Jane Addams’s “Cultural Fables”: Neighbors’ Narratives as Political Rhetoric in Progressive-Era America

• In Event: Rethinking the Genealogy of Oral History: Exploring the Radical Branch of our Family Tree

Abstract

Jane Addams developed “cultural fables” that were narratives of her neighbors’ experiences. Resembling a form of urban folktales, she used them to forge a new social ethics for industrial democracy; these fables or tales peppered her public speaking, her magazine and book publications; often repeated over her forty plus years as the interpreter of the immigrant to the American middle and upper classes, these tales furthered her political agenda and became a way of negotiating for cultural exchange and a methodology to foster mediation of conflict. Examining the usages of such tales, as well as Hull-House’s cultural performances and productions in different historical periods, I am attempting to critique Progressive practice and I raise questions about the manipulative versus the spontaneous in these interactions. Ultimately Addams and her brand of Progressives attempted to forge a public opinion that would shape national and international social policy. Issues of representation, social control, and empowerment of the vernacular/local enter into this analysis. Did Hull-House foster personal narratives among the neighbors that became part of an authentic democratic cultural exchange?

Author

• Rima Lunin Schultz, Independent Scholar