Jane Addams's Progressive Democracy: Hull-House and the Ethics of Reform

Abstract

This article examines how conditions in turn-of-the-century Chicago seemed inimical to uniting progressive policies and democratic politics, and shows how Jane Addams was unusual for her era in her simultaneous commitment to progressivism and democracy. In Democracy and Social Ethics and Twenty Years at Hull-House, Addams argues that humanity's ethical values must evolve in response to the new urban conditions emerging in the twentieth century. This article identifies various philosophical conflicts with which Addams had to deal in her attempt to reconcile democracy and progressivism, and shows how her experiences at Hull-House structured her responses to those philosophical oppositions. The three oppositions that Addams dealt with are the distinction between private or individual reform and public reform, the ethical gulf between abstract ethics (i.e., "honesty") and lived ethics (i.e., "neighborliness"), and the divergent interests of the wealthy and the poor.

In his response to the toasts made at the celebration of his seventieth birthday, John Dewey noted that Jane Addams "attributed to me some of the things in Chicago which she and her colleagues in Hull House did" (1930, 179). Most importantly, according to Dewey, Addams taught him "the enormous value of mental non-resistance, of tearing away the armor-plate of prejudice, of convention, isolation that keeps one from sharing to the full in the larger and even the more unfamiliar and alien ranges of the possibilities of human life and experience" (179). Many of Dewey's Chicago school colleagues and heirs (and, to a lesser extent, Dewey himself) have long been viewed as unwilling to admit the "more unfamiliar and alien" aspects into their conception of a progressive, democratic society. Working in Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and others were firmly committed to both democracy and progressive liberalism. But the Chicago of that era seemed inimical to bringing democracy and liberalism together. The masses were usually content to vote for the party boss, who illegally paid for his votes but nevertheless was democratically elected. And the progressive elites generally worked undemocratically, either employing modes such as religious charity or favoring the top-down, technocratic city planning pioneered in America by Daniel Burnham.

The reformers' choice seemed to be to empower the people and submit to unwanted but democratic outcomes, or to reform and revitalize the community by ignoring the people's ballot voice. For the most part, the Chicago school reformers chose progressive reforms at the expense of those democratic movements that seemed alien to them; as Andrew Feffer puts it, "Their notion of democracy could not accommodate popular sentiment that did not meet the standards of organized intelligence, as in the case of pacifists during the war or rank and file union members afterward" (1993, 269). Although the Chicago pragmatists believed in a public sphere that "was open to the contribution of many previously excluded sectors of American society, notably the organized working class (when responsibly led) . . . the Chicago pragmatists could not tolerate truly discordant voices in their reform conversations" (268-69). Neither the radical working class nor the elected but corrupt forces in society were welcome at the reform table. Reasonable progressive liberals were welcome; radicals and demagogues need not apply. For the most part, the men of the Chicago school struggled to reconcile progressive reform and democratic governance whenever the two came into conflict with each other.

As we know from Dewey's response to her toast, there was one Chicago pragmatist who was open to the more unfamiliar extremes of democracy, a figure who welcomed the voices of radicals and who praised some aspects of corrupt democracy: Jane Addams. As Edmund Wilson puts it: "Hull-House had always stood for tolerance: all the parties and all the faiths had found asylum there and lived pretty harmoniously together" (1964, 453). This harmony came from the efforts of Addams, a leader who "could not bind herself to parties and principles: what she did had to be done independently" (451). In this article, I wish to show that Jane Addams contributed a highly democratic and egalitarian vision to Chicago pragmatism, during an era when the false choice seemed to be between democratic governance or progressive reform. Although the general opinion of Addams's accomplishments ebbed and flowed throughout her lifetime and continues to fluctuate, I wish to show that Addams's writings and actions are a vital part of the liberal democratic tradition. In contrast to the cynical view that the people cannot act progressively and that progressives would be better off not acting through the people, I wish to show that Addams asserts the necessity of uniting progressive policies and truly democratic politics. Addams's goal was, as Mina Carson puts it, the "melting away [of] class distinction in the industrial cities" (2001, 38) in order to put the people in position to direct the city themselves.

This melting-away required a deep commitment to democracy, but a democracy that could make progressive alterations in American society. Addams's project had flaws, and there are those who argue that she was no more democratic than the other pragmatists, but it is my contention that Addams's central achievement was overcoming the divide between the upper and lower classes and envisioning a Chicago that could be both liberal and democratic. Her philosophical method was historical, evolutionary, and above all dialectical. In my analysis, I show how Addams overcame three seeming binaries that, if allowed to endure, would have prevented urban America from realizing a liberal and democratic society. The first of these oppositions is the practical distinction between individual and communal action; the second, the ethical distinction between the feudal morals of the party boss and the abstract ethics of a progressive reformer; and the final distinction is between the interests of the wealthy and those of the poor. By showing that all of these distinctions are either illusory or surmountable, Addams articulated a vision of the American urban landscape that could support both progressive liberalism and democracy.

The Individual vs. the Group

Inspired by Darwin, but deeply opposed to the Social Darwinist belief that society's events must be allowed to run their course in order to achieve an eventual good, Addams seeks to intervene in the process of moral evolution.¹ Thus, Addams adopts a position that is both Darwinian-Spencerian, eschewing solutions that do not spring from the organic cultural makeup and processes of the community, and Pragmatist, endorsing the ability to reason through and eventually adopt a new ethics. If this ethical evolution is achieved, she maintains, the result will be a newly integrated Chicago, a city without obvious divides between rich and poor, native and immigrant, and so forth.²

Addams takes on this opposition between the individual and the group in Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) and in her famous essay on the Pullman strike, "A Modern Lear" (written in 1896, but first published in 1912). Although Addams's project in Democracy and Social Ethics is to articulate a new form of ethics in which individual people come to realize how much their lives affect and are affected by the lives of others, she begins her chapter on industrial reform by recognizing the great virtues inherent in a titanic figure acting alone. Technocratic, top-down solutions do have an enormous appeal, even for Addams. Comparing the actions of a committee to those of an empowered individual, Addams notes that the committee's attempts "recall the wavering motion of a baby's arm before he has learned to coordinate his muscles" while the individual "acts promptly," "secures efficient results," and thereby "we are dazzled by his success" (1964, 137, 138). But without communal action, the individual's titanic efforts will eventually be for naught.

Addams uses George Pullman's transition from benevolent benefactor to malevolent strike-breaker to show both the strength and weakness of top-down reform. Addams sets up one of her typical oppositions near the beginning of "A Modern Lear":

During the discussions which followed the Pullman strike, the defenders of the situation were broadly divided between the people pleading for individual benevolence and those insisting upon social righteousness; between those who held that the philanthropy of the president had been most ungratefully received and those who maintained that the situation was the inevitable outcome of the social consciousness developing among working people.

(1965, 107)

Before we look at the side that Addams obviously takes, it is worth remembering the real benevolence of George Pullman. As Addams explains, Pullman "had been almost persecuted for this goodness by the more utilitarian members of his company" (109-10). In Pullman Town (built roughly fifteen miles south of Chicago), all of the improvements denied to the people in the slums of Chicago—libraries, public schools, sanitation, paved streets, and more—were provided. Furthermore, "[s]ince the town was completed in 1881, not a single case of cholera, typhoid, or yellow fever had been reported" (Miller 1996, 225). Pullman's model town was held up across the world as a beacon of what could be accomplished by the foresight of a single wise and forward-thinking individual; through his effort alone—and against the efforts of the less benevolent shareholders of his company—Pullman drastically improved the lives of his workers, giving them a hygienic town. No mother living in Pullman Town ever needed to fear losing a child to the diseases that were ravaging Chicago and other major cities.

So, Addams begins by recognizing the great service that Pullman did for his workers. But Pullman's contribution to the town is less remembered today than the strike and subsequent violence that Pullman eventually precipitated, and Addams uses that cataclysm to show what happens when top-down efforts are pursued. For Addams, this downfall was inevitable. The powerful individual must work a different way than Pullman did:

He has to discover what the people really want, and then provide "the channels in which the growing moral force of their lives shall flow." What he does attain, however, is not the result of his individual striving, as a solitary mountain-climber beyond that of the valley multitude but it is sustained and upheld by the sentiments and aspirations of many others.

(1964, 152)

The man who, like Pullman, brings sweeping change through individual action has indeed risen high above the norm, but his actions—if they remain solitary—are unlikely to have a great effect. They are sustained by his will alone; they do not channel the thoughts and feelings of the "valley multitude," so no matter how high the individual ascends, with his death or exhaustion comes the end of his progress. In Addams's conception, no progressive solution that is implemented undemocratically can endure.

Thus, she tells us, it was for Pullman: "The president assumed that he himself knew the needs of his men, and so far from wishing them to express their needs he denied to them the simple rights of trade organization, which would have been, of course, the merest preliminary to an attempt at associated expression" (1965, 111). When his workers asked for the ability to participate in the process of reform, Pullman categorically denied it to them and created a conflict of international dimensions. Addams can imagine a scenario in which Pullman welcomed his workers to the reform movement and capital and labor pulled together. As a result of such an effort, Addams argues that reforms could have been "made secure" because the entire valley could have been lifted permanently and the multitude "persuaded . . . to move up a few feet higher" (1964, 152). Instead of moving the multitude a few feet, Pullman destroyed saw all of his efforts destroyed in a flash of violence.

In contrast to the either/or binary that so obviously animated Pullman's actions, Addams seeks to synthesize the alternative visions. Pullman, and other defenders of the robber barons, undoubtedly would have agreed with what Addams writes in Democracy and Social Ethics: "Progress must always come through the individual who varies from the type and has sufficient energy to express this variation" (1964, 158-59). But Addams thinks that any individual or private project must then be taken up by the larger group. Addams tells of many other examples of this process, starting with: "Churches and missions establish reading rooms, until at last the public library system dots the city with branch reading rooms and libraries" (163-64). Addams declares that "improvements, intended for the common use, are after all only safe in the hands of the public itself" (153), but she believes that the impetus for change must come from the individual. After the individual's effort, the community must not only support the changes but must also take ownership of the reforms. Although Pullman did not trust his employees to take part in his larger project, Addams does not deny his accomplishments nor seek to discredit his efforts. Instead, she praises his benevolence in achieving something no community effort could have, even as she condemns him for not seeing that his reforms needed to be democratically supported to endure. This is Addams's first rejoinder to those who would seek to separate liberalism from democracy, or vice versa. A strong individual is necessary for reform, but that reform must eventually express the people's will.

Addams believes that Pullman's problem was, ultimately, an ethical one. When Pullman's workers turned on him, the man who had been celebrated "as the friend and benefactor of workingmen . . . was now execrated by workingmen throughout the entire country" (Addams 1965, 110). This happened because "he suddenly found his town in the sweep of a world-wide moral impulse. A movement had been going on about him and through the souls of his workingmen of which he had been unconscious. He had only heard of this movement by rumor" (114-15). The movement was the growth of a moral understanding on the parts of workingmen: "Their watchwords were brotherhood, sacrifice . . . and their persistent strivings were toward the ultimate freedom of that class from the conditions under which they now labor" (115). The workingmen were undergoing a moral evolution in which freedom and brotherhood were the new definitions of goodness; Pullman's "conception of goodness for them had been cleanliness, decency of living, and above all, thrift and temperance" (114).

Addams argues that the conflict between the individual and the group will continue to recur so long as they can find no common moral ground. Pullman had tried to steer history in one direction, but evolutionary forces were pushing history down a path with a different, more democratic ethical system. No individual, no matter how strong, can push against the evolutionary tides of history. But the powerful individual does have a role to play by providing an outlet through which a movement can flow; Pullman, as a reformer, could have and should have been a forerunner of the labor movement, not the man now remembered as one of its greatest enemies. Addams learned from his lesson, and her project became a push not just for physical reforms, but also for ethical evolution.

A New Ethics of the City

In so far as philanthropists are cut off from the influence of the Zeit-Geist, from the code of ethics which rule the body of men, from the great moral life springing from our common experiences, so long as they are "good to people," rather than "with them," they are bound to accomplish a large amount of harm.

(Addams 1965, 119)

These words, written about Pullman, apply equally to any philanthropist, even a settlement-house worker. This is one of Addams's strongest beliefs: no philanthropist can ever improve the lives of the people if the philanthropist and the people do not agree on how the people's lives need to be improved. Such an ethical gulf was an ineluctable fact of Addams's era. The conflict in which Addams was intervening is elucidated in Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform, which begins by detailing two distinct forms of ethics that had clashed for decades. In Hofstadter's formulation, the two ethics are a nativist belief in "general principles and abstract laws apart from and superior to personal needs" and an immigrant system that "placed strong personal loyalties above allegiance to abstract codes of laws and morals" (1955, 9).

This distinction runs through Hofstadter's entire book. On the one hand is a nativist, entrepreneurial system of ethics that demands in the political sphere a dedication to abstract, impartial rules of social justice. On the other hand is an immigrant ethic of communal belonging that places social needs before political and civic ones, and views personal, familial, and communitarian loyalty as more important than dedication to abstract ideas. It is my contention that Jane Addams, who is only a minor player in The Age of Reform, set out to overcome precisely this ethical gulf in Democracy and Social Ethics. Although Twenty Years at Hull-House is filled with passionate condemnations of corrupt party bosses, Democracy and Social Ethics is equally concerned with passionate condemnation of high-minded reformers who fail to comprehend the organic nature of the ethical system that the party bosses are manipulating.

As an example, Addams condemns the reformer who speechifies about the evils of the saloon without recognizing that the "evil" saloon is actually "the original social center of the Hull House neighborhood, and has a valuable social element, sociability, which must be preserved" (quoted in Linn 1935, 205). The saloon is a problematic community center, but nevertheless, it is the place where the worker gathers to see friends and receive succor from them in hard times.³ Hull-House must eventually supersede the saloon as a center for the neighborhood, and it can do so only if it first supersedes the antiquated (in Addams's term, "primitive") ethics that, while useful in the small town, is unsuited to the needs of the modern city. Democracy and Social Ethics is full of examples of this well-meaning but ultimately inadequate ethical instinct: the workingman who uncomplainingly sleeps in the park so that a pregnant acquaintance might have his bed, the men in the saloon who lend one another money and stand each other meals, the unemployed woman who passes up a job opportunity to take care of her neighbor's children, and the impoverished family that takes in an evicted widow and her five children (Addams 1964, 20-22, 32). Although good deeds are done, Addams sees no prospect for unified action in this neighborliness; those who come face to face with one another will help each other out, but the process goes no further. Left to itself, this simple form of charity will not create a nucleus of social organization more sophisticated than bar bonhomie.⁴

However, Addams fears that this primitive charity can be harnessed by an individual to create a problematic type of social organization. The rich man—be he corrupt alderman or ruthless capitalist—integrates himself into the community by taking advantage of primitive morality. He organizes the community by virtue of his ability to "minister directly to life and social needs" (Addams 1964, 224). These corporate or municipal leaders "are corrupt and often do their work badly," but "[t]hey realize that the people as a whole are clamoring for social results, and they hold their power because they respond to that demand" (224). To put it a different way, they hold their power because they express themselves through the primitive instinct; not only are they "[m]en living near to the masses of voters, and knowing them intimately," they act as if they are a part of the system of primitive charity (224). "Because of simple friendliness the alderman is expected to pay rent for the hardpressed tenant when no rent is forthcoming, to find 'jobs' when work is hard to get, to procure and divide among his constituents all the places which he can seize from city hall" (234). The alderman thus becomes another neighbor, another local face to turn to for help in a time of unemployment. The social reformer can make no headway against this "manifestation of human friendliness" when primitive neighborliness is the primary ethical system (240). Whereas Pullman did a great deal of good but was ultimately overthrown because his conception of good did not match that of the working class, these men can do a great deal of evil so long as their actions channel the ethical feelings of the working class.⁵

In order to displace the alderman, Addams has to do away with social reform's abstract ethics and replace them with a new version of neighborliness, one that shelters and organizes the neighborhood people but does not exploit them. As Anne Firor Scott puts it in her introduction to Democracy and Social Ethics: "A new social ethic would have to evolve which would be based on responsibility to the whole community" (1964, xxvi) not just the rich man. Furthermore, this new social ethic must be historical, able to recognize the importance of past and future actions in the creation of a greater good. The primitive instinct is impressive, seeing as the workingman who gives up his bed for a pregnant woman does so merely on the grounds of acquaintance. But Addams has to replace this powerful primitive charity—the charity of the tribe or village that depends on immediate proximity⁶ —with a sense of charity that can extend to everyone in the community and into the future.

The primitive sense of charity does provide a certain organization, but the organization that it provides benefits not the people, but the wealthy man. The wealthy man is able to exploit the neighborhood because it has no other way of organizing itself. Twenty Years at Hull-House is Addams's narrative of the project of creating a new organizational ethics in order to wrest agency away from the rich man. This extended excerpt from Twenty Years describes the state of the city before Hull-House:

The social organism has broken down through large districts of our great cities. Many of the people living there are very poor, the majority of them without leisure or energy for anything but the gain of subsistence.

They live for the moment side by side, many of them without knowledge of each other, without fellowship, without local tradition or public spirit, without social organization of any kind. Practically nothing is done to remedy this. The people who might do it, who have the social tact and training, the large houses, and the traditions and customs of hospitality, live in other parts of the city. The club houses, libraries, galleries, and semipublic conveniences for social life are also blocks away. We find workingmen organized into armies of producers because men of executive ability and business sagacity have found it to their interests thus to organize them. But these workingmen are not organized socially; although lodging in crowded tenement houses, they are living without a corresponding social contract. The chaos is as great as it would be were they working in huge factories without foreman or superintendent.

(1961, 240-41)

As we can see from her use of the term "social organism," Addams is using a biological description of human society; as a social organism, cities are conceived as organic systems that function by virtue of social ties. But Addams sees a city that is organized and connected only in an economic sense. The city has been sorted into neighborhoods, which function as organs in terms of creating wealth, but it has limited social organization because there is no social contact across neighborhoods. To make matters worse, the party boss has managed to take low-level social relationships and use them to enrich himself and the capitalist. The city of Chicago has economic connections to the entire world, but the working class of the city does not have social connections beyond face-to-face interactions.

As Addams tells us, the city built and sorted by the robber barons has created very dense slums—the workingmen are lodged in "crowded tenement houses." But within this dense conglomeration of people, no social organization has emerged. This is because the social function as it exists in both institutions—clubs, libraries, galleries—and as social practices—the making of social calls, meetings, parties, and so forth—has been sorted out of the districts that contain colonies of immigrants. The immigrants have been organized politically by and for the corrupt alderman and industrially by and for the business titan, but have no social institutions or practices through which to organize by and for themselves. Addams refers to the obvious excellence of the immigrants' industrial organization when she compares their lack of social organization to that of a huge factory without a foreman or superintendent. The result would be chaos, and such chaos is the state of the slums that surround Hull-House.

In order to overcome this chaos and make a progressive democratic movement possible, Addams must somehow synthesize the two ethical systems highlighted by Hofstadter. Addams believes in both the adherence to abstract ethics such as "honesty of administration" and the neighborly friendliness of the alderman. Addams sympathizes with the immigrants who, inspired by face-to-face neighborly kindness, think that "the charity visitor is moved by motives that are alien and unreal" (1964, 23). However, she also sees their primitive charity as unsuited to the reality of the modern city; simple neighborliness actually supports the corrupt alderman since, as the biggest neighbor, he can do the most favors while preventing real change from occurring. Addams, lamenting the fact that "[w]e are singularly slow to apply this evolutionary principle to human affairs in general" (65), wants to help the neighborhood organically evolve a better sense of ethics, one that combines neighborliness with an interest in the wider welfare of the entire community's future. Hull-House must somehow convince the people that it is in their best interest to adhere to a more universal ethical system. Although the alderman seems to be acting as a good neighbor, providing for his constituents, his corrupt methods of administration mean that the people are harmed in the long run. Addams's challenge is to show how an abstract concept such as "honesty of administration" can and should be joined with practical neighborliness. Addams wants to expand the concept of neighborly relations to the point that honesty can be subsumed under the idea of being a good neighbor, and she does that by adding historical awareness to neighborliness.

Addams argues that the failure of organization in the neighborhood is in fact the failure to understand how present conditions are shaped by evolutionary, historical processes. Because primitive charity does not contain historical awareness, this ethic is blind to the past events that have resulted in joblessness. Addams builds an industrial museum precisely to give the neighborhood this sense of history: "If these young people could actually see that the complicated machinery of the factory had been evolved from simple tools, they might at least make a beginning toward that education which Dr. Dewey defines as 'a continuing reconstruction of experience'" (1961, 156). If the people apprehend the evolution of technical processes, it is only one further step to apprehend the need for a concomitant evolution of social organization to regulate these processes. Terms that seem abstract—honesty, truth, justice—will become concrete and accessible with the acquisition of historical consciousness.

"Human progress is slow and perhaps never more cruel than in the advance of industry, but is not the worker comforted by knowing that other historical periods have existed similar to the one in which he finds himself, and that the readjustment may be shortened and alleviated by judicious action . . . ?" (Addams 1961, 157-58). Under the aegis of primitive charity, the best the worker can hope for is a big brother like the alderman, one who looks out for the financial, moral, and social interests of those around him in the short term. But with a historical understanding of progress, the worker can see that collective action, judiciously taken, can affect the future of the entire community. An evolutionary sense of history shows the workers that past, present, and future are all linked, and they must work for something more than just the present day. Here we see how Addams is taking a mediated evolutionary position. On the one hand, human society does progress in an evolutionary manner, with historical forces beyond human control creating modern conditions. But whereas a Social Darwinist understanding of history would end there, Addams finds a second lesson in history: human intervention can alter the arc of society's progress.⁷ This intervention, as we have seen, is possible at a grassroots level only if the neighborhood is integrated across class and other lines; a divided neighborhood is easily harnessed by the rich man for his own purposes. But the integrated neighborhood that understands the historical nature of its problems can theorize a forward-looking solution to its historically determined obstacles, and then act with a concerted unity that is unavailable to the individual. The neighborhood cannot unite to work for its own future unless it has gained historical understanding.

A Hull-House Metaphor: Active Yeast or a Digested Toad?

We can now consider the third binary that Addams believes must be overcome to bring progressive liberalism and true democracy together: the enforced separation of the classes. As we have just seen, Addams believes that a new, evolutionarily informed ethics will bring about an integrated neighborhood that can take action in the best interests of its residents. Addams's synthesis of natural ethical feeling and universal ethical ideas is best understood in terms of the changes she imagines it will bring to the neighborhood. Homogeneous neighborhoods, serving as the city's organs, might be ideal for economic and political unity, but a district that is homogeneous in its poverty, like Addams's own Halsted Street neighborhood, will experience social chaos and therefore stand open to the manipulation of the political boss. The challenge is thus to adopt a new ethics to create a social unity that will allow the people to determine the fate of the neighborhood.

So long as the dominant social ethics remains face-to-face neighborliness, the alderman or the boss will win, because he is the biggest and most powerful neighbor. To begin an ethical transformation, Addams first must replace the boss as the neighborhood's big brother. She doesn't want to put herself in the position once occupied by the boss, but instead seeks to build an institution that can represent the entire neighborhood. This institution is Hull-House, which represents the dehomogenization of the Halsted Street district by virtue of the arrival of the upper- and middle-class Hull-House residents.

The metaphor that we might expect from Addams, at this point, is yeast: the upper-class residents of Hull-House will enter the depressed neighborhood, and their actions will transform the inert raw material that is the impoverished immigrant community into a thriving neighborhood. This is precisely the metaphor some have taken from Addams's writings:

Granted the dominant role of the "better element" in American Society, the settlement movement considered itself to be the leaven in the dough. Jane Addams believed that persons were "chosen" for leadership by their moral eligibility and/or through a lifetime of dedication to serve society.

(Lissak 1989, 19)

But this view of the settlement workers as the "leaven in the dough"—which would link Addams with the other progressive liberals who want to limit the democratic aspect of reform—misrepresents Addams's position. Addams emphatically does not see her project as fermentation, with the residents acting as yeast. Instead, Addams understands the upper classes as equally in need of heterogeneity. To illustrate this point, she tells a story about a young girl who regrets having the freedom to pursue aesthetic pursuits, a freedom that her mother lacked. The girl, when told by her mother that the mother herself had musical talent, thought:

"I might believe I had unusual talent if I did not know what good music was; I might enjoy half an hour's practice a day if I were busy and happy the rest of the time. You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed! I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert first thing in the morning."

(Addams 1961, 47)

It has already been made clear what the lower classes have to gain from an integrated neighborhood: the power to control their own municipal destiny through organization. It is now clear that the upper classes need to be integrated with the lower classes just as badly, as a life of pure privilege is smothering and sickening—all sweetness with no salt.

The young Addams herself felt something like the young girl's complaint; writing in "The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements" in 1892 (reprinted in Twenty Years at Hull-House), she says:

Nothing so deadens the sympathies and shrivels the power of enjoyment as the persistent keeping away from the great opportunities for helpfulness and a continual ignoring of the starvation struggle which makes up the life of at least half the race. To shut one's self away from that half of the race life is to shut one's self away from the most vital part of it.

(1961, 76)

The "vital" part of life, which we might describe as the leaven in the dough, is not democratic ideals or honesty of administration; it is instead the struggle for existence that makes up the life of most humans.⁸ The inert life, if one of them is inert, is the upper- and middle-class life, which has been sundered from the more active aspects of human existence. However, Addams's goal is not to condemn or extol either of these alternatives but, just as she does with the individual/group and neighborly ethics/abstract ethics binaries, overcome them by synthesizing the two seeming opposites.

Addams sees only one way to overcome this particular opposition: the integration of the upper classes with the lower classes. As I have mentioned, Addams does not take recourse in a traditional metaphor of yeast. Instead, she uses a much more radical metaphor, deployed by an enemy of Hull-House but that she co-opts. She closes her chapter "Activities and Investigations" with a moral tale, told by a member of the Chicago Woman's Club who is skeptical of Hull-House. The woman tells of finding two toads in separate parts of her garden, one large and one small, and bringing the two of them together in the hope that the two toads might draw strength from each other. Instead, the larger of the toads promptly eats the smaller one: "The moral of the tale was clear applied to people who 'lived where they did not naturally belong'" (Addams 1961, 203). Addams responds:

I protested that was exactly what we wanted—to be swallowed and digested, to disappear into the bulk of the people.

Twenty years later I am willing to testify that something of the sort does take place after years of identification with an industrial community.

(1961, 203)

Addams concludes the "Activities and Investigations" chapter with this radical metaphor of digestion. The upper classes are not yeast, a separate organism that remakes the otherwise useless neighborhood. They are, in the toad metaphor, a separate organism that would be better off consumed by the larger portion of humanity, losing their unique status but gaining strength by virtue of their integration with a larger and more powerful organism. This organization allows class distinctions to be overcome, so the neighborhood can function as a single organic entity. This "digestion" metaphor carries with it, as Addams knows, a terrifying undercurrent: the loss of selfhood, of individuality, of differentiation. A mutualistic metaphor—Hull-House as the neighborhood watchdog or shepherd—would be much more reassuring, but Addams takes instead the metaphor of digestion, deployed by an enemy, as her own. As she attests, twenty years into the Hull-House project, the settlement house has in fact disappeared as a separate entity. Gone are the errors that marked a distinction between Hull-House and the Halsted Street neighborhood in the early days, such as when the residents of Hull-House, after giving a sick orphan infant the highest possible level of medical care, decided to have "it buried by county authorities" (Addams 1964, 241). This horrified the settlement house's neighbors—"[it] is doubtful if Hull-House has ever done anything which injured it so deeply in the minds of some of its neighbors"—and is the kind of mistake that would have never been made by the parasitic alderman who "saves the very poorest of his constituents from the awful horror of burial by the county" (242, 239).

The old Hull-House fought for the child's life but was not integrated well enough in the neighborhood to understand the horror of county burial. Addams wants to replace that conception of charity with one in which Hull-House, acting as "a big brother" who protects the entire neighborhood "from bullies," represents the seamless integration of the upper and lower classes, the Jews, Russians, Italians, and Irish, the respectable and the morally suspect, and even the anarchists and the socialists (1961, 112). All of those groups are welcome to Hull-House's parties, reading groups, and debating clubs. Institutional meetings, while often started by a middle- or upper-class resident, are run by all members of Hull-House. At Hull-House, the neighborhood comes together for play and for entertainment, but also to theorize ways to improve the neighborhood. When all of these functions are combined, and the differences between the Hull-House residents and Halsted Street residents have been subsumed under the banner of the neighborhood, then Hull-House can act as a big brother for the entire neighborhood—a big brother that is a sort of Leviathan without a head, made up as it is of the entire community.

Lissak and others are right that one of the weaknesses of Addams's project is that the leadership positions at Hull-House were held almost exclusively by the upper- and middle-class settlement members. For that reason, Addams's project is less radically democratic than she desires it to be, even as it is considerably more democratic than the efforts of any of the other Chicago pragmatists. Most famously, Addams herself was convinced by Tolstoy that her position as an administrator was too aristocratic, but her decision to add bread-baking to her tasks was dashed when she returned to America and faced the administrative duties that allowed her to respond to "the demand of actual and pressing human wants" (Addams 1961, 182). However, although the wealthier residents occupied almost all of the conventional leadership positions at Hull House, much of the most important work done in uniting the neighborhood came from the lower-class members of community. Most importantly, the sense of cosmopolitanism that made the whole project possible came not from Addams or any of the wealthier residents, but rather from the efforts of the impoverished immigrants. Marilyn Fischer explains:

Because Addams's neighbors had immigrated, many from rural peasant European settings, to noisy, congested, industrialized Chicago, they had "an unusual mental alertness and power of perception." . . . And they brought gifts, a wealth of experiences from which middle-class Americans could learn. In one of many examples, Addams . . . points to her Greek neighbors, who, benefiting from centuries of casual interactions among peoples on both sides of the Mediterranean, brought "habits and customs" of dealing with race relations with more sophistication and ease than most white Americans.

(2007, 160)

The cosmopolitanism that was one of Hull-House's greatest achievements was supported and deliberately nurtured by Addams. But it was the poorer, immigrant members of the Hull-House community who led the way in achieving that cosmopolitanism. Indeed, if Addams is right that a sense of universal community is necessary to achieve a progressive democracy, then the wealthier residents and outside leaders lagged far behind the Halsted Street community. Addams's text is full of such examples, from the picnic chaperone who let the boys put their arms around the girls' waists in defiance of the middle-class ethics of Addams and company; to the debating society where the only speakers who ever lost their tempers were college professors who could not keep up with the workingmen who formed the clubs; to the "Social Extension Committee" of Irish Halsted Street residents who invited only poor Italians to a particular party and eventually found their differences bridged, only because "the Italian men rose to the occasion" (1961, 119-21, 228, 234). While the wealthier residents often took the lead in organizing legislation and other big-picture projects, it was the poorer members of the Halsted Street neighborhood who did the crucial work of giving the neighborhood a sense of communitarian identity.

This is, according to Carol Nackenoff, an element missed by many who use Addams as an exemplar: "For Putnam, many of the community-based associations that developed and sustained social capital had little to do with politics; many of these associations simply linked neighbors who socialized together" (2009, 122). Nackenoff argues that we can go further than socialization and take from Addams "the importance of, or opportunities for trying to replicate, the cross-class, multiethnic, and even cosmopolitan character of the Hull-House networks today" (122). Hull-House was not just about community activity but was also about community bonds that would overcome all of the traditional divides of an urban neighborhood. Once the neighborhood is integrated, something much greater lies on the horizon; Addams worked "to organize women municipally, nationally, and internationally" (123).

In her narratives, Addams shows us that an integrated neighborhood can have national progressive implications. She argues that once the neighborhood has become an organized entity, it awakens to a fact pointed out to Addams by a visiting Englishman: "[I]n spite of the boasting on the part of leading citizens in the western, eastern, and southern towns, all American cities seemed to him essentially alike and all equally the results of an industry totally unregulated by well-considered legislation" (1961, 130). The organized neighborhood, of course, fights to improve the city via legislative and other means. Addams describes her efforts to topple the corrupt alderman of her ward, to reform city garbage collection, to enforce tenement laws that have been ignored, and various other municipal reform efforts (188, 195, 207). But the efforts do not end there; Hull-House also formed the nucleus of a committee that went on to recommend an Illinois state bill that would regulate sweatshops and child labor. The bill was passed based on the combined efforts of "trades-unions and of benefit societies, church organizations, and social clubs" (134). From the neighborhood-level organization of these groups comes decisive action at the state level. From there, Hull-House's battles in support of a federal sweatshop bill—based on their Illinois efforts—led to awareness that "only by federal regulation could their constituents in remote country places be protected from contagious disease raging in New York or Chicago" (139). Because the entire country is economically connected, with cities as nexus points, contagious diseases will leap across municipal and governmental boundaries with ease. The only solution is concerted national efforts, and those national efforts can be democratic if they are the eventual fruits of organization at the neighborhood level. As Addams reminds us, the great accomplishments of the first era of Progressive legislation began with community efforts of reform and were enacted only when all the various grassroots organizations were able to pull together.

Jane Addams saw the need for an agency to drive Chicago and organize it in the face of corrupt, wasteful, and destructive forces. Although she, like many of the other Chicago pragmatists, ultimately depended on her own reason and the works of other middle-class thinkers, her progressive dream was built on the necessity of democratic organization. A force for progressive good like Pullman Town would end disastrously without democratic engagement, as Pullman was unwilling to ask for the consent of his workers. Gaining consent was not even possible in the slums of Chicago, as the community was too fractured to make its own decisions. In response to this disorganization, Addams's Hull-House project sought to connect each member of the Halsted Street community to every other member, not spatially or even economically (as they were already connected economically), but ethically, socially, and temporally. From social ties came ethical bonds, and from ethical bonds—providing they cut across the axes of class, ethnicity, and ideology—came the ability for the citizenry to organize itself for its future interests. The result was an enduring community that could bring about liberal reforms via democratic methods, something that seemed impossible to both the corrupt party bosses and the outside charity workers alike. So long as the people of a neighborhood were united, they could direct the growth of the city in such a way that it benefited the people. And they could only be organized if they had a new, evolutionary ethics, one that acknowledged both the historico-evolutionary underpinnings of the current situation and the power of human reason to intervene in that process.

Addams learned these key lessons from her efforts to reform Chicago. First, individual efforts can accomplish much, but actions that are born of a bedrock of democratic support are much more difficult to dislodge. Second, democratic organization is possible only when communities are linked to each other socially and temporally; a shared social past and future are necessary for communal action. Finally, the upper classes, the experts, and the elites are not separate forces acting on this community but must be ethically and geographically integrated with the community. If all of these conditions are met, Addams believes that progressive policies can be democratically enacted; in their absence, progressive efforts must be effected undemocratically and democracy threatens to be inimical to progressivism. Although Addams's project never lived up to her toad metaphor—she herself remained an administrator and not a bread baker—her efforts were unique among the progressives of her times in that they offered a blueprint for how to gain democratic support for progressive reforms.