On navigating the tension between individualism and fellow feeling.
Erik Schneiderhan’s The Size of Others’ Burdens begins with an ill-fated anecdote about one of Chicago’s most celebrated community organizers—a story that ends in a tragic death precipitated by the misguided help of the community organizer at the story’s center. This book is, in part, about the community organizer in this story—one of America’s greatest figures—whose list of accomplishments should sound familiar: Chicago activist, University of Chicago lecturer, gifted orator, politician and elected official, crusader against discrimination, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and author of one of the most-read autobiographies in America today.
We’re talking, of course, about Jane Addams.
If your mind had trailed to a certain current president, you might be excused for the assumption, for the résumés of the famous Hull-House founder and President Barack Obama are startlingly similar. Both Addams and Obama countenanced devastating poverty and injustice in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. Both sought to eradicate these inequalities, first through direct community intervention and social work, and eventually by way of inserting themselves into the broader political machinery. For each, this struggle raised difficult questions: how do we navigate the tensions arising from statuses of privilege while helping the less fortunate; how do we remain engaged with local communities even while being pulled into increasingly high-stakes political roles?
Though we may not all face the precise circumstances that Jane Addams and Barack Obama each faced in their varied and storied careers, the underlying dilemma that both struggled with (and continue to struggle with, in Obama’s case) is a common one—what Schneiderhan calls the American’s dilemma. Essentially, the dilemma is this: how do we act in the face of competing social pressures while attempting to help others in our communities?
“We are asked by society to be good workers, to be good consumers and ‘buy American,’” Schneiderhan writes, “to be healthy, to be good parents, and to be good friends. We also have our own drives, from wanderlust to sitting down on the couch to spend an hour with a good book.” These competing social pressures push and pull us, leaving us torn and unsure how to move forward. What Schneiderhan shows is that Obama and Addams, like ordinary Americans, felt the tug of all these competing urges.
Their struggles and our struggles are not just personal challenges, but also social challenges. How do we help others and engage with our communities when so much of our day-to-day life is about looking out for ourselves? Addams and Obama, through their work in Chicago, show us how. Schneiderhan emphasizes the value of combining today’s state resources with the innovation and flexibility of Addams’s time to foster community building, and ends with a call for us to get up off the couch and make a difference. As Kirkus describes, “he leaves it to us to continue the journey these two began. His work, like theirs, is inspiring.”
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Kirkus Reviews
Schneiderhan's biographical comparison of Jane Addams and Barack Obama illustrates how little has changed regarding the difficulties of community building.
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