Alice
Hamilton, the sister of Edith
Hamilton, was born in New York on
27th February, 1869. Hamilton graduated from the University of Michigan
Medical School in 1893. She served internships at hospitals in Minneapolis
and Boston before studying bacteriology
at the University of Leipzig and at the Johns Hopkins Medical School.
In 1898 Hamilton was appointed professor of pathology at the Women's
Medical College at Northwestern University in Chicago.
After hearing a speech by Jane Addams
she decided to join the Hull House
settlement in the city. Other social reformers living at the settlement
included Ellen Gates Starr, Alzina
Stevens, Edith Abbott, Grace
Abbott, Florence Kelley, Julia
Lathrop, and Sophonisba Breckinridge.
Hamilton increasing became interested in social issues. In 1910 Charles
Deneen, the governor of Illinois, appointed her to a commission to
investigate occupational diseases. She studied industrial poisoning
in the lead, rubber and munitions industries and was able to prove
that lead, nitrous fumes and viscose rayon were causing serious side
effects including mental illness, loss of vision, paralysis and in
some cases, death.
Hamilton used this evidence to pressurize politicians to pass workmen's
compensation laws and factory owners to provide safer working conditions.
Hamilton's research into the dangers of industrial pollution was also
used in the campaign against child labour.
On the outbreak of the First World War, Hamilton
and a group of women pacifists in the
United States, began talking about the need to form an organization
to help bring it to an end. On the 10th January, 1915, over 3,000
women attended a meeting in the ballroom of the New Willard Hotel
in Washington and formed the Woman's Peace
Party. Other women involved in the organization included Jane
Addams, Mary McDowell, Florence
Kelley, Anna Howard Shaw, Belle
La Follette, Fanny Garrison Villard,
Emily Balch, Jeanette
Rankin, Lillian Wald, Edith
Abbott, Grace Abbott, Crystal
Eastman, Carrie Chapman Catt, Emily
Bach, and Sophonisba Breckinridge.
In April 1915, Arletta Jacobs, a suffragist
in Holland, invited members of the Woman's
Peace Party to an International Congress of Women in the Hague.
Hamilton, Jane Addams, Grace
Abbott and Emily Bach were chosen to
represent the United States. Others who went to the Hague included
Lida Gustava Heymann (Germany); Emmeline
Pethick-Lawrence, Emily Hobhouse,
(England); Chrystal Macmillan (Scotland)
and Rosika Schwimmer (Hungary).
The women were attacked in the press by Theodore
Roosevelt who described them as "hysterical pacifists"
and called their proposals "both silly and base".
Hamilton, along with Jane Addams, Florence
Kelley, Alice Hamilton, Emily
Balch, Mary Church Terrell, Jeanette
Rankin and Lillian Wald. she attended
the Women's International League for Peace
and Freedom conference in Zurich in April, 1919. After the conference
Hamilton and Addams made a tour of the Western
Front.
Hamilton lived in Hull House for twenty-two
years and thereafter returned for several months every year while
Jane Addams was alive.
In 1919 Hamilton became the first woman to be appointed to the staff
at the Harvard Medical School. She also
did studies on industrial pollution for the federal government and
the United Nations. She also wrote several
books including Industrial Poisons in the
United States (1925), Industrial
Toxicology (1934) and Exploring
the Dangerous Trades (1943).
Hamilton was a member of the League of Women
Voters, the Women's Trade Union League,
the National Consumer's League, the
American Civil Liberties Union, the Fellowship
of Reconciliation and the Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom. In 1927 Hamilton joined with John
Dos Passos, Paul Kellogg, Jane
Addams, Upton Sinclair, Dorothy
Parker, Ben Shahn, Edna
St. Vincent Millay, Floyd Dell, George
Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells in an effort
to prevent the execution of Nicola Sacco
and Bertolomeo Vanzetti.
Even after Hamilton retired she continued to be active in politics
and campaigned against McCarthyism,
the execution of Julius Rosenberg and
Ethel Rosenberg, and the Vietnam
War. At the age of eighty-eight Hamilton remarked that: "For
me the satisfaction is that things are better now, and I had some
part in it." Alice Hamilton died on 22nd September, 1970, aged
101.
(1)
Alice Hamilton joined Hull House in
1898 and stayed for twenty-two years. Hamilton wrote about her experiences
in her autobiography, Exploring the Dangerous Trades (1943)
Life
at Hull House was very simple so far as luxuries went, but it was
full of beauty. Miss Addams and Miss Starr brought with them many
charming furnishings, and whatever they bought had the two qualities
of durability and beauty. Our food was inexpensive, but dinner was
served to us in a long, paneled dinning room, lighted with chandeliers
of Spanish wrought iron; breakfast in a charming little coffee-house
built in imitation of an English inn. To me, the life there satisfied
every longing, for companionship, for the excitement of new experiences,
for constant intellectual stimulation, and for the sense of being
caught up in a big movement which enlisted my enthusiastic loyalty.
My part in it was humble enough. At that time there were few of the
social services which now we take as a matter of course. Hull House
had to have its own day nursery, kindergarten, public baths, playground,
as well as all the other activities which settlements still carry
on. There were no baby clinics, and, though I did not feel at all
competent to treat sick babies, I did venture to open a well-baby
clinic which very soon was taking in all the older brothers and sisters,
up to eight years of age.
Life
in a settlement does several things to you. Among others, it teaches
you that education and culture have little to do with real wisdom,
the wisdom that comes from life experiences. If one's contact with
the poor is only through their organizations, their clubs and trade
unions, one gets a very one-sided, distorted impression of the working-class,
which contains not only rebel youth but conservative middle age, not
only the radical leader but his wife, who cares more for a nice flat
and an electric refrigerator than for the emancipation of the workers.
(2) Alice Hamilton, Exploring
the Dangerous Trades (1943)
Another happening
which is stamped on my memory concerns a young Irish girl of sixteen,
gentle and shy, with the natural good breeding which one finds often
among the poorest Irish and which makes one believe that they are
right in saying that theirs was an old civilization when we Anglo-Saxons
were still savages. Celia was a waitress in an all-night restaurant,
for at that time a girl might work twelve hours a night seven nights
a week in Illinois. for her protection I had her join the waitresses'
union, and when her place went on strike she took her turn picketing.
Chicago police have never felt it part of their duty to observe the
law toward strikers; violence, often needless and unprovoked, had
been the rule. I felt personally responsible for Celia and made my
way through the crowd outside the restaurant just in time to see her
dragged along, unresisting, by a huge policeman and hustled with abusive
words into a police van.
(2)
Alice Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades (1943)
Another happening
which is stamped on my memory concerns a young Irish girl of sixteen,
gentle and shy, with the natural good breeding which one finds often
among the poorest Irish and which makes one believe that they are
right in saying that theirs was an old.
(3)
Alice Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades (1943)
Our English
visitors sometimes surprised us by combining social radicalism with
a total lack of democratic feeling, which to our way of thinking was
most inconsistent. A Fabian Socialist amused me very much when one
morning I took him out into our neighborhood. He was talking eagerly
about the need of vacation schools for London slum children as we
stepped out into our courtyard, which was crowded with children waiting
to go on a picnic in the country. He never saw them, at least not
as slum children like those he was eager to help; he only saw them
only as obstacles in his way, and he pushed them aside impatiently
as if they were so many chickens, all the time telling me about the
pitiful children in London. I thought to myself, "You may love
humanity, but you certainly do not love your fellow man."
We found we could not always trust English radicals and Socialists
to be nice to their American "comrades" when the latter
were from an inferior social level, as most of them were, and we had
some painful and embarrassing experiences when what was supposed to
be a joyful meeting of kindred souls proved to be a meeting of the
snubbers and the snubbed.
(4) Alice Hamilton joined the
Woman's
Peace Party
during the First World War and in April 1915
was a member of USA delegation that attended the International Congress
of Women at The Hague. She wrote to Mary Rozet Smith about the trip
on 22nd April, 1915.
It is a most novel trip. It
is like a perpetual meeting of the Woman's City Club, or the Federation
of Settlements, or something like that. Really it makes the day go
amazingly quickly. Always one is going to meetings or discussing the
last meeting or reading up something which somebody has said is peculiarly
illuminating on the underlying causes of the war.
I find the discussions ever so interesting and get quite absorbed
in them, and then all of a sudden the whole thing looks absurdly futile.
I suppose I shall always be a doubting Thomas and a pessimist. Miss
Sophonisba Breckinridge has been a great help. She and Miss Grace
Abbott and Miss Emily Balch and Miss Alice Post are acknowledgedly
the leaders. Miss Addams is really having a good time. She has made
every woman on board feel that she is an intimate friend and they
all adore her.
(5)
In April 1919 Alice Hamilton accompanied Florence
Kelley, Jane
Addams, Emily
Balch,
Jeanette Rankin and Lillian
Wald to
the Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom conference in Zurich. After
the conference she made a tour of the Western
Front and wrote a letter to her family about what she saw. (August,
1919)
I can't tell you how tragic
it is, the villages especially. One feels that these humble little
stone houses weren't the sort of thing that artillery ought to attack.
It is like killing kittens with machine-guns, they are so small and
helpless. One was just what we had always read about, a little place
of gray stone houses, pounded into a dreadful mess and in one house
only in the cellar, a red-cheeked old woman living, and in a dug-out
under the hill an old couple. The vitality of the old is so amazing.
British soldiers fill Amiens and we had to go to a queer little hotel,
but the dining room was warm and we had a wonderful dinner and Miss
Addams and I had a single bed in a queer little room, but clean. It
was so cold we didn't mind sleeping together.
(6) In 1924 Alice
Hamilton spent a month in the Soviet Union.
She wrote a letter to her family about her views on the new communist
government (10th November, 1924)
Russia is such a strange mixture. I can't generalize about it, because
one thing contradicts another. On the one hand there is the cruelty,
even now, to the counter-revolutionaries, but then it is not fair
to dwell on that because both sides were cruel, the Bolsheviks more
so only because they came out on top. Everyone here assumes that if
the Whites had won they would have exterminated the Reds so far as
they could catch them. And I have been told by Whites that in the
matter of brutality, of killing prisoners, and hostages, of torturing
and the rest, there was nothing to choose between the two, only that
one woman who was a Red Cross nurse under both sides, said that she
blamed the Whites more, because they were the highest in the land
and one expected more of them than of the lowest.
(7)
In 1933 Alice Hamilton visited Germany.
She wrote to Jane
Addams
about her experiences on 1st July, 1933.
All
the people we met in Frankfurt were Jews and all waiting - to see
when the blow would fall - or left suddenly without position or income
and with no possible chance of any employment. It is much worse than
Russia. There the Whites were such a poor lot, one could be terribly
sorry for them but nobody could wish them back in power. But in Germany
the down-and-outs are the best people they have.
(8)
Alice Hamilton, letter to Felix Frankfurter,
a member of the Supreme Court (15th July,
1959)
Why are we the only western
country that lives in terror of native Communists. All the European
countries have open and above-board political Communist parties some
even have members of Parliament or whatever, and they do not have
Un-Dutch Activities Committee. Look at the contrast between the English
treatment of Klaus Fuchs and our treatment of the Rosenbergs. Fuchs
is a scientist (which Rosenberg was not) he gave valuable atomic secrets
to the Russians (Urey testified that Rosenberg did not know enough
to do that) he confessed (the Rosenbergs refused to, though offered
their lives as reward) Fuchs acted during the war, the Rosenbergs
during peace.
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