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The “Un-American” Experiment: Jane Addams's Lessons from Pullman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2013

CHERYL HUDSON
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Abstract

The exceptional character of the United States' political culture has been and continues to be hotly contested. In the late nineteenth century, commentators framed radical ideologies as “un-American” and they subsequently entered the political lexicon as alien to American ideals and values. However, far less scholarly attention has been given to alternative definitions of “un-American” activity that emerged in the late nineteenth century. This article examines the charges made by contemporaries against the “un-American” town of Pullman and of George Pullman's patronage of his town and its workers. Through a close reading of Addams's critique of Pullman as “A Modern Lear” as well as other narratives and counternarratives contained within contemporary speeches, pamphlets, and newspaper and journal articles, this essay will demonstrate the flexible nature of the charge of “un-Americanism” in the crisis years of the 1890s. In that decade, the character of the modern nation was still highly contested and although the conservative, anti-union view won the immediate Pullman battle, it did not do so without a fight and it did not ultimately succeed in defining the character of the modern nation.

Type
Un-American Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 4: The “Un-American” , November 2013 , pp. 903 - 923
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

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40 Stead, William T., If Christ Came to Chicago: A Plea for the Union of All Who Love in the Service of All Who Suffer (Chicago: Laird & Lee Publishers, 1894)Google Scholar. Jane Addams recounts Stead's charges against Chicago, the work he carried out at Hull House, and his attempt to galvanize the reform community in Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House, 108–9. Stead's charge that Pullman failed to give back to the Chicago community continued to influence historical accounts for some time. In 1942 Almont Lindsey repeated Stead's charge that Pullman held aloof from civic activity, despite the fact that Pullman was treasurer of the Relief and Aid Society, president of YMCA, vice president of the Law and Order League, backer of the Haymarket verdict, founding member of the Commercial Club, and one of the business leaders most responsible for winning Chicago's right to host the World's Fair in 1893, as well as donating the statue commemorating the Fort Dearborn massacre to the city that year. See Lindsey, The Pullman Strike, 31; Smith, Urban Disorder, 179.

41 Stead, 92–3. Another Progressive commentator, Thomas Burke Grant, published an article in 1894 arguing in a similar vein. Grant compared Pullman unfavorably to Sir Titus Salt's company town Saltaire, largely because of George Pullman's vulgar financial motivation: “After draining the land and laying off the town, Mr. Pullman, unlike Sir Titus Salt, wanted first of all to make money. He wanted also, to take credit to himself for bringing out, so to speak, an American edition of the English experiment, particularly as most of the money in the Pullman Palace Car Company came from English shareholders.” Thomas Burke Grant, “Pullman and Its Lessons,” American Journal of Politics, 5, 2 (Aug. 1894), 190–204.

42 Pullman vice president Thomas Wickes quoted in Smith, 194; Addams, “A Modern Lear.”

43 Addams, “A Modern Lear.”

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54 Ibid., 8.

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56 Jane Addams, “Public Recreation and Social Morality,” 492.

57 John Higham, “The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s,” 175.

58 Addams, Spirit of Youth, 2.

59 Ibid., 8.

60 Addams, Spirit of Youth, 17.

61 Park, 764, notes that approximately 12 per cent of the 50 million dollars invested by US municipalities in parks and playgrounds between 1898 and 1908 was expended in the six months immediately following the 1907 Chicago Play Congress.

62 Director of parks and playgrounds quoted in Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, 250.

63 Victoria Brown, “Advocate for Democracy,” 136.