IN 1894, the Pullman Car Works, a paternalistic Chicago firm, announced a wage cut and its workers went on strike. Jane Addams, who had founded Hull House in Chicago five years earlier as a place of refuge and support for the poor, was stunned by the class antagonism that followed. "Nothing in my experience," she wrote many years later, had prepared her for "that distinct cleavage of society which a general strike at least momentarily affords." Unsure what to make of it all, Addams walked four and a half miles to the new statue of Abraham Lincoln created by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, where she brooded over the inscription, a reiteration of the Emancipator's call for charity to all, and then walked back to Hull House.

Did Jane Addams approach Lincoln as an equal? Or course not, for no one in American history rivals Lincoln's stature. Yet Addams would go on to become one of the greatest of Americans, and the pilgrimage she made to Lincoln Park, as Louise W. Knight relates in "Citizen," was a key stop along the way. Before the Pullman strike - and the simultaneous death of her sister Mary - Addams was a product of the small-town Midwest in which she was raised. Strongly shaped by the evangelical convictions of her father, she was as paternalistic, if in her own way, as George Pullman. Poor people lacked refinement; her task was to bring them culture. Sympathy, not solidarity, motivated her. She would teach the poor of Chicago Shakespeare and Goethe, and along the way, she would impress upon them the importance of virtue and the evils of vice.