Hull House: 'Abdu'l-Bahá Visits Jane Addams

On the afternoon of the 4th of May, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá and a small party — Mírzá Maḥmúd, Dr. Faríd, Mrs. Corinne True, and two or three Chicago Bahá'í friends — were driven from the Master's hotel down to the West Side of Chicago to call at Hull House. Hull House was the great American settlement house that Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr had founded in 1889 in an old Italianate mansion on Halsted Street, in the heart of the immigrant West Side. The house, by 1912, had grown into a complex of thirteen buildings serving thousands of immigrants weekly with classes, clubs, daycare, public health work, and a thousand small forms of social hospitality.

Miss Addams herself received the Master at the door. She was fifty-two years old, the most internationally known American woman of her generation; she would, in 1931, be the first American woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She and the Master had heard of each other for several years through mutual friends in the international peace movement. They had not met in person.

She led Him through the principal rooms. The kindergarten was in afternoon session. The English classes for adult Italian and Greek and Yiddish-speaking immigrants were filling several of the larger rooms. The infant welfare clinic was busy. The Master walked slowly through each space, speaking briefly with the workers and the visitors, observing the work in close detail.

The visitors had begun to assemble in the main hall — the neighbours of the immediate streets, the resident social workers, a number of the Hull House board members who had come specifically to see Him. The Master rose to address them.

This is the practical Christianity of our time.

The phrase, set down later in the published version of the talk, was the Master's keynote for the brief address. He named the work of the settlement houses — Hull House and the sister institutions then springing up in many American cities — as the visible application of the central teaching of Christ on the love of neighbour. He praised Miss Addams specifically. He extended the praise to the mostly young women who staffed the house and gave their early adulthoods to the work. He called the settlement movement a foreshadowing, on a small scale, of the more general hospitality the world would in time learn to extend across all the lines of nation and class.

After the address He took tea privately with Miss Addams in her own small office. The conversation was unrecorded but visibly warm. Miss Addams would, in subsequent years, speak publicly of the meeting as one of the formative encounters of her later career. She would attend Bahá'í meetings on several occasions, would speak warmly of the Faith in her own writings, and would, near the end of her life, write a generous public tribute to the Faith in the Bahá'í World yearbook.

The party left Hull House in the late afternoon. The Chicago Bahá'í friends, riding back across the city, had witnessed two of the most distinguished moral teachers of their time take the measure of each other and find a quiet mutual respect. The Master's blessing on the work of Hull House had been the public benediction. The private tea had been the personal one.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, talk of May 4, 1912 at Hull House, Chicago. Public domain text from the Bahá'í Reference Library.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1922). *The Promulgation of Universal Peace*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/promulgation-universal-peace/