Chicago, City of Big Ideals
Despite current anti-Chicago rhetoric in the conservative media, it’s a city with a deep stream of idealistic progressivism. My personal hero from the Chicago past is Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House. I challenge anyone to read Twenty Years at Hull House and not put the book down feeling considerable respect for her drive to ease suffering and give her neighbors a future.
Nobody is today going to attack Jane Addams, but it’s important to see the breadth of her engagement with social problems. She is not a person who simply sacrificed herself by living with the poor and channeling charity to them.. like Mother Teresa. Addams was both an activist and social scientist who advocated government intervention in industry through law (see chapter “Pioneer Labor Legislation in Illinois”). Hull House, while looking and sounding a lot like a place the earliest Christians would have been into, would not get the Limbaugh or Beck seal of approval. No doubt a contemporary version of Hull House would be portrayed as a den of socialism. But that is the usefulness of someone like Jane Addams: she’s a progressive figure who is, I think, beyond criticism and part of our common usable past.
The healthcare “debate” has put me in mind of her on a number of occasions. There is a common idea out there that we all need to be better neighbors and keep the government out of the business of helping people. This gets enunciated in a range of ways, but most striking to me was this video from the summer in which congressman Tom Coburn (R-OK) fields a question from a disconsolate woman and points to the need for friends and neighbors to help each other out. His idea is that government is not what we should look to, but rather private forms of charity.
Seeing this video I thought about an incident recounted in Twenty Years at Hull House:
I was told by the representatives of an informal association of manufacturers that if the residents of Hull-House would drop this nonsense about a sweat shop bill, of which they knew nothing, certain business men would agree to give fifty thousand dollars within two years to be used for any philanthropic activities of the Settlement. [27]
The relationship there between corporate interest and private charity is clear.. right? In fact, Addams speaks of this offer in terms of a “bribe.” That bribe is not always so stark, but it’s present in much of our debate on healthcare. The virtuous answer to healthcare is some version of a more godly society in which people help each other and look out for each other. But the winners in that case are the manufacturers and businessmen. What these moneyed men fear most is government imposed limitations on their profits. To avoid that they will give lots of private charity.. which makes them feel good and gives everything a patina of godliness.
What Addams understood is that being a good neighbor meant working actively to get government to do the right thing and limit child labor and the length of the working day. Being a good neighbor meant letting unions organize in your settlement house. Being a good neighbor meant accepting people from other countries and encouraging the continuation of their traditions. And that means turning down the “bribe” or the “myth” of personal goodness as the answer to social problems.
