Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America

5. Character’s Conduct: Spaces of Interethnic Emulation in Jane Addams’s “Charitable Effort”

204 5 Character’s Conduct Spaces of Interethnic Emulation in Jane Addams’s “Charitable Effort” We are now living amid the glories of a new outlook for woman. . . . She uniformly stamps the coin of character upon life and conduct on the home and nation, and the home will not suffer because of her zeal to ennoble and purify the body politic. —O.P. Furnas, “Our Mothers”1 The geography of character is a “branch” sure to be taught some day in public schools. —Frances Willard, “Scientific Temperance Instruction in the Public Schools”2 In 1928, the organizers of the Chicago Association for Child Study and Parent Education, one of many emerging organizations dedicated to the new science of pedagogy and child rearing, decided to address its annual conference to one of the most important social-reform projects in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, the project of “Building Character.” The “Mid-West Conference on Character Development ,” as it was called, gathered together a diverse and esteemed group of clinical psychologists, primary- and secondary-school educators, doctors , social reformers, and university presidents and professors. Some were noted for their expertise in the scientific study of character development, others for their practical expertise in the “training of character” as a distinct method of child rearing. The problems of character and character building were discussed from a number of different disciplinary and theoretical points of view, with paper sessions and roundtable discussions devoted to Character’s Conduct 205 such an array of topics as “Scientific Attitude toward Character Development ,” “Standards for Character,” “Creative Expression and Character Development ,” “The Use of Leisure Time for Character Development,” “Social Attitudes and Character,” “Religion and Character,” “ Building Character through Unified Education,” “The Physical Basis of the Child’s Emotional Health,” “How to Make or Break the Child,” “Creative Education and Character ,” “Ideals and Character,” and “Discipline and Character.”3 In assembling a panel on the topic of “Social Attitudes and Character,” the organizers turned to a person who not only was one of the nation’s foremost social reformers but who had also made the development of a “social ethic” the central aim of her reformist activities, the social reformer Jane Addams. As cofounder and leading theorist of the Hull House Settlement, established in 1889 in the nineteenth ward of Chicago’s West Side tenement district, Jane Addams had become by 1928 perhaps the most famous and influential voice for social justice, poverty relief, and child welfare in the United States.4 Lauded (and occasionally reviled) as “the conscience of the nation,” Addams was ranked, “[i]n every early twentieth century public opinion poll before World War I . . . as the most admired American woman, often as the most admired American,” and her work as a social reformer and activist earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.5 Addams had a profound and often direct impact on landmark state and federal legislation of the Progressive era, both through her own direct efforts and through the network of activists and prominent public figures she knew and influenced, including W.E.B. Du Bois, John Dewey, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Theodore Roosevelt, and Julia Lathrop, who was the first director of the U.S. Children’s Bureau. As a time in which explicit , external strategies of social regulation and control became the obsession of both governmental agencies and liberal social thinkers alike, the Progressive era had found a unique and often paradoxical advocate in Jane Addams. Addams envisioned Hull House, the effective platform for her reform work, as a kind of sociological laboratory in which both the working-class, immigrant populations of the tenement district and the middle-class reformers who settled there were together and reciprocally reformed through a communal reworking and readjustment of the performed markers of class, ethnicity, and gender. More important for the conference organizers, Addams had, like many female reformers and charity workers before her, made the study of family and child development central to understanding and ameliorating the effects of urban industrialization on the immigrant working classes and had also made a 206 Character’s Conduct variety of character-building practices—such as habit training, physical exercise, youth clubs, and elocution and etiquette lessons—central to the work of Hull House.6 The brief paper that Addams presented at the conference, titled “Social Attitudes and Character,” took up a familiar theme in a familiar style for anyone acquainted with either...