residents objectively necessary. This objective need was acknowledged by all who were concerned with social justice and who cared to examine the conditions surrounding rapid industrialization in the cities, but it needed to be more widely recogprincipled compromises · 41 Fischer_Addams_text.indd 41 10/29/08 10:25:56 AM nized. Addams’s second claim, however, was less obvious but for her no less important. It was that...