As a young woman, in an era much like our own, Jane Addams experienced a mental health crisis, a condition that doctors at the time referred to as “neurasthenia.” Perhaps it had something to do with the great social changes taking place all around her in late 19th century America.
A massive economic shift was underway, as industrialization overtook the agrarian economy. A communications revolution was taking place, with the invention of the radio and the telephone. Income inequality was a problem, disease was rampant and racist hate groups were on the rise.
Addams found her purpose in the contribution she wanted to make to the broader society. On a visit to the East End of London, Addams witnessed impoverished workers eating rotting vegetables off a filthy wagon. The scene reminded her of a dream that she had as a little girl: The world needed saving, and she wanted to play her part, so she built a wagon wheel.
What could she build now that she was a young woman witnessing the suffering so many were enduring at a time of dramatic social and economic change?
The answer turned out to be Hull House on South Halsted Street in Chicago. It started off as a way to meet the needs of recent immigrant laborers and their children in a part of Chicago where well-educated, middle-class women were not supposed to go. It turned into a way to renew American democracy.
Hull House leaders — almost all women — organized classes and activities for kids. There were hundreds of residents in the surrounding blocks, but only three bathtubs. So they built public baths.
For virtually every problem they discovered in their community, they modeled a concrete solution.
Youth violence and public intoxication were major problems at the turn of the 20th century. Hull House created adolescent leadership programs and a coffee shop as an alternative to saloons.
Tensions among Protestants, Catholics and Jews were high. Hull House designed itself as an interfaith space that deliberately brought people of different faiths together organized around “the fellowship of the deed.”
But while Addams might have started with building concrete solutions to local problems, she didn’t end there. From her base at Hull House, she fought for women’s suffrage, helped found the NAACP and was a key leader of the American Civil Liberties Union. She wrote articles against lynching and was friends with the famed Black feminist Ida B. Wells Barnett. She launched investigations into diseases that led to new laws and government agencies that dramatically improved public health.
Addams believed America wasn’t truly a democracy if it did not dignify the identities and invite the contributions of its varied inhabitants. She wrote: “The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in midair, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”
Addams didn’t put much stock in being ideologically pure. In the best pragmatist tradition, she did the right thing according to the circumstance and the evidence and worked with people of all identities and ideologies to get there. That included people with views very different from her own. Addams wrote: “We know instinctively that if we grow contemptuous of our fellows and consciously limit our intercourse to certain kinds of people whom we have previously decided to respect, we not only circumscribe our range of life, but limit the scope of our ethics.”
America is at a molten moment and needs constructive social change agents to shape it for the better. Young people can find their purpose in serving their communities and may even find themselves launching institutions and movements that wind up renewing American democracy.
Look no further than the example of Addams, who started off as a young person experiencing a mental health crisis and went on to change the nation and the world.
Eboo Patel is founder of Interfaith America and author of “We Need To Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy.”
First Published: April 27, 2022, 4:00 a.m.
