Strategy (57 page)

While he still blamed the excesses of his class for social divisions, he now saw urban life as the problem. Cities were venal and corrupt places, beyond reform. The cause went even deeper—the fault lay in the whole path humankind had taken in pursuit of economic development. Money had been allowed to get in the way of proper human relations. They could only be restored on the land where money could be irrelevant and people need not be alienated from each other and the beauty of nature. He set an example, returning to his estate in Yasnaya Polyana where he sought to create his own rural utopia, with but one garment, no money, and fulfillment through manual labor. With this complete retreat from modernity, Tolstoy insisted that he was living the only life that could be true to his faith. His stance was passive and uncooperative, but there was no direct action, for that would have involved both a degree of organization and a presumption of human agency.

“The Anarchists are right in everything,” he wrote in 1890, “in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without Authority, there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions.” Their one mistake, he continued, was to think that this could come about through a revolution. It would only come about by there being “more and more people who do not require the protection of governmental power … There can be only one permanent revolution—a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.”
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In May 1896, Tolstoy received a visitor at Yasnaya Polyana: Miss Jane Addams of Chicago. The daughter of a wealthy Illinois farmer, Addams was then in her mid-30s, and on her way to becoming one of the most admired and influential women in America. Her fame rested on the Hull House Settlement, founded in Chicago in 1889. This was modeled on the Toynbee Settlement in the East End of London, which she had visited a few years earlier. The underlying concept was that the educated and privileged should settle among the poor and deprived to the benefit of both. At Hull House, which at its peak was composed of thirteen buildings, could be found shelter, facilities for bathing, and a playground. In addition to opportunities to learn about and enjoy the so-called high culture of art, literature, and music, there were guest speakers and opportunities for debate, research, and campaigning.

Addams had read many of Tolstoy's books. She described
What to Do?
, published in the United States in 1887, as the source of her view that “only he who literally shares his own shelter and food with the poor, can claim to have served them.”
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The influence was evident, to the point of the great man being depicted in a mural in the Hull House dining room. As a strong pacifist and Christian with doubts about organized religion, she also explicitly embraced Tolstoy's commitment not to resist evil. She declared herself “philosophically convinced of the futility of opposition, who believe that evil can only be overcome with good and cannot be opposed.” Poverty, disease, and exploitation were a challenge for society as a whole and must be resolved through forms of reconciliation before they led to conflicts that could tear society apart. She described the Gospel as “an outward symbol of fellowship, some bond of peace, some blessed spot where the unity of the spirit might claim right of way over all differences.”
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Nonetheless, her encounter with Tolstoy was disappointing. He paid little attention to her description of Hull House while “glancing distrustfully at the sleeves of my travelling gown.” The amount of cloth this involved, he declared, was sufficient to clothe many young girls. Was this not a “barrier to the people”? And, when discovering that she had a farm in Illinois, was she not an “absentee landlord”? He suggested she would do more use “tilling her own soil” than by adding to the crowded city. The charges were unjust, but bothered her sufficiently to determine to spend two hours each day at the bakery on her return to Chicago. She tried but failed. This was not the best use of her time.
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This small incident revealed why she could not be a true follower of Tolstoy.

Tolstoy found the division of labor a crime against nature; Addams accepted that it was unavoidable. Her whole project was about getting people to accept the logic of inter-dependence. Whereas Tolstoy gave up on the city because it forced divisions among humanity, Addams believed that the city could and must be made to work for all its inhabitants. The fundamental point of principle Addams, and other progressives, shared with Tolstoy was a belief that social divisions were unnatural and could and must be transcended. But whereas Tolstoy believed in a world in which men, the land, and the spirit joined in unity, Addams sought to create a world without struggle in one of the least likely cities of the world, Chicago.

Chicago was then the world's fifth largest—after London, New York, Paris, and Berlin. It had taken shape far more recently than the others. The combined effects of the railroads, the city's position as the commercial and business center of the Midwest, and massive immigration had resulted in
the population doubling from five hundred thousand in 1880 to over a million in 1890, and to double again to well over two million by 1910. Some 60 percent of the population had been born abroad, and all but 20 percent were of recent immigrant stock. Germans, Poles, Russians, Italians, and Irish all formed distinctive and self-conscious communities, often in uneasy relationships with each other. After a great fire in 1871 destroyed the old wooden buildings, the city was largely rebuilt in stone and steel.
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Chicago invented the skyscraper. Money went into the arts, parks, and a brand new university, paid for by John D. Rockefeller. Life in the city was tough and conditions were dire. The “first in violence,” wrote radical journalist Lincoln Steffens in 1904, “deepest in dirt; loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, new; an overgrown gawk of a village, the teeming tough among cities. Criminally it was wide open; commercially it was brazen; and socially it was thoughtless and raw.”
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For his novel
The Jungle
, Upton Sinclair went undercover in the stockyards to expose the awful circumstances of immigrant workers in the meatpacking industry.

Max Weber visited Chicago in the fall of 1904 en route to a major scientific congress in St. Louis. He described it, in a striking metaphor, as being “like a human being with its skin peeled off and whose intestines are seen at work.”
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He toured the stockyards, watching the automated process whereby an “unsuspecting bovine” entered the slaughtering area, was hit by a hammer and collapsed, gripped by an iron clamp, hoisted up and started on a journey which saw workers “eviscerate and skin it.” It was possible, he observed, to “follow a pig from the sty to the sausage and the can.” At the time of his visit the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workman's Union were smarting after a defeat in a strike aimed at getting the stockyards unionized. Weber, apparently with a degree of exaggeration, described the aftermath: “Masses of Italians and Negroes as strike-breakers; daily shootings with dozens of dead on both sides; a streetcar was overturned and a dozen women were squashed because a non-union man had sat in it; dynamite threats against the Elevated Railway, and one of its cars was actually derailed and plunged into the river.”
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He also visited the Hull House Settlement, about which his wife Marianne wrote in glowing terms: “It includes a day nursery, accommodations for 30 women workers, a sports facility for young people, a large concert hall with a stage, an instructional kitchen, a kindergarten, rooms for all kinds of instruction in needlework and manual tasks, etc. During the winter 15,000 people of both sexes come here to receive instruction, inspiration, counsel, and enjoy themselves.”
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Addams had inserted herself and Hull House into a maelstrom of urban divisions, a result of the persistent issue of race and the treatment of blacks,
agrarian decline and urban rise, inter-ethnic tensions, and constant clashes between capital and labor. She attached herself to Progressivism, the major liberal project in the United States at the time. The Progressives saw the social problems of the time as the core challenge for government and feared that without urgent action they would lead to fractures that would be impossible to heal. Government must be a unifying force, above sectional interests, on behalf of society as a whole. In this Addams was a democratic optimist, convinced of the capacity of ordinary people to play constructive roles in civic affairs, with their own ideas on how to bring order and decency into their lives. She contrasted this to what she considered the naïve view, attributed to the English Fabians, “that somewhere in Church or State are a body of authoritative people who will put things to rights as soon as they really know what is wrong.”
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By making great art and big ideas available to ordinary people, she believed that they would be better able to develop themselves and make informed choices in their lives.

As a formidable social and political critic, she castigated the failure of the city government to clean the streets, educate the children, and regulate the workplace. She was a feminist, believed in racial equality, and backed labor unions. Yet her deepest conviction was that no conflict need be pursued to the point of violence and that ways could be found to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable. While she associated with socialists, she rejected economic determinism, class consciousness, and all preparations for a violent confrontation. While supporting unions, she wished they would make more of an effort to reach out to those they saw as their enemies. Hull House, she insisted, was “soberly opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal.”
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She understood why people were driven to extreme ends, but could not approve. She was at the same time appalled by a city apparently out of control, failing to ensure a decent way of life for its inhabitants, and desperate for an alternative to class warfare as a source of change. Somehow she wanted to get all the sections of the community, capitalist and worker, conservative and agitator, meeting under one roof. Then they would see through their differences to let the bemused immigrant, coping daily with the unscrupulous and exploitative, meet a “better type of American.”
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Her philosophy was set out in an essay prompted by a bitter dispute in Chicago involving the Pullman Company. The origins of this dispute did not lie simply in crude business practices but Pullman's paternalism in providing their workers with their own township. A recession led to cuts in workers' wages but not the rents for their homes. The workers' reaction was intense, leading to a dispute that lasted for months, considerable violence (thirteen deaths), and martial law. In her essay, Addams likened the conflict
to that between King Lear and his daughter Cordelia, a conflict that both lost because of their failure to appreciate the other's position.
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“We are all practically agreed that the social passion of the age is directed toward the emancipation of the wage-worker,” she wrote:

But just as Cordelia failed to include her father in the scope of her salvation and selfishly took it for herself alone, so workingmen in the dawn of the vision are inclined to claim it for themselves, putting out of their thoughts the old relationships; and just as surely as Cordelia's conscience developed in the new life and later drove her back to her father, where she perished, drawn into the cruelty and wrath which had now become objective and tragic, so the emancipation of working people will have to be inclusive of the employer from the first or it will encounter many failures, cruelties and reactions.
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Addams recognized the existence of conflicts, acknowledged that they were not wholly artificial, and accepted that groups might frustrate and irritate each other. But she also believed that it must be possible to prevent these conflicts from descending into violence. The problem, as Elshtain observed, was that she was committed to a “best-case scenario of the cosmopolitan future,” which played down the pugnacity of the various ethnic groups. Her own ability to navigate the complex ethnic politics of Chicago and identify shared interests turned this into her core mission. She saw sufficient examples of people putting aside their prejudices and traditional antagonisms as a result of the exigencies of the daily struggle for survival to make her optimistic about what could be achieved with any conflict, including one between states. Given the chance to express itself, the inherent goodness of people could overcome difference and even render war irrelevant. Presenting herself as “spokesperson for all peace loving women of the world,” she risked her popularity by opposing the U.S. entry into war in 1917. After the war, she devoted her energies to promoting peace, to the point of winning the Nobel Prize in 1931. She assumed that “the reconciliations resulting from the imperatives of city life could be replicated at an international level” and was convinced that “any concern for defense and security was tantamount to accepting militarism and authoritarianism.”
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Addams shared Tolstoy's wariness about detached academic research that did little for the subjects. Nonetheless, largely at the instigation of Florence
Kelley, who had a doctorate from Zurich and past dealings with Engels, Hull House was the center of a series of studies of the neighborhood, providing a compelling description of urban life at the turn of the century. It reflected progressive optimism that if the facts could be made known about social conditions, then measures might be taken to address them.
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At the University of Chicago, the idea that social research and action should go together was taken as almost a given. Albion Small was the founding head of the university's sociology department, the first in the United States, and until the start of the Second World War, the discipline's American “capital.”
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Small was an ordained minister who saw little incompatibility between his Christianity and social inquiry, and promoted sociology as charting a way forward between the forces of reaction and revolution. It was a tool for democratic change: “Conventionality is the thesis, Socialism the antithesis, Sociology is the synthesis.”
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In an article tellingly entitled “Scholarship and Social Agitation,” he provided a robust defense of the progressive creed. American scholars, he wrote, should “advance from knowledge of facts to knowledge of forces, and from knowledge of forces to control of forces in the interest of more complete social and personal life.” He lacked either sympathy with or confidence in any conception of sociology, “which is satisfied with abstractions, or which does not keep well in mind the relation of all research to the living interests of living men.” For these purposes, Chicago provided an exceptional base. It was a “vast sociological laboratory.”
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