There was no railroad service into or out of the city, and public transportation within the city also ceased as the streetcar workers joined the boycott. . On the question of what the strike accomplished, her thoughts had shifted somewhat. Agreeing, Addams decided that, instead of taking the idea to the uncooperative Howard, she would take it over his head to Debs. She had gone to Cleveland to give a commencement speech on June 19 at the College for Women of Western Reserve University. “We must learn to trust our democracy,” she writes, “giant-like and threatening as it may appear in its uncouth strength and untried applications.” Addams was edging toward trusting that working-class people, people without the cultural training in “the best,” could set their own course. as a friend and benefactor of workingmen.” The workers, however, thought the Pullman Company exercised too much control. The causes of the Pullman Strike went deeper than the company’s reaction to the depression. Although she had told Dewey that antagonism was always useless, she argues in “The Settlement as a Factor” that strikes, which were certainly were a form of antagonism, can be useful and necessary. In a letter to his wife Alice Dewey reported telling Addams that conflict was not only inevitable but possibly a good thing. Bibliovault “I once heard Father Huntington say,” she wrote in 1901, that it is “the essence of immorality to make an exception of one’s self.” She elaborated. . Farmers and producers were upset that they could not move their produce to market. That fall, Hull House, returning to normalcy, resumed its rich schedule of classes, club meetings, lectures, and exhibits. But she was back in Chicago by the second week in August and had soon joined the arbitration conference committee. Reformers, social commentators, and journalists across the country were fascinated by Pullman’s “socially responsible” experiment. First, there was the problem of her own worsening finances. And it was those roaming newsboys who were, of course, most vulnerable to the dangers and temptations of the city. One newsboy named Peter was found sleeping in News Alley at 2 a.m. on one of the coldest days of the winter. Antonio was one of the lucky ones, however. Furthermore, the residents’ book of maps was moving toward completion. Now the strikers were fighting not only the GMA but also the federal government. have been poured forth in a vitriolic tirade to scathe those who advocated and practiced . Jane Addams would honor this family claim for the rest of her life. Boys and girls as young as five or six peddled penny and two-penny papers in the wee morning hours, during the school day, and long, long, long after dark. She writes prophetically of “the larger solidarity which includes labor and capital” and that is based on a “notion of universal kinship” and “the common good.” One might read into her argument the conclusion of social justice, yet the principle remains uninvoked. Perhaps Dewey had been more persuasive than he realized. In June 1903, Cornelius Scanlan, a twelve-year-old newsboy was selling papers to street car travelers on 47th street when he was hit and killed by a northbound train. “So far, we have been unable to secure any legislative action on the subject,” she lamented. Addams’s principled vision and spiritual charisma had met their match in the cool machinery of John Dewey’s powerful mind. “Life teaches us,” she writes, that there is “nothing more inevitable than that right and wrong are most confusingly mixed; that the blackest wrong [can be] within our own motives.” When we triumph, she adds, we bear “the weight of self-righteousness.” In other words, no one—not unions and working-class people, not businesses and middle-class people, not settlement workers and other middle-class reformers—could claim to hold or ever could hold the highest moral ground. She was the only board member to turn up. Addams told John Dewey, who had come to town to take up his new position at the University of Chicago, that she had gone to meet with Edward Everett Ayer, a Chicago businessman with railroad industry clients who had often supported Hull House’s relief work, to ask him for another gift. Telegrams poured into the White House. Although the strike was over, innumerable questions remained unanswered. The board’s president, A. C. Bartlett, a businessman, was to arrange the meeting but, as of May 30, two weeks into the strike, he had done nothing. Elected as secretary to the committee, Jane Addams threw herself into organizing the event. While Jane Addams’s private world was crumbling, so was Chicago’s civic order. Mary Rozet Smith, among others, sent a generous check. Jane Addams would testify before the United States Strike Commission in August, as would George Pullman. The company’s stance was firm. The first question the board discussed was whether the Pullman workers wanted the strike to be arbitrated. Addams, happy to be back in the editor’s chair, wrote the prefatory note, edited essays, and wrote the meaty appendix that described the settlement’s activities and programs.