Jane Alexander

An American actress with a rarely equaled reputation for high-quality work, Jane Alexander (born 1939) has worked with equal success in the fields of film, theater, and television. She has not hesitated to take on roles with controversial content; her range as a performer is wide.

In the 1990s, Alexander spent four stormy years as the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the chief arts funding agency operated by the United States government. As federal arts funding became a political football during the politically polarized administration of President Bill Clinton, Alexander struggled to uphold the ideal of the arts as a broadly beneficial force in society. After leaving the agency, Alexander returned to acting, and although she suffered along with other middle-aged actresses from a general lack of substantial film parts for women, she still found a strong demand for her talents.

Granddaughter of Buffalo Bill's Physician

Born Jane Quigley in Boston, Massachusetts on October 28, 1939, Alexander grew up in a fairly affluent household. Her father, Thomas Quigley, was a noted sports physician and surgeon whose own father had been the personal physician to the famed prairie scout and Wild West show promoter William "Buffalo Bill" Cody. Alexander grew up going to symphony and dance concerts and traveling on her own by subway to Boston's splendid art museums. She loved the arts in general from a young age, but her acting career did not begin until her years at Sarah Lawrence College. There, she auditioned for and won a part in The Plough and the Stars, a play by Irish writer Sean O'Casey. Alexander immersed herself in the role, and for the rest of her career she would be noted for enthusiastic research into the lives, real or imagined, of the characters she played. Her investigations began with books and would sometimes extend to visiting places where a character may have spent time.

Upset by a friend's sudden death during her sophomore year, she left Sarah Lawrence and went to study theater at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland in 1959 and 1960. She married actor and director Robert Alexander in 1962, and their son Jason went on to become a director. Robert and Jane Alexander divorced in 1969. Her second husband, director Edwin Sherin, met Alexander when she auditioned for a play and impressed him with her total commitment to the role. They would marry in 1975, occasionally working together as director and lead actress.

Alexander's professional career began at the Charles Playhouse in Boston in 1964. The following year she moved on to the Arena Stage company in Washington, D.C. and had 15 parts in plays there between 1965 and 1968. Her career at Arena Stage culminated in her creation of the role of Eleanor in Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope, playing the mistress of troubled black heavyweight boxer Jack Jefferson—based on the real-life figure of Jack Johnson and played by actor James Earl Jones. The play was a major success and moved in 1969 to Broadway in New York, where Alexander's performance earned her a Tony award.

The portrayal of an interracial romance on stage, at a time when such subject matter was still rare, brought Alexander her first taste of controversy; she received hate mail that included occasional death threats. Ignoring the attacks, she continued to perform. The Great White Hope was filmed in 1971, once again with Alexander in the role of Eleanor, and she was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance.

Portrayed Eleanor Roosevelt

For the next several years, Alexander worked consistently in theater, films, and television. She appeared in the hit Broadway play Six Rms Riv Vu in 1972 and 1973, and took one of her few Shakespearean roles in Hamlet in 1975—despite her lifelong identification with high-quality material, Alexander was more oriented toward contemporary plays and films rather than toward theatrical classics. After small parts in The New Centurions (1972) and several other films, Alexander returned to the spotlight in 1976 with the starring role of Eleanor Roosevelt in the made-for-television film Eleanor and Franklin and its sequel, Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years, the following year. She also won another Academy Award nomination for her appearance in the political drama All the President's Men.

In 1979 Alexander landed the high-profile supporting role of Margaret in Kramer vs. Kramer, playing a friend to both parties in a bitter divorce struggle. The 1980 made-for-television film Playing for Time, in which Alexander played one of a group of female concentration-camp prisoners who stave off death by forming an orchestra and playing music for camp commanders, was another feather in Alexander's cap critically. Many of the films that made Alexander a familiar face appeared on television, and Testament (1983), a tale that manifested the nuclear-war jitters of the 1980s, started out in the television medium.

In Testament, Alexander played the mother in a California family trying to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Some critics condemned the film as melodramatic, but it brought the dangers of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union home to viewers in an immediate way, and Alexander gained praise for her performance as the film became a national topic of conversation and was rushed into theatrical release. Alexander showed her versatility with a complete about-face in her next role, playing the title role of Old West diarist Calamity Jane in a television film of 1984.

With new clout in the industry, Alexander could act on a desire to branch out from high-minded roles. "I get offered a lot of films that have a noble woman pursuing a noble cause, or something like that," she explained to David Sterritt of the Christian Science Monitor. Alexander served as both star and executive producer for Square Dance (1987), a family drama set in Texas that took Alexander to country-music dance clubs as she carried out her trademark research for the role. In 1989 Alexander went beyond her usual reserved image when she played flamboyant gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in the television film Malice in Wonderland, and she had an uncredited role in the acclaimed Civil War drama Glory, as the mother of Colonel Robert G. Shaw (played by Matthew Broderick), the commander of an all-black Union regiment.

Named to Head NEA

The early 1990s saw Alexander appearing on Broadway in the Wendy Wasserstein play The Sisters Rosenzweig, never giving a thought to entering the world of government service or politics. But a staffer for Rhode Island U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell called Alexander out of the blue and asked whether she would be interested in being considered for the chairmanship of the NEA. The agency had endured several years of controversy over what some saw as obscene art it had funded, and many conservatives in the U.S. Congress were angling for the NEA's elimination, or, at the very least, a reduction in funding. The widely respected Alexander, seen as a consensus choice who could heal wounds within the agency, soon made the short list and then was nominated by President Clinton.

Alexander, for her part, warmed to her new opportunity. As reported by The Boston Globe she told a Senate committee during her confirmation hearings that "the life I have led in theater, in the world of art, has given me so much personally—particularly from Endowment-supported work—that I wish at this time to give something back." Confirmed overwhelmingly in late 1992, Alexander pledged to maintain the agency's independence from political interference. "We have to," she told Interview. "We're upholding a democratic principle here. This is the federal government, and federal agencies do not discriminate. What we do is look for high standards of excellence in the arts."

Alexander took steps to broaden the NEA's base, traveling widely to visit community-based arts groups that benefited from the agency's increased emphasis on disbursing funds beyond the traditional culture centers of the northeastern U.S. Over her first two years as chairman she visited all 50 states, emphasizing the important role the arts could play in local communities and economies. Live, nonprofit arts events were especially critical in an increasingly technology-dominated society, Alexander argued, telling an Economic Club of Detroit audience (according to Vital Speeches of the Day) that such events "will begin to seem like some of the few authentic experiences we have, and they will be places where we appreciate the artist's skill—be it music or painting or theater—and the excitement of discovering new talent."

But Congressional Republicans, who ascended to majority status in the House of Representatives after the 1994 elections, continued to threaten the NEA's existence, leaving Alexander in a defensive posture most of the time. Washington's political environment was unfamiliar for Alexander, who had spent her whole life in arts-oriented settings. The people she worked with in Washington, she complained to Marilyn Stasio of American Theatre, were "a whole new breed. They are not well educated. They are hostile and suspicious of the arts, and it was tough for me to persuade them otherwise." President Clinton, preoccupied with other issues, met with Alexander only after she tried for two years to get an appointment. Few controversies over the funding of specific projects flared while Alexander was chairman, but a combination of new proposals to curb the agency's independence and a desire to return to acting—she had been inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1995—led her to resign as NEA chairman in 1997. By that time NEA funding had been cut by almost half.

Chronicled Experiences in Book

Alexander wrote about her NEA tenure in the book Command Performance: an Actress in the Theater of Politics, recounting her clashes with congressional conservatives. Steven C. Munson of Policy Review in his negative review of the book blamed many of the problems on what it saw as Alexander's own high-handedness, observing that "the point … that Alexander seems incapable of grasping … is that who's running an agency in Washington, and how he or she approaches that task, can actually make a difference, for good or ill. While the NEA … was spared extinction, it is by no means clear that its survival was because of, rather than despite, Jane Alexander." Art in America's Robert Atkins viewed the book through a different lens, calling it "essentially a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story in which an idealistic agency head loses her innocence in the snakepit of corruption and ambition that is Washington."

"After being away from theatre for all that time, I was pretty overwhelmed by how deeply moved I was to be back on stage," Alexander told Stasio. She threw herself back into her work, returning to the cinema screen for the first time in ten years with a small role in 1999's The Cider House Rules and taking on various theater projects in New York and Washington. A 2003 production of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts at Washington's Shakespeare Theatre seemed to refer back to her NEA experiences; it was staged with sexually explicit paintings on the set, standing in for the controversial books her character liked to read in the play as originally written. In 2005 she performed in the one-woman play What of the Night and made a triumphant return to television, starring in Warm Springs and returning to her long fascination with the family of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Her portrayal of Sara Delano Roosevelt, the president's mother, brought her an Emmy award and another flower in a long garland of honors that recognized her craft.

Books

Alexander, Jane, Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics, Public Affairs, 2000.

Newsmakers 1994 issue 4, Gale, 1994.

Periodicals

American Theatre, September 1998; July 2000; July-August 2003.

Art in America, July 2001.

Boston Globe, September 25, 1992.

Christian Science Monitor, March 13, 1987.

Dance Magazine, December 1997.

Interview, July 1994.

New York Times, March 6, 1984.

Policy Review, December 2000.

Variety, April 11, 2005.

Vital Speeches of the Day, January 15, 1996.

Washington Post, November 25, 1978.

Online

"Jane Alexander," Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com (December 4, 2005).

ADDAMS, JANE

Jane Addams, a pioneer in social reform, founded Hull House, the first settlement house in the United States, to serve the immigrant families who came to Chicago at the beginning of the industrial revolution. For nearly fifty years, Addams worked relentlessly for improved living and working conditions for America's urban poor, for women's suffrage, and for international pacifism.

Addams was the youngest of eight children born to John H. and Sarah Addams. Her mother died when she was two years old, and her teenage sisters, Mary, Martha, and Alice, took over her upbringing. Her family followed the Quaker faith, and valued hard work and change through peaceful efforts. Addams idolized her father, whom she described as a man of great integrity. He remained a pivotal figure in her life until his death in 1881.

Addams's first exposure to urban poverty occurred when she was six years old, during a trip with her father to Freeport, Illinois. Upon seeing the city's garbage-filled streets and slum housing, she asked her father why the people lived in such horrid houses. After her father told her the people were too poor to have nicer homes, she announced that she would buy a big house when she was grown, where poor children could come and play whenever they liked.

Addams suffered throughout her life from a painful curved spine that caused her to walk pigeon-toed. As a result, she was always self-conscious about her appearance. She was a good student and often helped classmates who were having difficulties with their studies. After graduating from high school in 1877, she attended nearby Rockford Female Seminary, one of the oldest institutions for female education in the area. Rockford encouraged its students to become missionaries, but Addams, who struggled with her religious beliefs all her life, refused to consider that vocation. While at Rockford, she met Ellen Gates Starr, who would later help her found Hull House. Reflecting Addams's emerging concern about the place of women in America, she and Starr attempted to convince the seminary to offer coursework equivalent to that of men's colleges. Eventually, the seminary did become Rockford College.

Addams graduated from Rockford in 1881. Several months later, she was devastated when her father died of a ruptured appendix while on a family vacation in Wisconsin. His death left her a wealthy woman, and she decided to fulfill her plan to attend the Women's Medical College of Philadelphia. Addams began her studies that fall, but almost immediately the back pain she had suffered all her life flared up, forcing her to undergo back surgery.

During her lengthy recovery, Addams toured Europe with her stepmother, Anna Haldeman Addams. Throughout her trip, Addams was struck by the poverty of the industrialized countries she visited. At a fruit and vegetable auction in London, she watched as starving men and women fought over decayed and bruised produce. As she wrote in her autobiography, her impression was of "myriads of hands, empty, pathetic, nerveless and workworn, … clutching forward for food that was already unfit to eat." She was also appalled at the lack of concern for poor people shown by better-off Europeans.

On her return home in 1885, Addams found herself exhausted, depressed, and unsure of her life's purpose. On a second trip to Europe, she visited Toynbee Hall, an experimental Oxford-based project in London's poverty-stricken East End. Educated young men had moved into the area and were offering literacy classes, art lessons, and other activities to residents. Because the men actually settled in the area and lived with the residents, Toynbee was called a settlement house.

"Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city'S disinherited."
—Jane Addams

Addams decided to use Toynbee as a model and establish a similar facility in the slums of Chicago. With over a million residents, that city was home to hundreds of thousands of immigrants—from Germany, Ireland, Sweden, Italy, Russia, Greece, and many other countries. These desperate people were a ready source of cheap labor for the Chicago factories, and their poor wages forced them to live in overcrowded, rat-infested tenements, surrounded by filthy, garbage-filled streets. Journalist Lincoln Steffens described the Chicago of that time as violent, foul smelling, and lawless.

Addams enlisted the aid of her former schoolmate, Starr, in her new venture. The women first had to overcome the adamant objections of friends and relatives who were horrified that two educated, unmarried women would consider living in the city's slums. But Addams and Starr soon found a house where they could begin their work, the former mansion of Charles J. Hull. Once a stately country home, the house was now surrounded by rundown, noisy city tenements. In the beginning, Addams was able to rent only a few rooms in the house, but eventually, Hull's heir, Helen Culver, gave her the entire house and some surrounding land.

After several months of cleaning and refurbishing, Addams and Starr opened Hull House in September 1889. Initially, the two were met with great suspicion by the area's residents. Local priests warned their parishioners the women might try to convert them to a new religion, and street children threw garbage and rocks at the house. But Addams and Starr continued to greet their neighbors in a friendly manner, and the residents soon discovered that the women were concerned about their well being. They also found that the women would sell them nourishing food for just a few pennies, and they soon came to depend on Hull House.

In the first few years of the settlement house, Addams established a kindergarten, a women's boarding house, the nation's first public playground, and a day care center for mothers forced to leave their children alone for as long as ten hours each day in order to work. Hull House offered evening college extension courses, English and art classes, a theater group, and books

and magazines for children and adults. Observing the long hours and dangerous working conditions that the neighborhood children were forced to endure, Addams and her friends soon began working for state regulation of child labor, and went on to lobby in Washington, D.C. At home, when city garbage collectors continually ignored overflowing garbage bins, Addams applied for and was appointed to the position of ward garbage inspector, and forced the trash collectors to remove the filth.

Addams described her work at Hull House as an effort to conserve and push forward the best of the community's achievements. She strove to respect and preserve the immigrants' cultures, and the holidays of their various nations were always celebrated at Hull House.

Among the volunteers who flocked to Hull House to work with Addams were several women who later brought about important social reform. Julia C. Lathrop helped establish Chicago's first juvenile court. Dr. Alice Hamilton worked in industrial medicine and conducted studies that helped improve factory conditions. Florence Kelley investigated sweatshops for the Illinois State Bureau of Labor and helped establish child labor laws. Although Addams developed a wide circle of influential supporters because of her work, such as socialist eugene v. debs and journalist Steffens, she also occasionally lost admirers for the same reason. Addams never wavered in her belief that the same activities that caused her to lose some supporters would help her to gain others.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Addams established herself as a prolific writer, publishing Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), Newer Ideals for Peace (1907), The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909), and the best-selling first volume of her autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910). During these years, she began to turn her attention more and more to women's issues—particularly the right to vote. In 1913, seven years before the nineteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted women the right to vote in all elections, she helped secure the vote for women in Chicago.

Addams's work continued to expand beyond Hull House and women's rights. In 1909, she supported the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) and served on its executive committee. In 1915, she helped establish the Women's Peace Party, and traveled to Europe to attend the International Women's Peace Conference in the Netherlands and carry the message of peace to the countries fighting in world war i. Addams continued to hold to her pacifist views even when the United States entered the war in 1917, and she was blacklisted as a result. The Daughters of the American Revolution, a group that had once honored Addams for her colonial ancestry, expelled her, and she was shunned by many other supporters. She continued her humanitarian work during the war, however, helping the U.S. Department of Food Administration to distribute food to European allies.

Following the war, Addams also worked to have food sent to the starving civilians in the defeated countries, setting off yet another round of criticism. In 1920, in response to increasing attempts to stifle unpopular opinion in the United States, Addams helped found the american civil liberties union, dedicated to protecting the individual's right to believe, write, and speak whatever he or she chooses.

By the 1930s, the public's bitterness toward Addams had abated. In 1931, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, an achievement that Addams felt justified her pacifist work to the world. Frederick Stang, of the Nobel Committee in Norway, said Addams had clung to her idealism during a difficult time in which peace was overshadowed. Addams went on to receive fourteen honorary degrees, among them one from Yale, the first honorary degree that school had ever awarded to a woman.

In 1930, Addams completed her autobiography with the publication of The Second Twenty Years at Hull House. A few years later, surgery revealed that Addams was suffering from advanced cancer. She died in May 1935. Shortly before her death, Addams was honored at an event marking the twentieth anniversary of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. In response to the many tributes she received, she said she was driven by the fear that she might give up too soon and fail to make the one effort that might save the world.

further readings

Addams, Jane. 2002. Democracy and Social Ethics. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.

Davis, Allen Freeman. 2000. American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams. Chicago, Ill.: Ivan Dee.

Deegan, Mary Jo. 1988. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books.

Linn, James Weber. 2000. Jane Addams: A Biography. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.

Polikoff, Barbara Garland. 1999. With One Bold Act: The Story of Jane Addams. Chicago: Boswell Books.

Addams, Jane (1860–1935), settlement‐house leader.Addams was born in Cedarville, Illinois. Her mother died when she was three; her father, a Quaker businessman and state legislator, subsequently remarried. Graduating from Rockford (Illinois) Female Seminary in 1881, Addams entered the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania but dropped out because of illness. Eight years of foreign travel, vocational uncertainty, and unfocused anxiety ended when Addams and her friend Ellen Gates Starr purchased Hull House in 1889 as a “settlement house,” or neighborhood social center on Chicago's Halsted Street.

Supported by wealthy Chicagoans, especially Addams's longtime partner Mary Rozet Smith, Hull House offered its working‐class immigrant neighborhood educational and cultural programs as well as practical help and even material aid. It also became a political and intellectual center for a group of women intellectuals excluded from university and governmental careers. Florence Kelley began her reform career at Hull House. Pursuing the agendas of Progressivism, Addams and her colleagues fought prostitution and saloons and lobbied for sweatshop regulation, health and housing codes, and worker‐protection laws, especially for women. Addams encouraged women social experts and helped bring into politics the influence of organized women, whom she viewed as “social housekeepers” with different political priorities from men.

Addams was notably successful in shaping her own image. Her two memoirs, Twenty Years at Hull‐House (1910) and Second Twenty Years (1930), created a benevolent, all‐knowing persona. Although remembered as a social worker, Addams was primarily a public intellectual who lectured widely and published extensively on reform issues. Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) offers the most comprehensive statement of her social thought. She was active in the woman suffrage movement, and in 1912 backed Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive party candidacy. John Dewey often visited Hull House during his years at the University of Chicago.

A lifelong pacifist, Addams broke with Dewey and other Progressive Era reformers to oppose America's entry into World War I. During the war she lectured for Herbert Hoover's Food Administration, which supplied food to war refugees. She described her wartime experiences in Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922). From 1919 to her death she was President of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. In the 1920s, Addams's pacifism and her support for the Sheppard‐Towner Act of 1921 (providing federally funded health care for mothers and children) made her a target of Red‐baiters. But by 1931, when she won the Nobel Peace Prize, her reputation had recovered. While scholars have noted the race and class limitations of the settlement movement, Addams is widely recognized as an advocate for social citizenship and leader in the Progressive Era reform movement.
See also Immigration; Prostitution and Antiprostitution; Settlement Houses; Society of Friends; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Allen F. Davis , American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams, 1973.
Ruth Crocker , Social Work and Social Order: The Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1992.

Ruth Crocker

Addams, Jane (1860–1935) US social worker and reformer. With her friend Ellen Grates Starr, she opened Hull House in Chicago in 1889, a pioneer settlement house for workers and immigrants. A pioneer of the new discipline of sociology, she had considerable influence over the planning of neighbourhood welfare institutions throughout the country. She was a leader of the WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE movement and an active pacifist.

Jane Ellen Harrison 1850–1928, English classical scholar. She applied archaeological discoveries in the interpretation of Greek religion. Her works include Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), Themis (1912), Ancient Art and Ritual (1913), and Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1921).

Bibliography: See biography by J. G. Stewart (1959).

Addams, Jane (1860–1935), reformer and sociologist, founded the Chicago social settlement, Hull‐House, in 1889. Among her books are Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912), Twenty Years at Hull‐House (1910), Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922), and The Second Twenty Years at Hull‐House (1930).