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WorkJane Addams

Newer Ideals of Peace

Her answer to the old peace movement: war ends when the work of feeding, housing and protecting people commands the loyalty that soldiering once did.

by Jane Addams193 passages held

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First published
(aged 47)
Original language
English

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Overview

Peace societies around 1900 had two arguments against war, and Jane Addams begins by setting both aside. One was pity: the writings of Leo Tolstoy and the battle paintings of the Russian artist Vasily Vereshchagin showed what a campaign does to the common soldier. The other was prudence: Jean de Bloch, a banker and economist in the Russian empire, had worked out that even an armed peace was ruining Europe. Both arguments, she says, only tell people to stop, and neither had held. Britain went to war in South Africa soon after the first Hague Conference, and the tsar who had called that conference disregarded its tribunal. Her own claim is that war will not be argued away. It will be replaced, as the work of keeping one another alive comes to ask for the courage and loyalty that people once found only in fighting. She takes the phrase for this from the philosopher William James, who had asked for a moral equivalent for war. The equivalent, she says, is already forming in the immigrant quarters of American cities, where people from some twenty nations have to help one another across every national line. Most of the book is therefore about Chicago. City government, she argues, still runs on habits left over from war: it polices and represses, and it gives the vote to men alone because voting began with those who bore arms. The real business of a modern city is safe factories, protected workers and children kept out of the mills, and the immigrants and women who know that work best have no part in directing it. One of her examples is the Chicago stockyards strike of 1904, in which established workers struck to protect the wages of the unskilled. The book came out early in 1907. That February James wrote to her that it had destroyed old views of his and opened new ones, and he asked her permission to send his spare copy to the playwright George Bernard Shaw; his own essay "The Moral Equivalent of War" was printed in 1910. The last chapter says that war is passing, and seven years later Europe was at war. From 1915 Addams argued the same case as chair of the Woman's Peace Party, against a hostile press.

Key concepts

What is the 'moral equivalent for war'?

Something that calls out the courage, loyalty and sacrifice that war calls out, without the killing. Addams quotes the phrase from an American philosopher she does not name and gives it a content of her own: the determination to abolish poverty and disease, to make work safe and to keep children out of the mills. People already admire this kind of heroism more each day, she holds, and war will fade as it takes hold.

What does Addams mean by 'newer ideals of peace'?

Ideals that act where the older ones only pleaded. Earlier peace advocates appealed to pity or to prudence and in the end merely told people to stop, which Addams calls the dovelike ideal. The newer ideals grow out of people's actual dealings with one another, above all the concern to feed, house and protect human life. Made effective, she believes, they would do away with war as a natural process, with no creed required.

What are 'survivals of militarism' in city government?

Habits of rule left over from the age when a city existed to defend itself. Addams counts among them the reliance on police and prohibition, the distrust of ordinary people, and a franchise limited to men because voting began with those who bore arms. A modern city has no enemy outside its walls. Its dangers are bad housing, foul water and dangerous work, and she argues that the old habits cannot deal with them.

What does Addams mean by 'enlarged housekeeping'?

Her name for what a modern city government actually has to do. Once people live crowded together, clean streets, pure milk, safe food and the care of children stop being private chores and become public business. Addams draws two conclusions. A candidate should be judged by whether he can keep the streets clean, not by his views on the navy. And women, the traditional housekeepers, ought to be consulted, which for her means the vote.

What is 'cosmic patriotism'?

A loyalty as strong as love of country that does not stop at the border. Addams admits the phrase is rather absurd and uses it for want of a better one. She sees it forming among immigrants in American cities, whose patriotism can be confined neither to the old country nor to the new, and she hopes it may grow strong enough to move masses of people beyond narrow national caution.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A substitute for war, not a sermon against it

If pity and arithmetic have not stopped a single war, what will? Addams answers that war ends only when something else asks for the same courage, and she finds that something in the work of keeping people alive.

Two arguments had carried the peace movement, and Addams sets both aside. Tolstoy and the painter Vereshchagin appealed to pity, the banker Jean de Bloch to prudence, and Britain went to war in South Africa soon after the first Hague Conference. Both appeals only say stop. She wants an ideal that is aggressive in its own right, and takes up the demand for a moral equivalent for war. The miners of Pennsylvania, she notes, bear more pain and danger each year than as many men in European barracks. War will pass when correcting the wrongs of industry looks as magnificent as fighting for the nation.

  • war
  • peace
  • militarism
  • patriotism
  • nonviolence
  • humanitarianism
  • compassion
  • social change

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Peace learned in the immigrant quarter

Where do people actually learn to care for strangers across national lines? Addams looks past the peace congresses to the poorest streets of Chicago, where people from a score of nations must help one another to get through the week.

Morality began inside the tribe, she argues, and stopped at its edge, and nations still keep one rule for their own and another for outsiders. In the crowded quarters of a great city that edge gives way: neighbours from many countries need each other, and kindness has to cross the line. Her proof is the Chicago stockyards strike of 1904, where settled Irish, German and Bohemian workers struck for newly arrived Slovaks, Poles and Lithuanians, and one speech was translated into six or eight languages. The native-born, meanwhile, legislate for the immigrant with contempt or patronage and never ask what he knows.

  • immigration
  • cosmopolitanism
  • citizenship
  • community
  • urban life
  • labor unions
  • labor conflict
  • poverty

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A city still governed like a fortress

Why does a modern city rule its people as if it were a garrison under siege? Addams traces its habits of repression, and its all-male vote, to the age when a city's business was defence.

Votes went first to those who bore arms, because the city's question was war. That city is gone. Its enemies now are foul water, bad housing, impure milk, dangerous trades and children in the mills, and Addams calls the task enlarged housekeeping. Testing a voter by his fitness to fight is therefore absurd, and leaving out women, who have always done this work, helps explain why it is done badly. The founders of the republic, she adds, trusted man in the abstract and would not look at actual people, so government learned to repress. Her test of a government is whether it protects the working child.

  • democracy
  • government
  • self-government
  • coercion
  • women's suffrage
  • child labor
  • industrialization
  • social welfare
  • political corruption
  • labor
  • child development

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Within this work

passages held
193
distinct concepts
363
by passages held, corpus-wide
#363

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “democracy” and “immigration”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 18 pairings. 89 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
democracyimmigration10
immigrationlabor6
child laborindustrialization5
laborwar5
labormilitarism4
democracylabor3
immigrationpatriotism3
militarismwar3
democracymilitarism2
democracypatriotism2
immigrationindustrialization2
child laborimmigration1
democracyindustrialization1
democracywar1
industrializationlabor1
industrializationmilitarism1
militarismpatriotism1
patriotismwar1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1902 Democracy and Social Ethics

    Her first book, published eight years before the memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House. Her later books on youth, prostitution and peace stand on its claim that people must be asked about their own good.

     EN
  2. 1907 Newer Ideals of Peace you are here EN
  3. 1909 The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets

    The one she named as her favourite, written in her twentieth year at Hull-House. Three years later A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil followed the girls of these same streets into the trade in prostitution.

     EN
  4. 1912 A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil

    Five magazine articles from McClure's, built on the case files of Chicago's Juvenile Protective Association. The book came out two years after her memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House.

     EN
  5. 1916 The Long Road of Woman's Memory

    The counterpart to The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets: that book listened to the young of the neighbourhood, this one to its old women. Its fifth chapter comes from her journey through wartime Europe in 1915.

     EN
  6. 1922 Peace and Bread in Time of War

    Part memoir and part argument, covering 1914 to 1921. It returns to the question of Newer Ideals of Peace fifteen years on, after the war that book had not expected.

     EN
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