1931

Jane Addams

Nicholas Murray Butler

for their assiduous effort to revive the ideal of peace and to rekindle the spirit of peace in their own nation and in the whole of mankind

Jane Addams (1860 - 1935)

USA

Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

Jane Addams was the second woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She founded the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1915, and worked for many years to get the great powers to disarm and conclude peace agreements. In the USA, Jane Addams worked to help the poor and to stop the use of children as industrial laborers. She ran Hull House in Chicago, a center which helped immigrants in particular. During World War I, she chaired a women's conference for peace held in the Hague in the Netherlands, and tried in vain to get President Woodrow Wilson of the USA to mediate peace between the warring countries. When the USA entered the war instead, Jane Addams spoke out loudly against this. She was consequently stamped a dangerous radical and a danger to US security. Addams was critical of the peace treaty that was forced on Germany in 1919, maintaining that it was so humiliating that it would lead to a German war of revenge. At the end of her life, Jane Addams was honored by the American government for her efforts for peace.

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862 - 1947)

USA

Top-Flight Peace Activist

Nicholas Butler shared the Peace Prize for 1931 with Jane Addams. He received it for his efforts to strengthen international law and the International Court at the Hague. Butler studied both in France and in Germany. He became a friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and later of President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1902 he became President of Columbia University. Butler participated in peace conferences and established contacts with several Peace Prize Laureates. During World War I he broke off his connections with Germany and was a warm supporter of United States entry into the war. In 1919 he opposed US entry into the new League of Nations, fearing that America's hands would be tied at the expense of national interests. In 1925, Butler became President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In his opinion, peace could only be achieved by an elite. Butler had close contacts with Europe's leading statesmen, and supported the French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, enabling the signing of the Briand-Kellogg Pact forbidding wars of aggression in 1928.