Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Clean Up Artist

"Nothing can be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon and left one unexpended effort which might have saved the world.” 


            She was the first woman to serve as the Nineteenth Ward Garbage Collector, and it was one of her proudest achievements.
            Back then in 1895 in Chicago, half of all children died before their fifth birthdays. That meant 10,000 to 12,000 deaths a year, half of all deaths in the city. A major cause was disease due to horrible sanitation. The Chicago River was a "cesspool, seething, boiling and reeking with filth, which fills the north wards of the city with [noxious] gases,” a contemporary account observed. What's more, corruption and incompetence plagued the city sanitation department.
            Jane Addams wouldn't stand for it. She filed 700 complaints with the city, and the mayor, weary of fielding her grievances, gave in, and put her in charge of garbage collection in her neighborhood.

The Garbage Buggy

            Every day thereafter she and her colleagues rose at dawn to pile into their official garbage collection buggy to follow the ward's garbage collectors. She handed out 300 official junior garbage collector badges to children so they could collect tin cans for recycling. She hauled landlords into court and nearly doubled the number of collection wagons in her area.
            Indefatigable. Relentless. Unstoppable. That was Jane Addams. "If she began doing it," said a childhood friend, "You couldn't make her quit."
            A tireless advocate for the poor, she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 and is regarded as the mother of social work in America.
            She was born to it. She adored her father—a staunch abolitionist. When she was two years old, she witnessed her mother's death in the throes in premature labor. An obituary noted her mother's "constant willingness" to aid "the suffering."

Her Deformities

            From her earliest days, she felt sympathy for the weak. At the age of four, she contracted tuberculosis of the spine, which left her with deformities. She often called herself an 'ugly duckling.' She knew what it was like to be 'different,' to feel shame through no fault of one's own.
            "I prayed with all my heart," she wrote, "that the ugly, pigeon-toed little girl, whose crooked back obliged her to walk with her head held very much upon one side, would never be pointed out to visitors as the daughter of [my father]."


            When she was six and her father took her on a buggy ride to the poor part of town, she felt wounded. "I remember launching at my father the pertinent inquiry why people lived in such horrid little houses so close together," she wrote in her autobiography. She told him that when she grew up her home "would not be built among the other large houses but [would be] right in the midst of horrid little houses like these."

“Dangerous” Ideas

            True to her prediction, in September 1889 she founded Hull House in a "congested quarter" of Chicago. She called it a settlement, and she likened herself and her co-workers to "pioneers in the midst of difficult surroundings." Why this neighborhood? The poorest  immigrants lived there. Mud ran thick in the streets. Few homes had tap water. The stench from garbage and human sewage was stomach churning. She had found her home.
            Over the next 40 years she fought against dishonesty in government and for sanitary codes. She helped win the vote for women and build playgrounds. She demanded factory safety laws and urged an end to child labor. Her enemies said she had 'dangerous' ideas. She co-founded the ACLU. She advocated world peace and pacifism and was called unpatriotic. In a word, she was fearless, the embodiment of courage.
            Perhaps a phrenologist knew her best. When she was 16, he 'read' the bumps on her head to estimate her character. (This quack practice was taken seriously back then.) His conclusion: "If she builds castles in the air, she always has some good foundation for them."

MORAL: Someone else's garbage can be your gold.

Buy the book "Courage 101: True Tales of Grit & Glory" at Amazon!







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