SOURCE: An introduction to The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, by Jane Addams, University of Illinois Press, 1972, pp. vii-xxx.

Jane Addams always claimed that The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets was her favorite book. Published in 1909, it received praise from sociologists, psychologists, and other critics. William James wrote in the American Journal of Sociology

Certain pages of Miss Addams' book seem to me to contain immortal statements of the fact that the essential and perennial function of the Youth-period is to reaffirm authentically the value and the charm of Life. All the details of the little book flow from this central insight or persuasion. Of how they flow I can give no account, for the wholeness of Miss Addams' embrace of life is her own secret. She simply inhabits reality, and everything she says necessarily expresses its nature. She can't help writing truth.¹

This was extravagant praise, but it was in no way unique, for in 1909 Jane Addams was probably the most famous woman in America. In that year she became the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Yale University and the first woman to be elected president of the National Conference on Charities and Corrections. Yet she was more than a celebrity; she was treated as a kind of spiritual leader, even a saint. One reviewer called her "The Lady Abbess of Chicago"; another said simply, "Miss Addams is a prophet. She brings us messages from God." But the review continued, "They are always messages for the time."² The last sentence was crucial, for Jane Addams was considered by many to be a special American kind of saint—practical, realistic, and useful, with special feminine insight into the problems of urban America. At a time when women were just beginning to take an active role in public life, she became the symbol of what woman could do. "Alert, a deep thinker, progressive, strong and tender-hearted, Jane Addams is a true type of useful American womanhood," Leslie's Weekly announced. Mrs. Ethelbert Stewart, wife of the labor leader and journalist, wrote, "I thank God for the intuitive motherhood that has made you see the needs so plainly, and the education and opportunity that has enabled you to express what you see, as we mothers of large families cannot."³

The legend of Jane Addams, which depicted her as a heroine and saint, influenced all those in her day who read what she wrote and continues to affect her reputation today. The legend is important in itself, but it obscures what she actually did. A careful reading of The Spirit of Youth may help separate the myth from the reality, but there are other reasons for a new edition at this time. The Spirit of Youth is certainly one of Jane Addams's best books. It establishes beyond doubt that she was a literary craftsman as well as a reformer. The book has been overshadowed by her autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull House, which appeared the next year, and her writing on peace, especially The Newer Ideals of Peace (1907) and Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922). Yet Spirit of Youth has much to tell us today; it offers perspective on youth culture, juvenile delinquency, drug addiction, the generation gap, the search for community in the city, and many other problems that still beset urban America. It is also an important book for understanding the emergence of concern for adolescence in the early twentieth century.

The concept of adolescence, of a time between childhood and adulthood, is such a commonly held assumption about the process of human development that it is accepted without thinking by most people today. Yet, as a number of scholars have recently pointed out, the idea of adolescence has had a relatively short history. The concept of a special time between childhood and adulthood developed gradually during the nineteenth century, but it was not until the first decade of the twentieth century that the idea became firmly planted in the national consciousness.⁴

In pre-industrial, rural societies there was usually no conception of children as a special group. They were seen as miniature adults. The boys were potential farmers or craftsmen, the girls potential mothers and homemakers. In Puritan Massachusetts a child seems to have been considered depraved and treated like an adult, dressed like an adult, and given adult tasks sometime between the ages of six and eight. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed a developing concern for childhood as a special time of innocence and development, and gradually the concept of an intermediate period of storm and stress and preparation emerged. This change was tied closely to industrial and urban developments and to the movement of population into the cities. A farm family had a great deal of unity; adults and children shared the same work, entertainment, and friends. But a move to the city often caused the breakdown of the family as an economic unit. Children and adults were separated during the day, and adolescents had much more contact with others of their age group. At the same time new employment opportunities, and eventually state laws, required longer periods of schooling and the extension of child-hood. There were class and ethnic distinctions and differences, of course, but industrial and urban changes affected all families to some extent and contributed to the discovery of childhood and adolescence.

After 1825 in the United States there was a great increase in the number of child-rearing books published; examples are Lydia M. Child's The Mother's Book (Boston, 1835) and H. W. Bulkeley's A Word to Parents (Philadelphia, 1858). These books decried the breakdown of parental authority and the increasing separation of young and old. Also published in greater numbers were books offering advice to adolescents (though the term generally used was "youth"). Such books as Henry Ward Beecher's Lectures to Young Men (Boston, 1844), Theodore Munger's On the Threshold (Boston, 1881), and Henrietta Keddie's Papers for Thoughtful Girls (Boston, 1860) had a wide sale. These books depicted youth as a critical transition period of life, a time when "passions" increased, when temptations had to be faced and overcome. Many writers associated these temptations and dangers with the corrupting influence of the city. Urban life as a corrupter of youth was also a favorite theme in the McGuffey Readers and in much of the popular fiction of the nineteenth century. In the 1890s books began to appear which dealt specifically with the problem of the slum child. Franklin H. Briggs in Boys as They Are Made and How to Remake Them (New York, 1894) blamed heredity for most delinquency. But Jacob Riis in The Children of the Poor (New York, 1892) argued that crowded tenements and filthy streets had something to do with juvenile crime in the city.

The point is that there was a considerable popular literature relating to youth and the city in the nineteenth century before there was any systematic attempt to study "youth" or adolescence. There was also, beginning in mid-century, a greater concern for "child study," stimulated by Darwin and especially by Friedrich Froebel and the kindergarten movement in Germany. The movement sought to develop the whole personality of the child, not through harsh discipline but, rather, through creative play and an introduction to art and music. In America the leader in the systematic child-study movement was G. Stanley Hall, a psychologist who after 1881 was president of Clark University. Hall's most influential work in this area, published in 1904, was Adolescence: Its Psychology, and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime and Education. This encyclopedic work contained an immense amount of information and had a large impact on thinking about adolescence in many fields; indeed, it introduced the term "adolescence" into common usage. Perhaps his most important theory was his idea of "recapitulation," that a child in his growth and development "recapitulated" the history of the race, that babies in their need to grasp and small children in the urge to climb were showing their kinship with the apes. Adolescence in this theory took on a crucial importance, for it represented the most recent of man's great leaps, and the adolescent had the possibility of advancing beyond the present stage of civilization. But Hall also saw this transitional stage as a troubled time of contradiction and emotional stress. Not everyone accepted Hall's ideas, and his theory of "recapitulation" was repudiated within two decades, but his work did serve to focus attention on the child and especially the adolescent.⁵

Jane Addams was familiar with Hall's work, and she used his theories in arguing for more parks and playgrounds for the children who needed an outlet for their animal energies. The romantic belief in the civilizing possibilities of youth that permeates The Spirit of Youth also owes something to Hall, as do constant references to primitive instincts. Yet she never once used the term "adolescence" in the book, preferring the older and more general word "youth." Her first thought was to call the book "Juvenile Delinquency and Public Morality" or "Juvenile Crime and Public Morals." She rejected these titles because they seemed too sociological, implying facts and figures and footnotes, and she had something more literary in mind, something that would appeal to a wide audience.⁶

Obviously Jane Addams was influenced by the writing of G. Stanley Hall and by the work of sociologists and other experts on adolescence and juvenile crime. But of greater importance were her observations in Chicago and the memories of her own childhood and youth. Part of her genius and success as a writer was her ability to adapt the theories of others and to make universal her own experience. Everything she wrote was in a real sense autobiographical.

Jane Addams grew up in Cedarville, Illinois, a small town near the Wisconsin border. She went to a one-room school, attended church and Sunday school, and roamed the hills and fields with her step-brother and the village children. They played chess, "King and Queen," and "crusades," or occasionally the girls watched the boys organize a sham battle or a parade. In winter they could slide down the gentle hills or skate on the mill pond. On special days, such as the Fourth of July, there were celebrations, and now and then a lecture, a revival meeting, or a wedding became a social occasion for young and old alike. Of course there were daily chores to do: cooking, cleaning, sewing, and needlework for the girls, feeding the cows and horses, splitting wood, and hoeing the garden for the boys. It was assumed by all in the village that girls were more domestic and more submissive than boys.

There was little sense of social class in Cedarville. Jane Addams, whose father owned the mill and several farms, as well as the largest house in town, played with the sons and daughters of the hired hands with little idea that she was superior. There was domestic help, of course, yet she learned how to sew and knit and bake bread. There was a sense of community in the small Illinois town, a close association between work and play, between young and old, between men and women of all backgrounds. Distinctions were made, but there was a feeling of belonging.

Cedarville was an important influence on Jane Addams. Like a great many others of her generation, she left the small town. She went away to college, she traveled twice for extended periods in Europe, and eventually she moved permanently to Chicago, but she always found time to visit Cedarville, even in her busiest years. The memories of her childhood became a reference point for evaluating and understanding the massive changes taking place in America during her own lifetime, and they enabled her to become an interpreter of those changes.

In January 1889 Jane Addams and Ellen Starr, a college classmate, moved to Chicago and began to talk about their "scheme." They had a difficult time explaining that their object was not to uplift the masses but to restore communications between the various parts of society, and that they were going to live in the slums as much to help themselves as to aid the poor. Some laughed at their idea, others ignored them, but a surprisingly large number of men and women rallied to their cause and offered assistance. They quickly learned that they were not the first people in America to have the idea of a settlement. Stanton Coit, also influenced by Toynbee Hall, had established a settlement in New York in 1886. In 1887 a group of Smith College graduates organized College Settlement Association, which founded a settlement in New York barely a week before Miss Addams and Miss Starr moved into the dilapidated mansion that would become Hull House. It was obvious even before they began that they were a part of a national, indeed an international, movement, and still they had only the vaguest notion of what they would do once they had moved in. They knew they wanted to be neighbors to the poor, but beyond that they were not sure.

They furnished the house, put the pictures they had collected in Europe on the walls, and began doing what they knew best—teaching, lecturing, and explaining their art objects. Ellen Starr started a reading group to discuss George Eliot's Romola, and they organized art exhibits. One of their tasks, they firmly believed, was to bring an appreciation of beauty and art to those forced to live in the drab environment of the slums. But they soon discovered that the neighbors had more immediate concerns than art and literature. They needed better food, clothing, and housing. The cultural activities of Hull House remained important, but very quickly the settlement became involved in attempts to improve conditions in the neighborhood, the city, and the nation.⁷

From the beginning it was the plight of the children and the young people that depressed the settlement workers most. They opened a kindergarten, began clubs and classes for the older children, and established the first public playground in Chicago in 1893. They also became aware of the horrors of child labor. The sallow-cheeked youngster forced to work twelve hours a day in a factory, the stunted and deformed and crippled children in the neighborhood were constant reminders of the problem. But the campaign against child labor really began when Florence Kelley moved to Hull House at the end of 1891. A large and powerful woman, educated at Cornell and the University of Zurich, she was an expert social investigator and a socialist. More radical than Jane Addams and the other residents, she forced them to confront the working and living conditions in the city. As chief factory inspector for Illinois, a job she held for four years, she made careful studies documenting the extent of child labor in the area and then mobilized a campaign to pass a state law against the abuse.

Florence Kelley was only one of a remarkable group of talented women who made Hull House the vital institution it became. There was also Julia Lathrop, a graduate of Vassar, an executive with a sense of humor and a passion for research. Alzina Stevens, a former labor leader, and Mary Kenny, a vivacious Irish girl from the neighborhood who became a labor organizer for the American Federation of Labor, both participated. Later there were Alice Hamilton, a doctor who became an expert on industrial disease, Grace and Edith Abbott, two sisters from Nebraska who pioneered in working with immigrants and became leaders in a variety of reform movements, and many more. A number of wealthy and socially prominent Chicago women never became residents, but they gave their time and money to the settlement. Most important of these talented and dedicated women were Mary Rozet Smith, Jane Addams's long-time friend and constant companion, and Mrs. Louise deKoven Bowen, a strong-minded woman who donated several buildings at Hull House as well as the summer camp and who served as treasurer and trustee of the settlement.

There were men too: residents like Edward Burchard and George Hooker, as well as others who came for a few months or a few years, such as the historian Charles Beard, William Lyon Mackenzie King, the future prime minister of Canada, and Gerard Swope, who would one day be president of General Electric. Many others, some famous, others unknown, visited the settlement or dropped in for a meal or a lecture. Over it all presided Jane Addams, called "Miss Addams" by all but her closest friends and treated with awe and almost reverence by many of the residents. She was occasionally resented, even hated, but she had the ability to solve differences, calm disagreements, and engineer compromises. She was given credit in the press for all that was accomplished at Hull House when often it was someone else who was responsible for an innovation. But Jane Addams was the acknowledged leader, the publicist, the one who wrote the articles and the books, made the speeches, and related the activities in and around Hull House to broader conceptions and movements.

Jane Addams and the others at Hull House were constantly studying their neighborhood, discovering problems which led them to initiate reforms at the city, state, or national level. Their concern for playgrounds and the need for parks and recreation led them to promote recreation centers in the city and to participate in the national play movement. When the National Playground Association of America was formed in 1906, Jane Addams was on the executive committee. The Hull House residents' experiments with kindergartens and adult education made them pioneers in progressive education. They tried to make the classroom relate to the reality of the world, and they believed that the school should be the center of the community. Their thinking paralleled that of John Dewey, and for good reason. Dewey was a good friend of the Hull House group, a frequent visitor to the settlement, and a member of the board of trustees. He learned from Hull House as the settlement workers learned from him.

Interest in young people in the neighborhood led the settlement residents to begin many other programs. Jane Addams was concerned with the widening split she observed between the immigrants and their children. As the children became Americanized, they tended to rebel against the language, customs, religion, and even the clothes of their mothers and fathers. In order to illustrate that the ways of the old country were not useless, she encouraged festivals and the preservation of native handicrafts, and in 1900 she organized the Hull House Labor Museum. By employing some of the older artisans as teachers, the Hull House reformers hoped to restore some of the immigrants' pride in the heritage of the Old World while at the same time giving the younger generation an appreciation of that heritage. They also believed that by showing the history of the textile industry or the process by which wheat was made into bread, or by teaching the ancient art of pottery making or wood carving, that they could demonstrate the relationship between raw material and finished product, a relationship that had disappeared in the modern factory. They also hoped to restore a pride in workmanship and a respect for useful things of beauty. Unfortunately, it was often a forlorn hope and a romantic dream.

The Labor Museum, the clubs and classes, and other activities did not keep the young people who lived in the Hull House neighborhood from getting into trouble with the law. The settlement workers were disturbed that many juvenile offenders were picked up for minor offenses and then were thrown together with hardened criminals. The spirit of adventure, the impulsive action, that would be of little consequence for the rural youth often resulted in a prison term and a life of crime for the city youngster. Concerned about this situation, the Hull House group agitated for the new law that, in 1899, provided for the first juvenile court in the nation. The juvenile court was not a criminal court, and it was supposed to keep the rights and interests of the offender chiefly in mind. The judge could put the delinquent on probation, make him a ward of the state, or assign him to an institution. While the main idea was to help rather than to penalize the child, it did not always work out that way, for the judge had great power while the offender had none of the rights of due process. Not until 1967 did a U.S. Supreme Court decision recognize that even juvenile offenders were entitled to procedural rights. Still, at the time, the juvenile court represented a major breakthrough in the treatment of boys and girls in trouble. Alzina Stevens of Hull House was the first probation officer of the court, and Julia Lathrop and then Mrs. Bowen were successively chairwomen of the Juvenile Court Committee. Through the cases that came before the court the Hull House residents had a chance to study systematically the problem of the juvenile delinquent and to try to understand why he got into trouble with the law. Jane Addams used material collected by the juvenile court to illustrate Spirit of Youth, and she dedicated the book to Mrs. Bowen, the chairman of the court committee.

The tragedy and pathos of the young offenders who came before the juvenile court not only inspired Jane Addams's book but also stimulated further attempts to solve the problem of juvenile crime. In 1909, the same year that The Spirit of Youth was published, the Hull House reformers organized the Juvenile Protective Association, an outgrowth of the Juvenile Court Committee. One of its purposes was to control or eliminate pool-rooms, bars, dance halls, theaters, and other institutions that the committee felt were breeders of crime and vice. Also in 1909 the reformers founded the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute at Hull House. Under the direction of Dr. William Healy, it became a leading center for research into the causes of delinquency. Healy's careful studies resulted in such books as The Individual Delinquent (1915), which rejected the theory that delinquency and crime were primarily caused by heredity. He emphasized that while delinquency had many causes, environment was the most important. In a more informal way, without the scientific evidence, Jane Addams came to a similar conclusion in her book.

Jane Addams wrote The Spirit of Youth, as she wrote most of her books, by first approaching a topic in a speech, then reworking it into an article, and finally arranging and rewriting the articles into a book manuscript. She revised constantly. The first time she gave a speech she often spoke from notes, talking quietly and calmly with a voice that could be heard easily throughout the auditorium. She illustrated her points with stories of people, sometimes pathetic, occasionally heroic, but always believable. As she gave the speech again and again, the timing became better, the illustrations sharper, until gradually she developed a polished manuscript. Usually she wrote her material out by hand (a hand that became increasingly more difficult to decipher the busier she became) before giving it to a secretary to type. Then she would cut up the typed manuscript, putting it back together again with common pins while writing in transitions and new ideas.

Jane Addams thought of herself as a professional writer and took pride in her published work. "I have always liked to write," she told a reporter, "even as a girl in school. Later when I spent a few months in Europe I took great interest in the expressive arts. I have had this feeling in everything I have written; I have not written as a philanthropist merely."⁸ Her articles appeared in a great variety of magazines, and often the same basic article appeared in several different places. She asked no fee from such journals as Charities and the Commons or The Public, but from the Ladies' Home Journal or McClure's she could drive a hard bargain.

She also drove a hard bargain when it came to signing a book contract. Her books were published by the Macmillan Company, in large part because Richard T. Ely, economist, professor at the University of Wisconsin, and academic entrepreneur, had persuaded her to do a book for a series he was editing for Macmillan called the Citizen's Library. The book turned out to be Democracy and Social Ethics, published in 1902. Her next book, The Newer Ideals of Peace, appeared in the same series in 1907. As her reputation spread, Edward Marsh, the Macmillan editor, realized what a valuable property he had, and he gently prodded her through friendly letters to work on another book. His efforts paid off; in February 1909 she wrote suggesting she might have a manuscript on juvenile delinquency ready by 15 October. Marsh was delighted and offered her "a royalty of 13% on the retail price of the first 1500 copies sold and 15% on all copies sold thereafter." Jane Addams replied quickly:

The terms you suggest are not as advantageous as those your company gave me for Newer Ideals of Peace. I have just looked over your account rendered April 30th, 1908, and find that I received 16¼ per cent upon 1112 copies of Newer Ideals of Peace and 16¼ per cent upon 497 of Democracy and Social Ethics, I am not able at this moment to lay my hand upon the original agreement, but I remember being paid an out and out sum when the manuscript was delivered. I think the sum was $100.⁹

As it turned out, she had confused 16¼ cents per copy with the percentage, which had been 13 on the previous books, but this penchant for bargaining for every dollar, for getting the best possible contract, was very much a part of her personality.

A determined pride and high professional standards motivated her as she prepared the book. It was to be composed of essays and speeches she had done over a period of two years, a speech before the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, an article that had appeared in Charities and the Commons called "Public Recreation and Social Morality," an address given for the New York Playground Association, an article that had been published in the Ladies' Home Journal called "Why Girls Go Wrong," and some other material. In the spring and summer of 1909 she spliced the pieces together, rearranging and rewriting until she had a finished manuscript—a manuscript that, unlike some of her other work, was changed very little as it passed from typescript to galley proof to page proof. The book was published in November 1909 with two excerpts appearing in the Ladies' Home Journal in October and November. The Macmillan editor was not sure he liked the title of the book and was worried about confusion of copyright arising from the magazine excerpts and the book coming out so closely together, but he did appreciate the speed and efficiency with which Jane Addams worked. It had been barely nine months since she had suggested that she might have a manuscript ready for fall. Yet she could still write to a friend, "I am sending you a copy of the book which I regard with mixed emotions, one is gratitude that it is out at last, and the other regret that I did not fuss with it longer."¹⁰

The book was received with immediate enthusiasm. Professional reviewers, friends, sociologists, settlement workers, ministers, and ordinary citizens showered the book with praise, not only for its content but also for its literary style. And the book sold—7,000 copies during the first year and a total of 18,000-20,000 during Jane Addams's lifetime—and many more got the message through her speeches and articles. One of the reasons for the success of the book, aside from the fact that Jane Addams wrote it, was its calm, optimistic answer to the problem of juvenile delinquency. She praised the exuberance, the energy, the good intentions, the creative possibilities of young people, and argued that it was only necessary 'to channel this creative force in the right direction.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the book, given the time that it was written, was Jane Addams's appreciation of the importance of sex and the basic erotic instincts, although she did assume that the sex drive is more important for the male than for the female. She referred to "the emotional force," the "fundamental instinct," "this sex susceptibility." Although she knew nothing of Freud, she suggested that the sex drive furnished "the momentum toward all art." She argued that this natural instinct, if repressed, served as "a cancer in the very tissues of society" and resulted in all kinds of deviant behavior. A good portion of the book is taken up with descriptions of how the modern city overstimulates the adolescent. "The newly awakened senses are appealed to by all that is gaudy and sensual, by flippant street music, the highly colored theater posters, the trashy love stories, the feathered hats, the cheap heroics of the revolvers displayed in the pawnshop windows," as well as movie theaters, dance halls, prostitution, and drugs.

The rural youth of another age, and of her memory, never had to face these temptations. In rural America the quest for adventure led to harmless pranks, but in the city the same impulse resulted in arrest and jail. She never argued for turning the clock back, for returning to the world of the small town, but rather she insisted on the need to channel and sublimate the natural drives of youth into creative and socially acceptable paths. She suggested Molière and Shakespeare to replace the cheap movie, chaperoned parties to compete with the dance halls, recreation centers and settlements to substitute for the saloon, parks and playgrounds and competitive sports to replace the spirit of adventure associated with drugs and liquor. She realized how difficult it was to find a "moral equivalent" for juvenile deliquency, and yet she revealed a certain naïve optimism in believing that her substitute would work. She is much more convincing in describing the irresistible attraction of the train, the movies, and the dance halls than in defining the alternatives. There is an assumption throughout that the lower-class urban environment of saloons, dance halls, and street life needed to be changed and made more like a middle- or upper-class neighborhood. And yet the book is amazingly free of moral superiority and puritanical preaching.

There was, however, another and more fundamental cause for the discontent of youth in the city—the industrial system which employed them for long hours in meaningless jobs. The city youth was not able to expend his energy in a worthwhile job as the rural youth could, for factory work tired only the nerves and the senses, not the body. Jane Addams understood the dullness and monotony of factory work, but her solutions seem to beg the question. She accepted the industrial revolution and realized that the machine was here to stay, but she had no great faith in technology. She wanted to control the machine so that it would not destroy the man who was forced to run it. She also wanted to preserve the art and skill of the craftsman. She put great faith in a practical industrial education to train young men and women for the real jobs they would be doing. She argued for a team spirit (for a kind of giant Labor Museum), so that thirty-nine men all working on the same product would appreciate that they were actually a meaningful part of one operation. She supported a revolt against shoddy, poorly designed products and against dehumanizing working conditions. But never did she carry her arguments to their logical conclusion and suggest that there was something fundamentally wrong with the industrial system. In the end, although she carefully documented the destruction being Wrought by the factory, the best she could offer was to help adjust young people to the system and make them a little happier in the process.

Jane Addams sent a copy of her book to Vida Scudder, a Christian Socialist, an English professor at Wellesley College, and one of the founders of the College Settlement Association. After praising the "rare and lovely tenderness" of the book, Miss Scudder continued, "I rebuke myself, but I grow heavy of heart as the years pass on, 'save the children,' was our cry when the settlements started twenty years ago. Those children are men and women now, fathers and mothers and still we raise the same cry and hold the new generation under the same stupid and criminal conditions as the old. How long, O Lord how long?"¹¹ But Jane Addams, like most of the progressives, was more optimistic; unlike the socialists, she still had faith that the system could be patched up and made to work, that the right legislation would solve the difficulties. At the end of the book she poses the alternatives: "We may either smother the divine fire of youth or we may feed it. We may either stand stupidly staring as it sinks into a murky fire of crime and flares into the intermittent blaze of folly or we may tend it into a lambent flame with power to make clean and bright our dingy city streets." In 1972 the city's streets are still dingy, and another generation is held "under the same stupid and criminal conditions as the old." It is easy now to reject the optimism of Jane Addams and echo the cry of Vida Scudder, "How long, O Lord how long?"

Yet as one reads The Spirit of Youth, despite its romantic optimism and its occasional archaic language, one is struck by the contemporary relevance of the book. Jane Addams used "colored" rather than "black," but already in 1909 she appreciated the need for the black youngster to search for his identity in an African past. Her discussion of the drug problem sounds as if it were written yesterday. She had little faith that the machine and technology would solve America's problems, as some did in her time. She occasionally betrayed the concern for racial differences that fascinated her generation, but she avoided seeing in those differences the cause of delinquency, as Jacob Riis and others did. She referred constantly to "primitive instincts" and the "primitive spirit of adventure," but she rejected the theory of Cesare Lombroso, still popular in 1909, that the criminal is an "atavistic reversal" or throwback to a more primitive form of man. Indeed, she rejected all versions of the hereditary explanation for delinquency and emphasized the child's relation to his environment, his family, and his neighborhood, while many experts in her day were finding the cause of delinquency in race, body type, or mental deficiency.

Jane Addams did not design the elaborate theory of growth and development that has characterized the work of Erik Erikson, but she does describe young people going through an "identity crisis." She appreciated the alienation and disaffection of the young in an urban and industrial world where there is little chance for a meaningful job or sense of community, and she would have agreed with many of the points made by Paul Goodman in Growing Up Absurd. Although by "youth" Jane Addams meant the time of life that Kenneth Keniston calls adolescence, rather than a post-adolescent period that is the product of a post-industrial age, she would agree with him that "it is a time of turmoil, fluctuations, and experimentation, when passing moods and enthusiasms follow each other with dizzying speed. The adolescent has little lasting sense of solidarity with others or with a tradition, and little ability to repudiate people and ideas that are foreign to his commitments."¹² Most of all, Jane Addams shares with Erikson, Keniston, and Goodman a faith in the potential, in the civilizing and regenerative power of the young—that more than anything else permeates every page of her book.

NOTES

¹American Journal of Sociology XV (Jan. 1910): 553. He said about the same thing in a letter to Jane Addams but added that it was "hard not to cry at certain pages." William James to Jane Addams, 13 Dec. 1909, Jane Addams Manuscripts, Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

² Harriet Park Thomas in American Journal of Sociology XV (Jan. 1910): 552-53; New York Observer, 16 Dec. 1909.

³Leslie's Weekly, 9 Dec. 1909; Mrs. Ethelbert Stewart to Jane Addams, Dec. 1909, Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

⁴ This and the following paragraphs depend heavily on Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, tr. Robert Baldick (New York, 1962); John and Virginia Demos, "Adolescence in Historical Perspective," Journal of Marriage and the Family XXXI (Nov. 1969): 632-38; John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970); Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Modern American Child Nurture (Philadelphia, 1968). See also , and

⁵ On Hall's ideas, see Lawrence A. Cremin, The Trans-formation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York, 1961), pp. 101-4, and Nathan G. Hale, Jr., Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876- 1917 (New York, 1971), pp. 100-109.

⁶ Edward Marsh to Jane Addams, 23 Feb. 1909, Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

⁷ See Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement (New York, 1967); and Allen F. Davis and Mary Lynn McCree, eds., Eighty Years at Hull House (Chicago, 1969), for the story of the growth and impact of Hull House.

⁸New York Sun, 30 Apr. 1910.

⁹ Marsh to Addams, 15, 23 Feb. 1909; Addams to Marsh, 25 Feb. 1909, Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

¹⁰ Jane Addams to Julia Lathrop, n.d., 1909, Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

¹¹ Vida Scudder to Jane Addams, 13 Nov. 1909, Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

¹² The quotation is from Kenneth Keniston, Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth (New York, 1969). For Erikson, see especially Childhood and Society (New York, 1950) and Identity, Youth and Crisis (New York, 1968).