Alderman. After three unsuccessful campaigns to
do so, Addams became convinced, writes Farrell,
"that patrician political reformers were, like charity visitors and philanthropic capitalists, brutally
undemocratic" (1967, p. 69). He concludes that "by
1900, her experience with the depression, the
Pullman Strike, the political battles in the
Nineteenth Ward, had led her to evolve a new and
significant ideal of progressive democracy...[an]
insistence that charity had to be made democratic,
that the social life of the city in all its aspects had
to be made increasingly democratic" (p. 69, 70).
The culmination of her thinking came in "The
Subtle Problems of Charity" (1899). As a personal
and institutional memoir, it is the ten year biographical benchmark of her settlement experience,
the precursor to the second decade summary of
Twenty Years at Hull House (1910). The nuanced
subtlety involving charity was representative of the
Hull House experience writ large. Charity was, she
wrote, "a comment on our democratic relations,"
"a perplexing question" (1899, p. 176) that
unveiled the undemocratic class assumptions that
underlay charitable relations: "the [charity] visitor
does not realize what a cruel advantage the person
who distributes charity has" (1899, p. 170). "The
Subtle Problems of Charity" laid open "the complexity of the situation" of the "industrial view"
(1899, p. 166) replete with a debilitating focus on
money, individualism, and work being imposed
upon the poor as a cultural standard. "In our charitable efforts," claimed Addams, "we think much
more of what a man ought to be than of what he is
or what he may become; and we ruthlessly force
our consensus and standards upon him" (p. 177).
Addams' ability to translate the cultural experience of the poor to those with wealth, and at the
same time make visible to the wealthy the depth of
their class assumptions and prejudices, was one of
the things that drew John Dewey to her and to Hull
House in the 1890s. Even before moving to the
University of Chicago in 1894, Dewey lectured at
Hull House and became one of its founding
trustees. His thinking about class, democracy, community, and education was profoundly affected by
his exposure to Hull House (Feffer, 1993, p. 107 -116; Ryan, 1995, pp. 149-153; Westbrook, 1991,
pp. 80-85). He recalled that one of the many things
he learned from Addams was "the enormous value
of mental non-resistance, of tearing away the
armor-plate of prejudice, of convention, isolation
that keeps one from sharing to the full in the larger
and even the more unfamiliar and alien ranges of
the possibilities of human life and experience"
(1930, p. 421). As Dewey's daughter, Jane M.
Dewey (named for Jane Addams) prepared a biog
The Emergence of Community Service in American Culture
raphy of her father in 1939, she explained that his
"faith in democracy...took on both a sharper and
deeper meaning because of Hull House and Jane
Addams" (quoted in Farrell, 1967, p. 69 n. 42). The
activities of Hull House were, Dewey claimed,
"modes of bringing people together, of doing away
with barriers...that keep people from real communion with each other" (1908, p. 150). It was from
his experience with settlements that he came to the
"growing recognition that the community life is
defective and disturbed excepting as it does thus
care for all its constituent parts. This is no longer
viewed as a matter of charity, but as a matter ofjustice" (1902, p. 91, 93).
Addams' struggles over the problems of charity,
community, and democracy most directly influenced Dewey's thinking about ethics. Dewey
defined ethics as not only activity-based but as the
foundation of community relations and democratic
progress. Ethics, he claimed, was a statement of
"the ways in which men are bound together in the
complex relations of their interactions" (1893, p.
56). Echoing Addams, Dewey wrote in his 1908
version of Ethics that
"Charity" (conceived as conferring benefits
upon others, doing things for them)...assumes
the continued and necessary existence of a
dependent "lower" class to be the recipient of
the kindness of their superiors; a class which
serves as the passive material for the cultivation in others of the virtues of charity, the higher class acquiring "merit" at the expense of the
lower, while the lower has gratitude and
respect for authority as its chief virtue. (p. 348)
One threat to democracy was that charity would
become a class-based justification for exploitation.
"There is a danger," wrote Dewey in 1908, "that
the erection of benevolence...will serve to supply
rich persons with a cloak for selfishness in other
directions" so that "philanthropy is made an offset
and compensation for brutal exploitation" (p. 349).
In 1932 he restated his position even more forcefully, perhaps out of frustration that the problem
persisted a quarter century later. "Charity," he
admonished, "may even be used as a sop to one's
social conscience while at the same time it buys off
the resentment which might otherwise grow up in
those who suffer from social injustice. Magnificent
philanthropy may be employed to cover up brutal
economic exploitation" (p. 301).
The second threat to democracy, as Dewey saw
it- and again the influence of Addams is evident -
was its tendency to reinforce social divisiveness.
"The danger is not in benevolence or altruism" per
se, explained Dewey, "but in that conception of
141
