Women and Rhetoric between the Wars

2. The Hope for Peace and Bread

32 X 2 The Hope for Peace and Bread Hephzibah Roskelly When Jane Addams stepped onto the stage at New York’s Carnegie Hall on 9 July 1915, she was undoubtedly the most respected woman in the United States and arguably the most famous woman in the world. The social settlement she had cofounded with Ellen Gates Starr in Chicago in 1893, Hull House, had proved a vibrant, successful effort to help immigrants prosper in their new country and had brought Addams acclaim from civic leaders, social activists and philosophers, and the public. After the publication of Twenty Years at Hull House (1910), she was increasingly sought after as a speaker on issues of economy, social justice, and peace in both national and international forums. In 1907, she had been named a delegate to the first National Peace Conference, and in 1915 she had attended the first gathering of what was to become the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom at The Hague. Her friend and frequent lecturer at Hull House, John Dewey, had by 1915 collaborated with her often as he worked to develop the action-oriented philosophical pragmatism for which he, along with William James and C. S. Peirce, had become famous.1 She had become so recognizable and appealing to the American electorate that in 1912 Theodore Roosevelt asked her to second his presidential nomination on the Progressive Party ticket, with a platform partially devoted to peace. The Hope for Peace and Bread 33 Her long experience as a speaker, her rapport with audiences across the globe, and her deep belief in the cause she was to speak on no doubt gave Addams reason for confidence as she began the talk that was soon to become infamous as the “Bayonet Charge Speech.” She had returned weeks before from a trip across Europe with the International Congress of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP—see Wendy Sharer’s chapter in this collection for more on the outcome of that congress). Visiting battlefields, and meeting with world leaders, soldiers, and citizens, Addams and her colleagues had heard testimony about the horrors of the Great War that had begun the year before and had already cost thousands of lives; they themselves had witnessed the privation, the violence, the futility of the conflict. Addams was convinced that the United States should not enter the war. Still, though passionate about her topic, Addams was a deliberate thinker and speaker, not given to elocutionary excess, and the opening lines of her speech were characteristic of her careful rhetoric as she cautioned her hearers against over-reaction: “One gets afraid of tall talk,” she admitted, “and one does not know where words may lead the people to whom one is speaking ” (“Bayonet” 328). Her speech worked against tall talk, even as it described the devastation, the starvation, and the soldiers’ hatred of the violence they performed. But tall talk was soon to become the rhetorical strategy of the day as the nation moved to war; Addams’s very reasonableness in the face of the emotionalism surrounding American calls to arms was to prove part of her undoing. In the weeks after she delivered the Bayonet Charge Speech, Addams suffered a dramatic reversal of fortune. For the duration of the world war and for at least a decade afterward, Addams lost much of her prestige and her platform, was taunted by the press for being at best a busybody and at worst a traitor, and was shunned by the public who cancelled her speeches, wrote her hate letters, and ignored her attempts at responding to their criticism. Roosevelt, who only three years before had stood with her to accept his party’s nomination for president, would criticize her in 1917 as “the most dangerous woman in America” (qtd. in True n. pag.). Addams’s work for peace and justice during and after the war in the face of sometimes virulent attacks was more than simply courageous perseverance. The methods of action and the rhetoric she employed in her work are well documented, especially in her books Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922) and The Second Twenty Years at Hull House Hephzibah Roskelly 34 (1930), and they reveal Addams’s involvement with and development of the pragmatic philosophy that Dewey made famous at Chicago’s School for Social Work. Pragmatism’s basic tenets, as suggested by James and Peirce and expanded...