Jane Addams: “Passing of the War Virtues”

Jane Addams was part of the Progressive movement, a broad and diverse middle-class coalition that, at the turn of the twentieth century, tried to reform American society and reconcile democracy with capitalism. The steady industrialization and urbanization of the 1880s and 1890s had deeply transformed American society, spurring harsh conflicts between labor and management. The middle class had supported the process of industrialization by espousing the Victorian values of laissez-faire individualism, domesticity, and self-control. Yet by the 1890s it was apparent that these values had trapped the middle class between the warring demands of big business and the working classes. Growing consumerism, a new wave of immigration, and tensions between the sexes further challenged bourgeois existence. In the face of these confrontations, the Progressives tried to reform the American capitalist system and its institutions from within, seeking to strike a compromise between radical demands and the preservation of established interests. Addams’s concern with the major issues of Progressivism and her own agenda for social reform clearly emerge in various of her essays and speeches. In chapter 8 of her book Newer Ideals of Peace (1907), entitled “Passing of the War Virtues,” she makes clear, for example, her condemnation of military ideals in the conception of an effective model of social control and efficient management of economic and political institutions.