Sick of Candy: Jane Addams and the Common Heartbeat

Jane Addams

During the Christmas holidays of 1889, Jane Addams and her fellow volunteers threw a party to gladden the spirits of poor immigrants who had so little cheer in their lives. She offered candy to the children — few of them were interested. Asked the reason, they told her that they worked in a candy factory. They sat at tables wrapping candy six days a week from seven in the morning until nine at night, with only a single break for dinner. They were sick of candy.

The industrial revolution was raging across the country and immigration was as much an issue then as it is today. Americans were fearful of the cacophony of languages, the looks and attitudes and customs of these newcomers. Addams had helped found a “settlement house” in Chicago to aid those in need. Hull House was a place where neighbors could meet and learn. It included clubs, language classes, art and music lessons, a kindergarten for younger children. The project was “grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race.”

The specter of the young candy workers struck Addams deeply. “The sharp consciousness of stern economic conditions,” Addams remembered, “was thus thrust upon us in the midst of the season of good will.”

Although Addams was raised in a middle-class family, she had endured hardships as a girl. She lost her mother when she was young. She herself was afflicted with spinal tuberculosis. Her father died when she was twenty.

On a visit to England, she had witnessed the Dickensian conditions of the poor in London and toured Toynbee Hall, where Cambridge students worked with the destitute. She felt an urgent need to do something. “Nothing could be worse,” she said, “than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world.”

Addams was called “a Christian without religion.” Rather than see immigrants as aliens, she empathized with those who had to work long hours and live in icy apartments without running water. She took as her motto, “with, not for”— to work with immigrants, not do things for them. She knew firsthand the remarkable generosity and humanity exhibited by the poor.

Hull House quickly became famous. Crowds visited during the 1893 Chicago world’s fair. Soon settlement houses appeared in other large cities across the country. They followed Addams’ lead in trying to balance Americanization and with pride in ethnic identity.

But 1893 also saw the beginning of the worst economic depression to that point in American history. A year later, the nation was shaken by a railroad strike centered in the Pullman factory in Chicago. The confrontation broke into open violence and federal troops were called out. Addams was appalled by “the shocking experience of that summer . . . the sharp division into class lines with the resultant distrust and bitterness.” She made valiant efforts to mediate a settlement.

The strike forced her to see an America split between its professed ideals and the brutal practicality of the marketplace. “Are you content that greed shall rule your business life," she asked the country's business classes, "while in your family and social life you live so differently?”

She insisted, “We must learn to trust our democracy.” She hoped for a deep shift in Americans’ view of themselves and of their fellow citizens, hoped that they could find what she called “the rhythm of the common heartbeat.”

Although she was rebuked for lack of patriotism when the United States entered World War I, Addams stuck by her pacifist beliefs and continued to work for peace on an international scale when the conflict was over. Today Chicago celebrates Jane Addams Day every December 10, the day she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Issues around immigration have not gone away. Infractions of child labor laws were up 68 percent in New York in 2022. Some citizens have a sentimental view about benign part-time work for teens. The reality is different: children continue to be exploited, deprived of an education, and set to dangerous jobs in slaughterhouses, farms, and factories.

With that first Christmas at Hull House in mind, in 1901 Jane Addams formed the Juvenile Protective Association, a nonprofit organization that today continues to help shield children from abuse and neglect. Hull House is also still active as a provider of social services in Chicago.

“The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain,” Addams insisted, “until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”

Jane Addams was a founder of the field of social work, a tireless advocate for women’s rights and suffrage, and a beacon of idealism throughout her life. When she died in 1935, she could rest in the assurance that she had not given up too soon and had expended every effort in her power to save the world.

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For more on Jane Addams in the 1890s, click HERE.

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