ECHOES OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
The residents of Hull-House have always seen many evidences of
the Russian Revolution; a forlorn family of little children whose
parents have been massacred at Kishinev are received and
supported by their relatives in our Chicago neighborhood; or a
Russian woman, her face streaming with tears of indignation and
pity, asks you to look at the scarred back of her sister, a young
girl, who has escaped with her life from the whips of the Cossack
soldiers; or a studious young woman suddenly disappears from the
Hull-House classes because she has returned to Kiev to be near
her brother while he is in prison, that she may earn money for
the nourishing food which alone will keep him from contracting
tuberculosis; or we attend a protest meeting against the newest
outrages of the Russian government in which the speeches are
interrupted by the groans of those whose sons have been
sacrificed and by the hisses of others who cannot repress their
indignation. At such moments an American is acutely conscious of
our ignorance of this greatest tragedy of modern times, and at
our indifference to the waste of perhaps the noblest human
material among our contemporaries. Certain it is, as the
distinguished Russian revolutionists have come to Chicago, they
have impressed me, as no one else ever has done, as belonging to
that noble company of martyrs who have ever and again poured
forth blood that human progress might be advanced. Sometimes
these men and women have addressed audiences gathered quite
outside the Russian colony and have filled to overflowing
Chicago's largest halls with American citizens deeply touched by
this message of martyrdom. One significant meeting was addressed
by a member of the Russian Duma and by one of Russia's oldest and
sanest revolutionists; another by Madame Breshkovsky, who later
languished a prisoner in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul.
In this wonderful procession of revolutionists, Prince Kropotkin,
or, as he prefers to be called, Peter Kropotkin, was doubtless
the most distinguished. When he came to America to lecture, he
was heard throughout the country with great interest and respect;
that he was a guest of Hull-House during his stay in Chicago
attracted little attention at the time, but two years later, when
the assassination of President McKinley occurred, the visit of
this kindly scholar, who had always called himself an "anarchist"
and had certainly written fiery tracts in his younger manhood,
was made the basis of an attack upon Hull-House by a daily
newspaper, which ignored the fact that while Prince Kropotkin had
addressed the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society at Hull-House,
giving a digest of his remarkable book on "Fields, Factories, and
Workshops," he had also spoken at the State Universities of
Illinois and Wisconsin and before the leading literary and
scientific societies of Chicago. These institutions and
societies were not, therefore, called anarchistic. Hull-House had
doubtless laid itself open to this attack through an incident
connected with the imprisonment of the editor on an anarchistic
paper, who was arrested in Chicago immediately after the
assassination of President McKinley. In the excitement following
the national calamity and the avowal by the assassin of the
influence of the anarchistic lecture to which he had listened,
arrests were made in Chicago of every one suspected of anarchy,
in the belief that a widespread plot would be uncovered. The
editor's house was searched for incriminating literature, his
wife and daughter taken to a police station, and his son and
himself, with several other suspected anarchists, were placed in
the disused cells in the basement of the city hall.
It is impossible to overstate the public excitement of the moment
and the unfathomable sense of horror with which the community
regarded an attack upon the chief executive of the nation, as a
crime against government itself which compels an instinctive
recoil from all law-abiding citizens. Doubtless both the horror
and recoil have their roots deep down in human experience; the
earliest forms of government implied a group which offered
competent resistance to outsiders, but assuming no protection was
necessary between any two of its own members, promptly punished
with death the traitor who had assaulted anyone within. An
anarchistic attack against an official thus furnishes an
accredited basis both for unreasoning hatred and for prompt
punishment. Both the hatred and the determination to punish
reached the highest pitch in Chicago after the assassination of
President McKinley, and the group of wretched men detained in the
old-fashioned, scarcely habitable cells, had not the least idea
of their ultimate fate. They were not allowed to see an attorney
and were kept "in communicado" as their excited friends called
it. I had seen the editor and his family only during Prince
Kropotkin's stay at Hull-House, when they had come to visit him
several times. The editor had impressed me as a quiet, scholarly
man, challenging the social order by the philosophic touchstone
of Bakunin and of Herbert Spencer, somewhat startled by the
radicalism of his fiery young son and much comforted by the
German domesticity of his wife and daughter. Perhaps it was but
my hysterical symptom of the universal excitement, but it
certainly seemed to me more than I could bear when a group of his
individualistic friends, who had come to ask for help, said: "You
see what becomes of your boasted law; the authorities won't even
allow an attorney, nor will they accept bail for these men,
against whom nothing can be proved, although the veriest
criminals are not denied such a right." Challenged by an
anarchist, one is always sensitive for the honor of legally
constituted society, and I replied that of course the men could
have an attorney, that the assassin himself would eventually be
furnished with one, that the fact that a man was an anarchist had
nothing to do with his rights before the law! I was met with the
retort that that might do for a theory, but that the fact still
remained that these men had been absolutely isolated, seeing no
one but policemen, who constantly frightened them with tales of
public clamor and threatened lynching.
The conversation took place on Saturday night and, as the final
police authority rests in the mayor, with a friend who was
equally disturbed over the situation, I repaired to his house on
Sunday morning to appeal to him in the interest of a law and
order that should not yield to panic. We contended that to the
anarchist above all men it must be demonstrated that law is
impartial and stands the test of every strain. The mayor heard
us through with the ready sympathy of the successful politician.
He insisted, however, that the men thus far had merely been
properly protected against lynching, but that it might now be
safe to allow them to see some one; he would not yet, however,
take the responsibility of permitting an attorney, but if I
myself chose to see them on the humanitarian errand of an
assurance of fair play, he would write me a permit at once. I
promptly fell into the trap, if trap it was, and within half an
hour was in a corridor in the city hall basement, talking to the
distracted editor and surrounded by a cordon of police, who
assured me that it was not safe to permit him out of his cell.
The editor, who had grown thin and haggard under his suspense,
asked immediately as to the whereabouts of his wife and daughter,
concerning whom he had heard not a word since he had seen them
arrested. Gradually he became composed as he learned, not that
his testimony had been believed to the effect that he had never
seen the assassin but once and had then considered him a foolish
half-witted creature, but that the most thoroughgoing "dragnet"
investigations on the part of the united police of the country
had failed to discover a plot and that the public was gradually
becoming convinced that the dastardly act was that of a solitary
man with no political or social affiliations.
The entire conversation was simple and did not seem to me unlike,
in motive or character, interviews I had had with many another
forlorn man who had fallen into prison. I had scarce returned to
Hull-House, however, before it was filled with reporters, and I
at once discovered that whether or not I had helped a brother out
of a pit, I had fallen into a deep one myself. A period of sharp
public opprobrium followed, traces of which, I suppose, will
always remain. And yet in the midst of the letters of protest
and accusation which made my mail a horror every morning came a
few letters of another sort, one from a federal judge whom I had
never seen and another from a distinguished professor in the
constitutional law, who congratulated me on what they termed a
sane attempt to uphold the law in time of panic.
Although one or two ardent young people rushed into print to
defend me from the charge of "abetting anarchy," it seemed to me
at the time that mere words would not avail. I had felt that the
protection of the law itself extended to the most unpopular
citizen was the only reply to the anarchistic argument, to the
effect that this moment of panic revealed the truth of their
theory of government; that the custodians of law and order have
become the government itself quite as the armed men hired by the
medieval guilds to protect them in the peaceful pursuit of their
avocations, through sheer possession of arms finally made
themselves rulers of the city. At that moment I was firmly
convinced that the public could only be convicted of the
blindness of its course, when a body of people with a
hundred-fold of the moral energy possessed by a Settlement group,
should make clear that there is no method by which any community
can be guarded against sporadic efforts on the part of half-
crazed, discouraged men, save by a sense of mutual rights and
securities which will include the veriest outcast.
It seemed to me then that in the millions of words uttered and
written at that time, no one adequately urged that
public-spirited citizens set themselves the task of patiently
discovering how these sporadic acts of violence against
government may be understood and averted. We do not know whether
they occur among the discouraged and unassimilated immigrants who
might be cared for in such a way as enormously to lessen the
probability of these acts, or whether they are the result of
anarchistic teaching. By hastily concluding that the latter is
the sole explanation for them, we make no attempt to heal and
cure the situation. Failure to make a proper diagnosis may mean
treatment of a disease which does not exist, or it may
furthermore mean that the dire malady from which the patient is
suffering be permitted to develop unchecked. And yet as the
details of the meager life of the President's assassin were
disclosed, they were a challenge to the forces for social
betterment in American cities. Was it not an indictment to all
those whose business it is to interpret and solace the wretched,
that a boy should have grown up in an American city so uncared
for, so untouched by higher issues, his wounds of life so
unhealed by religion that the first talk he ever heard dealing
with life's wrongs, although anarchistic and violent, should yet
appear to point a way of relief?
The conviction that a sense of fellowship is the only implement
which will break into the locked purpose of a half-crazed creature
bent upon destruction in the name of justice, came to me through
an experience recited to me at this time by an old anarchist.
He was a German cobbler who, through all the changes in the
manufacturing of shoes, had steadily clung to his little shop on
a Chicago thoroughfare, partly as an expression of his
individualism and partly because he preferred bitter poverty in a
place of his own to good wages under a disciplinary foreman. The
assassin of President McKinley on his way through Chicago only a
few days before he committed his dastardly deed had visited all
the anarchists whom he could find in the city, asking them for
"the password" as he called it. They, of course, possessed no
such thing, and had turned him away, some with disgust and all
with a certain degree of impatience, as a type of the
ill-balanced man who, as they put it, was always "hanging around
the movement, without the slightest conception of its meaning."
Among other people, he visited the German cobbler, who treated
him much as the others had done, but who, after the event had
made clear the identity of his visitor, was filled with the most
bitter remorse that he had failed to utilize his chance meeting
with the assassin to deter him from his purpose. He knew as well
as any psychologist who has read the history of such solitary men
that the only possible way to break down such a persistent and
secretive purpose, was by the kindliness which might have induced
confession, which might have restored the future assassin into
fellowship with normal men.
In the midst of his remorse, the cobbler told me a tale of his
own youth; that years before, when an ardent young fellow in
Germany, newly converted to the philosophy of anarchism, as he
called it, he had made up his mind that the Church, as much as
the State, was responsible for human oppression, and that this
fact could best be set forth "in the deed" by the public
destruction of a clergyman or priest; that he had carried
firearms for a year with this purpose in mind, but that one
pleasant summer evening, in a moment of weakness, he had confided
his intention to a friend, and that from that moment he not only
lost all desire to carry it out, but it seemed to him the most
preposterous thing imaginable. In concluding the story he said;
"That poor fellow sat just beside me on my bench; if I had only
put my hand on his shoulder and said, 'Now, look here, brother,
what is on your mind? What makes you talk such nonsense? Tell
me. I have seen much of life, and understand all kinds of men. I
have been young and hot-headed and foolish myself,' if he had
told me of his purpose then and there, he would never have
carried it out. The whole nation would have been spared this
horror." As he concluded he shook his gray head and sighed as if
the whole incident were more than he could bear--one of those
terrible sins of omission; one of the things he "ought to have
done," the memory of which is so hard to endure.
The attempt a Settlement makes to interpret American institutions
to those who are bewildered concerning them either because of their
personal experiences, or because of preconceived theories, would
seem to lie in the direct path of its public obligation, and yet it
is apparently impossible for the overwrought community to
distinguish between the excitement the Settlements are endeavoring
to understand and to allay and the attitude of the Settlement
itself. At times of public panic, fervid denunciation is held to
be the duty of every good citizen, and if a Settlement is convinced
that the incident should be used to vindicate the law and does not
at the moment give its strength to denunciation, its attitude is at
once taken to imply a championship of anarchy itself.
The public mind at such a moment falls into the old medieval
confusion--he who feeds or shelters a heretic is upon prima facie
evidence a heretic himself--he who knows intimately people among
whom anarchists arise is therefore an anarchist. I personally am
convinced that anarchy as a philosophy is dying down, not only in
Chicago, but everywhere; that their leading organs have
discontinued publication, and that their most eminent men in
America have deserted them. Even those groups which have
continued to meet are dividing, and the major half in almost
every instance calls itself socialist-anarchists, an apparent
contradiction of terms, whose members insist that the socialistic
organization of society must be the next stage of social
development and must be gone through with, so to speak, before
the ideal state of society can be reached, so nearly begging the
question that some orthodox socialists are willing to recognize
them. It is certainly true that just because anarchy questions
the very foundations of society, the most elemental sense of
protection demands that the method of meeting the challenge
should be intelligently considered.
Whether or not Hull-House has accomplished anything by its method
of meeting such a situation, or at least attempting to treat it
in a way which will not destroy confidence in the American
institutions so adored by refugees from foreign governmental
oppression, it is of course impossible for me to say.
And yet it was in connection with an effort to pursue an
intelligent policy in regard to a so-called "foreign anarchist"
that Hull-House again became associated with that creed six years
later. This again was an echo of the Russian revolution, but in
connection with one of its humblest representatives. A young
Russian Jew named Averbuch appeared in the early morning at the
house of the Chicago chief of police upon an obscure errand. It
was a moment of panic everwhere in regard to anarchists because
of a recent murder in Denver which had been charged to an Italian
anarchist, and the chief of police, assuming that the dark young
man standing in his hallway was an anarchist bent upon his
assassination, hastily called for help. In a panic born of fear
and self-defense, young Averbuch was shot to death. The members
of the Russian-Jewish colony on the west side of Chicago were
thrown into a state of intense excitement as soon as the
nationality of the young man became known. They were filled with
dark forebodings from a swift prescience of what it would mean to
them were the oduim of anarchy rightly or wrongly attached to one
of their members. It seemed to the residents of Hull-House most
important that every effort should be made to ascertain just what
did happen, that every means of securing information should be
exhausted before a final opinion should be formed, and this odium
fastened upon a colony of law-abiding citizens. The police might
be right or wrong in their assertion that the man was an
anarchist. It was, to our minds, also most unfortunate that the
Chicago police in the determination to uncover an anarchistic
plot should have utilized the most drastic methods of search
within the Russian-Jewish colony composed of families only too
familiar with the methods of Russian police. Therefore, when the
Chicago police ransacked all the printing offices they could
locate in the colony, when they raided a restaurant which they
regarded as suspicious because it had been supplying food at cost
to the unemployed, when they searched through private houses for
papers and photographs of revolutionaries, when they seized the
library of the Edelstadt group and carried the books, including
Shakespeare and Herbert Spencer, to the city hall, when they
arrested two friends of young Averbuch and kept them in the
police station forty-eight hours, when they mercilessly "sweated"
the sister, Olga, that she might be startled into a
confession--all these things so poignantly reminded them of
Russian methods that indignation fed both by old memory and
bitter disappointment in America, swept over the entire colony.
The older men asked whether constitutional rights gave no
guarantee against such violent aggression of police power, and
the hot-headed younger ones cried out at once that the only way
to deal with the police was to defy them, which was true of
police the world over. It was said many times that those who are
without influence and protection in a strange country fare
exactly as hard as do the poor in Europe; that all the talk of
guaranteed protection through political institutions is nonsense.
Every Settlement has classes in citizenship in which the
principles of American institutions are expounded, and of these
the community, as a whole, approves. But the Settlements know
better than anyone else that while these classes and lectures are
useful, nothing can possibly give lessons in citizenship so
effectively and make so clear the constitutional basis of a
self-governing community as the current event itself. The
treatment at a given moment of that foreign colony which feels
itself outraged and misunderstood, either makes its constitutional
rights clear to it, or forever confuses it on the subject.
The only method by which a reasonable and loyal conception of
government may be substituted for the one formed upon Russian
experiences is that the actual experience of refugees with
government in America shall gradually demonstrate what a very
different thing government means here. Such an event as the
Averbuch affair affords an unprecedented opportunity to make
clear this difference and to demonstrate beyond the possibility
of misunderstanding that the guarantee of constitutional rights
implies that officialism shall be restrained and guarded at every
point, that the official represents, not the will of a small
administrative body, but the will of the entire people, and that
methods therefore have been constituted by which official
aggression may be restrained. The Averbuch incident gave an
opportunity to demonstrate this to that very body of people who
need it most; to those who have lived in Russia where autocratic
officers represent autocratic power and where government is
officialism. It seemed to the residents in the Settlements
nearest the Russian-Jewish colony that it was an obvious piece of
public spirit to try out all the legal value involved, to insist
that American institutions were stout enough to break down in
times of stress and public panic.
The belief of many Russians that the Averbuch incident would be
made a prelude to the constant use of the extradition treaty for
the sake of terrorizing revolutionists both at home and abroad
received a certain corroboration when an attempt was made in 1908
to extradite a Russian revolutionist named Rudovitz who was living
in Chicago. The first hearing before a United States Commissioner
gave a verdict favorable to the Russian Government although this
was afterward reversed by the Department of State in Washington.
Partly to educate American sentiment, partly to express sympathy
with the Russian refugees in their dire need, a series of public
meetings was arranged in which the operations of the extradition
treaty were discussed by many of us who had spoken at a meeting
held in protest against its ratification fifteen years before. It
is impossible for anyone unacquainted with the Russian colony to
realize the consternation produced by this attempted extradition. I
acted as treasurer of the fund collected to defray the expenses of
halls and printing in the campaign against the policy of extradition
and had many opportunities to talk with members of the colony. One
old man, tearing his hair and beard as he spoke, declared that all
his sons and grandsons might thus be sent back to Russia; in fact,
all of the younger men in the colony might be extradited, for every
high-spirited young Russian was, in a sense, a revolutionist.
Would it not provoke to ironic laughter that very nemesis which
presides over the destinies of nations, if the most autocratic
government yet remaining in civilization should succeed in
utilizing for its own autocratic methods the youngest and most
daring experiment in democratic government which the world has
ever seen? Stranger results have followed a course of stupidity
and injustice resulting from blindness and panic!
It is certainly true that if the decision of the federal office
in Chicago had not been reversed by the department of state in
Washington, the United States government would have been
committed to return thousands of spirited young refugees to the
punishments of the Russian autocracy.
It was perhaps significant of our need of what Napoleon called a
"revival of civic morals" that the public appeal against such a
reversal of our traditions had to be based largely upon the
contributions to American progress made from other revolutions;
the Puritans from the English, Lafayette from the French, Carl
Schurz and many another able man from the German upheavals in the
middle of the century.
A distinguished German scholar writing at the end of his long
life a description of his friends of 1848 who made a gallant
although premature effort to unite the German states and to
secure a constitutional government, thus concludes: "But not a
few saw the whole of their lives wrecked, either in prison or
poverty, though they had done no wrong, and in many cases were
the finest characters it has been my good fortune to know. They
were before their time; the fruit was not ripe, as it was in
1871, and Germany but lost her best sons in those miserable
years." When the time is ripe in Russia, when she finally yields
to those great forces which are molding and renovating
contemporary life, when her Cavour and her Bismark finally throw
into the first governmental forms all that yearning for juster
human relations which the idealistic Russian revolutionists
embody, we may look back upon these "miserable years" with a
sense of chagrin at our lack of sympathy and understanding.
Again it is far from easy to comprehend the great Russian
struggle. I recall a visit from the famous revolutionist
Gershuni, who had escaped from Siberia in a barrel of cabbage
rolled under the very fortress of the commandant himself, had
made his way through Manchuria and China to San Francisco, and on
his way back to Russia had stopped in Chicago for a few days.
Three months later we heard of his death, and whenever I recall
the conversation held with him, I find it invested with that
dignity which last words imply. Upon the request of a comrade,
Gershuni had repeated the substance of the famous speech he had
made to the court which sentenced him to Siberia. As
representing the government against which he had rebelled, he
told the court that he might in time be able to forgive all of
their outrages and injustices save one; the unforgivable outrage
would remain that hundreds of men like himself, who were
vegetarians because they were not willing to participate in the
destruction of living creatures, who had never struck a child
even in punishment, who were so consumed with tenderness for the
outcast and oppressed that they had lived for weeks among
starving peasants only that they might cheer and solace
them,--that these men should have been driven into terrorism,
until impelled to "execute," as they call it,--"assassinate" the
Anglo-Saxon would term it,--public officials, was something for
which he would never forgive the Russian government. It was,
perhaps, the heat of the argument, as much as conviction, which
led me to reply that it would be equally difficult for society to
forgive these very revolutionists for one thing they had done,
their institution of the use of force in such wise that it would
inevitably be imitated by men of less scruple and restraint; that
to have revived such a method in civilization, to have justified
it by their disinterestedness of purpose and nobility of
character, was perhaps the gravest responsibility that any group
of men could assume. With a smile of indulgent pity such as one
might grant to a mistaken child, he replied that such Tolstoyan
principles were as fitted to Russia as "these toilettes,"
pointing to the thin summer gowns of his listeners, "were fitted
to a Siberian winter." And yet I held the belief then, as I
certainly do now, that when the sense of justice seeks to express
itself quite outside the regular channels of established
government, it has set forth on a dangerous journey inevitably
ending in disaster, and that this is true in spite of the fact
that the adventure may have been inspired by noble motives.
Still more perplexing than the use of force by the revolutionists
is the employment of the agent-provocateur on the part of the
Russian government. The visit of Vladimir Bourtzeff to Chicago
just after his exposure of the famous secret agent, Azeff, filled
one with perplexity in regard to a government which would connive
at the violent death of a faithful official and that of a member
of the royal household for the sake of bringing opprobrium and
punishment to the revolutionists and credit to the secret police.
The Settlement has also suffered through its effort to secure
open discussion of the methods of the Russian government. During
the excitement connected with the visit of Gorki to this country,
three different committees of Russians came to Hull-House begging
that I would secure a statement in at least one of the Chicago
dailies of their own view, that the agents of the Czar had
cleverly centered public attention upon Gorki's private life and
had fomented a scandal so successfully that the object of Gorki's
visit to America had been foiled; he who had known intimately the
most wretched of the Czar's subjects, who was best able to
sympathetically portray their wretchedness, not only failed to
get a hearing before an American audience, but could scarcely
find the shelter of a roof. I told two of the Russian committees
that it was hopeless to undertake any explanation of the bitter
attack until public excitement had somewhat subsided; but one
Sunday afternoon when a third committee arrived, I said that I
would endeavor to have reprinted in a Chicago daily the few
scattered articles written for the magazines which tried to
explain the situation, one by the head professor in political
economy of a leading university, and others by publicists well
informed as to Russian affairs.
I hoped that a cosmopolitan newspaper might feel an obligation to
recognize the desire for fair play on the part of thousands of its
readers among the Russians, Poles, and Finns, at least to the
extent of reproducing these magazine articles under a noncommittal
caption. That same Sunday evening, in company with one of the
residents, I visited a newspaper office only to hear its
representative say that my plan was quite out of the question, as
the whole subject was what newspaper men called "a sacred cow." He
said, however, that he would willingly print an article which I
myself should write and sign. I declined this offer with the
statement that one who had my opportunities to see the struggles
of poor women in securing support for their children, found it
impossible to write anything which would however remotely justify
the loosening of marriage bonds, even if the defense of Gorki made
by the Russian committees was sound. We left the newspaper office
somewhat discouraged with what we thought one more unsuccessful
effort to procure a hearing for the immigrants.
I had considered the incident closed, when to my horror and
surprise several months afterward it was made the basis of a
story with every possible vicious interpretation. One of the
Chicago newspapers had been indicted by Mayor Dunne for what he
considered an actionable attack upon his appointees to the
Chicago School Board of whom I was one, and the incident enlarged
and coarsened was submitted as evidence to the Grand Jury in
regard to my views and influence. Although the evidence was
thrown out, an attempt was again made to revive this story by the
managers of Mayor Dunne's second campaign, this time to show how
"the protector of the oppressed" was traduced. The incident is
related here as an example of the clever use of that old device
which throws upon the radical in religion, in education, and in
social reform, the oduim of encouraging "harlots and sinners" and
of defending their doctrines.
If the under dog were always right, one might quite easily try to
defend him. The trouble is that very often he is but obscurely
right, sometimes only partially right, and often quite wrong; but
perhaps he is never so altogether wrong and pig-headed and
utterly reprehensible as he is represented to be by those who add
the possession of prejudices to the other almost insuperable
difficulties of understanding him. It was, perhaps, not
surprising that with these excellent opportunities for misjudging
Hull-House, we should have suffered attack from time to time
whenever any untoward event gave an opening as when an Italian
immigrant murdered a priest in Denver, Colorado. Although the
wretched man had never been in Chicago, much less at Hull-House,
a Chicago ecclesiastic asserted that he had learned hatred of the
Church as a member of the Giordano Bruno Club, an Italian Club,
one of whose members lived at Hull-House, and which had
occasionally met there, although it had long maintained clubrooms
of its own. This club had its origin in the old struggles of
united Italy against the temporal power of the Pope, one of the
European echoes with which Chicago resounds. The Italian
resident, as the editor of a paper representing new Italy, had
come in sharp conflict with the Chicago ecclesiastic, first in
regard to naming a public school of the vicinity after Garibaldi,
which was of course not tolerated by the Church, and then in
regard to many another issue arising in anticlericalism, which,
although a political party, is constantly involved, from the very
nature of the case, in theological difficulties. The contest had
been carried on with a bitterness impossible for an American to
understand, but its origin and implications were so obvious that
it did not occur to any of us that it could be associated with
Hull-House either in its motive or direction.
The ecclesiastic himself had lived for years in Rome, and as I
had often discussed the problems of Italian politics with him, I
was quite sure he understood the raison d'etre for the Giordano
Bruno Club. Fortunately in the midst of the rhetorical attack,
our friendly relations remained unbroken with the neighboring
priests from whom we continued to receive uniform courtesy as we
cooperated in cases of sorrow and need. Hundreds of devout
communicants identified with the various Hull-House clubs and
classes were deeply distressed by the incident, but assured us it
was all a misunderstanding. Easter came soon afterwards, and it
was not difficult to make a connection between the attack and the
myriad of Easter cards which filled my mail.
Thus a Settlement becomes involved in the many difficulties of
its neighbors as its experiences make vivid the consciousness of
modern internationalism. And yet the very fact that the sense of
reality is so keen and the obligation of the Settlement so
obvious may perhaps in itself explain the opposition Hull-House
has encountered when it expressed its sympathy with the Russian
revolution. We were much entertained, although somewhat
ruefully, when a Chicago woman withdrew from us a large annual
subscription because Hull-House had defended a Russian refugee
while she, who had seen much of the Russian aristocracy in
Europe, knew from them that all the revolutionary agitation was
both unreasonable and unnecessary!
It is, of course impossible to say whether these oppositions were
inevitable or whether they were indications that Hull-House had
somehow bungled at its task. Many times I have been driven to
the confession of the blundering Amiel: "It requires ability to
make what we seem agree with what we are."
[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]
This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK
Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text
entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of
volunteer Jill Thoren.
[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]
[A Celebration of Women Writers]
"Chapter XVIII: Socialized Education." by Jane Addams (1860-1935)
From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by
Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp.
427-453.
[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]