In the 1890s, as corporations came to dominate the economy and the nation engaged in its first imperial adventures, violent labor battles took place on the streets of the burgeoning industrial cities and the ideology of American exceptionalism began to show the first signs of strain. What had stood at the heart of the American exception – abundant land, open opportunity, and economic independence – was rapidly disappearing. In that decade, the value of collective action and group identities vied with the more traditional values of individual autonomy and independence, contesting and destabilizing the character of the American nation. For historian Frederick Jackson Turner, the crisis of the 1890s was a crisis of the closure of the unique relationship Americans had forged with nature, labor, and the future. In that decade, anxious urban elites worried that America might not escape the historical laws that Marx had uncovered in Europe. They began to stigmatize collective class action as “un-American”; radical ideologies and collectivist class politics entered the American political lexicon as alien to American ideals and values.Footnote 1
The Pullman strike of 1894, a local strike that quickly took on national proportions, served as a focus for contemporaries – and for historians since – to contemplate the relationship between working-class political activity and American national identity. Social reformers located in nearby Chicago had a particularly strong interest in shaping the meaning and response to Pullman so that it might serve as a lesson in what were acceptable twentieth-century American values – and what were not. Jane Addams, social reformer and director of Chicago's first and foremost settlement house, pioneered the response. Far from characterizing the unions as “un-American,” however, Addams and other Progressives cast industrial capitalist George Pullman as the element in the conflict that was most out of step with those American values they hoped to preserve and advance into the new century.
This article therefore challenges the dominant historiographical focus on the stigmatization of working-class activity as “un-American.” Contemporary concerns about the alien nature of class solidarity and organization and their fundamental irreconcilability with American national values persisted through to the consensus historians of the post-World War II period.Footnote 2 New Labor Historians of the 1970s and 1980s searched for other, less essentialist, explanations for the relative weakness of class politics in the United States vis-à-vis Europe.Footnote 3 More recent studies develop the theme of contingent and pliable national values and identities further, arguing that in fact the language and ideologies of Americanism might – and did – also work to legitimize and strengthen the labor movement in practice.Footnote 4 Whether or not Americanism acted as barrier or boost to unionism and working-class identity formation, the debate about class and national values has hitherto focussed on workers and their unions, neglecting the other important dimension of contemporary interpretations. This article seeks to broaden the discussion about “un-American” activity that emerged in response to the urban-industrial upheavals of the late nineteenth century by noting the success that Jane Addams and other Progressive opinion-formers had in labeling strident capitalist activity in the 1890s, rather than socialism, as “Un-American.”
Charges made by contemporaries against the “un-American” town of Pullman and of industrialist George Mortimer Pullman's patronage of his town and its workers provide a telling insight into the making of notions of the un-American. Although the forces of combined capital formally won the Pullman battle of 1894, they did not do so without a challenge, and ultimately they were denied the opportunity of defining the character of the modern nation through their victory. While the federal government lined up with private interests to label the strikers unpatriotic, and to smash the strike, Progressive thinkers and reformers challenged the terms of the debate by unveiling and denouncing the “un-American” nature of Pullman's operations. Despite their best efforts, neither labor nor capital fully succeeded in defining Americanism in the 1890s; instead, the Pullman experiment acted as an “un-American” foil against which Progressive reformers defined what Americanism was, should be, and would become. Leading the response, Chicago's Jane Addams drew clear lessons about American values from Pullman. A reexamination of her contemporary writings opens a new window onto the way that Americans in the Progressive era understood the nature of the “un-American.”
PULLMAN'S AMERICA, THE WORLD'S FAIR AND PROGRESSIVISM
Industrialist George Pullman drew his own lessons from the widespread and bloody labor conflict that shook the nation in 1877. In 1880, he purchased four thousand acres of land near Lake Calumet, south of Chicago, on which to build factory plant and a model town to house workers and their families. He hoped that, in providing good housing and a pleasant environment for his workforce, the Pullman Palace Car Company could avoid the industrial strife that had befallen other ventures in the city. The political fallout from the 1886 Haymarket affair can only have persuaded Pullman of the correctness of his strategy. Indeed, labor conflict in Chicago continued to be sharp; between 1887 and 1894, the city hosted 528 strikes by 283,000 workers.Footnote 5
Fitting the profile of many other Chicago-based magnates of the period, George Pullman came from a relatively humble, small-town background. Born in 1831 in Brocton, New York, Pullman received little formal education but showed a flair for design and engineering that he put to good use when he moved to Chicago in 1855. At that time, the city was in the process of raising its buildings eight feet to allow for better drainage and Pullman oversaw the elevation of several structures and buildings. Having made the beginnings of a fortune, augmented by a successful mining stint in Colorado, Pullman applied himself to the improvement of the railroad sleeping car.Footnote 6 His belief in the commercial value of beauty and comfort brought his designs magnificent success. Across the national rail network, of which Chicago formed a central hub, Pullman standardized luxury in his “travelling hotel” idea. His promotional literature scoffed at the notion that Americans were interested only in practicality and utility and instead hailed quality in design and aesthetics as essential parts of the distinctively American faith in progress and cognizance of individuality.Footnote 7 To underline the patriotism of his new design, as well as assure his commercial success, Pullman publicized the use of one of his carriages to convey President Lincoln's body from Washington to his final Springfield, Illinois resting place in 1865.Footnote 8
Pullman represented in his life and his work the reality of the self-made man, the rugged individual of the frontier and the independent entrepreneur of classical liberalism. His political outlook reflected his personal experience but he nevertheless lived at a time of great social and cultural transformation. In building the town of Pullman, he hoped to set an example in applying corporate management techniques not only to the working but also to the living conditions of his workers. Recognizing that, in an age of combination and monopoly, the political economy of laissez-faire had been fatally compromised, Pullman sought an approach that might avoid the combative consequences of modern labor relations. He proclaimed proudly that the town of Pullman was a daring social experiment designed to solve the problem of labor–capital conflict “upon lines of mutual recognition.”Footnote 9
Most contemporary reports on the town of Pullman were positive; many saw the experiment as a viable solution to the labor problem.Footnote 10 Jane Addams, an old friend of Pullman's, witnessed “his genuine pride and pleasure in the model town he had built with so much care,” and reported how he was feted throughout Europe “as a friend and benefactor of workingmen.”Footnote 11 In stark contrast to the slums of Chicago, the town's streets were paved and well lit and boasted a range of residences, all provided with gas, water, indoor plumbing, sewerage. and regular garbage disposal. Residents also had use of a schoolhouse, a firehouse, a railroad station, stables, a hotel (housing the only licensed bar in town), parks, playing fields, the Arcade (with bank, theatre, and library), Market Hall, and a greenstone church. Just as he had technically engineered the elevation of Chicago's buildings from the swamp, so Pullman aimed to elevate the culture and consciousness of the working class by exposing them to a wholesome living environment. The model town offered a way out of the disorder caused by modern city living and was therefore viewed by many observers as a worthy template for the future, even if the reality of its operation required modifications in the concept of American citizenship.Footnote 12
Progressive economist Richard T. Ely's 1885 account of the town of Pullman sounded the first cautious warning, setting the benefits of a healthful, hygienic environment for the morals and manners of workers against the denial of autonomy that went along with it. Ultimately, Ely concluded that despite the uplifting effect of clean streets, attractive housing, and good jobs, Pullman was too strictly controlled and tightly regulated by one man to be judged a total success. Ely questioned whether Pullman cultivated the character attributes necessary for the creation of good American citizens; “the conclusion is unavoidable that the idea of Pullman is un-American … It is not the American ideal. It is benevolent, well-wishing feudalism, which desires the happiness of the people but in such a way as shall please the authorities.”Footnote 13 Ely's assessment that Pullman might please the authorities was not guesswork: a year before, the soon-to-be commissioner of labor Carroll D. Wright had studied conditions in Pullman and found that while workers could be said to be living in a “gilded cage,” they were indeed lucky to be doing so and should be glad of its advantages.Footnote 14 Before the strike, most assessments of Pullman were wholly positive while criticism was rare and, at worst – like Ely's – muted.
Pullman saw his experiment as fully in keeping with American values and ideals. As a grand symbol of the national progress and prosperity the town symbolized, he purchased the Corliss steam engine that had served as the centerpiece of the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 and used it to power his workshops.Footnote 15 An iconic machine, it had dazzled all those who came to witness it. William Dean Howells marveled at it upon first viewing: “wherever else the national bird is mute in one's breast, here he cannot fail to utter his pride and content … it is still in these things of iron and steel that the national genius most freely speaks”; while poet Walt Whitman was reduced to awed silence in its presence.Footnote 16 Pullman encased the engine behind glass in full public view as a celebration of his factory's contribution to the industrial and manufacturing prowess of the United States. He showcased the engine as a part of the triumphant march of American civilization and as a mark of the enterprising national spirit. Through his prominent display of the Corliss engine, Pullman announced that his company not only would embody American values but would aid the United States in the glorious endeavor of providing a progressive example for the rest of the world. For Pullman, the town of Pullman operated as a “city upon a hill” for the industrial age.
To similar effect and purpose, Pullman took a leading role in bringing the Columbian Exposition to Chicago in 1893. After helping Chicago win the national bid for the fair, Pullman marked the occasion with a patriotic gesture, organizing an extravagant ceremony to unveil his gift to the city of a statue commemorating the 1812 Fort Dearborn massacre.Footnote 17 A combination of civic-mindedness and homage to American frontiersmen, the ceremony also served to publicize Pullman's own contributions to the city and the nation. During the course of the fair, Pullman advertised his product, company, and model town by distributing free promotional brochures, arranging sightseeing excursions to Pullman, and exhibiting his trains and rolling stock in the fair. He portrayed his industrial effort as within the compass of national traditions and as an advertisement for American values.Footnote 18
Yet, despite Pullman's many attempts to equate his work with Americanism, national values and traditions had become highly contested during the decade of the 1890s and the spectacular celebration of American achievement that was the World's Fair clarified little. As Henry Adams noted, while “Chicago asked in 1893 for the first time the question whether the American people knew where they were driving,” it offered few answers for itself.Footnote 19 Old certainties were no longer relevant since the fair was nothing, according to Adams, if not “a step in evolution to startle Darwin.”Footnote 20 Its spectacular exhibits and displays underlined how rapid social and technological change had destabilized visions of the American future.
As American intellectuals cast around for the meaning of the modern urban order, historian Frederick Jackson Turner offered an imaginative repositioning of the national trajectory when he delivered his presidential address to the American Historical Association at the Chicago fair. Turner reformulated the American character as the consequence of interactions between pioneering individuals and their environment. For Turner, the frontier stripped settlers of their “garments of civilization” and provided “the line of most rapid and effective Americanization,” creating an individualistic, practical, and democratic people bound together by their exceptional national experience. Yet Turner also sounded a note of anxiety about the future. Fitting his speech to the occasion of the World's Fair in an urban metropolis that had recently been a frontier outpost, he ended by asking his audience to acknowledge that “now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”Footnote 21 No matter what the American future might be, it would not be a repetition of the past.
PULLMAN'S UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES
As it turned out, Pullman's “city upon a hill” soon became as irrelevant as a template for the future as Turner's frontier. The Pullman experiment, previously hailed as a possible solution to class conflict, urban disorder and moral decay, lost its luster when Pullman workers struck against the company in 1894. Although visitors to Chicago's Columbian Exposition had toured the town of Pullman and heralded its industrious and philanthropic character only one year before, contemporary commentators reinterpreted Pullman's experiment in national renewal as a tragic failure in the wake of the strike. Earlier misgivings about the undemocratic nature of a privately owned and run community surfaced with far greater force when it became clear that it had failed to provide a solution to the labor problem.
The strike, a protest at the maintenance of high rents in Pullman despite deep wage cuts, soon became national in scope when Pullman workers appealed to and won the support of the newly formed American Railway Union (ARU).Footnote 22 The General Managers Association (GMA), a tightly organized association of all railroads terminating in Chicago, responded by reframing the dispute as a choice between support for the anarchic and disorderly strikers or loyalty to the federal government, rather than as a battle between railroad workers and their employer. The railroads sought to depict the public itself, a body represented by the state, as the victims of the strike action, rather than the rather less sympathetic George Pullman.Footnote 23
The GMA's deflective strategy proved partially successful but neither their account of the strike, nor their version of Americanism, went uncontested. For sure, the powerful forces of combined capital, the federal government, and certain sections of the press lined up behind Pullman to smash the strike and denounce the strikers as unpatriotic and un-American. Yet the ARU and its sympathizers had put forward their own powerfully patriotic counternarrative throughout the course of the strike and in its aftermath, in an attempt to garner support and set the nation on an alternative path. As Troy Rondinone has vividly illustrated, the battle for national identity played an important role in the public debate surrounding the Pullman strike.Footnote 24 However, while Rondinone, like generations of historians before him, argues that the rhetoric surrounding the strike ultimately and effectively delegitimized the strikers and their cause as un-American, in fact the greatest casualty of the strike was the Pullman “idea” itself, support for which collapsed amid the turbulence and disorder of the conflict.Footnote 25
The contest for legitimate claim to the American creed was fierce. Against press and management charges of un-Americanism, Methodist minister Reverend William H. Carwardine, a Pullman resident, vehemently defended the patriotism of the workers. When union men and their supporters donned small white flags on their lapels to signify their peaceful backing of the strike action, managers and other members of the elite in both Pullman and Chicago began to wear miniature Stars and Stripes flags in their buttonholes. Carwardine asked, “Does this mean that they who wore the flag indicate thereby that the striking employees are un-American endorsers of lawlessness and anarchy?”Footnote 26 On the contrary, he argued, Pullman workingmen were steadfastly loyal Americans and active members of a host of patriotic societies. Many of them, he pointed out, had demonstrated their Americanism by fighting in the Civil War. Indeed, thirty-seven Pullman soldiers wore their Grand Army of the Republic button alongside their white flags. Carwardine himself wore both the white and American flags to symbolize “American labor protected by the stars and stripes in its demand for justice from the inhumanity of grasping corporations.”Footnote 27 Carwardine preferred to position workers as victims of a cruel capitalist in need of protection by the national state – a state they had loyally served – rather than to imagine them as unionists, activists, and strikers, fighting on their own behalf for their own version of justice.
Thus, during the strike, Carwardine followed the GMA in presenting the battle as that for a rightful claim on the federal state as representative of the people, a neutral arbiter of clashing self-interests. Carwardine depicted his interpretation of the situation as a reclaiming of the intentions of the Founding Fathers, concluding that if the United States was to continue giving “object lessons in government to the world,” the nation must demonstrate that it bows to no special interest but justice. He appealed to workingmen to put aside their own partisanship and to “Love your country. There is no better in this world. Love and uphold our constitution, and ever protect the flag for which our fathers, my father, died” (wishing, perhaps, with this patriotic declaration, to draw attention to the fact that George Pullman had paid for a substitute during the Civil War).Footnote 28 Carwardine's passionate appeal to patriotism challenged the notion of Americanism as strident self-interested individualism and began to reestablish the terms of national identity along lines of social justice – albeit measured and determined by intellectuals, reformers and the state.
The strike itself ended with a violent confrontation that was loaded with symbolic implications for national identity. Strikers and the police did battle on the Fourth of July, leading to a colossal fire breaking out on the site of the World's Fair and destroying seven of the magnificent buildings of the White City. The very next day, President Cleveland invoked the 1890 Sherman Act and ordered federal troops to Chicago to break the strike.Footnote 29 The utopian national vision of the future projected by the World's Fair was literally and figuratively reduced to ashes as the social relations of the city and the political might of the national state asserted themselves.Footnote 30
In Chicago, Jane Addams led the post-strike attack on Pullman's idea. Distinctly uncomfortable with the clash of interests represented by the strike, Addams highlighted the damaging impact such conflicts had on innumerable personal lives. Melodramatically recounting her own experience – of a dying sister whose family could not reach her deathbed because of transportation obstacles caused by the strike – Addams noted that not all Americans were as forbearing and charitable as her sister. It was imperative, then, if only to prevent “lasting bitterness” in the hearts of their fellow citizens, that both strikers and capitalists seek conciliation through an arbitration process.Footnote 31
Addams and other Progressive thinkers understood the “labor problem” not merely as one of low pay and poor conditions, nor simply as the conflict that resulted from power inequalities between worker and employer, but primarily as the renting apart of national interests that were in fact essentially mutually dependent. While Pullman himself had promised to reconcile labor–capital relations along lines of “mutual recognition,” the strike underlined for Addams the fact that Pullman's idea went both too far and not far enough. Although, in her understanding, Pullman admirably sought to overcome class conflict by providing his workers with an improved environment that worked to nullify the formulation of any self-interested demands, she regretted his failure to consider the need to suppress his own self-interest for the sake of the general good.
Rejecting Pullman's paternalism yet not fully embracing all the implications of popular democracy, Addams instead set about creating a new conception of democratic citizenship, one based upon an organic understanding of social organization and therefore freed from political contestation. She laid out her own understanding of the Pullman strike, and the lessons she drew from it, in a speech she gave to reform organizations in Chicago, Boston, and New York in its immediate aftermath. Not published until over a decade later, “A Modern Lear” represented an explicit critique not only of George Pullman and his corporation but also of the old order of private benevolence as the solution to social inequality.Footnote 32
Just as Shakespeare's Lear fell into error by seeking personal affirmation from his daughters for his indulgence of them, Addams argued, so Pullman brought about his own tragic downfall when he demanded gratitude and obedience from his workers in return for providing them with the “perfect surroundings” of his model town. Both men, in Addams's interpretation, “failed to catch the great moral lessons which their times offered them.” Those lessons, which Addams expanded upon, were contained both in Cordelia's “larger conception of duty” and in the Pullman workers' desire for justice beyond Pullman's clean streets, thrift, temperance, and decency. Addams did not reserve her criticism for Pullman alone, but argued that the strikers too should put the general national interest ahead of their own self-interested demands. While Pullman's mistake was to expect his generosity to command both glory and gratitude, the workers' lack of generosity with respect to their employer's motivation and intention was also at fault, in Addams's reading. The newly aroused working classes, in their single-minded demand for full and equal participation in American life, sought a noble end but echoed Cordelia's selfishness in dismissing established relationships and the past too quickly and easily. Addams warned that by failing to recognize the valid claim of the employer, labor unions were risking not only violent conflict and political repression but, even more worryingly, the possibility of losing sight of social justice in keeping with American values, “for the sake of fleshpots,” as Cordelia's elder sisters had done.
Ultimately, Addams concluded, the people of Chicago must embrace the ethical lesson that “conciliation and control” represented the only civilized response to industrial strife. For Addams, the way forward demanded calm compromise and levelheaded arbitration. Other Progressive critics echoed these themes, condemning the self-interested nature of Pullman's operations and taking pains to demonstrate how out of keeping with American national values and traditions the Pullman idea was. In his own testimonial pamphlet about the experience of the strike, the Reverend William H. Carwardine condemned Pullman as uncaring, immoral, and “un-American” for his poor treatment of workers during the strike and for his absolutist control over the economic and political life of the town. But in Carwardine's account, as for Addams, the really unforgivable sin was that Pullman refused to arbitrate.Footnote 33
Since self-interested action was the real culprit, neither the hardheaded accounting of the Pullman Company nor the disruptive democracy of the union represented true Americanism. In a plea for national unity that would overcome division by party or interest, Carwardine insisted that instead of tearing one another apart, representatives from capital and labor must come together to agree to terms of reconciliation. Staking out his own position above the fray, Carwardine argued, “I did not endorse the strike, and never have. I did not endorse the boycott … But I stood for justice.”Footnote 34 It was a demand for justice spoken on behalf of the Pullman workers, yet one which denied them their own voice. Rather, Carwardine suggested that state and federal arbitration courts be given the power to make firm and binding rulings just as in courts of international arbitration. Where there remained a refusal to arbitrate, as at Pullman, the federal government must seize the plant and run it in the interests of the whole people – whether, it can only be assumed, the people demanded, or indeed wanted, it or not.
The arguments Carwardine and Addams forwarded against self-interest and political contestation carried much influence within Progressive circles from the 1890s, forming the basis of a new understanding of democracy and citizenship. Philosopher John Dewey claimed that Addams's “Modern Lear” essay was “one of the greatest things I ever read both as to its form and its ethical philosophy.”Footnote 35 Reflecting on a particularly lively conversation with Addams about the strike, Dewey experienced a conversion of sorts, “I can see that I have always been interpreting the dialectic wrong end up – the unity as the reconciliation of opposites, instead of the opposites as the unity in its growth, and thus translated the physical tension into a moral thing.”Footnote 36 In other words, Dewey came to see social divisions as merely temporary alignments within a common whole and recognized therefore that neither side could lay claim to right. It was a turning point for Dewey and he took the lessons he learned from both Pullman and Addams about the need for the mediation and harmonization of social conflict into the development of his pragmatic philosophy and democratic ethics. Removed from any moral framework and devoid of the competing claims his former Hegelianism allowed, the operation of democracy took on a naturalistic hue requiring little decisive action or judgment from citizens, only perhaps the light touch of expert mediators to smooth its path.
Dewey's initial response to the Pullman strike, especially after the involvement of the American Railway Union, had been of great sympathy for the workers mixed with excitement that the national labor movement might bring about the perfection of the American personality through the expansion of democracy into the workplace. Even after the violent smashing of the strike, Dewey saw cause for optimism in the collectivism of the action and the way in which the strike had revealed the growing interconnectedness of the national economy.Footnote 37 The unity of purpose and community of interest between workers and capitalists only became apparent to Dewey, if not to the parties involved in the conflict, as he took on board Jane Addams's lesson that it was up to Progressive thinkers to encourage a more balanced view and to adopt a mode of compromise and conciliation rather than to promote any further antagonism.Footnote 38
Addams had attempted to bring her insights to bear on the resolution of the Pullman strike directly. As a member of the newly formed Chicago Civic Federation's Industrial Committee and Board of Conciliation, Addams worked to bring both sides to the negotiating table. While the ARU agreed to engage in arbitration talks, Pullman consistently insisted that there was “nothing to arbitrate,” apparently still clinging to the traditional notion of “right of contract”; that is, that his workers were free to leave his employ if they did not like the conditions there. Certainly the high rates of personnel turnover at Pullman indicated that workers were not averse to exercising this freedom.Footnote 39
The Chicago Civic Foundation was originally established in 1893 during a meeting of the “best elements of the community” called by British journalist and passionate reform advocate William T. Stead. Having come to Chicago to attend the World's Fair, Stead stayed on, using Addams's Hull House as a base from which to explore and vicariously experience the vice, corruption, and poverty of Chicago's Levee district. He published his findings in the sensational account If Christ Came to Chicago, a moral indictment of the city and its leading citizens, including Pullman.Footnote 40 Stead shared some of Addams's concerns about the extent of Pullman's power but he was more explicit than she was that Pullman, far from being too paternalistic, was actually not paternalistic enough – or, at least, that his paternalism was exercised for too narrow a goal. Stead's charge that “the autocrat of all the Russias could not more absolutely disbelieve in government by the people, for the people, through the people, than George Pullman” gave way to an unfavorable comparison of Pullman with the Duke of Westminster, who, Stead observed, properly observed the principle of noblesse oblige, worked hard for the general good, and “at least is in no danger of degenerating into a mere money-rake.”Footnote 41 If paternalism was to be employed, it must serve the social good, not the profit margin.
It was in part this call to work for social justice as an outcome, to forgo the callous materialism of Addams's “flesh-pots” and Stead's “money-rakes,” that spurred Chicago's reform establishment to action and gave birth to the Chicago Civic Federation. Membership ranged from federation president Lyman J. Gage, also president of the First National Bank, and Bertha Honore Palmer, chair of the Board of Lady Managers of the World's Fair, to radical University of Chicago economist Edward Bemis, as well as an array of merchants, educators, bankers, ministers, and labor officials. Stead urged these Chicagoans to take a stand in the face of conflicts of naked self-interest, be it Pullman's or the union members', and use their organization to forge a moral connection between the estranged parts of the urban whole.
Despite their apparently sincere desire to cultivate a democratic community in the social laboratory of Chicago, Progressive reformers held a view of working people that often mirrored Pullman's own. Throughout Jane Addams's own critique of Pullman there runs a tension between her argument that workers deserve greater autonomy (and, in any case, demand it) and her apparently unironic portrayal of them as Pullman's ungrateful “children.” Pullman had designed his attractive, orderly, and dry town to “improve [the worker's] character as citizens and the quality of their work,” and Addams agreed that “uplift” was a desirable goal for social reform. Yet Addams laid more store in gaining the consent of the citizenry than Pullman did. She conceded that democratic sanction might have the unfortunate result of slowing social progress but thought that such progress would ultimately be more legitimate for the cross-class community of interest it engendered.Footnote 42 The individualistic, heroic striving of Pullman's efforts and achievements might, Addams argued, take him to the mountain summit but he would be alone, “a solitary mountain climber beyond the sight of the valley multitude.” Far better than “teaching contemporaries to climb mountains” was to “persuade the villagers to move up a few feet higher.” Individual rights and freedoms could not exist independently within the context of a modern urban social order but must be harnessed to the social good. For Addams, the Pullman experience undermined any remaining notion of the validity of political self-interest. The essential lesson of Pullman was that the exercise of modern citizenship must rest on a foundation of group loyalties and activities; the expression of American national identity through individual character – rugged or otherwise – was no longer apposite.Footnote 43
The lessons that Addams took from Pullman were double-edged: while she assuredly shared many of the assumptions that drove Pullman's own social experiment, she also moved considerably beyond them, demonstrating that in a dynamic, complex urban American nation, the relationship between the environment and the individual citizen was more complicated than Pullman had supposed. Pullman may have been well intentioned but he clung to too many of the assumptions of the past, retaining too much faith in individualism and in the natural justice of the market and failing to observe the necessity of democratic participation for the building of American character and community. Underlining the struggle for national definition that engaged them and many of their contemporaries, Progressive thinkers loudly and insistently denounced the newly cast “un-American” aspects of Pullman's operations – notably self-interested individualism – while retaining much of his paternalistic approach to social welfare.
JANE ADDAMS AND THE STATE OF PLAY
Pullman acted as a foil against which Addams worked out her own position about how modern citizenship should operate and she, like many Progressives, used Chicago as her social laboratory. She searched for new and innovative ways to connect (and connect with) the free-floating cosmopolitan citizenry. As her “Modern Lear” essay indicated, she faulted Pullman for being stuck in the past, wedded to a form of philanthropy that demanded gratitude and subservience from its passive recipients. She nevertheless believed that Pullman was right to move beyond the notion of a citizen as an autonomous individual and rational subject and to take cognizance of the power of the social environment to mold and produce behaviors and actions. She hoped to turn this discovery to advantage in producing citizens, not by exhortation and example as nineteenth-century moral reformers had done, but by discreet environmental engineering as, in fact, Pullman had tried to do. For Addams, the crucial missing ingredient from Pullman's approach was community consent – without it, his experiment carried no legitimacy.
Yet, and again like that of many Progressive thinkers and reformers, Addams's response to the congested, conflict-ridden city was full of ambiguities and contradictions, apparent in her indecisiveness about how to characterize the popular will: was it too strong and interest-based so that it must be neutralized and defused; or was it entirely weak, if not absent, and easily led astray by cheap commercial amusements and corrupt politicians so that it must be morally corrected and socially uplifted? Despite her enthusiasm for democratic citizenship, her orientation toward the mass public often disclosed a sense of her own impotence in the face of the fast-moving social change that accompanied dramatic urban growth and expansion. And, given her frustrations about political power and social control, the solutions she developed were tinged with antidemocratic implications, denying and often removing the agency of ordinary citizens.Footnote 44
To be sure, Addams sought to retain what was best in the liberal and republican traditions of American citizenship but updated them in response to the conditions of city living.Footnote 45 She sought to forge a reconnection between the “classes and the masses” but also, importantly, between the generations. Addams focussed much of her effort on reforming citizenship through the children and young adults of the republic. After all, the young represented the future and, as John Higham has noted, the twentieth century was to put a special premium on youth as a phase of life characterized by “a maximum of spontaneity, freedom, and vital energy,” qualities seen to be lacking from the urban, industrial order.Footnote 46 Addams sought to re-create a wholeness of being and a unity of purpose in her drive to heal divisions between classes, generations, and ethnic groups, and to reconstruct a notion of the common good.
In her application of the lessons she learnt at Pullman to citizen-making in Chicago, Addams was clear that she acted not as Lady Bountiful but as a facilitator of both scientific solutions and democratic participation. She equally clearly rejected the ethical egoism of classical liberalism. She insisted that the current generation keep step with the evolution of social ethics since “to attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation.”Footnote 47 While Pullman clung to a negative notion of virtue (meaning cleanliness, decency, thrift, temperance, and an absence of vice), the workers had developed the positive and virtuous watchwords of brotherhood, sacrifice, mutual support, and subordination of the individual to the class. Since America was “passing from an age of individualism to one of association,” if employers, intellectuals, and reformers did not seize the initiative and free themselves from “the individualistic point of view,” they would be left behind by the common man.Footnote 48 Pullman was, for her, the best example of both the benefits and the costs of individualism; while she admired his strength and willingness to take risks, his refusal to arbitrate the strike showed that despite socializing an entire town, he had not socialized his conscience.
If a private employer should not indulge his workers in social experiments of positive environmentalism, then who – if anyone – should? Addams's writings make it quite clear: the “leading voices” such as the residents at Hull House would show the way but, ultimately, the state must take over.Footnote 49 Just as with the Civic Federation's attempt at arbitration during the Pullman strike, not the people themselves, nor any special interest, but an objective social body apparently representing the general public interest must enlarge the nature and bounds of democracy. The key question of agency became blurred for Addams as she replaced democratic desire with community consensus and state authority. That is not to say, however, that Addams consciously and deliberately looked to the state as an instrument of social control; rather, she was optimistic that good citizens, well made, would not require any such measures of control. The state's responsibility was, she believed, in the making of them.
Constantly searching for institutional means through which to effect the necessary changes to democratic citizenship, in the mid-1890s Addams hit upon the playground movement. Hull House opened Chicago's first public playground in May 1894 to a large crowd of cheering children.Footnote 50 Within a decade, Chicago's City Playground Commission had taken over the Hull House playground and the city had spent five million dollars on ten more new playgrounds. In 1907, the Playground Association of America (PAA) held its first annual conference, or “Play Congress,” in Chicago, attended by city officials, park directors, playground supervisors, principals, and reformers from cities across the nation. At the concluding “play festival” in Ogden Park, Addams addressed the crowd of four thousand to underline the importance of public provision of recreational facilities in the modern city if public morality and good citizenship were to follow.Footnote 51
Play produced fit, healthy, and morally robust citizens and prevented juvenile delinquency, according to play leaders. Lee Hanmer of the National Playground Association insisted, “The playground of today is the republic of tomorrow. If you want twenty years hence a nation of strong, efficient men and women, a nation in which there shall be justice and square dealing, work it out today with the boys and girls on the playground.”Footnote 52 Addams supported the movement for urban parks and playgrounds for many reasons, which she laid out in her 1909 work The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets.Footnote 53 In the book, Addams chastises modern city authorities for failing in their responsibility to provide an outlet for the “play impulse” among urban youth. Addams believed that the conditions within the modern city tended to corrupt and misdirect youth's natural cravings for excitement, romance, sex, and adventure. To ensure that they grew into good citizens, positive and uplifting entertainments must be made available to the city's youth since, she claimed, “Recreation alone can stifle vice.”Footnote 54
Other Progressive thinkers agreed; John Dewey and Luther Gulick also argued that urban parks and playgrounds could perform many of the functions of institutions like churches and schools, even families, which had lost some of their authority in the modern city. While beautiful parks put urban dwellers back into contact with nature, playgrounds and other organized leisure activities were actually more useful since they put citizens back into contact with one another and with their mutual cultural traditions. The usefulness of playgrounds lay in the “social education” of children and in their ability to transform the poor and foreign-born from a civic liability into a civic asset.Footnote 55
Addams believed that playgrounds would counteract the negative moral impact of undesirable home and working environments on poor and immigrant youth and, perhaps more importantly, would offer an alternative to “the vicious excitements and trivial amusements” of the city.Footnote 56 The dangers posed by urban commercial amusements, according to Addams, were psychological and cultural as well as moral. Influenced by the work of evolutionary psychologist G. Stanley Hall's 1904 publication Adolescence, she sought to protect and preserve the “spirit of youth” from the damaging effect of, in particular, nickelodeons and dance halls and harness it instead for the social good.Footnote 57
When Chicago passed a movie censorship ordinance – the nation's first – in November 1907, Addams demurred, arguing that in fact the failure of the city to take responsibility for public recreation was “almost worse than the restrictive measures” which “dam up the sweet fountain of youth.”Footnote 58 Through the provision of public recreational activities such as playgrounds, Addams hoped that Chicago city government could avoid the heavy-handed repression she associated with, for example, Pullman's total ban on saloons and instead facilitate the “free expression of the inner life” among urban youth.Footnote 59 Rather than imposing legal restrictions or pressing for conformity to a puritanical ethic, Addams argued that young people will be “made safe only through their own self control.”Footnote 60 The development of that self control was therefore the key to the making of good citizenship. She appeared unaware of the irony in her demand that it be cultivated from without through the exercise of urban public policy.
Addams's work and example at Hull House inspired the city authorities to fund public recreation, particularly parks and playgrounds, as a sound civic investment. In the period immediately after the 1907 PAA conference, Chicago and other US cities sank millions of dollars into the creation of parks and playgrounds, a large proportion going into Chicago's South Park system.Footnote 61 Chicago's director of playgrounds described the development as “better calculated to raise the standard of good citizenship than any other single agency in the hands of public servants.”Footnote 62 In May 1911, Addams addressed the Chicago Child Welfare Exhibit and expressed satisfaction with the movement toward greater governmental responsibility for public recreations. The mission of making citizens was ongoing, a process of production, but she believed it had been set in the right groove and could be trusted to the representatives of the people.
Thus, despite their strong denunciations of his “un-American” approach, Addams and other Chicago reformers adapted some of Pullman's social innovations to the demands of the big city, continuing his experiments in positive environmentalism. Ultimately, his model town lost credibility not because it represented an attempt to shape and determine individual citizen's behavior through manipulation of the environment – reformers viewed this as the most benign and positive aspect of the experiment – but because it was pursued by a private individual in his own interest, rather than for the broader social good. Addams's own social experiment with playgrounds shared much of the paternalism of Pullman's model town while her demands for arbitration distanced social justice from political self-interest. Both denied the conscious deliberations of ordinary (adult) citizens about the proper nature of American citizenship.
Progressive commentary about the Pullman strike and boycott turned a working-class defense of living standards and autonomy into a struggle for national self-definition. With his model town, George Pullman had begun the process of modifying the relationship between the individual and the environment to suit the industrial age, a process fine-tuned by Addams. Although the union lost in 1894, the Pullman strike was far from an unqualified victory for the railroads and even less so for Pullman and his “idea.” In the wake of the strike, Jane Addams helped shape a new urban politics based on the conciliation of clashing private interests by expert public commissions. Despite the fact that Addams's efforts for the Chicago Civic Federation had failed to bring arbitration to the Pullman dispute, the subsequent US Strike Commission's report on the strike vindicated the federation's efforts to arbitrate and deemed Pullman's actions “un-American.” The following year, the federation sponsored legislation for a state Board of Conciliation and Arbitration, empowered to mediate labor disputes. At the federal level, the 1898 Erdman Act folded official labor arbitration into national policy. Far from being a victory for political democracy, as Victoria Brown has argued, this development snatched the exercise of democracy out of the hands of the very people who reformers claimed they wanted to empower.Footnote 63
Shortly after George Pullman's death in 1897 a court ruled that the company must divest itself of the town management since it overreached its function as a private enterprise. George Pullman's ambitious, experimental, and risk-taking character had represented nineteenth-century Americanism, but those who began to build the American welfare state restyled his approach, particularly his refusal to arbitrate, as “un-American.” Progressives like Addams looked – just as the GMA had done at the height of the strike – to the state as a representative of the people for the legitimizing power to act. Their objections to Pullman's denial of agency to his workers were just and admirable – even if they were only voiced in the aftermath of the strike and the obvious failure of his social experiment. Yet Addams did not herself have a robust faith in the agency and ability of ordinary citizens when they acted in their own economic or political interests rather than that of the general good. A deep irony lay behind her desire to make all citizens, whatever their background, “masters of their own economic and social careers,” by insisting that the state intercede positively on citizens' behalf. Using the class conflict of Pullman as a reference point and foil, Jane Addams asserted her own cultural authority as mediator by delineating political conflict itself as corrosive to social democracy and therefore “un-American.” Casting out individual self-interest and democratic contestation alongside strike action, laissez-faire capitalism and private philanthropy, Addams placed compromise, conciliation, and consensus right at the center of American political culture for the twentieth century.
