Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy

Marilyn Fischer, Carol Nackenoff, Wendy Chmielewski, Marilyn Fischer, Carol Nackenoff, Wendy Chmielewski

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780252076121, 9780252034060
• eBook ISBN: 9780252091223
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Using a rich array of newly available sources and contemporary methodologies from many disciplines, the ten original essays in this volume give a fresh appraisal of Addams as a theorist and practitioner of democracy. In an increasingly interdependent world, Addams's life work offers resources for activists, scholars, policy makers, and theorists alike. This volume demonstrates how scholars continue to interpret Addams as a model for transcending disciplinary boundaries, generating theory out of concrete experience, and keeping theory and practice in close and fruitful dialogue.

Contributors are Harriet Hyman Alonso, Victoria Bissell Brown, Wendy Chmielewski, Marilyn Fischer, Shannon Jackson, Louise W. Knight, Carol Nackenoff, Karen Pastorello, Wendy Sarvasay, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, and Camilla Stivers.

SECTION II

Jane Addams and the Practice of Democratic Citizenship

3

Jane Addams’s Theory of Cooperation

LOUISE W. KNIGHT

For most people, cooperation is one of those ideas that seems too vague to be much use as a guide to living or to seeking social reforms, let alone substantial enough to constitute a theory. But in the nineteenth century in Great Britain and the United States, as scholars have shown, the critics of the dominant ideology of individualism—that is, those on the left wing of the political spectrum—embraced cooperation as a theory and developed methods for acting upon it in the economic realms of production and consumption, in the social realm of utopian community living, and in the political realm of democracy. Jane Addams first encountered some of these ideas as a teenage reader. By the time she moved to Chicago in 1889 to start a settlement house with Ellen Gates Starr, she was ready to be an enthusiastic cooperator. In this paper, I will trace the reform origins of the theory of cooperation in Great Britain, because those theorist-reformers influenced Addams the most, tell the story of Addams’s developing fascination with the theory, and discuss the ways it influenced her first ten years of work in social reform and her own theories about that work.¹

The Nineteenth-Century Theory of Cooperation

Cooperation as an idea cannot be said to have been invented by anyone, but in the nineteenth century it became the focus of a sustained enthusiasm for societal reform in both Europe and the United States. It was an enthusiasm that gave birth to multiple forms of socialism, new forms of utopian communities, and economic “co-ops,” among other things. Beginning in 1817, the philosophical ideas of Charles Fourier, Claude Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, and Auguste Comte caused France to become one such flourishing center of cooperative theory and practice, while the ideas of Robert Owen sparked similar developments in Great Britain.²

An industrialist as well as a reformer and philosopher, Robert Owen promoted the idea of improving human character and escaping the evils of competition and individualism through his lectures, books, magazines, and experiments by forming “cooperative” agricultural and manufacturing communities.³ A “cooperative motto” expressed his commitment to mutual service: “Each for all and all for each.”⁴ The vocabulary available to express these ideas was expanded in 1827, when an Owenite supporter introduced the word “socialist” as a synonym for “cooperative” and an antonym for “individualist.” The new word would prove particularly protean.⁵

The next development in Great Britain was for the idea of cooperation to be Christianized. The social Christian, or Christian socialist (the terms were used interchangeably) movement arose in 1848, the brainchild of a young lawyer, John Ludlow, and two Anglican ministers, Frederick Denison Maurice and Charles Kingsley. Influenced by the ideas of the Owenite movement, as well as by the rise of Chartism—a prolabor movement—their cooperative ideal was both economic and spiritual. On the economic side, troubled by the injustices suffered by working-class people and rejecting the popular belief that competition was the law of the universe, followers of these young men founded a tailor cooperative, where shared investment and labor produced shared profit, and Maurice became president of a society for promoting workingmen’s associations. On the spiritual side, troubled by the contemporary Christian emphasis on saving individual souls, Ludlow, Maurice, and Kingsley claimed that prosperous Christians had a primary duty to help the poor and to improve society, that salvation was a social undertaking.⁶

The ideas of the early cooperative movement produced a creative ferment in British society, and in time generated many of the most innovative British reform projects of the century—most notably the producer and consumer cooperative movements; an energetic labor movement; the British wing of the scientific, or Marxist, socialist movement; the workers’ education movement; and the settlement house movement (all of these would have their American counterparts).

The reaction of British economists to cooperative theory was mostly, and not surprisingly, negative. The great majority thought the concept nonsense, being thoroughly devoted to the economic doctrine of laissez-faire, which argued that government should not interfere with commerce. But a few felt the idea’s appeal. John Stuart Mill, for example, writing in 1848, foresaw a future when associations of workers would collectively own the capital that funded their economic production. He predicted that after society had transitioned from capitalism to a “cooperative socialism,” individuals would have greater freedom because they would have greater economic equality and, therefore, greater opportunity to deliberate among themselves.⁷

In the United States, the movement found its earliest expressions in utopian communities. In 1825, Robert Owen founded his model American “cooperative” community, New Harmony, in Indiana, where all members did equal labor and shared the profits. Adin Ballou founded his Christian cooperative utopia in Milford, Massachusetts (renaming the town Hopedale) in 1841, even before Christian socialism had formally emerged in England. In 1854, Ballou, who was also committed to nonresistance, published Practical Christian Socialism.⁸ In 1842, another cooperative community in Massachusetts, the famous Brook Farm, began. As early as 1845 at least one American labor union envisioned “a network of cooperatively owned stores and buying clubs.”⁹ And in 1847, John H. Noyes, a Christian perfectionist and a former enthusiast of Fourier’s ideas, founded the communistic Oneida community in New York.¹⁰ After the hiatus of the Civil War, a new generation of Americans revived these ideas. Farmers embraced economic cooperation in production and consumption in the 1870s and 1880s; idealists founded new utopian communities; the Knights of Labor encouraged the spread of “cooperatives” in the form of local assemblies; and reformers interested in women’s issues started cooperative kitchens, day care programs, apartments, and factories, among other things.¹¹ In 1889, W. D. P. Bliss and others founded the Society of Christian Socialists.¹²

Jane Addams and the Theory of Cooperation

In her childhood, youth, and young adult years, Jane Addams encountered various cooperative and/or socialist ideas. Her first documented interest in the theory of cooperation was her fascination, which she mentions in her memoir, Twenty Years at Hull-House, with Robert Owen’s New Harmony experiment. She first learned about it in 1873, when, at twelve, she read the Atlantic Monthly’s three-part series on the long-defunct utopian community.¹³ She also knew about the farmers’ cooperative movement. In 1875 the Stephenson County Farmers’ Cooperative was founded in Freeport, Illinois, a city nearby to Addams’s home of Cedarville. She first encountered the ideas of Christian socialism in 1881, when she read Charles Kingsley’s novel, Hypatia.¹⁴ And in her twenties, she learned about the ideas of the French philosopher Auguste Comte, probably through the writings of John Stuart Mill, who wrote a book about Comte and was an enthusiast.¹⁵

Addams’s interest in cooperation became more formal and focused in 1888, when, on a visit to London, she met two prominent British Christian socialists, Rev. Samuel and Henrietta Barnett. Just a few years prior they had founded the world’s first settlement house, Toynbee Hall, in the city’s East End, a low-income working-class neighborhood. Addams visited the settlement and became friends with the Barnetts, who were happy to mentor her. The Barnetts’ left-leaning Christian socialism was manifest in several ways. First, the settlement was a new sort of community founded on social Christian ideals, making it a cooperative utopia of a sort.¹⁶ Second, the Barnetts were concerned with economic issues and supported labor union organizing. At the same time, the Barnetts embraced the mainstream version of Christian socialism that, by the 1880s, was dominating the views of the Anglican Church leadership. This version offered a completely spiritualized critique of individualism. Concern for the poor and the suffering was primarily to be expressed through sympathy.¹⁷ It was a version that held particular appeal to Addams, who had no interest in economic issues at this juncture.

Two books, by authors well known to the Barnetts, captured this version well; Addams likely read them in 1888 or soon after. One was by W. H. Fremantle, whom Addams had accidentally met just before arriving in London. He was the Canon of Canterbury, a social Christian, and a friend of Samuel and Henrietta Barnett. In his influential The World as the Subject of Redemption (1885),¹⁸ Fremantle claimed that the goal was to “save the world” by abandoning selfishness and “imbu[ing] all human relations with the spirit of Christ’s self-renouncing love.”¹⁹ The second book, by Brooke Foss Westcott, the Canon of Westminster, was Social Aspects of Christianity (1883). Westcott noted the suffering caused by “tyrannical individualism” and called for his readers to find a social fellowship with those in the household, the factory, and the warehouse. Thus they would find the “deeper, more abiding delight which comes from successfully administering to the good of others.”²⁰

For the Barnetts, the challenge was how to put their social Christian ideals into action. Their approach was to use cooperation as a primary method for the economic and social undertakings of the settlement house. They liked to say that “‘with’ not ‘for,’” was their motto. To them, this meant not designing or running a program for people, but making it possible for people to design and/or operate it themselves. In the economic realm, the Barnetts worked with shoeblacks to launch a cooperative hotel and with teachers to found a cooperative traveling society. In the social realm, they approached school reform by seeking cooperation among parents, teachers, administrators, and students. Within the settlement house, the Barnetts considered cooperation best expressed through the principle of self-governance. Thus at Toynbee Hall the many boys and girls and adult clubs and the residents group were self-governing. The residents were a group of male college graduates who lived at the settlement house and spent their free time being sociable with, and offering structured programs to, the men and children of the neighborhood. The residents met weekly at a session that Samuel Barnett chaired, “the Grand,” to settle policy questions relating to residential life at the house.²¹

Cooperation at Hull-House

A little more than a year after visiting Toynbee Hall, Addams and her friend Ellen Gates Starr cofounded Hull-House, a cooperative community modeled in most ways after the British settlement.²² But while the Barnetts stayed focused on the principle of cooperation, Addams integrated the idea of nonresistance into her cooperative theory and practice. Her introduction to those ideas came from the writings of Leo Tolstoy in the 1880s, particularly his book, My Religion.²³ Certainly, the two ideas were complementary. Because cooperators rejected the idea of one person making decisions on behalf of others, they presumably also rejected the idea of one person using force to mandate the compliance of others.

In the early years, Addams tended to merge the two principles of cooperation and nonresistance. She wrote in 1892 that “the first residents” of Hull-House began with the conviction “that it would be a foolish and unwarranted expenditure of force to oppose or to antagonize any individual or set of people in the neighborhood.” They intended, she explained, to live “with opposition to no man, with recognition of the good in every man, even the most wretched.” In order to do this, the residents “must be emptied of … all self-assertion and be ready to arouse and interpret the public opinion of their neighborhood. They must be content to … grow into a sense of relationship and mutual interests.”²⁴ A few years later she wrote that the settlement was “designed” to promote “co-operation with all [the] good which it finds in its neighborhood.”²⁵

Wary of labels, Addams did not call herself a social Christian, but it is clear she considered herself one. In a letter to her stepbrother, George Hal-deman, during her first months at Hull-House, she predicted approvingly that “Christian socialism” would spread once prosperous people realized the extent of “the misery” of the poor. In 1892, she wrote that the settlement movement “is only one manifestation of that wider humanitarian movement which throughout Christendom … is endeavoring to embody itself, not in a sect, but in society itself.” In 1895, she spoke of settlements as “an attempt in the direction of social Christianity,” and quoted Samuel Barnett’s views on the subject at length.²⁶

Many of Hull-House’s early cooperative projects were, like Toynbee Hall’s, cooperative economic experiments conducted upon a principle often found in cooperative enterprises, the principle of self-governance.²⁷ Neighbors and Hull-House residents together organized the “coal cooperative” (1893), the public or “cooperative” kitchen (called the Coffee House)(1893), and the Jane Club, a “cooperative” workingwomen’s residence possibly inspired by Toynbee Hall’s shoeblacks hotel, with the same hope of providing inexpensive lodgings. Addams encouraged Mary Kenney, a working woman and union organizer, to form the free-standing club in 1892 (it was not, in its early years, a project of Hull-House’s, although it was located in the neighborhood). To prepare Kenney and her friends for th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section I: Addams’s Experimental Method
• Section II: Jane Addams and the Practice of Democratic Citizenship
• Section III: Democratic Cosmopolitanism and Peace
• Contributors
• Index