Publication information |
Source: Twenty Years at Hull-House Source type: book Document type: book chapter Document title: “Echoes of the Russian Revolution” [chapter 17] Author(s): Addams, Jane Publisher: Macmillan Company Place of publication: New York, New York Year of publication: 1911 Pagination: 400-26 (excerpt below includes only pages 409-10) |
Citation |
Addams, Jane. “Echoes of the Russian Revolution” [chapter 17]. Twenty Years at Hull-House. New York: Macmillan, 1911: pp. 400-26. |
Transcription |
excerpt of chapter |
Keywords |
Leon Czolgosz (activities, whereabouts, etc.: Chicago, IL); anarchists (Chicago, IL). |
Named persons |
William McKinley. |
Notes |
From title page: Twenty Years at Hull-House, with Autobiographical
Notes.
From title page: By Jane Addams, Hull-House, Chicago, Author of “Democracy
and Social Ethics,” “Newer Ideals of Peace,” “The Spirit of Youth and
the City Streets,” etc.
From title page: With Illustrations by Norah Hamilton, Hull-House, Chicago. |
Document |
Echoes of the Russian Revolution [excerpt]
The conviction that a sense of fellowship
is the only implement which will break into the locked purpose of a half-crazed
creature bent upon destruction in the name of justice, came to me through an
experience recited to me at this time by an old anarchist.
He was a German cobbler who, through all the changes
in the manufacturing of shoes, had steadily clung to his little shop on a Chicago
thoroughfare, partly as an expression of his individualism and partly because
he preferred bitter poverty in a place of his own to good wages under a disciplinary
foreman. The assassin of President McKinley on his way through Chicago only
a few days before he committed his dastardly deed, had visited all the anarchists
whom he could find in the city, asking them for “the password” as he called
it. They, of course, possessed no such thing, and had turned him away, some
with disgust and all with a certain degree of impatience, as a type of the ill-balanced
man who, as they put it, was always “hanging around the movement, without the
slightest conception of its meaning.” Among other people, he visited the German
cobbler, who treated him much as the others had done, but who, after the event
had made clear the identity of his visitor, was filled with the most bitter
remorse that he had failed [409][410] to utilize
his chance meeting with the assassin to deter him from his purpose. He knew
as well as any psychologist who has read the history of such solitary men that
the only possible way to break down such a persistent and secretive purpose,
was by the kindliness which might have induced confession, which might have
restored the future assassin into fellowship with normal men.