Julia Lathrop

THE BEGINNINGS OF socialized medicine in America can be traced to the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921, which set up child welfare bureaus around the country. Messianic activism by wealthy spinsters and lesbians led to the bill’s passage against considerable opposition. Today’s liberals and proponents of Obamacare are heirs to this wave of genteel progressivism.

Such is the argument in this fascinating essay by economist Murray Rothbard. Readers of Henry James’ book The Bostonians will find the women he describes vividly familar, particularly Jane Addams, who founded Hull House in the Chicago slums, and Julia Lathrop, who set up the country’s first juvenile court and was later president of the National Conference of Social Work. The women, inspired in their activism by the English art critic and socialist John Ruskin, were believed to have been lovers at one point. Rothbard writes:

The most prominent of the Yankee progressive social workers, and emblematic of the entire movement, was Jane Addams (b. 1860). Her father, John H. Addams, was a pietist Quaker who settled in northern Illinois, constructed a sawmill, invested in railroads and banks, and became one of the wealthiest men in northern Illinois. John H. Addams was a lifelong Republican, who attended the founding meeting of the Republican Party at Ripon, Wisconsin in 1854, and served as a Republican State Senator for 16 years.

Graduating from one of the first all-women colleges, the Rockford Female Seminary, in 1881, Jane Addams was confronted by the death of her beloved father. Intelligent, upper class, and energetic, she was faced with the dilemma of what to do with her life. She had no interest in men, so marriage was not in the cards; indeed, in her lifetime, she seems to have had several intense lesbian affairs….

… Jane Addams was able to use her upper-class connections to acquire fervent supporters, many of them women who became intimate and probably lesbian friends of Miss Addams. One staunch financial supporter was Mrs. Louise de Koven Bowen (b. 1859), whose father, John de Koven, a Chicago banker, had amassed a great fortune. Mrs. Bowen became an intimate friend of Jane Addams; she also became the treasurer, and even built a house for the settlement. Other society women supporters of Hull House included Mary Rozet Smith, who had a lesbian affair with Jane Addams, and Mrs. Russell Wright, the mother of the future-renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Mary Rozet Smith, indeed, was able to replace Ellen Starr in Jane Addams’s lesbian affection. She did so in two ways: by being totally submissive and self-deprecating to the militant Miss Addams, and by supplying copious financial support to Hull House. Mary and Jane proclaimed themselves “married” to each other.

In objecting to Sheppard-Towner, Senator James A. Reed (D-Mo), stated,  “It is now proposed to turn the control of the mothers of the land over to a few single ladies holding government jobs in Washington…. We would better reverse the proposal and provide for a committee of mothers to take charge of the old maids and teach them how to acquire a husband and have babies of their own.”

 Rothbard describes the evangelical Christian roots of the ladies’ activism:

The abolitionist and slightly later cohort were fanatically postmillennial Christian, but the later progressive cohort, born, as we have seen, around 1860, were no less fanatical but more secular and less Christian-Kingdom oriented. The progression was virtually inevitable; after all, if your activism as a Christian evangelist had virtually nothing to do with Christian creed or liturgy or even personal reform, but was focused exclusively in using the force of government to shape up everyone, stamp out sin, and usher in a perfect society, if government is really God’s major instrument of salvation, then the role of Christianity in one’s practical activity began to fade into the background. Christianity became taken for granted, a background buzz; one’s practical activity was designed to use the government to stamp out liquor, poverty, or whatever is defined as sin, and to impose one’s own values and principles on the society.

                        — Comments —

A reader writes:

After reading your entry on Postmillennial Spinsters, Lesbianism and Obamacare, it seems to reinforce my thinking process lately that Christianity has been a net negative for the West. Certainly it has for the last few hundred years. The question that troubles me is whether or not Christianity necessarily must devolve into a mish-mash of universalist tripe or if the progressives have simply co-opted it for their own evil devices. I’m tending of late to favor the former belief. This naturally makes me question whether the death knell for the West sounded upon Constantine’s conversion. Of course, this is most difficult at my stage in life.

Laura writes:

If you take your definition of Christianity from these heretical outgrowths of it, if you believe they reflect the meaning of Christ’s life, then it doesn’t matter how many postmillennial spinsters there were or how many hundreds of years they held sway because Christian truth would be evil and untenable. If, however, these views of an egalitarian paradise on earth have no basis in Christianity, and directly contradict it, then it doesn’t matter how many of these pseudo-prophets there have been, the fact is they are wrong.

Where else would evil most effectively enter the world but through the doorway of Christianity? Whether Christianity has been a “net negative for the West” or not is secondary to the question of whether or not it is true. And, of course Christianity has not been a net negative, but the foundation. It’s more accurate to say that the creation of the West and all its further blossoming began with its conversion to Christianity.

As Lawrence Auster writes here:

… it was Christianity, specifically the Roman Catholic Church, which, over centuries, slowly turned the rough Germanic barbarian warriors of Europe into civilized, peaceful, and law-abiding men, turned barbarian tribes into Christian nations, and made possible the later achievements of the Renaissance and modernity.

An important principle of this Christian civilization was St. Augustine’s division of the world into the City of God and the City of Man. This in turn was based on Jesus’ all-important statement, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.” This articulation of the world into the secular realm and the spiritual realm is a keynote of Western culture and distinguishes it from all other civilizations. It limits the power of the state over the individual, which makes it quite different from the classical civilization, where there was no inherent limit to political power and men belonged to the state. Classical citizenship was very different from modern Western (and Christian) citizenship. [emphasis mine]

He goes on to say:

Our very notion of individualism, of an inviolable individual self, is a product of Judaism and Christianity, in which God is above man and creates man and gives each person a potential value which no human power has the right to violate. This concept did not come from the classical heritage. It came from Judaism and Christianity. John Locke’s notion of natural rights was derived directly from the Bible. Because God created man’s nature, God wants man to live, therefore man has a natural right to that which will make his life possible, namely life, liberty and property.

Our Constitution, with its separation of powers and checks and balances, is derived from the Christian idea of original sin. Since man is inherently flawed, no man, and no human agency, should have unlimited power.

I could go on and on showing the formative Christian components of our civilization.

Jake Jacobsen writes:

In a related vein, one of the most singularly chilling things I ever recall reading was in Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism where he describes all these people attending the Bull Moose Party convention and singing Christian hymns but replacing Christ’s name with Roosevelt’s.

It actually sent a chill down my spine!

Lydia Sherman writes:

Marx said, “My object in life is to dethrone God, and destroy capitalism.” He had just enough knowledge of the Bible to use it to do harm. As much as he hated the word of God, one scripture he quoted for the purpose of achieving his own ends was: “He who will not work, should not eat.” (2nd Thessalonians 3:10). Marx used the verse in Acts 4:34-35 : “Distribution was made unto every man according as he had need,” to justify the well-known communist slogan with similar sentiments: to each according to his need. 

People from many different countries had gathered in Jerusalem in 33 A.D. to celebrate the Pentecos feast. The Christians pooled their resources to provide for them. It was a temporary arrangement to accommodate the many foreigners attending the feast, not a permanent way of life designed to make a perfect society, as Marx and others like him, would have people believe. This is one example of the way people use the BIble to justify their own doctrines.  Marx and subsequent communists used the command to “love not the world, nor the things that are in it,” (Ist John 2:15) to justify the denying of private property. Anyone who attempts to be a good steward of valued posessions, is accused of being materialistic. Others throughout history have taken Scripture out of context to corrupt the message. Sometimes a little knowledge is dangerous. 

If people will sit down and read the scriptures for their own enrichment, they will find themselves changed people. When they only read about the Bible, they cannot get an accurate picture of what they are supposed to be. Karl Marx was promoted as a great social engineer, but he was nothing more than a false prophet, ruining the lives of millions then, and now.

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