twenty years at hull house

chapters are devoted, remaining only in the distinctive, measured voice

in which the activities of HulhHouse are described. Jane Addams and

HulhHouse have merged, or as she says in the preface "no effort is

made in the recital to separate my own history from that of Hull'

House" because "so far as a mind is pliant under the pressure of events

and experiences, it becomes hard to detach it."

What did Jane Addams learn from the twenty years at HulhHouse

described in the last twO'thirds of the book? What were the "conclm

sions" that she felt had been forced upon her by her experiences? The

most important, perhaps, is Addams s steadfast refusal to adopt any

ideology and her insistence upon the primacy of direct, unmediated

experience. In her first reference to the HulhHouse experiment, in

the preface, she insists that she came to HulhHouse "without any pre'

conceived social theories or economic views," and she repeats the

claim throughout the book. The theme is developed most fully per'

haps in chapter 9, in which she describes the lively economic debates

in Chicago in the 1890s and yet concludes that the positive changes in

Chicago came "from men of affairs rather than from those given to

speculation." "Was the whole decade of discussion," she writes, "an

illustration of that striking fact which has been likened to the chang'

ing of swords in Hamlet; that the abstract minds at length yield to the

inevitable or at least grow less ardent in their propaganda, while the

concrete minds, dealing constantly with daily affairs, in the end deni'

onstrate the reality of abstract notions?" Part of Addams s vehement

refusal to adopt any systematic view of society stemmed from a realisticrecognition that factionalism would threaten HulhHouse. To ally the

project with socialism, for example, or to affiliate with a religious de'

nomination would inevitably draw down the wrath of other groups.

Addams tried to remain above the fray of ideological controversy.

There is no reason, either, to doubt her personal investment in a quest

for a reality beneath the veils of theory. She shared her distrust of generalizations and her reverence for unmediated reality with many others

of her generation—John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen, for example,

among her Chicago contemporaries—who saw their task as the strip'

ping away of worn idealizations and the encounter with raw experience.

Addamss belief that by eschewing ideology she could uncover real'

ity seems perhaps from our perspective dubious and even quaint. The

belief that one is above ideology is itself an ideology, an indication