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.