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By Tom Gilsenan [1] Introduction Jane Addams and Mahatma Gandhi were friends. They wrote to each other, supported each other and told stories about each other’s work. This paper explores their friendship, a little-known story in the lives of two of the great peacemakers of the 20th century. It is based on correspondence and other materials in print and in archives. Especially important in developing this paper has been the Jane Addams Papers [2] . Jane Addams (1860-1935) is best known for her role as a founder of social work. Hull House, which she and Ellen Gates Starr started in 1889, is considered one of the earliest settings of the social work profession. [3] This “settlement house” was a social and community centre with a wide variety of programs and activities for people who lived nearby. It also became a centre for activists and reformers interested in a host of issues – from child labour to educational reform, from racism to feminism. Hull House was a major centre for national and international peacemaking in the early part of the 20th century. Addams took her settlement house experiences as an advocate for healthier and safer neighbourhoods and applied them to national and global issues. By 1914 she had become a “spokesperson for all peace loving women of the world.” [4] She helped found the Women’s Peace Party in the United States. Later, in 1919, she was a founder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Addams travelled extensively to promote peace, including several trips to Europe and a trip around the world in 1923. She wrote about these trips and the people she met in a continuous stream of books and articles. For example, she discussed Arnold Toynbee in Twenty Years at Hull House and Leo Tolstoy in Peace and Bread in Time of War. [5] Addams also developed friendships with peacemakers throughout the US and around the world. [6] Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) is well known as the leader of the independence movement in India. He spent more than 30 years organising and lobbying to free the country from the British. He developed a philosophy of non-violent resistance, which he named satyagraha… Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence had influence far beyond India, both during his lifetime and in the half century since then. His principles have been embraced by a host of other peacemakers, from Desmond Tutu in South Africa to Martin Luther King in the United States, from Tibetan leader Dalai Lama to Cesar Chavez, leader of the United Farm Workers Union. Addams’s and Gandhi’s work as peacemakers overlapped in the first decades of the 20th century. Yet there has been little, if any, exploration of connections between them… Mahatma Gandhi’s Letters to Americans , edited by E.S. Reddy, includes letters to W.E.B. DuBois, Franklin Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger and Upton Sinclair among others. [7] But there are no letters to Jane Addams. However, Reddy does make one mention of Addams in the introduction to the letters of Gandhi to Reverend John Haynes Holmes. “As a token of his appreciation, he sent to Dr. Holmes in 1923, through Ms. Jane Addams, a Gandhi cap made out of cotton cloth spun by his own hands.” This mention of Addams is significant because by this time she and Holmes had been friends for a number of years. Holmes, a minister in New York City, had participated with Addams in many projects. For example, both were among the founders of the NAACP. And both were also founders of the American Civil Liberties Union. Holmes had preached sermons about Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence. Gandhi-Addams letters And it is here – in the discussion about the cap – that there is the first mention of Gandhi in the papers of Jane Addams. On an around the world tour in 1923, she went to India to see Gandhi. He was in prison, so she didn’t get in to see him. “I have found it impossible to see Gandhi,” she wrote to Holmes in a February 6 letter from Delhi, India. “He’s been allowed very few visitors.” Addams went on to say that she visited the community of Gandhi followers at Ahmedabad. Her impression was that it “was like the beginnings of a religious order, as the Franciscans must have been before St. Francis died.” [8] And the cap? Despite not being able to see Gandhi, Addams assured Holmes that she picked up the cap and would bring it back with her. Addams had another assignment with Gandhi while in India. She was supposed to interview him for the Survey magazine. She wrote to editor Bruno Lasker with the disappointing news. “I visited the colony at Ahmedabad, but I can’t see Gandhi.” [9] Though these are the earliest letters that have been found in the files of either Addams or Gandhi, they would suggest earlier correspondence between the two. Before going to India, for example, it is likely that Addams would have written to Gandhi to make arrangements to meet him. The discussion about the cap suggests additional correspondence. Those would have been practical letters. It would seem likely that there were philosophical letters as well -- exchanges between Gandhi and Addams about peace, non-violence and other topics. Both Gandhi and Addams corresponded with other peacemakers of their time. Holmes was one example; Leo Tolstoy was another. No letters have been found to support this. However, it is likely that some correspondence between Gandhi and Addams was not preserved. Most of the archived letters pointing to a friendship between Gandhi and Addams were written after Addams’ trip to India. Even before her world trip was finished, she was writing to others about Gandhi and Gandhian thought. For example, in a March 18 letter (probably sent from Japan), Addams wrote to her friend Emily Balch about Gandhi’s “movements” in India. [10] Again, it would seem likely that Addams wrote to Gandhi about her trip to India either while she was still travelling or after she returned to the United States. . But no record of such correspondence could be found, perhaps because Gandhi received it while he was being held in prison. However, there is a 1929 letter that suggests Gandhi and Addams had been in contact during the intervening years. Writing on October 8 that year, she tells Gandhi that she is sending friends to meet him. They are “friends of Hull House and sympathetic to the outlook on life which you, above all men, represent.” [11] Addams went on to refer to other friends of hers who had visited Gandhi earlier. Strong evidence for a friendship between Gandhi and Addams is to be found in correspondence during 1931. Addams wrote to Gandhi and invited him to speak at a European conference of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom planned for February 1932 [12] . Gandhi presumably replied, though no record could be found of this. There is a record of a letter from Gandhi to Addams during 1931. He sent it along with a letter to someone else. A notation of a letter forwarded to Addams still exists, though the letter could not be found. [13] In other correspondence that year Addams referred to Gandhi as “our friend.” That came in a letter to John Haynes Holmes on October 23. [14] 1931 was also the year Jane Addams received the Nobel Peace Prize, the first American woman to receive the prize. However, she was not able to attend the Nobel awards. She was recovering from an operation to remove an ovarian cyst. A handwritten letter from Gandhi in October 1932 is more evidence of their friendship. Gandhi was in prison again and wrote on prison stationery: Dear Sister. My inner being tells me that spiritual unity can only be attained by resisting with our whole self the modern false life. Your servant, MK Gandhi [15] The same month in 1932 Mary Rozet Smith, one of Addams’ closest friends, wrote a ‘wish you were here letter’ to Addams and Lillian Wald. Smith was at Hull House in Chicago; Addams and Wald were on the East Coast. “Miss [Muriel]Lester is here and full of stories of Gandhi in London,” [16] she wrote. Lester was head of Kingsley Hall, a settlement house in London where Gandhi had stayed on a visit to England in 1931. Smith’s letter is another confirmation of the great interest Addams had in Gandhi. In 1933, Addams contributed an essay to the “Golden Book of Gandhi,” a book of tributes collected by John Haynes Holmes. Also that year, she and Gandhi were invited to be “honorary presidents” of a Longfellow Centennial celebration planned by the International Longfellow Society. They were chosen as among the “truly good and great benefactors of mankind.” [17] In 1934, Addams was asked to help in a campaign to nominate Gandhi for a Nobel Peace Prize. A letter from Jerome Davis said her support would be very valuable because she had earlier received the prize. [18] Correspondence found connecting Gandhi and Addams ends there. Addams died in May 1935. There are references to condolences coming to Hull House from a number of countries, including India, after her death. But no letter or telegram from India was found in the archives searched. Other links A link between Gandhi and Addams can also be found in the writing they did about each other. Both were prolific writers; a search of their writings shows that each cited the other several times. Gandhi reprinted excerpts from Twenty Years at Hull House in a weekly publication he edited; Addams wrote about Gandhi for Christian Century and other publications. Gandhi reprinted 10 pages of Chapter 11 (“Immigrants and their children”) of Addams’ Twenty Years in Young India, a weekly newspaper he edited for 12 years. He offered this selection to support his efforts to revive the spinning wheel in India. In an introduction he wrote: “The following extracts from Miss Jane Addams’ Twenty Years at Hull House show what a great part handicrafts, especially the spinning wheel, have played in her experiments at Hull House, and what a cultural asset she has found in handicrafts. The last passage throws a flood of light on the moral potentialities of the revival of the spinning wheel.” [19] In other issues Gandhi notes efforts of the peace movement in the United States and Europe, especially of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, an organisation Addams helped found and which she headed for a number of years. He no doubt had Addams in mind when he wrote, “Women of the west are playing a most important, if not the leading, part in the movement.” [20] Addams also wrote about Gandhi in several articles. In Tolstoy and Gandhi, she outlined Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence and Tolstoy’s influence on this. She applauded Gandhi, noted that she visited his “ashram,” and said his philosophy represents a great alternative to the “classic pattern of domination and conflict” predominant in the West. [21] Writing about human rights in another essay, Addams said, “no man living on the planet today has done more than has Mahatma Gandhi.” She says that his approach offers a model that can be used in all countries to solve “problems of race relations.” [22] Besides the essays and articles that were published, Addams submitted several others about Gandhi that were rejected. The Jane Addams Papers include rejections from several magazine editors for such articles, including Good Housekeeping, Atlantic Monthly and Pictorial Review. [23] Educational significance Jane Addams and Gandhi were friends. The correspondence and writings cited in this paper show the outlines of a friendship between them, which stretched over a number of years – from at least the early 1920s until Addams’ death in 1935. This friendship of two of the great peacemakers of the 20th century is a little-known story that has potential educational significance in the following ways: · First, it may help enrich our understanding of the importance of personal relationships in social change movements. · Second, it could add to our perspective on peace movements by showing connections across national and cultural lines. · Third, it suggests a commitment to gender equity in one circle of early 20th century leaders – an alternative to the view that the opinions of women were always dismissed as misguided or uninformed. · Fourth, it adds to our understanding of the role of Jane Addams in American history. December 2001
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