Loving Immigrants: Jane Addams
When we are shaken, we return to our life-giving and enriching principles. So let me return to love as an ethical-political principle in American philosophy.
Let me start with Jane Addams, the American pragmatist and feminist philosopher I have been reading with my students. Addams, from Illinois, earned a college degree in the late 19th Century, and dedicated her intellectual and political life to various causes of peace and solidarity, including her work with immigrants at Hull House in Chicago. At Hull House, which she co-founded and co-directed, Addams worked with immigrants arriving at Chicago from all over Europe - Italy, Ireland, and so on - in the early 20th Century. The immigrants received shelter, schooling and training of various sorts, and other forms of support. But Addams always emphasized how much the immigrants gave, not what they received. Above all, she described them as loving, gracious and disposed to solidarity.
In Newer Ideals of Peace (1906), she argued that those masses of immigrants, encountering each other in the large cities of the U.S. like Chicago or New York, were spontaneously creating and cultivating a new cosmopolitan and pacifist culture that would substitute militaristic nationalism. She wrote:
"In seeking companionship in the new world, all the immigrants are reduced to the fundamental equalities and universal necessities of human life itself, and they inevitably develop the power of association which comes from daily contact with those who are unlike each other in all save the universal characteristics of [people]."
Perhaps Addams was too hopeful about the end of nationalism. But she was right about loving immigrants. Their "powers of association" are sympathy - feeling with one another - and love. Immigrants, on the whole, are emotionally alert, sensitive people. They offer love and deserve to be loved. This country, like so many others in the Americas, is all the richer because of them, because of us.
Some of the people who want us out of here will not listen to this. But many will, if we know how to engage them. Addams believed this and staked her life on it. So do I.
Let me start with Jane Addams, the American pragmatist and feminist philosopher I have been reading with my students. Addams, from Illinois, earned a college degree in the late 19th Century, and dedicated her intellectual and political life to various causes of peace and solidarity, including her work with immigrants at Hull House in Chicago. At Hull House, which she co-founded and co-directed, Addams worked with immigrants arriving at Chicago from all over Europe - Italy, Ireland, and so on - in the early 20th Century. The immigrants received shelter, schooling and training of various sorts, and other forms of support. But Addams always emphasized how much the immigrants gave, not what they received. Above all, she described them as loving, gracious and disposed to solidarity.
In Newer Ideals of Peace (1906), she argued that those masses of immigrants, encountering each other in the large cities of the U.S. like Chicago or New York, were spontaneously creating and cultivating a new cosmopolitan and pacifist culture that would substitute militaristic nationalism. She wrote:
"In seeking companionship in the new world, all the immigrants are reduced to the fundamental equalities and universal necessities of human life itself, and they inevitably develop the power of association which comes from daily contact with those who are unlike each other in all save the universal characteristics of [people]."
Perhaps Addams was too hopeful about the end of nationalism. But she was right about loving immigrants. Their "powers of association" are sympathy - feeling with one another - and love. Immigrants, on the whole, are emotionally alert, sensitive people. They offer love and deserve to be loved. This country, like so many others in the Americas, is all the richer because of them, because of us.
Some of the people who want us out of here will not listen to this. But many will, if we know how to engage them. Addams believed this and staked her life on it. So do I.
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