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page_611 < previous page page_611 next page > Page 611 European socialist thinking. (Her translation of Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 is still the preferred scholarly version.) In Zurich she also met and married Lazare Wischnewetzky, a Polish socialist medical student, and gave birth to three children in three years. Physically abused by her husband, she fled with her children to Chicago after their return to New York in 1886, where at Hull-House her potential as a social reformer finally found fertile soil. Kelley exerted an immediate and dramatic influence on the generation of women reformers who clustered within the social settlement movement during the Progressive Era. Her understanding of the material basis of class conflict and her familiarity with American political institutions, combined with her spirited personality, placed her in the vanguard of a generation of reformers who sought to make American government more responsive to what they saw as the needs of working people. In this way they were critical components in the process by which American governments, state and national, shifted from liberal laissez-faire policies to positive regulatory programs. Kelley summarized her reform strategy in the phrase ''investigate, educate, legislate, and enforce." These tactics drew on her talents as a social scientist, a publicist, a lobbyist, and an attorney. As secretary-general of the NCL, Kelley helped establish sixty-four local consumers' leagues throughout the United States, traveling extensively among them each year to promote policies agreed upon by the national board. She and the Oregon league orchestrated the successful defense of the ten-hour-working-day legislation for women in the 1908 U.S. Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon. This was the legal innovation of the "Brandeis brief," which argued on the basis of sociological evidence rather than legal precedent. Kelley also introduced the social experiment of the minimum wage to the United States in 1909 and campaigned against child labor on a number of fronts. She herself thought her most important social contribution was the passage in 1921 of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, which for the first time allocated federal funds for health care. Kathryn Kish Sklar, "Hull House as a Community of Women Reformers in the 1890's," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 10 (Summer 1985): 657677; Kathyrn Kish Sklar, ed., Florence Kelley, Notes of Sixty Years: The Autobiography of Florence Kelley (1986). KATHRYN KISH SKLAR See also Child Labor; Muller v. Oregon; Progressivism; Settlement Houses. Kellogg-Briand Pact In this treaty, signed on August 27, 1928, the United States, France, Great Britain, Japan, Italy, Belgium, Poland, and Czechoslovakia renounced war as an instrument of national policy. French foreign minister Aristide Briand first suggested a treaty between the United States and France renouncing war as a method of settling disputes between the two countries. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg was furious because Briand proposed the treaty in a speech made directly to the American people, rather than going through diplomatic channels. If he accepted Briand's offer, he feared it would drag the United States into alliance with France in the event of another European war  which was what Briand had in mind. But if Kellogg declined, groups favoring such a treaty would attack him in Congress and in the press. Support for the treaty came from opposite ends of the political spectrum. For example, Nicholas Murray Butler, the internationalist president of Columbia University, believed a treaty would move America closer to the League of Nations, whereas isolationist senator William E. Borah, a pacifist, simply hoped that the treaty would end war. Kellogg turned the tables on Briand by picking up an idea of Senator Borah's for a multilateral treaty. Both Kellogg and Briand knew that such a treaty lacked force, but Briand, already a Nobel Peace Prize winner, could hardly ignore public demand for an antiwar treaty. (Kellogg, too, was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1929 for his role in formulating the pact.) Great celebrations accompanied the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, but diplomats did not take the pledge seriously. In the United States,  < previous page page_611 next page >

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