Jane Addams: “A Modern Lear”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

By the 1880s the status of labor in the United States had undergone dramatic changes. The introduction of technological innovations and a more mechanized production reduced the process of manufacturing to series of specific, time-determined, and standardized tasks. Workers could no longer consider themselves as actual producers and increasingly felt slaves to machines. The laissez-faire capitalism that prevailed during the Gilded Age, which lasted through the late nineteenth century until the depression-causing Panic of 1893, prevented the passage of effective protective legislation for workers. Anxious over their loss of independence in the production process and their inability to obtain better wages and working conditions, workers began to form unions such as the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor. The conflicts between labor and the capitalist imperative became harsher as a severe economic depression materialized in the late 1880s and through the 1890s. Just like the Haymarket riot in Chicago, where at the end of a rally a bomb thrown at police led to fatal gunfire and capital punishment, the Pullman strike of 1894 represented the dramatic and irreconcilable clash between the interests of management and labor.

The Pullman Palace Car Company adopted a paternalistic policy toward its workers that Addams compares in her essay on the strike to the attitude of Shakespeare's King Lear toward his daughters. The company owned a town near Chicago where it housed its workers, providing them with accommodation and services but also exercising a high degree of social control over them. Pullman workers could never negotiate their wages. When the company was struck by the economic recession in 1893, workers' wages were cut by up to 40 percent while rents and prices in the so-called model town remained unaltered. Led by the charismatic Eugene V. Debs, the workers voted in favor of the strike. George Pullman refused to negotiate with union leaders and, thanks to U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney, obtained a court ruling to prevent the strikers from obstructing the railways and interrupting the delivery of mail. This, in turn, led President Grover Cleveland to send troops to Chicago. Although the stated task of the troops was to protect the mail, they were effectively used to suppress the strike, which ended within a month.

The opening of Addams's speech expresses her grief over “the barbaric instinct to kill, roused on both sides” and “the sharp division into class lines” caused by the Pullman strike. Here, Addams tries to position herself as mediating between the warring demands of the workers and the response of the employer. Yet, although the last part of the essay is devoted to what Addams sees as the shortcomings of the workers' strategy in the incident, it is clear that her sympathies lie with the strikers. The main body of the essay is devoted to criticism of Pullman's paternalistic attitude toward his employees, an attitude that the author finds strikingly similar to that of King Lear toward his daughters. Addams finds that “the relation of Lear to his children was archaic and barbaric, holding in it merely the beginnings of a family life, since developed.” She claims that in the future we may come to see the industrial dynamics of American society at the turn of the century as being “quite as incomprehensible and selfish, quite as barbaric and undeveloped, as was the family relationship between Lear and his daughters.” As Lear was at heart unable to listen to his children, in spite of his magnanimous offer, so Pullman, with his model town and ostentatious philanthropy, was unwilling to hear the demands of his employees.

Like Lear, Pullman had so thought of himself as noble and indulgent that he lost the capacity to perceive himself to be wrong. To Addams, Pullman's initial intentions were actually well meaning, as he “began to build his town from an honest desire to give his employees the best surroundings.” Yet, as the outside world began to heap praise on Pullman for his philanthropic efforts, such external praise became more important, and he ceased to consider the usefulness of his benevolence “by the standard of the men's needs.” Locked within the walls of his model town, Pullman lost touch with the development of the labor movement and his workers' evolving demands. Pullman believed his definition of what was good for his workers (“cleanliness, decency of living, and above all, thrift and temperance”) to be universal and timeless. He was therefore unable to understand his employees' striving for “the ultimate freedom … from the conditions under which they now labor.”

Addams praises the strikers' movement, however “ill-directed,… ill-timed and disastrous in results,” for its “unselfish impulse.” To the contrary, Pullman's stubbornness in refusing arbitration was rooted in his attitude of “consulting first its own personal and commercial ends,” which led him to neglect the widespread demands for social improvements. Pullman is therefore representative of those philanthropists who are cut off from the social developments of their times and from “the great moral life” deriving from “common experiences.” These philanthropists, “so long as they are ‘good to people,’ rather than ‘with them,’ … are bound to accomplish a large amount of harm.”

The last part of Addams's speech balances the criticism of Pullman with criticism of the strikers’ movement. Just as Cordelia in King Lear does not escape censure for her coldness and lack of tenderness, the workingmen's conception of emancipation was too narrow, as it did not include their employer. To Addams, the doctrine of workers' emancipation rather must become part of a universal movement whose “fusing power” can “touch those who think they lose, as well as those who think they gain.” In the end, Pullman occupies center stage in Addams's conclusion: learning from his dramatic failure could serve to avert similar industrial tragedies in the future.