Document 11: D.A.R. "Dossier on Jane Addams," Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Jane Addams Papers, Series 1 (Jane Addams Papers Microfilm, reel 18, #1307-1315, #1317-1318).

Document 11: D.A.R. "Dossier on Jane Addams," Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Jane Addams Papers, Series 1 (Jane Addams Papers Microfilm, reel 18, #1307-1315, #1317-1318).

Introduction

       The DAR's "dossier" on Addams reads as a virtual who's who of communism and socialism in America, connecting the reformer with nearly every known or suspected "Red" of the era.

D.A.R. Dossier: Jane Addams

        Jane Addams presided over the fifth biennial congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom at Dublin, Ireland in July 1926. She is international president of this organization. Her reputation as a radical pacifist is well known. Previous to this she, with other pacifists, interviewed President Coolidge begging him to use his influence to get the world to disarm.

        At Cleveland, Ohio, during the sessions in May of the National Conference of Social Workers, Miss Addams asserted that the Russian Revolution, far more than the world war, has colored American thought in the last few years and that the American people must learn to take a world view.

        Miss Addams, on February 17th, this year, spoke before the Chicago Liberal Club affiliated with the Fellowship of Youth for Peace. This meeting took place at the Harper Assembly hall of the University of Chicago. At this meeting she said among other things:

        "The United States hasn't always has the highest respect for Haiti. The Youth Movement is composed of young people who are going back to a more wholesome culture. While in Europe, I saw large numbers of youth hiking through the country in unconventional manner, much more unconventional than even the unconventional modern youth of America." (The Youth Movement is notoriously a free-love institution as it now exists in Germany.)

        Others that appeared with Miss Addams during this course of meetings were such notorious un-Americans as Robert Minor,[A] the Communist, and Eugene V. Debs,[B] the Socialist and seditionist.

        Miss Addams, under the guise of a welfare worker recently appealed to Judge Dennis E. Sullivan to rescind the jail terms of a number of women garment workers jailed for contempt of court for violating an injunction.

        Miss Addams permitted C.E. Ruthenberg, General Secretary of the Workers (Communist) Party of America the use of Hull House for an Anti-Fascist Society gathering.

        Miss Addams is a very active proponent and member of the National Child Labor Committee.[C]

        On May 17th, she gave over the use of Hull House for a meeting of the Student's Anti-Militarist League at which meeting resolutions were adopted condemning the policy of military training in the schools, striking at the Citizens' Military Training Camps, demanding the withdrawal of all American troops from foreign lands and waters, and demanding the genuine and unhampered freedom of the Philippines, Haiti, Nicaragua and other American colonies and semi-colonies. The principal speaker at this meeting was Max Shachtman, one of the leading spirits of the Young Workers League, and known to be such by Miss Addams. At this meeting a permanent organization was formed and the honorary chairman that was elected was Miss Addams. She is consistently in the company and working with the open and avowed enemies of our country.

        She is on the National Committee of the notorious American Civil Liberties Union with such other notorious reds, pinks, and yellows as Roger M. Baldwin,[D] Harry E. Ward,[E] Wm. Z. Foster,[F] Elizabeth Gurley Flynn,[G] Scott Nearing,[H] Norman K. Thomas,[I] Morris Hillquit,[J] A. J. Muste,[K] Eugene V. Debs, etc., etc., etc.

        Miss Addams was an endorser of the American Friends Service Committee in connection with Russian relief and which relief was so thoroughly exposed. For her Pax special she received contributions from the notorious American Fund for Public Service (given over by Charles P. Garland, wealthy free-love eccentric recently jailed). Her connection with the General Committee of Peoples of American Society is well known and furthermore she was thoroughly exposed in a Senate investigation in January 1919, during which investigation it was discovered that she was a member of the Advisory Board of the Russian Reconstruction Farms, therefore in direct contact with Leon Trotsky.[L]

        She served in an official capacity with the Public Ownership League of America, the Red leanings of which was thoroughly aired.

        The Lusk report shows her relations with the People's Council of America.

        Her organization, namely the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, was so desirous of securing "peace on earth and good will toward men" that it took the trouble to send out in May 1923 a bulletin assailing the imperialism of the United States, in which bulletin, in order to create hatred for America, is recited the fact that we stole our country from the native Indians and exterminated them. This bulletin was printed in English and Spanish in parallel columns and had wide distribution in Mexico, the object, of course, being to infer to the Mexicans that we were going to steal their country and exterminate them. Her organization also endorses the Slacker's Oath written by Harriet Connor Brown.

        "The Daily Worker" which is the official mouthpiece of the Workers (Communist) Party of America, on May 19th printed an advertisement that Jane Addams Hull House was given over for a meeting on the Passaic strike and this meeting was addressed by no less a notorious communist than F.G. Biedenkapp National Secretary of the International Workers' Aid, which is [a] subsidiary organization of the Workers (Communist) Party of America.

        On May 18th, "The Daily Worker" gives Miss Addams as opening the Anti-Militarist Conference held at Hull House on May 17th as making the introductory talk, we quote: "She spoke on the need of uniting right and left wings of the movement against militarism into a single unit to carry on the drive."

        This was a Communist inspired meeting and Miss Addams knew it, for no one has ever claimed that she was senile and did not have a good set of brains to think with.

        On April 28th, Miss Addams spoke at the Germantown Women's Club House, Germantown, Pa., which hall was leased under a subterfuge by her organization, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. The way this hall was leased was thoroughly exposed by Mrs. William Codd(?) who objected to the propaganda that was spread at this meeting by Miss Addams and others.

        Miss Addams is connected with the National Council for the Prevention of War, the Foreign Policy Association and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, all three of them notoriously "yellow" organizations and playing the same of the Reds.

        During the World War, she took an active part in the un-American activities of the following radical organizations:-

    Civil Liberties Bureau (later American Civil Liberties Union)
    Fellowship of Reconciliation
    American League for Limitation of Armaments
    National Peace Federation
    American Neutral Conference
    National Women's Peace Party
    First American Conference for Democracy and Terms of Peace
    Committee on Conditions in Ireland
    Emergency Peace Federation

        Her association and collaboration with Mrs. Rosika Schwimmer[M] of Budapest, Hungary, (a German agent) and Louis Lochner,[N] a notorious pacifist and organizer of many pro-German organizations during the World War, as well as with many other more or less prominent pacifists, radicals, and Communists during and after the war point clearly to the fact that she is one of the most active radicals in this country.

        In the last presidential election she actively campaigned for La Follette.[O] The "New Republic" of September 10th, 1924, published her article "Why I Shall Vote for La Follette."

        "The World Tomorrow" of November 1925 says about her: "Of late years, following the romantic movement of social welfare, there has come a reaction in the direction of realism." Miss Addams is now about sixty-six years of age.

        On July 17th, 1925, Col. E. M. House,[P] Advisor to President Wilson wrote to the latter regarding her. Jane Addams comes on Monday. Hapgood and Crane thought I should see her. She has accumulated a wonderful lot of misinformation in Europe. She saw Von Jagow,[Q] Gray, and many others, and for one reason or another, they were not quite candid with her, so she has a totally wrong impression.

        Assistant Secretary of War, Hanford MacNider, in an address before the Women's National Republican Club on March 20th, declared that the adherence of Jane Addams to professional pacifism was "deeply deplorable" because she was a fine woman and famed for her good works, consequently inferring to his audience at the time that her pacifism was therefore more dangerous.

        Chicago newspapers, as far back as 1902, in writing of some of the activities of Miss Addams, used captions such as follows:-
                Coal Barons are Lashed
                Jane Addams Raps all Self-Made Men
                Crimes Laid to Law
                Jane Addams Wants Government Ownership
                Deportation of Radicals Rapped by Jane Addams
                Miss Addams on Communism
                Seen in Chicago Russian Tyranny

        In 1908 Mrs. Potter Palmer withdrew her liberal support of Hull House discontinuing all further contributions and asking the removal of her name as a donor to Hull House.[R]

        In January 1921, the Department of Justice gave out a list of fifty-two people who were in control of Red organizations in this country and in this list appeared the name of Miss Jane Addams.

        Under date of November 29, 1921, the American Civil Liberties Union with Jane Addams on its National Committee, issued an appeal for the release of political prisoners, and in this instance, these prisoners appealed for happened to be the I.W.W. Pollak gang of crop and barn burners, cattle poisoners, and general committers of sabotage.

        Jane Addams is a friend of Anna Louise Strong, Soviet agent that recently toured this country. "Anise" when in Chicago, stops at Hull House.[S]

        She was listed as a stockholder in Sidney Hillman's[T] Russian American Industrial Corporation along with Lenin, Congressman La Guardia,[U] Debs, etc., etc. Sidney Hillman is President of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, a Communist outfit.

        Roger Baldwin's public testimony before the Lusk committee has never been repudiated by Miss Addams.

        Miss Addams appears as one of the signers of the now thoroughly discredited Winthrop D. Lane pamphlet (financed by [the] Garland Fund) against military training in schools and colleges.

        She, so far as any public records go, has never raised her voice toward the disarmament of Russia or toward the lessening of the Communists' ability and willingness to carry on civil war in America and other countries outside of Russia but she is doing everything she apparently can do to lessen the ability of America and other countries to resist a Communist uprising and civil war. In other words, all her actions have tended toward the strengthening of the hands of the Communists to make for the success of a Communist war in our country.

 

A. Robert Minor (1884-1952) was a radical activist and political cartoonist. He joined the Communist Party in the 1920s and quickly became part of its organizational hierarchy. Minor served as a delegate to the Communist International from 1922 to 1924 and ran unsuccessfully for several state and national offices. In 1940 he was elected as acting General Secretary of the American Communist Party.
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B. Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) led the 1894 Chicago Pullman Strike and later organized the Social Democratic Party of America. A prominent American Socialist, Debs ran for President on the Socialist Party ticket repeatedly between 1900 and 1920.
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C. The National Child Labor Committee was established in 1904 to publish facts about child labor, raise public awareness regarding the problem, and promote laws for the welfare of working children.
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D. Roger Nash Baldwin (1884-1981) served prison time as a conscientious objector during World War I. Following the war he assisted in founding the American Civil Liberties Bureau and acted as its director from 1920 to 1950. Baldwin was married to Madeleine Z. Doty, American war correspondent and WILPF member, from 1919 to 1935.
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E. Harry E. Ward (1873-1966), a Methodist clergyman, served as Chairman of the ACLU from 1920 to 1940 and of the American League for Peace and Democracy between 1934 and 1940.
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F. William Z. Foster (1881-1961), an American labor leader, joined the Socialist Party in 1900, the Industrial Workers of the World in 1909, and the Communist Party in 1921. Foster is noted for organizing the 1919 steelworker strike and running as the Communist Party candidate for President between 1924 and 1932.
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G. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964) was a radical writer and labor organizer who campaigned for, among other issues, civil rights for immigrants, workers and women. Flynn opposed World War I and in 1918 founded the Workers Defense Union. Although she was one of the founders of the ACLU, she was expelled in 1940 for her Communist affiliations. The following year she was chosen as a member of the Communist Party's Central Committee. In 1951 Flynn was arrested and imprisoned for subversive activities.
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H. Scott Nearing (b. 1883), a lecturer at the Rand School of Social Science in New York, ran for a New York Congressional seat as a Socialist candidate in 1919.
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I. Actually Norman M. Thomas (1884-1968), Associate Editor of The Nation between 1921 and 1922 and Socialist candidate for President from 1924 to 1948.
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J. Morris Hillquit (1869-1933), a lawyer and Socialist leader, ran as the Socialist candidate for mayor of New York in 1917.
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K. A. J. Muste (1885-1967) is referred to by some as the "American Ghandi." Muste, a well-known pacifist, was a founder of the ACLU. He founded a Marxist workers party in 1933 but returned to Christianity in 1936.
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L. Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) served as the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the Soviet Government beginning in 1917. His greatest achievement for the Bolsheviks was the successful organization of the "Red Army" in 1920 which repelled the invading armies, among them the American Expeditionary Force, who sought to overthrow the Bolshevik government. Trotsky sought to succeed Lenin as Party leader in 1924 but was defeated by Stalin. He was expelled from the Communist Party and later exiled.
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M. Rosika Schwimmer (1877-1948) served as Hungarian minister to Switzerland in 1918 and 1919 but fled the country following Bela Kun's Communist coup. She was refused American citizenship on the basis of her pacifism and labeled as both a German agent and a Bolshevik spy. Following the war Schwimmer organized trade unions for women and led a campaign for world citizenship for stateless people. For more on Rosika Schwimmer, see "How Did Women Activists Promote Peace in Their 1915 Tour of Warring European Capitals?" on this website.
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N. Louis Lochner (1887-1975), foreign correspondent to the Berlin bureau between 1924 and 1941. Lochner was Secretary of the Chicago Peace Society from 1914 to 1915 and co-organizer of the Emergency Peace Federation. For more on Lochner, see "What Experiences Did Women Peace Envoys Encounter in their 1915 Tour of Warring European Capitals?," on this website.
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O. Robert LaFollette (1855-1925) held a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1885 to 1891, was elected governor of Wisconsin in 1900,1902, and 1904, and served as United States Senator from 1906. LaFollette instituted numerous progressive reforms during his tenure as Governor and in the Senate opposed U.S. entrance into World War I and was highly critical of Wilson's war policies.
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P. Col. Edward M. House (1858-1938), an American diplomat, represented the President to the European nations during the war and was the United States representative at the inter-allied conference to coordinate military and naval actions. He served on the American commission to negotiate peace in 1919.
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Q. Gottlieb von Jagow (1863-1935) was German State Secretary for Foreign Affairs between 1913 and 1916.
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R. Bertha Honore Palmer (1849-1918), a Chicago society leader, often attended meetings at Hull House during the 1890s. Although she was interested in social and economic reform, supported the Women's Trade Union League and promoted suffrage, Palmer was strongly opposed to militant feminism. For more on Palmer's involvement in the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, see " How Did African-American Women Define Their Citizenship at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893?" on this website.
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S. Anna Louise Strong (1885-1970) was an American journalist in Russia during the early 1920s and later become involved in labor issues, specifically child-welfare work. Allegations that she was a Communist are correct.
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T. Sidney Hillman (1887-1946) was a labor leader who served as President of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and as Vice-President of the CIO.
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U. Fiorello Henry LaGuardia (1882-1947) was a lawyer who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1917 to 1921 and between 1923 and 1933. He was elected mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945 and served as Chief of the U.S. office of Civilian Defense from 1941 to 1942.
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