In 1866, 6-year-old Jane Addams accompanied her father, a prosperous businessman, on an errand through a poor area of northern Illinois.

Raised in a cultured, middle-class environment, Addams had never witnessed poverty and squalor.

"I remember asking my father why people lived in such horrid little houses so close together," she later recalled.

Told they lacked money to live in better towns, "I declared with much firmness that when I grew up I should have a large house and that it would be built right in the midst of horrid little houses like these," so that children could play.

She did just that.

In 1889, Addams, by now 29, and her friend Ellen Starr purchased an old mansion in the slums of Chicago's West Side. The settlement, called Hull House, aimed to alleviate the poverty and alienation of urban life and be a center for civic and social reform.

Most of Chicago's residents were immigrants. Hull House offered English tutoring and training in such fields as metal work, book binding, wood carving and dressmaking.

Hull House — named after the original owner — also provided schooling for kids and adults, plus child care, hot lunches and social clubs.

It didn't end there. The settlement expanded to include an art gallery, swimming pool, library, gymnasium, drama group and music school.

Two years after opening, Hull House was host to 2,000 people a week.

Shooting For Peace

Addams devoted her life to social and political reform, but her No. 1 cause was disarmament and peace. In 1931, she became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She also was the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Yale University.

As much as she came to be admired, Adams was also despised by many for her pacifist views.

When America entered World War I in 1917, her pacifist actions led to much ridicule and censorship. She was put on a traitors list by a state senator.

During the war, she led international efforts to mediate between the warring parties and helped found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

That led to her expulsion from the Daughters of the American Revolution. The group said Addams was in a movement "to destroy civilization and Christianity," as well as "the government of the United States."

Upon having her honorary membership revoked, Addams replied wryly, "I had supposed at the time that it was for life, but apparently it was only for good behavior."

Addams became the target of resentment and animosity among compatriots. Although she had taken up other unpopular causes, such as women's suffrage and equality, she had never felt the agony of alienation by her fellow citizens.

"I experienced," she said, "a bald sense of social opprobrium and widespread misunderstanding which brought me very near to self-pity, perhaps the lowest point to which human nature can sink."

In "Peace and Bread in Time of War," one of her dozen books, she wrote: "After the United States entered the war, the press throughout the country systematically undertook to misrepresent and malign pacifists. We came to regard this misrepresentation as part of the war technique and in fact an inevitable consequence of war itself."

Addams held firm to her pacifist beliefs and said of her critics: "It becomes perfectly natural for the mass to call such an individual a traitor and to insist that if he is not for the nation, then he is against it. To this an estimated 9 million people can bear witness who have been burned as witches and heretics, not by mobs, but by order of ecclesiastical and civil courts."

Addams stayed the course.

She wrote books, essays and lectured worldwide to promote peace among nations.

She also spoke vigorously for better working conditions and wages, protective services for children, for public parks, better sanitation and clean air for tubercular children.

Much of what occurred at Hull House became the basis for civic and social legislation. Addams was instrumental in the passage of child labor laws and developing a court system for juveniles, as well as juvenile detention facilities to keep convicted children out of adult prisons. She also supported unemployment insurance and elderly care.

First lady Eleanor Roosevelt hailed Addams as one of the greatest living women. In a poll in 1931 on the 10 greatest women of the day, Jane Addams placed first, ahead of Marie Curie and Helen Keller.

Addams was received by the heads of many nations and the pope, and was highly regarded by Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, and Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. In a tribute to Addams in 1935, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes called her the "truest American," with "none braver."

He added: "And while others only indulge in outraged sputtering at the denial of constitutional rights, Miss Adams will go quietly and really do something about it."

Franklin Roosevelt, after a meeting with Addams, said "she understood more about the real problems of the people of the United States than anybody else does."

Addams was 2 when her mother died. Her greatest influence was her father, John Addams, an Illinois senator from 1854 to 1870 and a friend of Abraham Lincoln.

He encouraged his daughter to read, and she was among the first generation of middle-class girls to attend college. Addams aspired to be a physician, a goal detoured by her father's death and an illness.

She recovered to help people in other ways — and to stand up for what's right. In her early years at Hull House, she pushed for passage of legislation to improve factory conditions. A group of manufacturers responded by offering her $50,000 to go to philanthropic activities.

"The fact broke upon me that I was being offered a bribe," she wrote. She rejected the offer.

Some considered her views dangerous and radical, what with socialists and union organizers meeting at Hull House. Again, she fought back.

Speaking at Swarthmore College after receiving an honorary degree in 1932, Addams attacked what she saw as the intolerance of the public.

"The national self-righteousness of the American people," she said, "is often honestly disguised as patriotism. It is really part of that adolescent self-assertion, sometimes crudely expressed in sheer boasting, which the United States has never quite outgrown."

Pushing 'Vigorous Thinking'

She lashed out at the inattention paid to immigration, labor and social problems.

"Such a stultifying situation," she said, "is more dangerous than ever just now, because the nation needs all the free and vigorous thinking which is available in this period of maladjustment. We must realize that narrow-mindedness, which includes fanatic nationalism, is suicidal."

More than 6,000 people showed up for her funeral at Hull House when she died in 1935.

BY BRIAN DEAGON