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WorkJane Addams

Peace and Bread in Time of War

A pacifist's own record of the First World War: called a traitor for opposing it, she went on to ask Americans to feed Europe.

by Jane Addams204 passages held

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First published
(aged 62)
Original language
English

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Overview

A remark about bayonets, made at Carnegie Hall in New York in July 1915, followed Jane Addams for years. She had just returned from The Hague, where she had presided over a congress of women from warring and neutral countries, and from visits to governments on both sides to propose that the neutral nations mediate. Young soldiers, she told the audience, had said they found a bayonet charge hard to make without a stimulant: rum for the English, ether for the Germans, absinthe for the French. The newspapers reported her as saying that no soldier could charge unless he was half drunk, and the war correspondent Richard Harding Davis attacked her in a letter to The New York Times. During the war, she writes, the press treated pacifist, traitor and pro-German as one word. This book, published in 1922, is her account, as a pacifist, of the years 1914 to 1921. It records the founding of the Woman's Peace Party in January 1915, President Wilson's refusal to call a conference of neutrals, and Henry Ford's Peace Ship of December 1915, which sailed while she lay in a Chicago hospital. It argues that opposing a war is not disloyalty, and that feeding people is an older human habit than fighting and a firmer base for peace among nations. The second claim grew from the only war work open to her: she toured the country for Herbert Hoover's Food Administration, asking women to save food for Europe. She points to the Russian soldiers who left the front in 1917 to go home and farm, and charges that the League of Nations faced a starving continent in its first year and did not make the feeding of it its task. She had seen the hunger in 1919, among schoolchildren in Lille and then in Germany, where she travelled with Quaker relief workers. She also records what her stand cost: the leading American teachers of pragmatism had come out for the war, and she describes the pacifist as cast into a desert. The novelist Zona Gale reviewed the book with respect in the New York Herald in April 1922. In 1931 Addams shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University. An anniversary edition appeared in 1945 with an introduction by the philosopher John Dewey, who had supported the war in 1917; he called her position realism.

Key concepts

What does 'bread labor' mean in Peace and Bread?

Work on the land that produces food, held to be every person's first duty. Addams takes the phrase from Bondereff, whose book of that name states the aspirations of the Russian peasants, and uses it to explain the Russian soldiers of 1917. They believed their real obligation was to till the recovered soil and treated the world war as an interruption. For her it names a motive as deep as the urge to fight, and one that works against it.

What did pacifism mean to Addams during the war?

Proposing another method for settling the quarrel, not standing aside from it. Addams rejects the charge that her group wanted national isolation, since the question, she says, was one of method. Before America entered they pressed for a conference of neutrals. Afterwards they looked for work, such as feeding Europe, that would show what the alternative was. In her words they were urging a reasonable and vital alternative to war.

What was continuous mediation?

A plan to end the war by negotiation while it was still being fought. Presented by Julia Wales of the University of Wisconsin, it proposed that neutral nations form a commission of experts to explore the issues and put proposals to both sides. It rested on the assumption that every country wanted peace and that the question was one of terms. The Woman's Peace Party made the calling of such a conference of neutrals the first plank of its platform.

What does Addams mean by 'aloneness'?

Her word for the opposite of mass consciousness: the state of someone shut out of a feeling that millions share. She describes missing the comradeship her fellow citizens enjoyed in wartime and standing outside an enchantment. Dissent came to seem unnatural as well as hard, and she admits a secret yearning to join in what she calls the folly of all mankind. Of the contentment of the self-righteous, which was imputed to pacifists, she says they had none.

Which two instincts does Addams find behind every government?

Security from attack and security from starvation. Addams holds that both began as tribal habits and are still present in every government. The war used the first to the limit, as one nation after another mobilised for a war it called purely defensive. The second became the basis of the great organisations that fed armies and distributed food to civilians. She wanted the League of Nations to build on the second, because hunger is a need all peoples share.

Themes of the book

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

Standing out against a nation at war

Has one person the right to stand out against millions of fellow citizens in wartime? Addams puts the question to herself, admits how near she came to doubting, and describes what the isolation does to a mind.

Newspapers printed pacifist, traitor and pro-German as if they were one word, and a remark of hers about bayonet charges and rum followed her for years. The harder trial was inward. She believed in the judgment of the mass of people, and now they were against her. The leading teachers of pragmatism had come out for the war. The pacifist, she writes, can travel from the mire of self-pity straight to the barren hills of self-righteousness and hate himself in both places. What held in the end was a plain rule: a person's first allegiance is to their vision of the truth, and they are bound to affirm it.

  • pacifism
  • political dissent
  • public opinion
  • patriotism
  • political repression
  • conscription
  • moral responsibility
  • nationalism
  • war

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Feeding is older than fighting

Which work could a pacifist honestly do in a war she opposed? Addams asked American women to save food for Europe, and found in that task an instinct older than battle on which peace might rest.

Feeding the helpless, she argues, is as primitive as fighting and far older: tribes fed their children long before men fought in masses. Speaking for Hoover's Food Administration she told audiences of the Corn Mother, the harvest spirit that is always feminine, to give the saving of wheat its ancient dignity. The same motive showed in the Russian soldiers of 1917, who talked with their enemies across the trenches and wanted to go home to the land, since bread labour seemed the real duty and the Czar's war an interruption. The starving schoolchildren she saw at Lille in 1919 turned the argument into an accusation.

  • food security
  • hunger
  • humanitarianism
  • solidarity
  • labor
  • peacebuilding
  • peace
  • war and peace

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Neutrals, diplomats and a hungry continent

Why did the governments, with every chance, neither stop the war nor mend the peace? Addams reports from the women's congress at The Hague to the first year of the League of Nations, and blames a diplomacy that does not look at human need.

From The Hague in 1915 the women carried one proposal to governments on both sides: a conference of neutrals offering continuous mediation, on the view that peace was a question of terms. Wilson did not call it, and Henry Ford's Peace Ship took up the idea amid ridicule. When Wilson chose war he explained that a neutral could only call through a crack in the door of the peace conference. The League that followed met a starving Europe and stayed indifferent to it. Addams believes the task of feeding would have given the League what treaties could not, a human motive wider than any nation.

  • international cooperation
  • international institutions
  • internationalism
  • international relations
  • diplomacy
  • neutrality
  • peace activism
  • international law
  • political leadership
  • democracy

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Within this work

passages held
204
distinct concepts
364
by passages held, corpus-wide
#348

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: “pacifism” and “war”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 22 pairings. 85 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
pacifismwar18
pacifismwar and peace8
pacifismpublic opinion7
humanitarianisminternational cooperation6
peacebuildingwar6
humanitarianismwar5
international cooperationwar5
internationalismpacifism5
internationalismwar5
public opinionwar5
humanitarianismpacifism3
humanitarianismwar and peace3
international cooperationpacifism3
internationalismpeacebuilding3
humanitarianismpublic opinion2
pacifismpeacebuilding2
peacebuildingpublic opinion2
public opinionwar and peace2
humanitarianisminternationalism1
international cooperationwar and peace1
internationalismpublic opinion1
peacebuildingwar and peace1

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

    Finished seven years before the war of 1914, this is the hopeful one among her books on peace. Peace and Bread in Time of War returns to its question after that war.

     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 you are here EN
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