Twenty Years at Hull House; with Autobiographical Notes

PLATES

Jane Addams, from a photograph taken in 1899 Frontispiece

John H. Addams, from a photograph taken in 1880 22

Ellen Gates Starr, from a photograph taken in 1906 64

A Hull-House Interior 88

A View from a Hull-House Window 112

A Spent Old Man 154

Sweatshop Workers 198

Chicago River at Halsted Street 258

Polk Street opposite Hull-House 280

Julia C. Lathrop 310

A Studio in Hull-House Court 370

A View between Hull-House Gymnasium and Theater 426

ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

Birthplace, Jane Addams, Cedarville, Illinois 4

Jane Addams, aged Seven, from a Photograph of 1867 7

Mill at Cedarville, Illinois 10

Stream at Cedarville, Illinois 22

Old Abe 42

Rockford College, Rockford, Illinois 44

Porto del Popolo, Rome 76

View of St. Peter's 88

Polk Street opposite Hull-House 95

South Halsted Street opposite Hull-House 96

Consulting the Hull-House Bulletin Board, from a Photograph by

Lewis W. Hine 104

A Boy's Club Member 105

An Italian Woman with Grandchild 111

Portrait, Jane Addams, from a Charcoal Drawing by Alice Kellogg

Tyler of 1892 114

Main Entrance to Hull-House 128

Head of Slavic Woman 134

Head of Italian Woman 135

A Doorway in Hull-House Court 149

Woman and Child in Hull-House Reception Room 154

In a Tenement House, Sick Mother and Children 164

A Row of Nursery Babies 168

A Neighborhood Alley 181

Hull-House on Halsted Street, Apartment House in Foreground 197

An Italian Sweatshop Worker 208

Out of Work, from a Drawing by Alice Kellogg Tyler 220

Head of Immigrant Woman 226

Aniello 235

Irish Spinner in the Hull-House Labor Museum 238

Scandinavian Weaver in the Hull-House Labor Museum 239

Italian Spinner in the Hull-House Labor Museum 241

An Italian Grocery opposite Hull-House 258

Sketches of Tolstoy Mowing 271

Head of Russian Immigrant 275

Rear Tenement in Hull-House Neighborhood 282

An Alley near Hull-House 293

A View from Hull-House Window 314

Alley between Hull-House Buildings 321

A Window in the Hull-House Library 346

An Italian Mother and Child 354

Facade of Bowen Hall 363

A Club Child listening to a Story 367

In the Hull-House Studio, from a Photograph by Lewis W. Hine 374

Exterior Hull-House Music School 379

In the Hull-House Music School 383

Terrace in the Hull-House Court 398

South Halsted Street 401

Russian Immigrant on Halsted Street, from a Photograph by Lewis W. Hine 416

Entrance to Hull-House Courtyard 426

Boy at Forge, Hull-House Boy's Club, from a Photograph by Lewis W. Hine 439

Steps to Hull-House Terrace 447

Waiting in the Hull-House Hall 453

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This book has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK Initiative at the

Celebration of Women Writers through the combined work of: Adrienne

Fermoyle, Andrea Jeddi, David Cheezem, Diana Camden, Flo Carriere, Jill

Thoren, Judi Oswalt, Margaret Sylvia, Samantha M. Constant, Terri Perkins,

and Mary Mark Ockerbloom.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Preface." by Jane Addams (1860-1935)

From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by Jane

Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. vii-ix.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

PREFACE

Every preface is, I imagine, written after the book has been

completed and now that I have finished this volume I will state

several difficulties which may put the reader upon his guard

unless he too postpones the preface to the very last.

Many times during the writing of these reminiscences, I have

become convinced that the task was undertaken all too soon.

One's fiftieth year is indeed an impressive milestone at which

one may well pause to take an accounting, but the people with

whom I have so long journeyed have become so intimate a part of

my lot that they cannot be written of either in praise or blame;

the public movements and causes with which I am still identified

have become so endeared, some of them through their very

struggles and failures, that it is difficult to discuss them.

It has also been hard to determine what incidents and experiences

should be selected for recital, and I have found that I might

give an accurate report of each isolated event and yet give a

totally misleading impression of the whole, solely by the

selection of the incidents. For these reasons and many others I

have found it difficult to make a [Page viii] faithful record of

the years since the autumn of 1889 when without any preconceived

social theories or economic views, I came to live in an

industrial district of Chicago.

If the reader should inquire why the book was ever undertaken in

the face of so many difficulties, in reply I could instance two

purposes, only one of which in the language of organized charity,

is "worthy." Because Settlements have multiplied so easily in the

United States I hoped that a simple statement of an earlier

effort, including the stress and storm, might be of value in

their interpretation and possibly clear them of a certain charge

of superficiality. The unworthy motive was a desire to start a

"backfire," as it were, to extinquish two biographies of myself,

one of which had been submitted to me in outline, that made life

in a Settlement all too smooth and charming.

The earlier chapters present influences and personal motives with

a detail which will be quite unpardonable if they fail to make

clear the personality upon whom various social and industrial

movements in Chicago reacted during a period of twenty years. No

effort is made in the recital to separate my own history from

that of Hull-House during the years in which I was "launched deep

into the stormy intercourse of human life" for, so far as a mind

is pliant under the pressure of events and experiences, it

becomes hard to detach it.

It has unfortunately been necessary to abandon [Page ix] the

chronological order in favor of the topical, for during the early

years at Hull-House, time seemed to afford a mere framework for

certain lines of activity and I have found in writing this book,

that after these activities have been recorded, I can scarcely

recall the scaffolding.

More than a third of the material in the book has appeared in The

American Magazine, one chapter of it in McClure's Magazine, and

earlier statements of the Settlement motive, published years ago,

have been utilized in chronological order because it seemed

impossible to reproduce their enthusiasm.

It is a matter of gratification to me that the book is

illustrated from drawings made by Miss Norah Hamilton of

Hull-House, and the cover designed by another resident, Mr. Frank

Hazenplug. I am indebted for the making of the index and for

many other services to Miss Clara Landsberg, also of Hull-House.

If the conclusions of the whole matter are similar to those I have

already published at intervals during the twenty years at

Hull-House, I can only make the defense that each of the earlier

books was an attempt to set forth a thesis supported by

experience, whereas this volume endeavors to trace the experiences

through which various conclusions were forced upon me.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter I: Earliest Impressions." by Jane Addams (1860-1935)

From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by Jane

Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 1-22.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

CHAPTER I

EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS

On the theory that our genuine impulses may be connected with our

childish experiences, that one's bent may be tracked back to that

"No-Man's Land" where character is formless but nevertheless

settling into definite lines of future development, I begin this

record with some impressions of my childhood.

All of these are directly connected with my father, although of

course I recall many experiences apart from him. I was one of

the younger members of a large family and an eager participant in

the village life, but because my father was so distinctly the

dominant influence and because it is quite impossible to set

forth all of one's early impressions, it has seemed simpler to

string these first memories on that single cord. Moreover, it

was this cord which not only held fast my supreme affections, but

also first drew me into the moral concerns of life, and later

afforded a clew there to which I somewhat wistfully clung in the

intricacy of its mazes.

It must have been from a very early period that I recall "horrid

nights" when I tossed about in my bed because I had told a lie. I

was held in the grip of a miserable dread of death, a double

fear, first, that I myself should die in my sins and go straight

to that fiery Hell which was never mentioned at home, but which I

had heard all about from other children, and, second, that my

father--representing the entire adult world which I had basely

deceived--should himself die before I had time to tell him. My

only method of obtaining relief was to go downstairs to my

father's room and make full confession. The high resolve to do

this would push me out of bed and carry me down the stairs

without a touch of fear. But at the foot of the stairs I would

be faced by the awful necessity of passing the front door--which

my father, because of his Quaker tendencies, did not lock--and of

crossing the wide and black expanse of the living room in order

to reach his door. I would invariably cling to the newel post

while I contemplated the perils of the situation, complicated by

the fact that the literal first step meant putting my bare foot

upon a piece of oilcloth in front of the door, only a few inches

wide, but lying straight in my path. I would finally reach my

father's bedside perfectly breathless and having panted out the

history of my sin, invariable received the same assurance that if

he "had a little girl who told lies," he was very glad that she

"felt too bad to go to sleep afterward." No absolution was asked

for or received, but apparently the sense that the knowledge of

my wickedness was shared, or an obscure understanding of the

affection which underlay the grave statement, was sufficient, for

I always went back to bed as bold as a lion, and slept, if not

the sleep of the just, at least that of the comforted.

I recall an incident which must have occurred before I was seven

years old, for the mill in which my father transacted his business

that day was closed in 1867. The mill stood in the neighboring

town adjacent to its poorest quarter. Before then I had always

seen the little city of ten thousand people with the admiring eyes

of a country child, and it had never occurred to me that all its

streets were not as bewilderingly attractive as the one which

contained the glittering toyshop and the confectioner. On that day

I had my first sight of the poverty which implies squalor, and

felt the curious distinction between the ruddy poverty of the

country and that which even a small city presents in its shabbiest

streets. I remember launching at my father the pertinent inquiry

why people lived in such horrid little houses so close together,

and that after receiving his explanation I declared with much

firmness when I grew up I should, of course, have a large house,

but it would not be built among the other large houses, but right

in the midst of horrid little houses like those.

That curious sense of responsibility for carrying on the world's

affairs which little children often exhibit because "the old man

clogs our earliest years," I remember in myself in a very absurd

manifestation. I dreamed night after night that every one in the

world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the

responsibility of making a wagon wheel. The village street

remained as usual, the village blacksmith shop was "all there,"

even a glowing fire upon the forge and the anvil in its customary

place near the door, but no human being was within sight. They

had all gone around the edge of the hill to the village cemetery,

and I alone remained alive in the deserted world. I always stood

in the same spot in the blacksmith shop, darkly pondering as to

how to begin, and never once did I know how, although I fully

realized that the affairs of the world could not be resumed until

at least one wheel should be made and something started. Every

victim of nightmare is, I imagine, overwhelmed by an excessive

sense of responsibility and the consciousness of a fearful

handicap in the effort to perform what is required; but perhaps

never were the odds more heavily against "a warder of the world"

than in these reiterated dreams of mine, doubtless compounded in

equal parts of a childish version of Robinson Crusoe and of the

end-of-the-world predictions of the Second Adventists, a few of

whom were found in the village. The next morning would often

find me, a delicate little girl of six, with the further

disability of a curved spine, standing in the doorway of the

village blacksmith shop, anxiously watching the burly,

red-shirted figure at work. I would store my mind with such

details of the process of making wheels as I could observe, and

sometimes I plucked up courage to ask for more. "Do you always

have to sizzle the iron in water?" I would ask, thinking how

horrid it would be to do. "Sure!" the good-natured blacksmith

would reply, "that makes the iron hard." I would sigh heavily and

walk away, bearing my responsibility as best I could, and this of

course I confided to no one, for there is something too

mysterious in the burden of "the winds that come from the fields

of sleep" to be communicated, although it is at the same time too

heavy a burden to be borne alone.

My great veneration and pride in my father manifested itself in

curious ways. On several Sundays, doubtless occurring in two or

three different years, the Union Sunday School of the village was

visited by strangers, some of those "strange people" who live

outside a child's realm, yet constantly thrill it by their close

approach. My father taught the large Bible class in the lefthand

corner of the church next to the pulpit, and to my eyes at least,

was a most imposing figure in his Sunday frock coat, his fine

head rising high above all the others. I imagined that the

strangers were filled with admiration for this dignified person,

and I prayed with all my heart that the ugly, pigeon-toed little

girl, whose crooked back obliged her to walk with her head held

very much upon one side, would never be pointed out to these

visitors as the daughter of this fine man. In order to lessen

the possibility of a connection being made, on these particular

Sundays I did not walk beside my father, although this walk was

the great event of the week, but attached myself firmly to the

side of my Uncle James Addams, in the hope that I should be

mistaken for his child, or at least that I should not remain so

conspicuously unattached that troublesome questions might

identify an Ugly Duckling with her imposing parent. My uncle,

who had many children of his own, must have been mildly surprised

at this unwonted attention, but he would look down kindly at me,

and say, "So you are going to walk with me to-day?" "Yes,

please, Uncle James," would be my meek reply. He fortunately

never explored my motives, nor do I remember that my father ever

did, so that in all probability my machinations have been safe

from public knowledge until this hour.

It is hard to account for the manifestations of a child's adoring

affection, so emotional, so irrational, so tangled with the

affairs of the imagination. I simply could not endure the

thought that "strange people" should know that my handsome father

owned this homely little girl. But even in my chivalric desire

to protect him from his fate, I was not quite easy in the

sacrifice of my uncle, although I quieted my scruples with the

reflection that the contrast was less marked and that, anyway,

his own little girl "was not so very pretty." I do not know that

I commonly dwelt much upon my personal appearance, save as it

thrust itself as an incongruity into my father's life, and in

spite of unending evidence to the contrary, there were even black

moments when I allowed myself to speculate as to whether he might

not share the feeling. Happily, however, this specter was laid

before it had time to grow into a morbid familiar by a very

trifling incident. One day I met my father coming out of his

bank on the main street of the neighboring city which seemed to

me a veritable whirlpool of society and commerce. With a playful

touch of exaggeration, he lifted his high and shining silk hat

and made me an imposing bow. This distinguished public

recognition, this totally unnecessary identification among a mass

of "strange people" who couldn't possibly know unless he himself

made the sign, suddenly filled me with a sense of the absurdity

of the entire feeling. It may not even then have seemed as

absurd as it really was, but at least it seemed enough so to

collapse or to pass into the limbo of forgotten specters.

I made still other almost equally grotesque attempts to express

this doglike affection. The house at the end of the village in

which I was born, and which was my home until I moved to

Hull-House, in my earliest childhood had opposite to it--only

across the road and then across a little stretch of

greensward--two mills belonging to my father; one flour mill, to

which the various grains were brought by the neighboring farmers,

and one sawmill, in which the logs of the native timber were

sawed into lumber. The latter offered the great excitement of

sitting on a log while it slowly approached the buzzing saw which

was cutting it into slabs, and of getting off just in time to

escape a sudden and gory death. But the flouring mill was much

more beloved. It was full of dusky, floury places which we

adored, of empty bins in which we might play house; it had a

basement, with piles of bran and shorts which were almost as good

as sand to play in, whenever the miller let us wet the edges of

the pile with water brought in his sprinkling pot from the

mill-race.

In addition to these fascinations was the association of the mill

with my father's activities, for doubtless at that time I

centered upon him all that careful imitation which a little girl

ordinarily gives to her mother's ways and habits. My mother had

died when I was a baby and my father's second marriage did not

occur until my eighth year.

I had a consuming ambition to posses a miller's thumb, and would

sit contentedly for a long time rubbing between my thumb and

fingers the ground wheat as it fell from between the millstones,

before it was taken up on an endless chain of mysterious little

buckets to be bolted into flour. I believe I have never since

wanted anything more desperately than I wanted my right thumb to

be flattened, as my father's had become, during his earlier years

of a miller's life. Somewhat discouraged by the slow process of

structural modification, I also took measures to secure on the

backs of my hands the tiny purple and red spots which are always

found on the hands of the miller who dresses millstones. The

marks on my father's hands had grown faint, but were quite

visible when looked for, and seemed to me so desirable that they

must be procured at all costs. Even when playing in our house or

yard, I could always tell when the millstones were being dressed,

because the rumbling of the mill then stopped, and there were few

pleasures I would not instantly forego, rushing at once to the

mill, that I might spread out my hands near the mill-stones in

the hope that the little hard flints flying form the miller's

chisel would light upon their backs and make the longed-for

marks. I used hotly to accuse the German miller, my dear friend

Ferdinand, "of trying not to hit my hands," but he scornfully

replied that he could not hit them if he did try, and that they

were too little to be of use in a mill anyway. Although I hated

his teasing, I never had the courage to confess my real purpose.

This sincere tribute of imitation, which affection offers to its

adored object, had later, I hope, subtler manifestations, but

certainly these first ones were altogether genuine. In this

case, too, I doubtless contributed my share to that stream of

admiration which our generation so generously poured forth for

the self-made man. I was consumed by a wistful desire to

apprehend the hardships of my father's earlier life in that

faraway time when he had been a miller's apprentice. I knew that

he still woke up punctually at three o'clock because for so many

years he had taken his turn at the mill in the early morning, and

if by chance I awoke at the same hour, as curiously enough I

often did, I imagined him in the early dawn in my uncle's old

mill reading through the entire village library, book after book,

beginning with the lives of the signers of the Declaration of

Independence. Copies of the same books, mostly bound in

calfskin, were to be found in the library below, and I

courageously resolved that I too would read them all and try to

understand life as he did. I did in fact later begin a course of

reading in the early morning hours, but I was caught by some

fantastic notion of chronological order and early legendary form.

Pope's translation of the "Iliad," even followed by Dryden's

"Virgil," did not leave behind the residuum of wisdom for which I

longed, and I finally gave them up for a thick book entitled "The

History of the World" as affording a shorter and an easier path.

Although I constantly confided my sins and perplexities to my

father, there are only a few occasions on which I remember having

received direct advice or admonition; it may easily be true,

however, that I have forgotten the latter, in the manner of many

seekers after advice who enjoyably set forth their situation but

do not really listen to the advice itself. I can remember an

admonition on one occasion, however, when, as a little girl of

eight years, arrayed in a new cloak, gorgeous beyond anything I

had ever worn before, I stood before my father for his approval.

I was much chagrined by his remark that it was a very pretty

cloak--in fact so much prettier than any cloak the other little

girls in the Sunday School had, that he would advise me to wear

my old cloak, which would keep me quite as warm, with the added

advantage of not making the other little girls feel badly. I

complied with the request but I fear without inner consent, and I

certainly was quite without the joy of self-sacrifice as I walked

soberly through the village street by the side of my counselor.

My mind was busy, however, with the old question eternally

suggested by the inequalities of the human lot. Only as we

neared the church door did I venture to ask what could be done

about it, receiving the reply that it might never be righted so

far as clothes went, but that people might be equal in things

that mattered much more than clothes, the affairs of education

and religion, for instance, which we attended to when we went to

school and church, and that it was very stupid to wear the sort

of clothes that made it harder to have equality even there.

It must have been a little later when I held a conversation with

my father upon the doctrine of foreordination, which at one time

very much perplexed my childish mind. After setting the

difficulty before him and complaining that I could not make it

out, although my best friend "understood it perfectly," I settled

down to hear his argument, having no doubt that he could make it

quite clear. To my delighted surprise, for any intimation that

our minds were on an equality lifted me high indeed, he said that

he feared that he and I did not have the kind of mind that would

ever understand fore-ordination very well and advised me not to

give too much time to it; but he then proceeded to say other

things of which the final impression left upon my mind was, that

it did not matter much whether one understood foreordination or

not, but that it was very important not to pretend to understand

what you didn't understand and that you must always be honest

with yourself inside, whatever happened. Perhaps on the whole as

valuable a lesson as the shorter catechism itself contains.

My memory merges this early conversation on religious doctrine

into one which took place years later when I put before my father

the situation in which I found myself at boarding school when

under great evangelical pressure, and once again I heard his

testimony in favor of "mental integrity above everything else."

At the time we were driving through a piece of timber in which

the wood choppers had been at work during the winter, and so

earnestly were we talking that he suddenly drew up the horses to

find that he did not know where he was. We were both entertained

by the incident, I that my father had been "lost in his own

timber" so that various cords of wood must have escaped his

practiced eye, and he on his side that he should have become so

absorbed in this maze of youthful speculation. We were in high

spirits as we emerged from the tender green of the spring woods

into the clear light of day, and as we came back into the main

road I categorically asked him:-

"What are you? What do you say when people ask you?"

His eyes twinkled a little as he soberly replied:

"I am a Quaker."

"But that isn't enough to say," I urged.

"Very well," he added, "to people who insist upon details, as some

one is doing now, I add that I am a Hicksite Quaker"; and not

another word on the weighty subject could I induce him to utter.

These early recollections are set in a scene of rural beauty,

unusual at least for Illinois. The prairie around the village

was broken into hills, one of them crowned by pine woods, grown

up from a bag full of Norway pine seeds sown by my father in

1844, the very year he came to Illinois, a testimony perhaps that

the most vigorous pioneers gave at least an occasional thought to

beauty. The banks of the mill stream rose into high bluffs too

perpendicular to be climbed without skill, and containing caves

of which one at least was so black that it could not be explored

without the aid of a candle; and there was a deserted limekiln

which became associated in my mind with the unpardonable sin of

Hawthorne's "Lime-Burner." My stepbrother and I carried on games

and crusades which lasted week after week, and even summer after

summer, as only free-ranging country children can do. It may be

in contrast to this that one of the most piteous aspects in the

life of city children, as I have seen it in the neighborhood of

Hull-House, is the constant interruption to their play which is

inevitable on the streets, so that it can never have any

continuity--the most elaborate "plan or chart" or "fragment from

their dream of human life" is sure to be rudely destroyed by the

passing traffic. Although they start over and over again, even

the most vivacious become worn out at last and take to that

passive "standing 'round" varied by rude horseplay, which in time

becomes so characteristic of city children.

We had of course our favorite places and trees and birds and

flowers. It is hard to reproduce the companionship which

children establish with nature, but certainly it is much too

unconscious and intimate to come under the head of aesthetic

appreciation or anything of the sort. When we said that the

purple wind-flowers--the anemone patens--"looked as if the winds

had made them," we thought much more of the fact that they were

wind-born than that they were beautiful: we clapped our hands in

sudden joy over the soft radiance of the rainbow, but its

enchantment lay in our half belief that a pot of gold was to be

found at its farther end; we yielded to a soft melancholy when we

heard the whippoorwill in the early twilight, but while he

aroused in us vague longings of which we spoke solemnly, we felt

no beauty in his call.

We erected an altar beside the stream, to which for several years

we brought all the snakes we killed during our excursions, no

matter how long the toil--some journey which we had to make with

a limp snake dangling between two sticks. I remember rather

vaguely the ceremonial performed upon this altar one autumn day,

when we brought as further tribute one out of every hundred of

the black walnuts which we had gathered, and then poured over the

whole a pitcher full of cider, fresh from the cider mill on the

barn floor. I think we had also burned a favorite book or two

upon this pyre of stones. The entire affair carried on with such

solemnity was probably the result of one of those imperative

impulses under whose compulsion children seek a ceremonial which

shall express their sense of identification with man's primitive

life and their familiar kinship with the remotest past.

Long before we had begun the study of Latin at the village

school, my brother and I had learned the Lord's Prayer in Latin

out of an old copy of the Vulgate, and gravely repeated it every

night in an execrable pronunciation because it seemed to us more

religious than "plain English."

When, however, I really prayed, what I saw before my eyes was a

most outrageous picture which adorned a song-book used in Sunday

School, portraying the Lord upon his throne, surrounded by tiers

and tiers of saints and angels all in a blur of yellow. I am

ashamed to tell how old I was when that picture ceased to appear

before my eyes, especially when moments of terror compelled me to

ask protection from the heavenly powers.

I recall with great distinctness my first direct contact with

death when I was fifteen years old: Polly was an old nurse who

had taken care of my mother and had followed her to frontier

Illinois to help rear a second generation of children. She had

always lived in our house, but made annual visits to her cousins

on a farm a few miles north of the village. During one of those

visits, word came to us one Sunday evening that Polly was dying,

and for a number of reasons I was the only person able to go to

her. I left the lamp-lit, warm house to be driven four miles

through a blinding storm which every minute added more snow to

the already high drifts, with a sense of starting upon a fateful

errand. An hour after my arrival all of the cousin's family went

downstairs to supper, and I was left alone to watch with Polly.

The square, old-fashioned chamber in the lonely farmhouse was

very cold and still, with nothing to be heard but the storm

outside. Suddenly the great change came. I heard a feeble call

of "Sarah," my mother's name, as the dying eyes were turned upon

me, followed by a curious breathing and in place of the face

familiar from my earliest childhood and associated with homely

household cares, there lay upon the pillow strange, august

features, stern and withdrawn from all the small affairs of life.

That sense of solitude, of being unsheltered in a wide world of

relentless and elemental forces which is at the basis of

childhood's timidity and which is far from outgrown at fifteen,

seized me irresistibly before I could reach the narrow stairs and

summon the family from below.

As I was driven home in the winter storm, the wind through the

trees seemed laden with a passing soul and the riddle of life and

death pressed hard; once to be young, to grow old and to die,

everything came to that, and then a mysterious journey out into

the Unknown. Did she mind faring forth alone? Would the journey

perhaps end in something as familiar and natural to the aged and

dying as life is to the young and living? Through all the drive

and indeed throughout the night these thoughts were pierced by

sharp worry, a sense of faithlessness because I had forgotten the

text Polly had confided to me long before as the one from which

she wished her funeral sermon to be preached. My comfort as

usual finally came from my father, who pointed out what was

essential and what was of little avail even in such a moment as

this, and while he was much too wise to grow dogmatic upon the

great theme of death, I felt a new fellowship with him because we

had discussed it together.

Perhaps I may record here my protest against the efforts, so

often made, to shield children and young people from all that has

to do with death and sorrow, to give them a good time at all

hazards on the assumption that the ills of life will come soon

enough. Young people themselves often resent this attitude on

the part of their elders; they feel set aside and belittled as if

they were denied the common human experiences. They too wish to

climb steep stairs and to eat their bread with tears, and they

imagine that the problems of existence which so press upon them

in pensive moments would be less insoluble in the light of these

great happenings.

An incident which stands out clearly in my mind as an exciting

suggestion of the great world of moral enterprise and serious

undertakings must have occurred earlier than this, for in 1872,

when I was not yet twelve years old, I came into my father's room

one morning to find him sitting beside the fire with a newspaper in

his hand, looking very solemn; and upon my eager inquiry what had

happened, he told me that Joseph Mazzini was dead. I had never

even heard Mazzini's name, and after being told about him I was

inclined to grow argumentative, asserting that my father did not

know him, that he was not an American, and that I could not

understand why we should be expected to feel badly about him. It

is impossible to recall the conversation with the complete

breakdown of my cheap arguments, but in the end I obtained that

which I have ever regarded as a valuable possession, a sense of the

genuine relationship which may exist between men who share large

hopes and like desires, even though they differ in nationality,

language, and creed; that those things count for absolutely nothing

between groups of men who are trying to abolish slavery in America

or to throw off Hapsburg oppression in Italy. At any rate, I was

heartily ashamed of my meager notion of patriotism, and I came out

of the room exhilarated with the consciousness that impersonal and

international relations are actual facts and not mere phrases. I

was filled with pride that I knew a man who held converse with

great minds and who really sorrowed and rejoiced over happenings

across the sea. I never recall those early conversations with my

father, nor a score of others like them, but there comes into my

mind a line from Mrs. Browning in which a daughter describes her

relations with her father:--

"He wrapt me in his large

Man's doublet, careless did it fit or no."

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer David Cheezem.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter II: Influence of Lincoln." by Jane Addams (1860-1935)

From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by

Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 23-43.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

CHAPTER II

INFLUENCE OF LINCOLN

I suppose all the children who were born about the time of the

Civil War have recollections quite unlike those of the children

who are living now. Although I was but four and a half years old

when Lincoln died, I distinctly remember the day when I found on

our two white gateposts American flags companioned with black. I

tumbled down on the harsh gravel walk in my eager rush into the

house to inquire what they were "there for." To my amazement I

found my father in tears, something that I had never seen before,

having assumed, as all children do, that grown-up people never

cried. The two flags, my father's tears, and his impressive

statement that the greatest man in the world had died, constituted

my initiation, my baptism, as it were, into the thrilling and

solemn interests of a world lying quite outside the two white

gateposts. The great war touched children in many ways: I

remember an engraved roster of names, headed by the words "Addams'

Guard," and the whole surmounted by the insignia of the American

eagle clutching many flags, which always hung in the family

living-room. As children we used to read this list of names again

and again. We could reach it only by dint of putting the family

Bible on a chair and piling the dictionary on top of it; using the

Bible to stand on was always accompanied by a little thrill of

superstitious awe, although we carefully put the dictionary above

that our profane feet might touch it alone. Having brought the

roster within reach of our eager fingers,--fortunately it was

glazed,--we would pick out the names of those who "had fallen on

the field" from those who "had come back from the war," and from

among the latter those whose children were our schoolmates. When

drives were planned, we would say, "Let us take this road," that

we might pass the farm where a soldier had once lived; if flowers

from the garden were to be given away, we would want them to go to

the mother of one of those heroes whose names we knew from the

"Addams' Guard." If a guest should become interested in the roster

on the wall, he was at once led by the eager children to a small

picture of Colonel Davis which hung next the opposite window, that

he might see the brave Colonel of the Regiment. The introduction

to the picture of the one-armed man seemed to us a very solemn

ceremony, and long after the guest was tired of listening, we

would tell each other all about the local hero, who at the head of

his troops had suffered wounds unto death. We liked very much to

talk to a gentle old lady who lived in a white farmhouse a mile

north of the village. She was the mother of the village hero,

Tommy, and used to tell us of her long anxiety during the spring

of '62; how she waited day after day for the hospital to surrender

up her son, each morning airing the white homespun sheets and

holding the little bedroom in immaculate readiness. It was after

the battle of Fort Donelson that Tommy was wounded and had been

taken to the hospital at Springfield; his father went down to him

and saw him getting worse each week, until it was clear that he

was going to die; but there was so much red tape about the

department, and affairs were so confused, that his discharge could

not be procured. At last the hospital surgeon intimated to his

father that he should quietly take him away; a man as sick as

that, it would be all right; but when they told Tommy, weak as he

was, his eyes flashed, and he said, "No, sir; I will go out of the

front door or I'll die here." Of course after that every man in

the hospital worked for it, and in two weeks he was honorably

discharged. When he came home at last, his mother's heart was

broken to see him so wan and changed. She would tell us of the

long quiet days that followed his return, with the windows open so

that the dying eyes might look over the orchard slope to the

meadow beyond where the younger brothers were mowing the early

hay. She told us of those days when his school friends from the

Academy flocked in to see him, their old acknowledged leader, and

of the burning words of earnest patriotism spoken in the crowded

little room, so that in three months the Academy was almost

deserted and the new Company who marched away in the autumn took

as drummer boy Tommy's third brother, who was only seventeen and

too young for a regular. She remembered the still darker days

that followed, when the bright drummer boy was in Andersonville

prison, and little by little she learned to be reconciled that

Tommy was safe in the peaceful home graveyard.

However much we were given to talk of war heroes, we always fell

silent as we approached an isolated farmhouse in which two old

people lived alone. Five of their sons had enlisted in the Civil

War, and only the youngest had returned alive in the spring of

1865. In the autumn of the same year, when he was hunting for

wild ducks in a swamp on the rough little farm itself, he was

accidently shot and killed, and the old people were left alone to

struggle with the half-cleared land as best they might. When we

were driven past this forlorn little farm our childish voices

always dropped into speculative whisperings as to how the

accident could have happened to this remaining son out of all the

men in the world, to him who had escaped so many chances of

death! Our young hearts swelled in first rebellion against that

which Walter Pater calls "the inexplicable shortcoming or

misadventure on the part of life itself"; we were overwhelmingly

oppressed by that grief of things as they are, so much more

mysterious and intolerable than those griefs which we think dimly

to trace to man's own wrongdoing.

It was well perhaps that life thus early gave me a hint of one of

her most obstinate and insoluble riddles, for I have sorely

needed the sense of universality thus imparted to that mysterious

injustice, the burden of which we are all forced to bear and with

which I have become only too familiar.

My childish admiration for Lincoln is closely associated with a

visit made to the war eagle, Old Abe, who, as we children well

knew, lived in the state capital of Wisconsin, only sixty-five

miles north of our house, really no farther than an eagle could

easily fly! He had been carried by the Eighth Wisconsin Regiment

through the entire war, and now dwelt an honored pensioner in the

state building itself.

Many times, standing in the north end of our orchard, which was

only twelve miles from that mysterious line which divided

Illinois from Wisconsin, we anxiously scanned the deep sky,

hoping to see Old Abe fly southward right over our apple trees,

for it was clearly possible that he might at any moment escape

from his keeper, who, although he had been a soldier and a

sentinel, would have to sleep sometimes. We gazed with thrilled

interest at one speck after another in the flawless sky, but

although Old Abe never came to see us, a much more incredible

thing happened, for we were at last taken to see him.

We started one golden summer's day, two happy children in the

family carriage, with my father and mother and an older sister to

whom, because she was just home from boarding school, we

confidently appealed whenever we needed information. We were

driven northward hour after hour, past harvest fields in which

the stubble glinted from bronze to gold and the heavy-headed

grain rested luxuriously in rounded shocks, until we reached that

beautiful region of hills and lakes which surrounds the capital

city of Wisconsin.

But although Old Abe, sitting sedately upon his high perch, was

sufficiently like an uplifted ensign to remind us of a Roman

eagle, and although his veteran keeper, clad in an old army coat,

was ready to answer all our questions and to tell us of the

thirty-six battles and skirmishes which Old Abe had passed

unscathed, the crowning moment of the impressive journey came to

me later, illustrating once more that children are as quick to

catch the meaning of a symbol as they are unaccountably slow to

understand the real world about them.

The entire journey to the veteran war eagle had itself symbolized

that search for the heroic and perfect which so persistently

haunts the young; and as I stood under the great white dome of

Old Abe's stately home, for one brief moment the search was

rewarded. I dimly caught a hint of what men have tried to say in

their world-old effort to imprison a space in so divine a line

that it shall hold only yearning devotion and high-hearted hopes.

Certainly the utmost rim of my first dome was filled with the

tumultuous impression of soldiers marching to death for freedom's

sake, of pioneers streaming westward to establish self-government

in yet another sovereign state. Only the great dome of St.

Peter's itself has ever clutched my heart as did that modest

curve which had sequestered from infinitude in a place small

enough for my child's mind, the courage and endurance which I

could not comprehend so long as it was lost in "the void of

unresponsible space" under the vaulting sky itself. But through

all my vivid sensations there persisted the image of the eagle in

the corridor below and Lincoln himself as an epitome of all that

was great and good. I dimly caught the notion of the martyred

President as the standard bearer to the conscience of his

countrymen, as the eagle had been the ensign of courage to the

soldiers of the Wisconsin regiment.

Thirty-five years later, as I stood on the hill campus of the

University of Wisconsin with a commanding view of the capitol

building a mile directly across the city, I saw again the dome

which had so uplifted my childish spirit. The University, which

was celebrating it's fiftieth anniversary, had honored me with a

doctor's degree, and in the midst of the academic pomp and the

rejoicing, the dome again appeared to me as a fitting symbol of the

state's aspiration even in its high mission of universal education.

Thousands of children in the sixties and seventies, in the

simplicity which is given to the understanding of a child, caught a

notion of imperishable heroism when they were told that brave men

had lost their lives that the slaves might be free. At any moment

the conversation of our elders might turn upon these heroic events;

there were red-letter days, when a certain general came to see my

father, and again when Governor Oglesby, whom all Illinois children

called "Uncle Dick," spent a Sunday under the pine trees in our

front yard. We felt on those days a connection with the great

world so much more heroic than the village world which surrounded

us through all the other days. My father was a member of the state

senate for the sixteen years between 1854 and 1870, and even as a

little child I was dimly conscious of the grave march of public

affairs in his comings and goings at the state capital.

He was much too occupied to allow time for reminiscence, but I

remember overhearing a conversation between a visitor and himself

concerning the stirring days before the war, when it was by no

means certain that the Union men in the legislature would always

have enough votes to keep Illinois from seceding. I heard with

breathless interest my father's account of the trip a majority of

the legislators had made one dark day to St. Louis, that there

might not be enough men for a quorum, and so no vote could be

taken on the momentous question until the Union men could rally

their forces.

My father always spoke of the martyred President as Mr. Lincoln,

and I never heard the great name without a thrill. I remember

the day--it must have been one of comparative leisure, perhaps a

Sunday--when at my request my father took out of his desk a thin

packet marked "Mr. Lincoln's Letters," the shortest one of which

bore unmistakable traces of that remarkable personality. These

letters began, "My dear Double-D'ed Addams," and to the inquiry

as to how the person thus addressed was about to vote on a

certain measure then before the legislature, was added the

assurance that he knew that this Addams "would vote according to

his conscience," but he begged to know in which direction the

same conscience "was pointing." As my father folded up the bits

of paper I fairly held my breath in my desire that he should go

on with the reminiscence of this wonderful man, whom he had known

in his comparative obscurity, or better still, that he should be

moved to tell some of the exciting incidents of the

Lincoln-Douglas debates. There were at least two pictures of

Lincoln that always hung in my father's room, and one in our

old-fashioned upstairs parlor, of Lincoln with little Tad. For

one or all of these reasons I always tend to associate Lincoln

with the tenderest thoughts of my father.

I recall a time of great perplexity in the summer of 1894, when

Chicago was filled with federal troops sent there by the

President of the United States, and their presence was resented

by the governor of the state, that I walked the wearisome way

from Hull-House to Lincoln Park--for no cars were running

regularly at that moment of sympathetic strikes--in order to look

at and gain magnanimous counsel, if I might, from the marvelous

St. Gaudens statue which had been but recently been placed at the

entrance of the park. Some of Lincoln's immortal words were cut

into the stone at his feet, and never did a distracted town more

sorely need the healing of "with charity towards all" than did

Chicago at that moment, and the tolerance of the man who had won

charity for those on both sides of "an irrepressible conflict."

Of the many things written of my father in that sad August in

1881, when he died, the one I cared for most was written by an old

political friend of his who was then editor of a great Chicago

daily. He wrote that while there were doubtless many members of

the Illinois legislature who during the great contracts of the war

time and the demoralizing reconstruction days that followed, had

never accepted a bribe, he wished to bear testimony that he

personally had known but this one man who had never been offered a

bribe because bad men were instinctively afraid of him.

I feel now the hot chagrin with which I recalled this statement

during those early efforts of Illinois in which Hull- House

joined, to secure the passage of the first factory legislation. I

was told by the representatives of an informal association of

manufacturers that if the residents of Hull-House would drop this

nonsense about a sweatshop bill, of which they knew nothing,

certain business men would agree to give fifty thousand dollars

within two years to be used for any of the philanthropic

activities of the Settlement. As the fact broke upon me that I

was being offered a bribe, the shame was enormously increased by

the memory of this statement. What had befallen the daughter of

my father that such a thing could happen to her? The salutary

reflection that it could not have occurred unless a weakness in

myself had permitted it, withheld me at least from an historic

display of indignation before the two men making the offer, and I

explained as gently as I could that we had no ambition to make

Hull-House "the largest institution on the West Side," but that we

were much concerned that our neighbors should be protected from

untoward conditions of work, and--so much heroics, youth must

permit itself--if to accomplish this the destruction of Hull-House

was necessary, that we would cheerfully sing a Te Deum on its

ruins. The good friend who had invited me to lunch at the Union

League Club to meet two of his friends who wanted to talk over the

sweat shop bill here kindly intervened, and we all hastened to

cover the awkward situation by that scurrying away from ugly

morality which seems to be an obligation of social intercourse.

Of the many old friends of my father who kindly came to look up

his daughter in the first days of Hull-House, I recall none with

more pleasure than Lyman Trumbull, whom we used to point out to

members of the Young Citizen's Club as the man who had for days

held in his keeping the Proclamation of Emancipation until his

friend President Lincoln was ready to issue it. I remember the

talk he gave at Hull-House on one of our early celebrations of

Lincoln's birthday, his assertion that Lincoln was no cheap

popular hero, that the "common people" would have to make an

effort if they would understand his greatness, as Lincoln

painstakingly made a long effort to understand the greatness of

the people. There was something in the admiration of Lincoln's

contemporaries, or at least of those men who had known him

personally, which was quite unlike even the best of the devotion

and reverent understanding which has developed since. In the

first place, they had so large a fund of common experience; they

too had pioneered in a western country, and had urged the

development of canals and railroads in order that the raw prairie

crops might be transported to market; they too had realized that

if this last tremendous experiment in self-government failed here,

it would be the disappointment of the centuries and that upon

their ability to organize self-government in state, county, and

town depended the verdict of history. These men also knew, as

Lincoln himself did, that if this tremendous experiment was to

come to fruition, it must be brought about by the people

themselves; that there was no other capital fund upon which to

draw. I remember an incident occurring when I was about fifteen

years old, in which the conviction was driven into my mind that

the people themselves were the great resource of the country. My

father had made a little address of reminiscence at a meeting of

"the old settlers of Stephenson County," which was held every

summer in the grove beside the mill, relating his experiences in

inducing the farmers of the county to subscribe for stock in the

Northwestern Railroad, which was the first to penetrate the county

and make a connection with the Great Lakes at Chicago. Many of the

Pennsylvania German farmers doubted the value of "the whole

new-fangled business," and had no use for any railroad, much less

for one in which they were asked to risk their hard-earned

savings. My father told of his despair in one farmers' community

dominated by such prejudice which did not in the least give way

under his argument, but finally melted under the enthusiasm of a

high-spirited German matron who took a share to be paid for "out

of butter and egg money." As he related his admiration of her, an

old woman's piping voice in the audience called out: "I'm here

to-day, Mr. Addams, and I'd do it again if you asked me." The old

woman, bent and broken by her seventy years of toilsome life, was

brought to the platform and I was much impressed by my father's

grave presentation of her as "one of the public-spirited pioneers

to whose heroic fortitude we are indebted for the development of

this country." I remember that I was at that time reading with

great enthusiasm Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero Worship," but on the

evening of "Old Settlers' Day," to my surprise, I found it

difficult to go on. Its sonorous sentences and exaltation of the

man who "can" suddenly ceased to be convincing. I had already

written down in my commonplace book a resolution to give at least

twenty-five copies of this book each year to noble young people of

my acquaintance. It is perhaps fitting in this chapter that the

very first Christmas we spent at Hull-House, in spite of exigent

demands upon my slender purse for candy and shoes, I gave to a

club of boys twenty-five copies of the then new Carl Schurz's

"Appreciation of Abraham Lincoln."

In our early effort at Hull-House to hand on to our neighbors

whatever of help we had found for ourselves, we made much of

Lincoln. We were often distressed by the children of immigrant

parents who were ashamed of the pit whence they were digged, who

repudiated the language and customs of their elders, and counted

themselves successful as they were able to ignore the past.

Whenever I held up Lincoln for their admiration as the greatest

American, I invariably pointed out his marvelous power to retain

and utilize past experiences; that he never forgot how the plain

people in Sangamon County thought and felt when he himself had

moved to town; that this habit was the foundation for his

marvelous capacity for growth; that during those distracting

years in Washington it enabled him to make clear beyond denial to

the American people themselves, the goal towards which they were

moving. I was sometimes bold enough to add that proficiency in

the art of recognition and comprehension did not come without

effort, and that certainly its attainment was necessary for any

successful career in our conglomerate America.

An instance of the invigorating and clarifying power of Lincoln's

influence came to me many years ago in England. I had spent two

days in Oxford under the guidance of Arnold Toynbee's old friend

Sidney Ball of St. John's College, who was closely associated

with the group of scholars we all identify with the beginnings of

the Settlement movement. It was easy to claim the philosophy of

Thomas Hill Green, the road-building episode of Ruskin, the

experimental living in the east end by Frederick Maurice, the

London Workingman's College of Edward Dennison, as foundations

laid by university men for the establishment of Toynbee Hall. I

was naturally much interested in the beginnings of the movement

whose slogan was "Back to the People," and which could doubtless

claim the Settlement as one of its manifestations. Nevertheless

the processes by which so simple a conclusion as residence among

the poor in East London was reached, seemed to me very involved

and roundabout. However inevitable these processes might be for

class-conscious Englishmen, they could not but seem artificial to

a western American who had been born in a rural community where

the early pioneer life had made social distinctions impossible.

Always on the alert lest American Settlements should become mere

echoes and imitations of the English movement, I found myself

assenting to what was shown me only with that part of my

consciousness which had been formed by reading of English social

movements, while at the same time the rustic American looked on

in detached comment.

Why should an American be lost in admiration of a group of Oxford

students because they went out to mend a disused road, inspired

thereto by Ruskin's teaching for the bettering of the common

life, when all the country roads in America were mended each

spring by self-respecting citizens, who were thus carrying out

the simple method devised by a democratic government for

providing highways. No humor penetrated my high mood even as I

somewhat uneasily recalled certain spring thaws when I had been

mired in roads provided by the American citizen. I continued to

fumble for a synthesis which I was unable to make until I

developed that uncomfortable sense of playing two roles at once.

It was therefore almost with a dual consciousness that I was

ushered, during the last afternoon of my Oxford stay, into the

drawingroom of the Master of Balliol. Edward Caird's "Evolution

of Religion," which I had read but a year or two before, had been

of unspeakable comfort to me in the labyrinth of differing

ethical teachings and religious creeds which the many immigrant

colonies of our neighborhood presented. I remember that I wanted

very much to ask the author himself how far it was reasonable to

expect the same quality of virtue and a similar standard of

conduct from these divers people. I was timidly trying to apply

his method of study to those groups of homesick immigrants

huddled together in strange tenement houses, among whom I seemed

to detect the beginnings of a secular religion or at least of a

wide humanitarianism evolved out of the various exigencies of the

situation; somewhat as a household of children, whose mother is

dead, out of their sudden necessity perform unaccustomed offices

for each other and awkwardly exchange consolations, as children

in happier households never dream of doing. Perhaps Mr. Caird

could tell me whether there was any religious content in this

Faith to each other; this fidelity

Of fellow wanderers in a desert place.

But when tea was over and my opportunity came for a talk with my

host, I suddenly remembered, to the exclusion of all other

associations, only Mr. Caird's fine analysis of Abraham Lincoln,

delivered in a lecture two years before.

The memory of Lincoln, the mention of his name, came like a

refreshing breeze from off the prairie, blowing aside all the

scholarly implications in which I had become so reluctantly

involved, and as the philosopher spoke of the great American "who

was content merely to dig the channels through which the moral life

of his countrymen might flow," I was gradually able to make a

natural connection between this intellectual penetration at Oxford

and the moral perception which is always necessary for the

discovery of new methods by which to minister to human needs. In

the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all

dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment somewhat

of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life.

Gradually a healing sense of well-being enveloped me and a quick

remorse for my blindness, as I realized that no one among his own

countrymen had been able to interpret Lincoln's greatness more

nobly than this Oxford scholar had done, and that vision and

wisdom as well as high motives must lie behind every effective

stroke in the continuous labor for human equality; I remembered

that another Master of Balliol, Jowett himself, had said that it

was fortunate for society that every age possessed at least a few

minds, which, like Arnold Toynbee's, were "perpetually disturbed

over the apparent inequalities of mankind." Certainly both the

English and American settlements could unite in confessing to

that disturbance of mind.

Traces of this Oxford visit are curiously reflected in a paper I

wrote soon after my return at the request of the American Academy

of Political and Social Science. It begins as follows:--

The word "settlement," which we have borrowed from London,

is apt to grate a little upon American ears. It is not,

after all, so long ago that Americans who settled were

those who had adventured into a new country, where they

were pioneers in the midst of difficult surroundings. The

word still implies migrating from one condition of life to

another totally unlike it, and against this implication

the resident of an American settlement takes alarm.

We do not like to acknowledge that Americans are divided

into two nations, as her prime minister once admitted of

England. We are not willing, openly and professedly, to

assume that American citizens are broken up into classes,

even if we make that assumption the preface to a plea that

the superior class has duties to the inferior. Our

democracy is still our most precious possession, and we do

well to resent any inroads upon it, even though they may

be made in the name of philanthropy.

Is it not Abraham Lincoln who has cleared the title to our

democracy? He made plain, once for all, that democratic

government, associated as it is with all the mistakes and

shortcomings of the common people, still remains the most valuable

contribution America has made to the moral life of the world.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer Diana Camden.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter III: Boarding-School Ideals." by Jane Addams (1860-1935)

From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by

Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp.

43-64.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

CHAPTER III

BOARDING-SCHOOL IDEALS

As my three older sisters had already attended the seminary at

Rockford, of which my father was trustee, without any question I

entered there at seventeen, with such meager preparation in Latin

and algebra as the village school had afforded. I was very

ambitious to go to Smith College, although I well knew that my

father's theory in regard to the education of his daughters

implied a school as near at home as possible, to be followed by

travel abroad in lieu of the wider advantages which the eastern

college is supposed to afford. I was much impressed by the

recent return of my sister from a year in Europe, yet I was

greatly disappointed at the moment of starting to humdrum

Rockford. After the first weeks of homesickness were over,

however, I became very much absorbed in the little world which

the boarding school in any form always offers to its students.

The school at Rockford in 1877 had not changed its name from

seminary to college, although it numbered, on its faculty and

among its alumnae, college women who were most eager that this

should be done, and who really accomplished it during the next

five years. The school was one of the earliest efforts for

women's higher education in the Mississippi Valley, and from the

beginning was called "The Mount Holyoke of the West."

It reflected much of the missionary spirit of that pioneer

institution, and the proportion of missionaries among its early

graduates was almost as large as Mount Holyoke's own. In

addition there had been thrown about the founders of the early

western school the glamour of frontier privations, and the first

students, conscious of the heroic self-sacrifice made in their

behalf, felt that each minute of the time thus dearly bought must

be conscientiously used. This inevitably fostered an atmosphere

of intensity, a fever of preparation which continued long after

the direct making of it had ceased, and which the later girls

accepted, as they did the campus and the buildings, without

knowing that it could have been otherwise.

There was, moreover, always present in the school a larger or

smaller group of girls who consciously accepted this heritage and

persistently endeavored to fulfill its obligation. We worked in

those early years as if we really believed the portentous

statement from Aristotle which we found quoted in Boswell's

Johnson and with which we illuminated the wall of the room

occupied by our Chess Club; it remained there for months, solely

out of reverence, let us hope, for the two ponderous names

associated with it; at least I have enough confidence in human

nature to assert that we never really believed that "There is the

same difference between the learned and the unlearned as there is

between the living and the dead." We were also too fond of quoting

Carlyle to the effect, "'Tis not to taste sweet things, but to do

noble and true things that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs."

As I attempt to reconstruct the spirit of my contemporary group

by looking over many documents, I find nothing more amusing than

a plaint registered against life's indistinctness, which I

imagine more or less reflected the sentiments of all of us. At

any rate here it is for the entertainment of the reader if not

for his edification: "So much of our time is spent in

preparation, so much in routine, and so much in sleep, we find it

difficult to have any experience at all." We did not, however,

tamely accept such a state of affairs, for we made various and

restless attempts to break through this dull obtuseness.

At one time five of us tried to understand De Quincey's marvelous

"Dreams" more sympathetically, by drugging ourselves with opium.

We solemnly consumed small white powders at intervals during an

entire long holiday, but no mental reorientation took place, and

the suspense and excitement did not even permit us to grow

sleepy. About four o'clock on the weird afternoon, the young

teacher whom we had been obliged to take into our confidence,

grew alarmed over the whole performance, took away our De Quincey

and all the remaining powders, administrated an emetic to each of

the five aspirants for sympathetic understanding of all human

experience, and sent us to our separate rooms with a stern

command to appear at family worship after supper "whether we were

able to or not."

Whenever we had a chance to write, we took, of course, large

themes, usually from the Greek because they were the most

stirring to the imagination. The Greek oration I gave at our

Junior Exhibition was written with infinite pains and taken to

the Greek professor in Beloit College that there might be no

mistakes, even after the Rockford College teacher and the most

scholarly clergyman in town had both passed upon it. The oration

upon Bellerophon and his successful fight with the Chimera

contended that social evils could only be overcome by him who

soared above them into idealism, as Bellerophon mounted upon the

winged horse Pegasus, had slain the earthy dragon.

There were practically no Economics taught in women's colleges--at

least in the fresh-water ones--thirty years ago, although we

painstakingly studied "Mental" and "Moral" Philosophy, which,

though far from dry in the classroom, became the subject of more

spirited discussion outside, and gave us a clew for animated

rummaging in the little college library. Of course we read a

great deal of Ruskin and Browning, and liked the most abstruse

parts the best; but like the famous gentleman who talked prose

without knowing it, we never dreamed of connecting them with our

philosophy. My genuine interest was history, partly because of a

superior teacher, and partly because my father had always insisted

upon a certain amount of historic reading ever since he had paid

me, as a little girl, five cents a "Life" for each Plutarch hero I

could intelligently report to him and twenty-five cents for every

volume of Irving's "Life of Washington."

When we started for the long vacations, a little group of five

would vow that during the summer we would read all of Motley's

"Dutch Republic" or, more ambitious still, all of Gibbon's

"Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." When we returned at the

opening of school and three of us announced we had finished the

latter, each became skeptical of the other two. We fell upon

each other in a sort of rough-and-tumble examination, in which no

quarter was given or received; but the suspicion was finally

removed that anyone had skipped. We took for a class motto the

early Saxon word for lady, translated into breadgiver, and we

took for our class color the poppy, because poppies grow among

the wheat, as if Nature knew that wherever there was hunger that

needed food there would be pain that needed relief. We must have

found the sentiment in a book somewhere, but we used it so much

it finally seemed like an idea of our own, although of course

none of us had ever seen a European field, the only page upon

which Nature has written this particular message.

That this group of ardent girls, who discussed everything under

the sun with unabated interest, did not take it all out in talk

may be demonstrated by the fact that one of the class who married

a missionary founded a very successful school in Japan for the

children of the English and Americans living there; another of

the class became a medical missionary to Korea, and because of

her successful treatment of the Queen, was made court physician

at a time when the opening was considered of importance in the

diplomatic as well as in the missionary world; still another

became an unusually skilled teacher of the blind; and one of them

a pioneer librarian in that early effort to bring "books to the

people."

Perhaps this early companionship showed me how essentially

similar are the various forms of social effort, and curiously

enough, the actual activities of a missionary school are not

unlike many that are carried on in a Settlement situated in a

foreign quarter. Certainly the most sympathetic and

comprehending visitors we have ever had at Hull-House have been

returned missionaries; among them two elderly ladies, who had

lived for years in India and who had been homesick and bewildered

since their return, declared that the fortnight at Hull-House had

been the happiest and most familiar they had had in America.

Of course in such an atmosphere a girl like myself, of serious

not to say priggish tendency, did not escape a concerted pressure

to push her into the "missionary field." During the four years it

was inevitable that every sort of evangelical appeal should have

been made to reach the comparatively few "unconverted" girls in

the school. We were the subject of prayer at the daily chapel

exercise and the weekly prayer meeting, attendance upon which was

obligatory.

I was singularly unresponsive to all these forms of emotional

appeal, although I became unspeakably embarrassed when they were

presented to me at close range by a teacher during the "silent

hour," which we were all required to observe every evening, and

which was never broken into, even by a member of the faculty,

unless the errand was one of grave import. I found these

occasional interviews on the part of one of the more serious

young teachers, of whom I was extremely fond, hard to endure, as

was a long series of conversations in my senior year conducted by

one of the most enthusiastic members of the faculty, in which the

desirability of Turkey as a field for missionary labor was

enticingly put before me. I suppose I held myself aloof from all

these influences, partly owing to the fact that my father was not

a communicant of any church, and I tremendously admired his

scrupulous morality and sense of honor in all matters of personal

and public conduct, and also because the little group to which I

have referred was much given to a sort of rationalism, doubtless

founded upon an early reading of Emerson. In this connection,

when Bronson Alcott came to lecture at the school, we all vied

with each other for a chance to do him a personal service because

he had been a friend of Emerson, and we were inexpressibly

scornful of our younger fellow-students who cared for him merely

on the basis of his grandfatherly relation to "Little Women." I

recall cleaning the clay of the unpaved streets off his heavy

cloth overshoes in a state of ecstatic energy.

But I think in my case there were other factors as well that

contributed to my unresponsiveness to the evangelical appeal. A

curious course of reading I had marked out for myself in medieval

history, seems to have left me fascinated by an ideal of mingled

learning, piety and physical labor, more nearly exemplified by

the Port Royalists than by any others.

The only moments in which I seem to have approximated in my own

experience to a faint realization of the "beauty of holiness," as

I conceived it, was each Sunday morning between the hours of nine

and ten, when I went into the exquisitely neat room of the

teacher of Greek and read with her from a Greek testament. We

did this every Sunday morning for two years. It was not exactly

a lesson, for I never prepared for it, and while I was held

within reasonable bounds of syntax, I was allowed much more

freedom in translation than was permitted the next morning when I

read Homer; neither did we discuss doctrines, for although it was

with this same teacher that in our junior year we studied Paul's

Epistle to the Hebrews, committing all of it to memory and

analyzing and reducing it to doctrines within an inch of our

lives, we never allowed an echo of this exercise to appear at

these blessed Sunday morning readings. It was as if the

disputations of Paul had not yet been, for we always read from

the Gospels. The regime of Rockford Seminary was still very

simple in the 70's. Each student made her own fire and kept her

own room in order. Sunday morning was a great clearing up day,

and the sense of having made immaculate my own immediate

surroundings, the consciousness of clean linen, said to be close

to the consciousness of a clean conscience, always mingles in my

mind with these early readings. I certainly bore away with me a

lifelong enthusiasm for reading the Gospels in bulk, a whole one

at a time, and an insurmountable distaste for having them cut up

into chapter and verse, or for hearing the incidents in that

wonderful Life thus referred to as if it were merely a record.

My copy of the Greek testament had been presented to me by the

brother of our Greek teacher, Professor Blaisdell of Beloit

College, a true scholar in "Christian Ethics," as his department

was called. I recall that one day in the summer after I left

college--one of the black days which followed the death of my

father--this kindly scholar came to see me in order to bring such

comfort as he might and to inquire how far I had found solace in

the little book he had given me so long before. When I suddenly

recall the village in which I was born, its steeples and roofs

look as they did that day from the hilltop where we talked

together, the familiar details smoothed out and merging, as it

were, into that wide conception of the universe, which for the

moment swallowed up my personal grief or at least assuaged it with

a realization that it was but a drop in that "torrent of sorrow

and aguish and terror which flows under all the footsteps of man."

This realization of sorrow as the common lot, of death as the

universal experience, was the first comfort which my bruised

spirit had received. In reply to my impatience with the Christian

doctrine of "resignation," that it implied that you thought of

your sorrow only in its effect upon you and were disloyal to the

affection itself, I remember how quietly the Christian scholar

changed his phraseology, saying that sometimes consolation came to

us better in the words of Plato, and, as nearly as I can remember,

that was the first time I had ever heard Plato's sonorous argument

for the permanence of the excellent.

When Professor Blaisdell returned to his college, he left in my

hands a small copy of "The Crito." The Greek was too hard for me,

and I was speedily driven to Jowett's translation. That

old-fashioned habit of presenting favorite books to eager young

people, although it degenerated into the absurdity of

"friendship's offerings," had much to be said for it, when it

indicated the wellsprings of literature from which the donor

himself had drawn waters of healing and inspiration.

Throughout our school years, we were always keenly conscious of

the growing development of Rockford Seminary into a college. The

opportunity for our Alma Mater to take her place in the new

movement of full college education for women filled us with

enthusiasm, and it became a driving ambition with the

undergraduates to share in this new and glorious undertaking. We

gravely decided that it was important that some of the students

should be ready to receive the bachelor's degree the very first

moment that the charter of the school should secure the right to

confer it. Two of us, therefore, took a course in mathematics,

advanced beyond anything previously given in the school, from one

of those early young women working for a Ph.D., who was

temporarily teaching in Rockford that she might study more

mathematics in Leipsic.

My companion in all these arduous labors has since accomplished

more than any of us in the effort to procure the franchise for

women, for even then we all took for granted the righteousness of

that cause into which I at least had merely followed my father's

conviction. In the old-fashioned spirit of that cause I might

cite the career of this companion as an illustration of the

efficacy of higher mathematics for women, for she possesses

singular ability to convince even the densest legislators of their

legal right to define their own electorate, even when they quote

against her the dustiest of state constitutions or city charters.

In line with this policy of placing a woman's college on an

equality with the other colleges of the state, we applied for an

opportunity to compete in the intercollegiate oratorical contest

of Illinois, and we succeeded in having Rockford admitted as the

first woman's college. When I was finally selected as the

orator, I was somewhat dismayed to find that, representing not

only one school but college women in general, I could not resent

the brutal frankness with which my oratorical possibilities were

discussed by the enthusiastic group who would allow no personal

feeling to stand in the way of progress, especially the progress

of Woman's Cause. I was told among other things that I had an

intolerable habit of dropping my voice at the end of a sentence

in the most feminine, apologetic and even deprecatory manner

which would probably lose Woman the first place.

Woman certainly did lose the first place and stood fifth, exactly

in the dreary middle, but the ignominious position may not have

been solely due to bad mannerisms, for a prior place was easily

accorded to William Jennings Bryan, who not only thrilled his

auditors with an almost prophetic anticipation of the cross of

gold, but with a moral earnestness which we had mistakenly

assumed would be the unique possession of the feminine orator.

I so heartily concurred with the decision of the judges of the

contest that it was with a care-free mind that I induced my

colleague and alternate to remain long enough in "The Athens of

Illinois," in which the successful college was situated, to visit

the state institutions, one for the Blind and one for the Deaf and

Dumb. Dr Gillette was at that time head of the latter

institution; his scholarly explanation of the method of teaching,

his concern for his charges, this sudden demonstration of the care

the state bestowed upon its most unfortunate children, filled me

with grave speculations in which the first, the fifth, or the

ninth place in the oratorical contest seemed of little moment.

However, this brief delay between our field of Waterloo and our

arrival at our aspiring college turned out to be most

unfortunate, for we found the ardent group not only exhausted by

the premature preparations for the return of a successful orator,

but naturally much irritated as they contemplated their garlands

drooping disconsolately in tubs and bowls of water. They did not

fail to make me realize that I had dealt the cause of woman's

advancement a staggering blow, and all my explanations of the

fifth place were haughtily considered insufficient before that

golden Bar of Youth, so absurdly inflexible!

To return to my last year of school, it was inevitable that the

pressure toward religious profession should increase as

graduating day approached. So curious, however, are the paths of

moral development that several times during subsequent

experiences have I felt that this passive resistance of mine,

this clinging to an individual conviction, was the best moral

training I received at Rockford College. During the first decade

of Hull-House, it was felt by propagandists of diverse social

theories that the new Settlement would be a fine coign of vantage

from which to propagate social faiths, and that a mere

preliminary step would be the conversion of the founders; hence I

have been reasoned with hours at a time, and I recall at least

three occasions when this was followed by actual prayer. In the

first instance, the honest exhorter who fell upon his knees

before my astonished eyes, was an advocate of single tax upon

land values. He begged, in that phraseology which is deemed

appropriate for prayer, that "the sister might see the beneficent

results it would bring to the poor who live in the awful

congested districts around this very house."

The early socialists used every method of attack,--a favorite one

being the statement, doubtless sometimes honestly made, that I

really was a socialist, but "too much of a coward to say so." I

remember one socialist who habitually opened a very telling

address he was in the habit of giving upon the street corners, by

holding me up as an awful example to his fellow socialists, as

one of their number "who had been caught in the toils of

capitalism." He always added as a final clinching of the

statement that he knew what he was talking about because he was a

member of the Hull-House Men's Club. When I ventured to say to

him that not all of the thousands of people who belong to a class

or club at Hull-House could possibly know my personal opinions,

and to mildly inquire upon what he founded his assertions, he

triumphantly replied that I had once admitted to him that I had

read Sombart and Loria, and that anyone of sound mind must see

the inevitable conclusions of such master reasonings.

I could multiply these two instances a hundredfold, and possibly

nothing aided me to stand on my own feet and to select what

seemed reasonable from this wilderness of dogma, so much as my

early encounter with genuine zeal and affectionate solicitude,

associated with what I could not accept as the whole truth.

I do not wish to take callow writing too seriously, but I reproduce

from an oratorical contest the following bit of premature

pragmatism, doubtless due much more to temperament than to

perception, because I am still ready to subscribe to it, although

the grandiloquent style is, I hope, a thing of the past: "Those who

believe that Justice is but a poetical longing within us, the

enthusiast who thinks it will come in the form of a millennium,

those who see it established by the strong arm of a hero, are not

those who have comprehended the vast truths of life. The actual

Justice must come by trained intelligence, by broadened sympathies

toward the individual man or woman who crosses our path; one item

added to another is the only method by which to build up a

conception lofty enough to be of use in the world."

This schoolgirl recipe has been tested in many later experiences,

the most dramatic of which came when I was called upon by a

manufacturing company to act as one of three arbitrators in a

perplexing struggle between themselves, a group of

trade-unionists and a non-union employee of their establishment.

The non-union man who was the cause of the difficulty had ten

years before sided with his employers in a prolonged strike and

had bitterly fought the union. He had been so badly injured at

that time, that in spite of long months of hospital care he had

never afterward been able to do a full day's work, although his

employers had retained him for a decade at full pay in

recognition of his loyalty. At the end of ten years the once

defeated union was strong enough to enforce its demands for a

union shop and in spite of the distaste of the firm for the

arrangement, no obstacle to harmonious relations with the union

remained but for the refusal of the trade-unionists to receive as

one of their members the old crippled employee, whose spirit was

broken as last and who was now willing to join the union and to

stand with his old enemies for the sake of retaining his place.

But the union men would not receive "a traitor," the firm flatly

refused to dismiss so faithful an employee, the busy season was

upon them, and everyone concerned had finally agreed to abide

without appeal by the decision of the arbitrators. The chairman

of our little arbitration committee, a venerable judge, quickly

demonstrated that it was impossible to collect trustworthy

evidence in regards to the events already ten years old which lay

at the bottom of this bitterness, and we soon therefore ceased to

interview the conflicting witnesses; the second member of the

committee sternly bade the men remember that the most ancient

Hebraic authority gave no sanction for holding even a just

resentment for more than seven years, and at last we all settled

down to that wearisome effort to secure the inner consent of all

concerned, upon which alone the "mystery of justice" as

Maeterlinck has told us, ultimately depends. I am not quite sure

that in the end we administered justice, but certainly employers,

trade-unionists, and arbitrators were all convinced that justice

will have to be established in industrial affairs with the same

care and patience which has been necessary for centuries in order

to institute it in men's civic relationships, although as the

judge remarked the search must be conducted without much help

from precedent. The conviction remained with me, that however

long a time might be required to establish justice in the new

relationships of our raw industrialism, it would never be stable

until it had received the sanction of those upon whom the present

situation presses so harshly.

Towards the end of our four years' course we debated much as to

what we were to be, and long before the end of my school days it

was quite settled in my mind that I should study medicine and

"live with the poor." This conclusion of course was the result of

many things, perhaps epitomized in my graduating essay on

"Cassandra" and her tragic fate "always to be in the right, and

always to be disbelieved and rejected."

This state of affairs, it may readily be guessed, the essay held

to be an example of the feminine trait of mind called intuition,

"an accurate perception of Truth and Justice, which rests

contented in itself and will make no effort to confirm itself or

to organize through existing knowledge." The essay then

proceeds--I am forced to admit, with overmuch conviction--with

the statement that women can only "grow accurate and intelligible

by the thorough study of at least one branch of physical science,

for only with eyes thus accustomed to the search for truth can

she detect all self-deceit and fancy in herself and learn to

express herself without dogmatism." So much for the first part of

the thesis. Having thus "gained accuracy, would woman bring this

force to bear throughout morals and justice, then she must find

in active labor the promptings and inspirations that come from

growing insight." I was quite certain that by following these

directions carefully, in the end the contemporary woman would

find "her faculties clear and acute from the study of science,

and her hand upon the magnetic chain of humanity."

This veneration for science portrayed in my final essay was

doubtless the result of the statements the textbooks were then

making of what was called the theory of evolution, the acceptance

of which even thirty years after the publication of Darwin's

"Origin of Species" had about it a touch of intellectual

adventure. We knew, for instance, that our science teacher had

accepted this theory, but we had a strong suspicion that the

teacher of Butler's "Analogy" had not. We chafed at the

meagerness of the college library in this direction, and I used

to bring back in my handbag books belonging to an advanced

brother-in-law who had studied medicine in Germany and who

therefore was quite emancipated. The first gift I made when I

came into possession of my small estate the year after I left

school, was a thousand dollars to the library of Rockford

College, with the stipulation that it be spent for scientific

books. In the long vacations I pressed plants, stuffed birds and

pounded rocks in some vague belief that I was approximating the

new method, and yet when my stepbrother who was becoming a real

scientist, tried to carry me along with him to the merest outskirts

of the methods of research, it at once became evident that I had

no aptitude and was unable to follow intelligently Darwin's

careful observations on the earthworm. I made a heroic effort,

although candor compels me to state that I never would have

finished if I had not been pulled and pushed by my really ardent

companion, who in addition to a multitude of earthworms and a fine

microscope, possessed untiring tact with one of flagging zeal.

As our boarding-school days neared the end, in the consciousness

of approaching separation we vowed eternal allegiance to our

"early ideals," and promised each other we would "never abandon

them without conscious justification," and we often warned each

other of "the perils of self-tradition."

We believed, in our sublime self-conceit, that the difficulty of

life would lie solely in the direction of losing these precious

ideals of ours, of failing to follow the way of martyrdom and

high purpose we had marked out for ourselves, and we had no

notion of the obscure paths of tolerance, just allowance, and

self-blame wherein, if we held our minds open, we might learn

something of the mystery and complexity of life's purposes.

The year after I had left college I came back, with a classmate,

to receive the degree we had so eagerly anticipated. Two of the

graduating class were also ready and four of us were dubbed B.A.

on the very day that Rockford Seminary was declared a college in

the midst of tumultuous anticipations. Having had a year outside

of college walls in that trying land between vague hope and

definite attainment, I had become very much sobered in my desire

for a degree, and was already beginning to emerge from that

rose-colored mist with which the dream of youth so readily

envelops the future.

Whatever may have been the perils of self-tradition, I certainly

did not escape them, for it required eight years--from the time I

left Rockford in the summer of 1881 until Hull-House was opened

in the the autumn of 1889--to formulate my convictions even in

the least satisfactory manner, much less to reduce them to a plan

for action. During most of that time I was absolutely at sea so

far as any moral purpose was concerned, clinging only to the

desire to live in a really living world and refusing to be content

with a shadowy intellectual or aesthetic reflection of it.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer Diana Camden.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter IV: The Snare of Preparation." by Jane Addams

(1860-1935) From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with

Autobiographical Notes. by Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan

Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 65-88.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

CHAPTER IV

THE SNARE OF PREPARATION

The winter after I left school was spent in the Woman's Medical

College of Philadelphia, but the development of the spinal

difficulty which had shadowed me from childhood forced me into Dr.

Weir Mitchell's hospital for the late spring, and the next winter I

was literally bound to a bed in my sister's house for six months.

In spite of its tedium, the long winter had its mitigations, for

after the first few weeks I was able to read with a luxurious

consciousness of leisure, and I remember opening the first volume

of Carlyle's "Frederick the Great" with a lively sense of gratitude

that it was not Gray's "Anatomy," having found, like many another,

that general culture is a much easier undertaking than professional

study. The long illness inevitably put aside the immediate

prosecution of a medical course, and although I had passed my

examinations creditably enough in the required subjects for the

first year, I was very glad to have a physician's sanction for

giving up clinics and dissecting rooms and to follow his

prescription of spending the next two years in Europe.

Before I returned to America I had discovered that there were

other genuine reasons for living among the poor than that of

practicing medicine upon them, and my brief foray into the

profession was never resumed.

The long illness left me in a state of nervous exhaustion with

which I struggled for years, traces of it remaining long after

Hull-House was opened in 1889. At the best it allowed me but a

limited amount of energy, so that doubtless there was much

nervous depression at the foundation of the spiritual struggles

which this chapter is forced to record. However, it could not

have been all due to my health, for as my wise little notebook

sententiously remarked, "In his own way each man must struggle,

lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated

from his active life."

It would, of course, be impossible to remember that some of these

struggles ever took place at all, were it not for these selfsame

notebooks, in which, however, I no longer wrote in moments of

high resolve, but judging from the internal evidence afforded by

the books themselves, only in moments of deep depression when

overwhelmed by a sense of failure.

One of the most poignant of these experiences, which occurred

during the first few months after our landing upon the other side

of the Atlantic, was on a Saturday night, when I received an

ineradicable impression of the wretchedness of East London, and

also saw for the first time the overcrowded quarters of a great

city at midnight. A small party of tourists were taken to the

East End by a city missionary to witness the Saturday night sale

of decaying vegetables and fruit, which, owing to the Sunday laws

in London, could not be sold until Monday, and, as they were

beyond safe keeping, were disposed of at auction as late as

possible on Saturday night. On Mile End Road, from the top of an

omnibus which paused at the end of a dingy street lighted by only

occasional flares of gas, we saw two huge masses of ill-clad

people clamoring around two hucksters' carts. They were bidding

their farthings and ha'pennies for a vegetable held up by the

auctioneer, which he at last scornfully flung, with a gibe for

its cheapness, to the successful bidder. In the momentary pause

only one man detached himself from the groups. He had bidden in

a cabbage, and when it struck his hand, he instantly sat down on

the curb, tore it with his teeth, and hastily devoured it,

unwashed and uncooked as it was. He and his fellows were types

of the "submerged tenth," as our missionary guide told us, with

some little satisfaction in the then new phrase, and he further

added that so many of them could scarcely be seen in one spot

save at this Saturday night auction, the desire for cheap food

being apparently the one thing which could move them

simultaneously. They were huddled into ill-fitting, cast-off

clothing, the ragged finery which one sees only in East London.

Their pale faces were dominated by that most unlovely of human

expressions, the cunning and shrewdness of the bargain-hunter who

starves if he cannot make a successful trade, and yet the final

impression was not of ragged, tawdry clothing nor of pinched and

sallow faces, but of myriads of hands, empty, pathetic, nerveless

and workworn, showing white in the uncertain light of the street,

and clutching forward for food which was already unfit to eat.

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human

hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from

savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward. I

have never since been able to see a number of hands held upward,

even when they are moving rhythmically in a calisthenic exercise,

or when they belong to a class of chubby children who wave them

in eager response to a teacher's query, without a certain revival

of this memory, a clutching at the heart reminiscent of the

despair and resentment which seized me then.

For the following weeks I went about London almost furtively,

afraid to look down narrow streets and alleys lest they disclose

again this hideous human need and suffering. I carried with me

for days at a time that curious surprise we experience when we

first come back into the streets after days given over to sorrow

and death; we are bewildered that the world should be going on as

usual and unable to determine which is real, the inner pang or the

outward seeming. In time all huge London came to seem unreal save

the poverty in its East End. During the following two years on

the continent, while I was irresistibly drawn to the poorer

quarters of each city, nothing among the beggars of South Italy

nor among the salt miners of Austria carried with it the same

conviction of human wretchedness which was conveyed by this

momentary glimpse of an East London street. It was, of course, a

most fragmentary and lurid view of the poverty of East London, and

quite unfair. I should have been shown either less or more, for I

went away with no notion of the hundreds of men and women who had

gallantly identified their fortunes with these empty-handed

people, and who, in church and chapel, "relief works," and

charities, were at least making an effort towards its mitigation.

Our visit was made in November, 1883, the very year when the Pall

Mall Gazette exposure started "The Bitter Cry of Outcast London,"

and the conscience of England was stirred as never before over

this joyless city in the East End of its capital. Even then,

vigorous and drastic plans were being discussed, and a splendid

program of municipal reforms was already dimly outlined. Of all

these, however, I had heard nothing but the vaguest rumor.

No comfort came to me then from any source, and the painful

impression was increased because at the very moment of looking

down the East London street from the top of the omnibus, I had

been sharply and painfully reminded of "The Vision of Sudden

Death" which had confronted De Quincey one summer's night as he

was being driven through rural England on a high mail coach. Two

absorbed lovers suddenly appear between the narrow, blossoming

hedgerows in the direct path of the huge vehicle which is sure to

crush them to their death. De Quincey tries to send them a

warning shout, but finds himself unable to make a sound because

his mind is hopelessly entangled in an endeavor to recall the

exact lines from the Iliad which describe the great cry with

which Achilles alarmed all Asia militant. Only after his memory

responds is his will released from its momentary paralysis, and

he rides on through the fragrant night with the horror of the

escaped calamity thick upon him, but he also bears with him the

consciousness that he had given himself over so many years to

classic learning--that when suddenly called upon for a quick

decision in the world of life and death, he had been able to act

only through a literary suggestion.

This is what we were all doing, lumbering our minds with

literature that only served to cloud the really vital situation

spread before our eyes. It seemed to me too preposterous that in

my first view of the horror of East London I should have recalled

De Quincey's literary description of the literary suggestion

which had once paralyzed him. In my disgust it all appeared a

hateful, vicious circle which even the apostles of culture

themselves admitted, for had not one of the greatest among the

moderns plainly said that "conduct, and not culture is three

fourths of human life."

For two years in the midst of my distress over the poverty which,

thus suddenly driven into my consciousness, had become to me the

"Weltschmerz," there was mingled a sense of futility, of

misdirected energy, the belief that the pursuit of cultivation

would not in the end bring either solace or relief. I gradually

reached a conviction that the first generation of college women

had taken their learning too quickly, had departed too suddenly

from the active, emotional life led by their grandmothers and

great-grandmothers; that the contemporary education of young

women had developed too exclusively the power of acquiring

knowledge and of merely receiving impressions; that somewhere in

the process of 'being educated' they had lost that simple and

almost automatic response to the human appeal, that old healthful

reaction resulting in activity from the mere presence of

suffering or of helplessness; that they are so sheltered and

pampered they have no chance even to make "the great refusal."

In the German and French pensions, which twenty-five years ago

were crowded with American mothers and their daughters who had

crossed the seas in search of culture, one often found the mother

making real connection with the life about her, using her

inadequate German with great fluency, gaily measuring the

enormous sheets or exchanging recipes with the German Hausfrau,

visiting impartially the nearest kindergarten and market, making

an atmosphere of her own, hearty and genuine as far as it went,

in the house and on the street. On the other hand, her daughter

was critical and uncertain of her linguistic acquirements, and

only at ease when in the familiar receptive attitude afforded by

the art gallery and opera house. In the latter she was swayed

and moved, appreciative of the power and charm of the music,

intelligent as to the legend and poetry of the plot, finding use

for her trained and developed powers as she sat "being

cultivated" in the familiar atmosphere of the classroom which

had, as it were, become sublimated and romanticized.

I remember a happy busy mother who, complacent with the knowledge

that her daughter daily devoted four hours to her music, looked up

from her knitting to say, "If I had had your opportunities when I

was young, my dear, I should have been a very happy girl. I always

had musical talent, but such training as I had, foolish little

songs and waltzes and not time for half an hour's practice a day."

The mother did not dream of the sting her words left and that the

sensitive girl appreciated only too well that her opportunities

were fine and unusual, but she also knew that in spite of some

facility and much good teaching she had no genuine talent and

never would fulfill the expectations of her friends. She looked

back upon her mother's girlhood with positive envy because it was

so full of happy industry and extenuating obstacles, with

undisturbed opportunity to believe that her talents were unusual.

The girl looked wistfully at her mother, but had not the courage

to cry out what was in her heart: "I might believe I had unusual

talent if I did not know what good music was; I might enjoy half

an hour's practice a day if I were busy and happy the rest of the

time. You do not know what life means when all the difficulties

are removed! I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages.

It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning."

This, then, was the difficulty, this sweet dessert in the morning

and the assumption that the sheltered, educated girl has nothing

to do with the bitter poverty and the social maladjustment which

is all about her, and which, after all, cannot be concealed, for

it breaks through poetry and literature in a burning tide which

overwhelms her; it peers at her in the form of heavy-laden market

women and underpaid street laborers, gibing her with a sense of

her uselessness.

I recall one snowy morning in Saxe-Coburg, looking from the window

of our little hotel upon the town square, that we saw crossing and

recrossing it a single file of women with semicircular, heavy,

wooden tanks fastened upon their backs. They were carrying in this

primitive fashion to a remote cooling room these tanks filled with

a hot brew incident to one stage of beer making. The women were

bent forward, not only under the weight which they were bearing,

but because the tanks were so high that it would have been

impossible for them to have lifted their heads. Their faces and

hands, reddened in the cold morning air, showed clearly the white

scars where they had previously been scalded by the hot stuff which

splashed if they stumbled ever so little on their way. Stung into

action by one of those sudden indignations against cruel conditions

which at times fill the young with unexpected energy, I found

myself across the square, in company with mine host, interviewing

the phlegmatic owner of the brewery who received us with

exasperating indifference, or rather received me, for the innkeeper

mysteriously slunk away as soon as the great magnate of the town

began to speak. I went back to a breakfast for which I had lost my

appetite, as I had for Gray's "Life of Prince Albert" and his

wonderful tutor, Baron Stockmar, which I had been reading late the

night before. The book had lost its fascination; how could a good

man, feeling so keenly his obligation "to make princely the mind of

his prince," ignore such conditions of life for the multitude of

humble, hard-working folk. We were spending two months in Dresden

that winter, given over to much reading of "The History of Art" and

after such an experience I would invariably suffer a moral

revulsion against this feverish search after culture. It was

doubtless in such moods that I founded my admiration for Albrecht

Durer, taking his wonderful pictures, however, in the most

unorthodox manner, merely as human documents. I was chiefly

appealed to by his unwillingness to lend himself to a smooth and

cultivated view of life, by his determination to record its

frustrations and even the hideous forms which darken the day for

our human imagination and to ignore no human complications. I

believed that his canvases intimated the coming religious and

social changes of the Reformation and the peasants' wars, that they

were surcharged with pity for the downtrodden, that his sad

knights, gravely standing guard, were longing to avert that

shedding of blood which is sure to occur when men forget how

complicated life is and insist upon reducing it to logical dogmas.

The largest sum of money that I ever ventured to spend in Europe

was for an engraving of his "St. Hubert," the background of which

was said to be from an original Durer plate. There is little

doubt, I am afraid, that the background as well as the figures

"were put in at a later date," but the purchase at least

registered the high-water mark of my enthusiasm.

The wonder and beauty of Italy later brought healing and some

relief to the paralyzing sense of the futility of all artistic

and intellectual effort when disconnected from the ultimate test

of the conduct it inspired. The serene and soothing touch of

history also aroused old enthusiasms, although some of their

manifestations were such as one smiles over more easily in

retrospection than at the moment. I fancy that it was no smiling

matter to several people in our party, whom I induced to walk for

three miles in the hot sunshine beating down upon the Roman

Campagna, that we might enter the Eternal City on foot through

the Porta del Popolo, as pilgrims had done for centuries. To be

sure, we had really entered Rome the night before, but the

railroad station and the hotel might have been anywhere else, and

we had been driven beyond the walls after breakfast and stranded

at the very spot where the pilgrims always said "Ecco Roma," as

they caught the first glimpse of St. Peter's dome. This

melodramatic entrance into Rome, or rather pretended entrance,

was the prelude to days of enchantment, and I returned to Europe

two years later in order to spend a winter there and to carry out

a great desire to systematically study the Catacombs. In spite of

my distrust of "advantages" I was apparently not yet so cured but

that I wanted more of them.

The two years which elapsed before I again found myself in Europe

brought their inevitable changes. Family arrangements had so

come about that I had spent three or four months of each of the

intervening winters in Baltimore, where I seemed to have reached

the nadir of my nervous depression and sense of maladjustment, in

spite of my interest in the fascinating lectures given there by

Lanciani of Rome, and a definite course of reading under the

guidance of a Johns Hopkins lecturer upon the United Italy

movement. In the latter I naturally encountered the influence of

Mazzini, which was a source of great comfort to me, although

perhaps I went too suddenly from a contemplation of his wonderful

ethical and philosophical appeal to the workingmen of Italy,

directly to the lecture rooms at Johns Hopkins University, for I

was certainly much disillusioned at this time as to the effect of

intellectual pursuits upon moral development.

The summers were spent in the old home in northern Illinois, and

one Sunday morning I received the rite of baptism and became a

member of the Presbyterian church in the village. At this time

there was certainly no outside pressure pushing me towards such a

decision, and at twenty-five one does not ordinarily take such a

step from a mere desire to conform. While I was not conscious of

any emotional "conversion," I took upon myself the outward

expressions of the religious life with all humility and

sincerity. It was doubtless true that I was

"Weary of myself and sick of asking

What I am and what I ought to be,"

and that various cherished safeguards and claims to

self-dependence had been broken into by many piteous failures.

But certainly I had been brought to the conclusion that

"sincerely to give up one's conceit or hope of being good in

one's own right is the only door to the Universe's deeper

reaches." Perhaps the young clergyman recognized this as the test

of the Christian temper, at any rate he required little assent to

dogma or miracle, and assured me that while both the ministry and

the officers of his church were obliged to subscribe to doctrines

of well-known severity, the faith required to the laity was

almost early Christian in its simplicity. I was conscious of no

change from my childish acceptance of the teachings of the

Gospels, but at this moment something persuasive within made me

long for an outward symbol of fellowship, some bond of peace,

some blessed spot where unity of spirit might claim right of way

over all differences. There was also growing within me an almost

passionate devotion to the ideals of democracy, and when in all

history had these ideals been so thrillingly expressed as when

the faith of the fisherman and the slave had been boldly opposed

to the accepted moral belief that the well-being of a privileged

few might justly be built upon the ignorance and sacrifice of the

many? Who was I, with my dreams of universal fellowship, that I

did not identify myself with the institutional statement of this

belief, as it stood in the little village in which I was born,

and without which testimony in each remote hamlet of Christendom

it would be so easy for the world to slip back into the doctrines

of selection and aristocracy?

In one of the intervening summers between these European journeys

I visited a western state where I had formerly invested a sum of

money in mortgages. I was much horrified by the wretched

conditions among the farmers, which had resulted from a long

period of drought, and one forlorn picture was fairly burned into

my mind. A number of starved hogs--collateral for a promissory

note--were huddled into an open pen. Their backs were humped in a

curious, camel-like fashion, and they were devouring one of their

own number, the latest victim of absolute starvation or possibly

merely the one least able to defend himself against their

voracious hunger. The farmer's wife looked on indifferently, a

picture of despair as she stood in the door of the bare, crude

house, and the two children behind her, whom she vainly tried to

keep out of sight, continually thrust forward their faces almost

covered by masses of coarse, sunburned hair, and their little bare

feet so black, so hard, the great cracks so filled with dust that

they looked like flattened hoofs. The children could not be

compared to anything so joyous as satyrs, although they appeared

but half-human. It seemed to me quite impossible to receive

interest from mortgages placed upon farms which might at any

season be reduced to such conditions, and with great inconvenience

to my agent and doubtless with hardship to the farmers, as

speedily as possible I withdrew all my investment. But something

had to be done with the money, and in my reaction against unseen

horrors I bought a farm near my native village and also a flock of

innocent-looking sheep. My partner in the enterprise had not

chosen the shepherd's lot as a permanent occupation, but hoped to

speedily finish his college course upon half the proceeds of our

venture. This pastoral enterprise still seems to me to have been

essentially sound, both economically and morally, but perhaps one

partner depended too much upon the impeccability of her motives

and the other found himself too preoccupied with study to know

that it is not a real kindness to bed a sheepfold with straw, for

certainly the venture ended in a spectacle scarcely less harrowing

than the memory it was designed to obliterate. At least the sight

of two hundred sheep with four rotting hoofs each, was not

reassuring to one whose conscience craved economic peace. A

fortunate series of sales of mutton, wool, and farm enabled the

partners to end the enterprise without loss, and they passed on,

one to college and the other to Europe, if not wiser, certainly

sadder for the experience.

It was during this second journey to Europe that I attended a

meeting of the London match girls who were on strike and who met

daily under the leadership of well-known labor men of London. The

low wages that were reported at the meetings, the phossy jaw

which was described and occasionally exhibited, the appearance of

the girls themselves I did not, curiously enough, in any wise

connect with what was called the labor movement, nor did I

understand the efforts of the London trades-unionists, concerning

whom I held the vaguest notions. But of course this impression

of human misery was added to the others which were already making

me so wretched. I think that up to this time I was still filled

with the sense which Wells describes in one of his young

characters, that somewhere in Church or State are a body of

authoritative people who will put things to rights as soon as

they really know what is wrong. Such a young person persistently

believes that behind all suffering, behind sin and want, must lie

redeeming magnanimity. He may imagine the world to be tragic and

terrible, but it never for an instant occurs to him that it may

be contemptible or squalid or self-seeking. Apparently I looked

upon the efforts of the trades-unionists as I did upon those of

Frederic Harrison and the Positivists whom I heard the next

Sunday in Newton Hall, as a manifestation of "loyalty to

humanity" and an attempt to aid in its progress. I was

enormously interested in the Positivists during these European

years; I imagined that their philosophical conception of man's

religious development might include all expressions of that for

which so many ages of men have struggled and aspired. I vaguely

hoped for this universal comity when I stood in Stonehenge, on

the Acropolis in Athens, or in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.

But never did I so desire it as in the cathedrals of Winchester,

Notre Dame, Amiens. One winter's day I traveled from Munich to

Ulm because I imagined from what the art books said that the

cathedral hoarded a medieval statement of the Positivists' final

synthesis, prefiguring their conception of a "Supreme Humanity."

In this I was not altogether disappointed. The religious history

carved on the choir stalls at Ulm contained Greek philosophers as

well as Hebrew prophets, and among the disciples and saints stood

the discoverer of music and a builder of pagan temples. Even then

I was startled, forgetting for the moment the religious revolutions

of south Germany, to catch sight of a window showing Luther as

he affixed his thesis on the door at Wittenberg, the picture

shining clear in the midst of the older glass of saint and symbol.

My smug notebook states that all this was an admission that "the

saints but embodied fine action," and it proceeds at some length

to set forth my hope for a "cathedral of humanity," which should

be "capacious enough to house a fellowship of common purpose,"

and which should be "beautiful enough to persuade men to hold

fast to the vision of human solidarity." It is quite impossible

for me to reproduce this experience at Ulm unless I quote pages

more from the notebook in which I seem to have written half the

night, in a fever of composition cast in ill-digested phrases

from Comte. It doubtless reflected also something of the faith

of the Old Catholics, a charming group of whom I had recently met

in Stuttgart, and the same mood is easily traced in my early

hopes for the Settlement that it should unite in the fellowship

of the deed those of widely differing religious beliefs.

The beginning of 1887 found our little party of three in very

picturesque lodgings in Rome, and settled into a certain

student's routine. But my study of the Catacombs was brought to

an abrupt end in a fortnight by a severe attack of sciatic

rheumatism, which kept me in Rome with a trained nurse during

many weeks, and later sent me to the Riviera to lead an invalid's

life once more. Although my Catacomb lore thus remained

hopelessly superficial, it seemed to me a sufficient basis for a

course of six lectures which I timidly offered to a Deaconess's

Training School during my first winter in Chicago, upon the

simple ground that this early interpretation of Christianity is

the one which should be presented to the poor, urging that the

primitive church was composed of the poor and that it was they

who took the wonderful news to the more prosperous Romans. The

open-minded head of the school gladly accepted the lectures,

arranging that the course should be given each spring to her

graduating class of Home and Foreign Missionaries, and at the end

of the third year she invited me to become one of the trustees of

the school. I accepted and attended one meeting of the board,

but never another, because some of the older members objected to

my membership on the ground that "no religious instruction was

given at Hull-House." I remember my sympathy for the

embarrassment in which the head of the school was placed, but if

I needed comfort, a bit of it came to me on my way home from the

trustees' meeting when an Italian laborer paid my street-car

fare, according to the custom of our simpler neighbors. Upon my

inquiry of the conductor as to whom I was indebted for the little

courtesy, he replied roughly enough, "I cannot tell one dago from

another when they are in a gang, but sure, any one of them would

do it for you as quick as they would for the Sisters."

It is hard to tell just when the very simple plan which afterward

developed into the Settlement began to form itself in my mind. It

may have been even before I went to Europe for the second time,

but I gradually became convinced that it would be a good thing to

rent a house in a part of the city where many primitive and

actual needs are found, in which young women who had been given

over too exclusively to study might restore a balance of activity

along traditional lines and learn of life from life itself; where

they might try out some of the things they had been taught and

put truth to "the ultimate test of the conduct it dictates or

inspires." I do not remember to have mentioned this plan to

anyone until we reached Madrid in April, 1888.

We had been to see a bull fight rendered in the most magnificent

Spanish style, where greatly to my surprise and horror, I found

that I had seen, with comparative indifference, five bulls and

many more horses killed. The sense that this was the last

survival of all the glories of the amphitheater, the illusion

that the riders on the caparisoned horses might have been knights

of a tournament, or the matadore a slightly armed gladiator

facing his martyrdom, and all the rest of the obscure yet vivid

associations of an historic survival, had carried me beyond the

endurance of any of the rest of the party. I finally met them in

the foyer, stern and pale with disapproval of my brutal

endurance, and but partially recovered from the faintness and

disgust which the spectacle itself had produced upon them. I had

no defense to offer to their reproaches save that I had not

thought much about the bloodshed; but in the evening the natural

and inevitable reaction came, and in deep chagrin I felt myself

tried and condemned, not only by this disgusting experience but

by the entire moral situation which it revealed. It was suddenly

made quite clear to me that I was lulling my conscience by a

dreamer's scheme, that a mere paper reform had become a defense

for continued idleness, and that I was making it a raison d'etre

for going on indefinitely with study and travel. It is easy to

become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future

can never keep, and I had fallen into the meanest type of

self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in

preparation for great things to come. Nothing less than the

moral reaction following the experience at a bullfight had been

able to reveal to me that so far from following in the wake of a

chariot of philanthropic fire, I had been tied to the tail of the

veriest ox-cart of self-seeking.

I had made up my mind that next day, whatever happened, I would

begin to carry out the plan, if only by talking about it. I can

well recall the stumbling and uncertainty with which I finally

set it forth to Miss Starr, my old-time school friend, who was

one of our party. I even dared to hope that she might join in

carrying out the plan, but nevertheless I told it in the fear of

that disheartening experience which is so apt to afflict our most

cherished plans when they are at last divulged, when we suddenly

feel that there is nothing there to talk about, and as the golden

dream slips through our fingers we are left to wonder at our own

fatuous belief. But gradually the comfort of Miss Starr's

companionship, the vigor and enthusiasm which she brought to bear

upon it, told both in the growth of the plan and upon the sense

of its validity, so that by the time we had reached the

enchantment of the Alhambra, the scheme had become convincing and

tangible although still most hazy in detail.

A month later we parted in Paris, Miss Starr to go back to Italy,

and I to journey on to London to secure as many suggestions as

possible from those wonderful places of which we had heard,

Toynbee Hall and the People's Palace. So that it finally came

about that in June, 1888, five years after my first visit in East

London, I found myself at Toynbee Hall equipped not only with a

letter of introduction from Canon Fremantle, but with high

expectations and a certain belief that whatever perplexities and

discouragement concerning the life of the poor were in store for

me, I should at least know something at first hand and have the

solace of daily activity. I had confidence that although life

itself might contain many difficulties, the period of mere

passive receptivity had come to an end, and I had at last

finished with the ever-lasting "preparation for life," however

ill-prepared I might be.

It was not until years afterward that I came upon Tolstoy's phrase

"the snare of preparation," which he insists we spread before the

feet of young people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious

inactivity at the very period of life when they are longing to

construct the world anew and to conform it to their own ideals.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer Judi Oswalt.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter V: First Days at Hull-House." by Jane Addams (1860-1935)

From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by

Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp.

89-112.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

CHAPTER V

FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE

The next January found Miss Starr and myself in Chicago,

searching for a neighborhood in which we might put our plans into

execution. In our eagerness to win friends for the new

undertaking, we utilized every opportunity to set forth the

meaning of the Settlement as it had been embodied at Toynbee

Hall, although in those days we made no appeal for money, meaning

to start with our own slender resources. From the very first the

plan received courteous attention, and the discussion, while

often skeptical, was always friendly. Professor Swing wrote a

commendatory column in the Evening Journal, and our early

speeches were reported quite out of proportion to their worth. I

recall a spirited evening at the home of Mrs. Wilmarth, which was

attended by that renowned scholar, Thomas Davidson, and by a

young Englishman who was a member of the then new Fabian society

and to whom a peculiar glamour was attached because he had

scoured knives all summer in a camp of high-minded philosophers

in the Adirondacks. Our new little plan met with criticism, not

to say disapproval, from Mr. Davidson, who, as nearly as I can

remember, called it "one of those unnatural attempts to

understand life through cooperative living."

It was in vain we asserted that the collective living was not an

essential part of the plan, that we would always scrupulously pay

our own expenses, and that at any moment we might decide to

scatter through the neighborhood and to live in separate

tenements; he still contended that the fascination for most of

those volunteering residence would lie in the collective living

aspect of the Settlement. His contention was, of course,

essentially sound; there is a constant tendency for the residents

to "lose themselves in the cave of their own companionship," as

the Toynbee Hall phrase goes, but on the other hand, it is

doubtless true that the very companionship, the give and take of

colleagues, is what tends to keep the Settlement normal and in

touch with "the world of things as they are." I am happy to say

that we never resented this nor any other difference of opinion,

and that fifteen years later Professor Davidson handsomely

acknowledged that the advantages of a group far outweighed the

weaknesses he had early pointed out. He was at that later moment

sharing with a group of young men, on the East Side of New York,

his ripest conclusions in philosophy and was much touched by

their intelligent interest and absorbed devotion. I think that

time has also justified our early contention that the mere

foothold of a house, easily accessible, ample in space,

hospitable and tolerant in spirit, situated in the midst of the

large foreign colonies which so easily isolate themselves in

American cities, would be in itself a serviceable thing for

Chicago. I am not so sure that we succeeded in our endeavors "to

make social intercourse express the growing sense of the economic

unity of society and to add the social function to democracy".

But Hull-House was soberly opened on the theory that the

dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal; and that as

the social relation is essentially a reciprocal relation, it

gives a form of expression that has peculiar value.

In our search for a vicinity in which to settle we went about

with the officers of the compulsory education department, with

city missionaries, and with the newspaper reporters whom I recall

as a much older set of men than one ordinarily associates with

that profession, or perhaps I was only sent out with the older

ones on what they must all have considered a quixotic mission.

One Sunday afternoon in the late winter a reporter took me to

visit a so-called anarchist sunday school, several of which were

to be found on the northwest side of the city. The young man in

charge was of the German student type, and his face flushed with

enthusiasm as he led the children singing one of Koerner's poems.

The newspaperman, who did not understand German, asked me what

abominable stuff they were singing, but he seemed dissatisfied

with my translation of the simple words and darkly intimated that

they were "deep ones," and had probably "fooled" me. When I

replied that Koerner was an ardent German poet whose songs

inspired his countrymen to resist the aggressions of Napoleon,

and that his bound poems were found in the most respectable

libraries, he looked at me rather askance and I then and there

had my first intimation that to treat a Chicago man, who is

called an anarchist, as you would treat any other citizen, is to

lay yourself open to deep suspicion.

Another Sunday afternoon in the early spring, on the way to a

Bohemian mission in the carriage of one of its founders, we

passed a fine old house standing well back from the street,

surrounded on three sides by a broad piazza, which was supported

by wooden pillars of exceptionally pure Corinthian design and

proportion. I was so attracted by the house that I set forth to

visit it the very next day, but though I searched for it then and

for several days after, I could not find it, and at length I most

reluctantly gave up the search.

Three weeks later, with the advice of several of the oldest

residents of Chicago, including the ex-mayor of the city, Colonel

Mason, who had from the first been a warm friend to our plans, we

decided upon a location somewhere near the junction of Blue

Island Avenue, Halsted Street, and Harrison Street. I was

surprised and overjoyed on the very first day of our search for

quarters to come upon the hospitable old house, the quest for

which I had so recently abandoned. The house was of course

rented, the lower part of it used for offices and storerooms in

connection with a factory that stood back of it. However, after

some difficulties were overcome, it proved to be possible to

sublet the second floor and what had been a large drawing-room on

the first floor.

The house had passed through many changes since it had been built

in 1856 for the homestead of one of Chicago's pioneer citizens,

Mr. Charles J. Hull, and although battered by its vicissitudes,

was essentially sound. Before it had been occupied by the

factory, it had sheltered a second-hand furniture store, and at

one time the Little Sisters of the Poor had used it for a home

for the aged. It had a half-skeptical reputation for a haunted

attic, so far respected by the tenants living on the second floor

that they always kept a large pitcher full of water on the attic

stairs. Their explanation of this custom was so incoherent that

I was sure it was a survival of the belief that a ghost could not

cross running water, but perhaps that interpretation was only my

eagerness for finding folklore.

The fine old house responded kindly to repairs, its wide hall and

open fireplace always insuring it a gracious aspect. Its

generous owner, Miss Helen Culver, in the following spring gave

us a free leasehold of the entire house. Her kindness has

continued through the years until the group of thirteen

buildings, which at present comprises our equipment, is built

largely upon land which Miss Culver has put at the service of the

Settlement which bears Mr. Hull's name. In those days the house

stood between an undertaking establishment and a saloon. "Knight,

Death and the Devil," the three were called by a Chicago wit, and

yet any mock heroics which might be implied by comparing the

Settlement to a knight quickly dropped away under the genuine

kindness and hearty welcome extended to us by the families living

up and down the street.

We furnished the house as we would have furnished it were it in

another part of the city, with the photographs and other

impedimenta we had collected in Europe, and with a few bits of

family mahogany. While all the new furniture which was bought

was enduring in quality, we were careful to keep it in character

with the fine old residence. Probably no young matron ever placed

her own things in her own house with more pleasure than that with

which we first furnished Hull-House. We believed that the

Settlement may logically bring to its aid all those adjuncts

which the cultivated man regards as good and suggestive of the

best of the life of the past.

On the 18th of September, 1889, Miss Starr and I moved into it,

with Miss Mary Keyser, who began performing the housework, but who

quickly developed into a very important factor in the life of the

vicinity as well as that of the household, and whose death five

years later was most sincerely mourned by hundreds of our neighbors.

In our enthusiasm over "settling," the first night we forgot not

only to lock but to close a side door opening on Polk Street, and

we were much pleased in the morning to find that we possessed a

fine illustration of the honesty and kindliness of our new neighbors.

Our first guest was an interesting young woman who lived in a

neighboring tenement, whose widowed mother aided her in the

support of the family by scrubbing a downtown theater every

night. The mother, of English birth, was well bred and carefully

educated, but was in the midst of that bitter struggle which

awaits so many strangers in American cities who find that their

social position tends to be measured solely by the standards of

living they are able to maintain. Our guest has long since

married the struggling young lawyer to whom she was then engaged,

and he is now leading his profession in an eastern city. She

recalls that month's experience always with a sense of amusement

over the fact that the succession of visitors who came to see the

new Settlement invariably questioned her most minutely concerning

"these people" without once suspecting that they were talking to

one who had been identified with the neighborhood from childhood.

I at least was able to draw a lesson from the incident, and I

never addressed a Chicago audience on the subject of the

Settlement and its vicinity without inviting a neighbor to go

with me, that I might curb any hasty generalization by the

consciousness that I had an auditor who knew the conditions more

intimately than I could hope to do.

Halsted Street has grown so familiar during twenty years of

residence that it is difficult to recall its gradual changes,--the

withdrawal of the more prosperous Irish and Germans, and the slow

substitution of Russian Jews, Italians, and Greeks. A description

of the street such as I gave in those early addresses still stands

in my mind as sympathetic and correct.

Halsted Street is thirty-two miles long, and one of the

great thoroughfares of Chicago; Polk Street crosses it

midway between the stockyards to the south and the

shipbuilding yards on the north branch of the Chicago

River. For the six miles between these two industries the

street is lined with shops of butchers and grocers, with

dingy and gorgeous saloons, and pretentious establishments

for the sale of ready-made clothing. Polk Street, running

west from Halsted Street, grows rapidly more prosperous;

running a mile east to State Street, it grows steadily

worse, and crosses a network of vice on the corners of

Clark Street and Fifth Avenue. Hull-House once stood in

the suburbs, but the city has steadily grown up around it

and its site now has corners on three or four foreign

colonies. Between Halsted Street and the river live about

ten thousand Italians--Neapolitans, Sicilians, and

Calabrians, with an occasional Lombard or Venetian. To

the south on Twelfth Street are many Germans, and side

streets are given over almost entirely to Polish and

Russian Jews. Still farther south, these Jewish colonies

merge into a huge Bohemian colony, so vast that Chicago

ranks as the third Bohemian city in the world. To the

northwest are many Canadian-French, clannish in spite of

their long residence in America, and to the north are

Irish and first-generation Americans. On the streets

directly west and farther north are well-to-do English

speaking families, many of whom own their own houses and

have lived in the neighborhood for years; one man is still

living in his old farmhouse.

The policy of the public authorities of never taking an

initiative, and always waiting to be urged to do their

duty, is obviously fatal in a neighborhood where there is

little initiative among the citizens. The idea underlying

our self- government breaks down in such a ward. The

streets are inexpressibly dirty, the number of schools

inadequate, sanitary legislation unenforced, the street

lighting bad, the paving miserable and altogether lacking

in the alleys and smaller streets, and the stables foul

beyond description. Hundreds of houses are unconnected

with the street sewer. The older and richer inhabitants

seem anxious to move away as rapidly as they can afford

it. They make room for newly arrived immigrants who are

densely ignorant of civic duties. This substitution of

the older inhabitants is accomplished industrially also,

in the south and east quarters of the ward. The Jews and

Italians do the finishing for the great clothing

manufacturers, formerly done by Americans, Irish, and

Germans, who refused to submit to the extremely low prices

to which the sweating system has reduced their successors.

As the design of the sweating system is the elimination of

rent from the manufacture of clothing, the "outside work"

is begun after the clothing leaves the cutter. An

unscrupulous contractor regards no basement as too dark,

no stable loft too foul, no rear shanty too provisional,

no tenement room too small for his workroom, as these

conditions imply low rental. Hence these shops abound in

the worst of the foreign districts where the sweater

easily finds his cheap basement and his home finishers.

The houses of the ward, for the most part wooden, were

originally built for one family and are now occupied by

several. They are after the type of the inconvenient

frame cottages found in the poorer suburbs twenty years

ago. Many of them were built where they now stand; others

were brought thither on rollers, because their previous

sites had been taken by factories. The fewer brick

tenement buildings which are three or four stories high

are comparatively new, and there are few large tenements.

The little wooden houses have a temporary aspect, and for

this reason, perhaps, the tenement-house legislation in

Chicago is totally inadequate. Rear tenements flourish;

many houses have no water supply save the faucet in the

back yard, there are no fire escapes, the garbage and

ashes are placed in wooden boxes which are fastened to the

street pavements. One of the most discouraging features

about the present system of tenement houses is that many

are owned by sordid and ignorant immigrants. The theory

that wealth brings responsibility, that possession entails

at length education and refinement, in these cases fails

utterly. The children of an Italian immigrant owner may

"shine" shoes in the street, and his wife may pick rags

from the street gutter, laboriously sorting them in a

dingy court. Wealth may do something for her

self-complacency and feeling of consequence; it certainly

does nothing for her comfort or her children's improvement

nor for the cleanliness of anyone concerned. Another

thing that prevents better houses in Chicago is the

tentative attitude of the real estate men. Many unsavory

conditions are allowed to continue which would be regarded

with horror if they were considered permanent. Meanwhile,

the wretched conditions persist until at least two

generations of children have been born and reared in them.

In every neighborhood where poorer people live, because

rents are supposed to be cheaper there, is an element

which, although uncertain in the individual, in the

aggregate can be counted upon. It is composed of people

of former education and opportunity who have cherished

ambitions and prospects, but who are caricatures of what

they meant to be--"hollow ghosts which blame the living

men." There are times in many lives when there is a

cessation of energy and loss of power. Men and women of

education and refinement come to live in a cheaper

neighborhood because they lack the ability to make money,

because of ill health, because of an unfortunate marriage,

or for other reasons which do not imply criminality or

stupidity. Among them are those who, in spite of untoward

circumstances, keep up some sort of an intellectual life;

those who are "great for books," as their neighbors say.

To such the Settlement may be a genuine refuge.

In the very first weeks of our residence Miss Starr started a

reading party in George Eliot's "Romola," which was attended by a

group of young women who followed the wonderful tale with

unflagging interest. The weekly reading was held in our little

upstairs dining room, and two members of the club came to dinner

each week, not only that they might be received as guests, but

that they might help us wash the dishes afterwards and so make

the table ready for the stacks of Florentine photographs.

Our "first resident," as she gaily designated herself, was a

charming old lady who gave five consecutive readings from

Hawthorne to a most appreciative audience, interspersing the

magic tales most delightfully with recollections of the elusive

and fascinating author. Years before she had lived at Brook Farm

as a pupil of the Ripleys, and she came to us for ten days

because she wished to live once more in an atmosphere where

"idealism ran high." We thus early found the type of class which

through all the years has remained most popular--a combination of

a social atmosphere with serious study.

Volunteers to the new undertaking came quickly; a charming young

girl conducted a kindergarten in the drawing room, coming

regularly every morning from her home in a distant part of the

North Side of the city. Although a tablet to her memory has

stood upon a mantel shelf in Hull-House for five years, we still

associate her most vividly with the play of little children,

first in her kindergarten and then in her own nursery, which

furnished a veritable illustration of Victor Hugo's definition of

heaven--"a place where parents are always young and children

always little." Her daily presence for the first two years made

it quite impossible for us to become too solemn and

self-conscious in our strenuous routine, for her mirth and

buoyancy were irresistible and her eager desire to share the life

of the neighborhood never failed, although it was often put to a

severe test. One day at luncheon she gaily recited her futile

attempt to impress temperance principles upon the mind of an

Italian mother, to whom she had returned a small daughter of five

sent to the kindergarten "in quite a horrid state of

intoxication" from the wine-soaked bread upon which she had

breakfasted. The mother, with the gentle courtesy of a South

Italian, listened politely to her graphic portrayal of the

untimely end awaiting so immature a wine bibber; but long before

the lecture was finished, quite unconscious of the incongruity,

she hospitably set forth her best wines, and when her baffled

guest refused one after the other, she disappeared, only to

quickly return with a small dark glass of whisky, saying

reassuringly, "See, I have brought you the true American drink."

The recital ended in seriocomic despair, with the rueful

statement that "the impression I probably made on her darkened

mind was, that it was the American custom to breakfast children

on bread soaked in whisky instead of light Italian wine."

That first kindergarten was a constant source of education to us.

We were much surprised to find social distinctions even among its

lambs, although greatly amused with the neat formulation made by

the superior little Italian boy who refused to sit beside uncouth

little Angelina because "we eat our macaroni this way"--imitating

the movement of a fork from a plate to his mouth--"and she eat

her macaroni this way," holding his hand high in the air and

throwing back his head, that his wide-open mouth might receive an

imaginary cascade. Angelina gravely nodded her little head in

approval of this distinction between gentry and peasant. "But

isn't it astonishing that merely table manners are made such a

test all the way along--" was the comment of their democratic

teacher. Another memory which refuses to be associated with

death, which came to her all too soon, is that of the young girl

who organized our first really successful club of boys, holding

their fascinated interest by the old chivalric tales, set forth

so dramatically and vividly that checkers and jackstraws were

abandoned by all the other clubs on Boys' Day, that their members

might form a listening fringe to "The Young Heros."

I met a member of the latter club one day as he flung himself out

of the House in the rage by which an emotional boy hopes to keep

from shedding tears. "There is no use coming here any more,

Prince Roland is dead," he gruffly explained as we passed. We

encouraged the younger boys in tournaments and dramatics of all

sorts, and we somewhat fatuously believed that boys who were

early interested in adventurers or explorers might later want to

know the lives of living statesmen and inventors. It is needless

to add that the boys quickly responded to such a program, and

that the only difficulty lay in finding leaders who were able to

carry it out. This difficulty has been with us through all the

years of growth and development in the Boys' Club until now, with

its five-story building, its splendid equipment of shops, of

recreation and study rooms, that group alone is successful which

commands the services of a resourceful and devoted leader.

The dozens of younger children who from the first came to Hull-

House were organized into groups which were not quite classes and

not quite clubs. The value of these groups consisted almost

entirely in arousing a higher imagination and in giving the

children the opportunity which they could not have in the crowded

schools, for initiative and for independent social relationships.

The public schools then contained little hand work of any sort,

so that naturally any instruction which we provided for the

children took the direction of this supplementary work. But it

required a constant effort that the pressure of poverty itself

should not defeat the educational aim. The Italian girls in the

sewing classes would count the day lost when they could not carry

home a garment, and the insistence that it should be neatly made

seemed a super-refinement to those in dire need of clothing.

As these clubs have been continued during the twenty years they

have developed classes in the many forms of handicraft which the

newer education is so rapidly adapting for the delight of

children; but they still keep their essentially social character

and still minister to that large number of children who leave

school the very week they are fourteen years old, only too eager

to close the schoolroom door forever on a tiresome task that is

at last well over. It seems to us important that these children

shall find themselves permanently attached to a House that offers

them evening clubs and classes with their old companions, that

merges as easily as possible the school life into the working

life and does what it can to find places for the bewildered young

things looking for work. A large proportion of the delinquent

boys brought into the juvenile court in Chicago are the oldest

sons in large families whose wages are needed at home. The

grades from which many of them leave school, as the records show,

are piteously far from the seventh and eighth where the very

first introduction in manual training is given, nor have they

been caught by any other abiding interest.

In spite of these flourishing clubs for children early

established at Hull-House, and the fact that our first organized

undertaking was a kindergarten, we were very insistent that the

Settlement should not be primarily for the children, and that it

was absurd to suppose that grown people would not respond to

opportunities for education and social life. Our enthusiastic

kindergartner herself demonstrated this with an old woman of

ninety who, because she was left alone all day while her daughter

cooked in a restaurant, had formed such a persistent habit of

picking the plaster off the walls that one landlord after another

refused to have her for a tenant. It required but a few week's

time to teach her to make large paper chains, and gradually she

was content to do it all day long, and in the end took quite as

much pleasure in adorning the walls as she had formally taken in

demolishing them. Fortunately the landlord had never heard the

aesthetic principle that exposure of basic construction is more

desirable than gaudy decoration. In course of time it was

discovered that the old woman could speak Gaelic, and when one or

two grave professors came to see her, the neighborhood was filled

with pride that such a wonder lived in their midst. To mitigate

life for a woman of ninety was an unfailing refutation of the

statement that the Settlement was designed for the young.

On our first New Year's Day at Hull-House we invited the older

people in the vicinity, sending a carriage for the most feeble

and announcing to all of them that we were going to organize an

Old Settlers' Party.

Every New Year's Day since, older people in varying numbers have

come together at Hull-House to relate early hardships, and to take

for the moment the place in the community to which their pioneer

life entitles them. Many people who were formerly residents of

the vicinity, but whom prosperity has carried into more desirable

neighborhoods, come back to these meetings and often confess to

each other that they have never since found such kindness as in

early Chicago when all its citizens came together in mutual

enterprises. Many of these pioneers, so like the men and women of

my earliest childhood that I always felt comforted by their

presence in the house, were very much opposed to "foreigners,"

whom they held responsible for a depreciation of property and a

general lowering of the tone of the neighborhood. Sometimes we had

a chance for championship; I recall one old man, fiercely

American, who had reproached me because we had so many "foreign

views" on our walls, to whom I endeavored to set forth our hope

that the pictures might afford a familiar island to the immigrants

in a sea of new and strange impressions. The old settler guest,

taken off his guard, replied, "I see; they feel as we did when we

saw a Yankee notion from Down East,"--thereby formulating the dim

kinship between the pioneer and the immigrant, both "buffeting the

waves of a new development." The older settlers as well as their

children throughout the years have given genuine help to our

various enterprises for neighborhood improvement, and from their

own memories of earlier hardships have made many shrewd

suggestions for alleviating the difficulties of that first sharp

struggle with untoward conditions.

In those early days we were often asked why we had come to live

on Halsted Street when we could afford to live somewhere else. I

remember one man who used to shake his head and say it was "the

strangest thing he had met in his experience," but who was

finally convinced that it was "not strange but natural." In time

it came to seem natural to all of us that the Settlement should

be there. If it is natural to feed the hungry and care for the

sick, it is certainly natural to give pleasure to the young,

comfort to the aged, and to minister to the deep-seated craving

for social intercourse that all men feel. Whoever does it is

rewarded by something which, if not gratitude, is at least

spontaneous and vital and lacks that irksome sense of obligation

with which a substantial benefit is too often acknowledged.

In addition to the neighbors who responded to the receptions and

classes, we found those who were too battered and oppressed to

care for them. To these, however, was left that susceptibility

to the bare offices of humanity which raises such offices into a

bond of fellowship.

From the first it seemed understood that we were ready to perform

the humblest neighborhood services. We were asked to wash the

new-born babies, and to prepare the dead for burial, to nurse the

sick, and to "mind the children."

Occasionally these neighborly offices unexpectedly uncovered ugly

human traits. For six weeks after an operation we kept in one of

our three bedrooms a forlorn little baby who, because he was born

with a cleft palate, was most unwelcome even to his mother, and

we were horrified when he died of neglect a week after he was

returned to his home; a little Italian bride of fifteen sought

shelter with us one November evening to escape her husband who

had beaten her every night for a week when he returned home from

work, because she had lost her wedding ring; two of us officiated

quite alone at the birth of an illegitimate child because the

doctor was late in arriving, and none of the honest Irish matrons

would "touch the likes of her"; we ministered at the deathbed of

a young man, who during a long illness of tuberculosis had

received so many bottles of whisky through the mistaken kindness

of his friends, that the cumulative effect produced wild periods

of exultation, in one of which he died.

We were also early impressed with the curious isolation of many

of the immigrants; an Italian woman once expressed her pleasure

in the red roses that she saw at one of our receptions in

surprise that they had been "brought so fresh all the way from

Italy." She would not believe for an instant that they had been

grown in America. She said that she had lived in Chicago for six

years and had never seen any roses, whereas in Italy she had seen

them every summer in great profusion. During all that time, of

course, the woman had lived within ten blocks of a florist's

window; she had not been more than a five-cent car ride away from

the public parks; but she had never dreamed of faring forth for

herself, and no one had taken her. Her conception of America had

been the untidy street in which she lived and had made her long

struggle to adapt herself to American ways.

But in spite of some untoward experiences, we were constantly

impressed with the uniform kindness and courtesy we received.

Perhaps these first days laid the simple human foundations which

are certainly essential for continuous living among the poor;

first, genuine preference for residence in an industrial quarter

to any other part of the city, because it is interesting and

makes the human appeal; and second, the conviction, in the words

of Canon Barnett, that the things that make men alike are finer

and better than the things that keep them apart, and that these

basic likenesses, if they are properly accentuated, easily

transcend the less essential differences of race, language,

creed, and tradition.

Perhaps even in those first days we made a beginning toward that

object which was afterwards stated in our charter: "To provide a

center for higher civic and social life; to institute and

maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to

investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial

districts of Chicago."

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer Diana Camden.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter VI: The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements." by

Jane Addams (1860-1935) From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with

Autobiographical Notes. by Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan

Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 113-127.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

CHAPTER VI

SUBJECTIVE NECESSITY FOR SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS

The Ethical Culture Societies held a summer school at Plymouth,

Massachusetts, in 1892, to which they invited several people

representing the then new Settlement movement, that they might

discuss with others the general theme of Philanthropy and Social

Progress.

I venture to produce here parts of a lecture I delivered in

Plymouth, both because I have found it impossible to formulate

with the same freshness those early motives and strivings, and

because, when published with other papers given that summer, it

was received by the Settlement people themselves as a

satisfactory statement.

I remember on golden summer afternoon during the sessions of the

summer school that several of us met on the shores of a pond in a

pine wood a few miles from Plymouth, to discuss our new movement.

The natural leader of the group was Robert A. Woods. He had

recently returned from a residence in Toynbee Hall, London, to

open Andover House in Boston, and had just issued a book, "English

Social Movements," in which he had gathered together and focused

the many forms of social endeavor preceding and contemporaneous

with the English Settlements. There were Miss Vida D. Scudder and

Miss Helena Dudley from the College Settlement Association, Miss

Julia C. Lathrop and myself from Hull-House. Some of us had

numbered our years as far as thirty, and we all carefully avoided

the extravagance of statement which characterizes youth, and yet I

doubt if anywhere on the continent that summer could have been

found a group of people more genuinely interested in social

development or more sincerely convinced that they had found a clue

by which the conditions in crowded cities might be understood and

the agencies for social betterment developed.

We were all careful to avoid saying that we had found a "life

work," perhaps with an instinctive dread of expending all our

energy in vows of constancy, as so often happens; and yet it is

interesting to note that of all the people whom I have recalled as

the enthusiasts at that little conference have remained attached to

Settlements in actual residence for longer or shorter periods each

year during the eighteen years that have elapsed since then,

although they have also been closely identified as publicists or

governmental officials with movements outside. It is as if they

had discovered that the Settlement was too valuable as a method as

a way of approach to the social question to abandoned, although

they had long since discovered it was not a "social movement" in

itself. This, however, is anticipating the future, whereas the

following paper on "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements"

should have a chance to speak for itself. It is perhaps too

late in the day to express regret for its stilted title.

This paper is an attempt to analyze the motives which underlie a

movement based, not only upon conviction, but upon genuine

emotion, wherever educated young people are seeking an outlet for

that sentiment for universal brotherhood, which the best spirit of

our times is forcing from an emotion into a motive. These young

people accomplish little toward the solution of this social

problem, and bear the brunt of being cultivated into unnourished,

oversensitive lives. They have been shut off from the common

labor by which they live which is a great source of moral and

physical health. They feel a fatal want of harmony between their

theory and their lives, a lack of coordination between thought and

action. I think it is hard for us to realize how seriously many

of them are taking to the notion of human brotherhood, how eagerly

they long to give tangible expression to the democratic ideal.

These young men and women, longing to socialize their democracy,

are animated by certain hopes which may be thus loosely

formulated; that if in a democratic country nothing can be

permanently achieved save through the masses of the people, it

will be impossible to establish a higher political life than the

people themselves crave; that it is difficult to see how the

notion of a higher civic life can be fostered save through common

intercourse; that the blessings which we associate with a life of

refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made

universal if they are to be permanent; that the good we secure for

ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air,

until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common

life. It is easier to state these hopes than to formulate the

line of motives, which I believe to constitute the trend of the

subjective pressure toward the Settlement. There is something

primordial about these motives, but I am perhaps overbold in

designating them as a great desire to share the race life. We all

bear traces of the starvation struggle which for so long made up

the life of the race. Our very organism holds memories and

glimpses of that long life of our ancestors, which still goes on

among so many of our contemporaries. Nothing so deadens the

sympathies and shrivels the power of enjoyment as the persistent

keeping away from the great opportunities for helpfulness and a

continual ignoring of the starvation struggle which makes up the

life of at least half the race. To shut one's self away from that

half of the race life is to shut one's self away from the most

vital part of it; it is to live out but half the humanity to which

we have been born heir and to use but half our faculties. We have

all had longings for a fuller life which should include the use of

these faculties. These longings are the physical complement of

the "Intimations of Immortality," on which no ode has yet been

written. To portray these would be the work of a poet, and it is

hazardous for any but a poet to attempt it.

You may remember the forlorn feeling which occasionally seizes

you when you arrive early in the morning a stranger in a great

city: the stream of laboring people goes past you as you gaze

through the plate-glass window of your hotel; you see hard

working men lifting great burdens; you hear the driving and

jostling of huge carts and your heart sinks with a sudden sense

of futility. The door opens behind you and you turn to the man

who brings you in your breakfast with a quick sense of human

fellowship. You find yourself praying that you may never lose

your hold on it all. A more poetic prayer would be that the

great mother breasts of our common humanity, with its labor and

suffering and its homely comforts, may never be withheld from

you. You turn helplessly to the waiter and feel that it would be

almost grotesque to claim from him the sympathy you crave because

civilization has placed you apart, but you resent your position

with a sudden sense of snobbery. Literature is full of

portrayals of these glimpses: they come to shipwrecked men on

rafts; they overcome the differences of an incongruous multitude

when in the presence of a great danger or when moved by a common

enthusiasm. They are not, however, confined to such moments, and

if we were in the habit of telling them to each other, the

recital would be as long as the tales of children are, when they

sit down on the green grass and confide to each other how many

times they have remembered that they lived once before. If these

childish tales are the stirring of inherited impressions, just so

surely is the other the striving of inherited powers.

"It is true that there is nothing after disease, indigence and a

sense of guilt, so fatal to health and to life itself as the want

of a proper outlet for active faculties." I have seen young girls

suffer and grow sensibly lowered in vitality in the first years

after they leave school. In our attempt then to give a girl

pleasure and freedom from care we succeed, for the most part, in

making her pitifully miserable. She finds "life" so different

from what she expected it to be. She is besotted with innocent

little ambitions, and does not understand this apparent waste of

herself, this elaborate preparation, if no work is provided for

her. There is a heritage of noble obligation which young people

accept and long to perpetuate. The desire for action, the wish

to right wrong and alleviate suffering haunts them daily. Society

smiles at it indulgently instead of making it of value to itself.

The wrong to them begins even farther back, when we restrain the

first childish desires for "doing good", and tell them that they

must wait until they are older and better fitted. We intimate

that social obligation begins at a fixed date, forgetting that it

begins at birth itself. We treat them as children who, with

strong-growing limbs, are allowed to use their legs but not their

arms, or whose legs are daily carefully exercised that after a

while their arms may be put to high use. We do this in spite of

the protest of the best educators, Locke and Pestalozzi. We are

fortunate in the meantime if their unused members do not weaken

and disappear. They do sometimes. There are a few girls who, by

the time they are "educated", forget their old childish desires

to help the world and to play with poor little girls "who haven't

playthings". Parents are often inconsistent: they deliberately

expose their daughters to knowledge of the distress in the world;

they send them to hear missionary addresses on famines in India

and China; they accompany them to lectures on the suffering in

Siberia; they agitate together over the forgotten region of East

London. In addition to this, from babyhood the altruistic

tendencies of these daughters are persistently cultivated. They

are taught to be self-forgetting and self-sacrificing, to

consider the good of the whole before the good of the ego. But

when all this information and culture show results, when the

daughter comes back from college and begins to recognize her

social claim to the "submerged tenth", and to evince a

disposition to fulfill it, the family claim is strenuously

asserted; she is told that she is unjustified, ill-advised in her

efforts. If she persists, the family too often are injured and

unhappy unless the efforts are called missionary and the

religious zeal of the family carry them over their sense of

abuse. When this zeal does not exist, the result is perplexing.

It is a curious violation of what we would fain believe a

fundamental law--that the final return of the deed is upon the

head of the doer. The deed is that of exclusiveness and caution,

but the return, instead of falling upon the head of the exclusive

and cautious, falls upon a young head full of generous and

unselfish plans. The girl loses something vital out of her life

to which she is entitled. She is restricted and unhappy; her

elders meanwhile, are unconscious of the situation and we have

all the elements of a tragedy.

We have in America a fast-growing number of cultivated young

people who have no recognized outlet for their active faculties.

They hear constantly of the great social maladjustment, but no way

is provided for them to change it, and their uselessness hangs

about them heavily. Huxley declares that the sense of uselessness

is the severest shock which the human system can sustain, and that

if persistently sustained, it results in atrophy of function.

These young people have had advantages of college, of European

travel, and of economic study, but they are sustaining this shock

of inaction. They have pet phrases, and they tell you that the

things that make us all alike are stronger than the things that

make us different. They say that all men are united by needs and

sympathies far more permanent and radical than anything that

temporarily divides them and sets them in opposition to each

other. If they affect art, they say that the decay in artistic

expression is due to the decay in ethics, that art when shut away

from the human interests and from the great mass of humanity is

self-destructive. They tell their elders with all the bitterness

of youth that if they expect success from them in business or

politics or in whatever lines their ambition for them has run,

they must let them consult all of humanity; that they must let

them find out what the people want and how they want it. It is

only the stronger young people, however, who formulate this. Many

of them dissipate their energies in so-called enjoyment. Others

not content with that, go on studying and go back to college for

their second degrees; not that they are especially fond of study,

but because they want something definite to do, and their powers

have been trained in the direction of mental accumulation. Many

are buried beneath this mental accumulation with lowered vitality

and discontent. Walter Besant says they have had the vision that

Peter had when he saw the great sheet let down from heaven,

wherein was neither clean nor unclean. He calls it the sense of

humanity. It is not philanthropy nor benevolence, but a thing

fuller and wider than either of these.

This young life, so sincere in its emotion and good phrases and

yet so undirected, seems to me as pitiful as the other great mass

of destitute lives. One is supplementary to the other, and some

method of communication can surely be devised. Mr. Barnett, who

urged the first Settlement,--Toynbee Hall, in East

London,--recognized this need of outlet for the young men of

Oxford and Cambridge, and hoped that the Settlement would supply

the communication. It is easy to see why the Settlement movement

originated in England, where the years of education are more

constrained and definite than they are here, where class

distinctions are more rigid. The necessity of it was greater

there, but we are fast feeling the pressure of the need and

meeting the necessity for Settlements in America. Our young

people feel nervously the need of putting theory into action, and

respond quickly to the Settlement form of activity.

Other motives which I believe make toward the Settlement are the

result of a certain renaissance going forward in Christianity.

The impulse to share the lives of the poor, the desire to make

social service, irrespective of propaganda, express the spirit of

Christ, is as old as Christianity itself. We have no proof from

the records themselves that the early Roman Christians, who

strained their simple art to the point of grotesqueness in their

eagerness to record a "good news" on the walls of the catacombs,

considered this good news a religion. Jesus had no set of truths

labeled Religious. On the contrary, his doctrine was that all

truth is one, that the appropriation of it is freedom. His

teaching had no dogma to mark it off from truth and action in

general. He himself called it a revelation--a life. These early

Roman Christians received the Gospel message, a command to love

all men, with a certain joyous simplicity. The image of the Good

Shepherd is blithe and gay beyond the gentlest shepherd of Greek

mythology; the hart no longer pants, but rushes to the water

brooks. The Christians looked for the continuous revelation, but

believed what Jesus said, that this revelation, to be retained

and made manifest, must be put into terms of action; that action

is the only medium man has for receiving and appropriating truth;

that the doctrine must be known through the will.

That Christianity has to be revealed and embodied in the line of

social progress is a corollary to the simple proposition, that

man's action is found in his social relationships in the way in

which he connects with his fellows; that his motives for action

are the zeal and affection with which he regards his fellows. By

this simple process was created a deep enthusiasm for humanity;

which regarded man as at once the organ and the object of

revelation; and by this process came about the wonderful

fellowship, the true democracy of the early Church, that so

captivates the imagination. The early Christians were

preeminently nonresistant. They believed in love as a cosmic

force. There was no iconoclasm during the minor peace of the

Church. They did not yet denounce nor tear down temples, nor

preach the end of the world. They grew to a mighty number, but

it never occurred to them, either in their weakness or in their

strength, to regard other men for an instant as their foes or as

aliens. The spectacle of the Christians loving all men was the

most astounding Rome had ever seen. They were eager to sacrifice

themselves for the weak, for children, and for the aged; they

identified themselves with slaves and did not avoid the plague;

they longed to share the common lot that they might receive the

constant revelation. It was a new treasure which the early

Christians added to the sum of all treasures, a joy hitherto

unknown in the world--the joy of finding the Christ which lieth

in each man, but which no man can unfold save in fellowship. A

happiness ranging from the heroic to the pastoral enveloped them.

They were to possess a revelation as long as life had new meaning

to unfold, new action to propose.

I believe that there is a distinct turning among many young men

and women toward this simple acceptance of Christ's message. They

resent the assumption that Christianity is a set of ideas which

belong to the religious consciousness, whatever that may be.

They insist that it cannot be proclaimed and instituted apart

from the social life of the community and that it must seek a

simple and natural expression in the social organism itself. The

Settlement movement is only one manifestation of that wider

humanitarian movement which throughout Christendom, but

pre-eminently in England, is endeavoring to embody itself, not in

a sect, but in society itself.

I believe that this turning, this renaissance of the early

Christian humanitarianism, is going on in America, in Chicago, if

you please, without leaders who write or philosophize, without

much speaking, but with a bent to express in social service and in

terms of action the spirit of Christ. Certain it is that

spiritual force is found in the Settlement movement, and it is

also true that this force must be evoked and must be called into

play before the success of any Settlement is assured. There must

be the overmastering belief that all that is noblest in life is

common to men as men, in order to accentuate the likenesses and

ignore the differences which are found among the people whom the

Settlement constantly brings into juxtaposition. It may be true,

as the Positivists insist, that the very religious fervor of man

can be turned into love for his race, and his desire for a future

life into content to live in the echo of his deeds; Paul's formula

of seeking for the Christ which lieth in each man and founding our

likenesses on him, seems a simpler formula to many of us.

In a thousand voices singing the Hallelujah Chorus in Handel's

"Messiah," it is possible to distinguish the leading voices, but

the differences of training and cultivation between them and the

voices in the chorus, are lost in the unity of purpose and in the

fact that they are all human voices lifted by a high motive.

This is a weak illustration of what a Settlement attempts to do.

It aims, in a measure, to develop whatever of social life its

neighborhood may afford, to focus and give form to that life, to

bring to bear upon it the results of cultivation and training;

but it receives in exchange for the music of isolated voices the

volume and strength of the chorus. It is quite impossible for me

to say in what proportion or degree the subjective necessity

which led to the opening of Hull-House combined the three trends:

first, the desire to interpret democracy in social terms;

secondly, the impulse beating at the very source of our lives,

urging us to aid in the race progress; and, thirdly, the

Christian movement toward humanitarianism. It is difficult to

analyze a living thing; the analysis is at best imperfect. Many

more motives may blend with the three trends; possibly the desire

for a new form of social success due to the nicety of

imagination, which refuses worldly pleasures unmixed with the

joys of self-sacrifice; possibly a love of approbation, so vast

that it is not content with the treble clapping of delicate

hands, but wishes also to hear the bass notes from toughened

palms, may mingle with these.

The Settlement then, is an experimental effort to aid in the

solution of the social and industrial problems which are

engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It

insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of

a city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the

overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the

other; but it assumes that this overaccumulation and destitution

is most sorely felt in the things that pertain to social and

educational privileges. From its very nature it can stand for no

political or social propaganda. It must, in a sense, give the

warm welcome of an inn to all such propaganda, if perchance one of

them be found an angel. The only thing to be dreaded in the

Settlement is that it lose its flexibility, its power of quick

adaptation, its readiness to change its methods as its environment

may demand. It must be open to conviction and must have a deep and

abiding sense of tolerance. It must be hospitable and ready for

experiment. It should demand from its residents a scientific

patience in the accumulation of facts and the steady holding of

their sympathies as one of the best instruments for that

accumulation. It must be grounded in a philosophy whose

foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy

which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a

drunken woman or an idiot boy. Its residents must be emptied of

all conceit of opinion and all self-assertion, and ready to arouse

and interpret the public opinion of their neighborhood. They must

be content to live quietly side by side with their neighbors,

until they grow into a sense of relationship and mutual interests.

Their neighbors are held apart by differences of race and

language which the residents can more easily overcome. They are

bound to see the needs of their neighborhood as a whole, to

furnish data for legislation, and to use their influence to secure

it. In short, residents are pledged to devote themselves to the

duties of good citizenship and to the arousing of the social

energies which too largely lie dormant in every neighborhood given

over to industrialism. They are bound to regard the entire life

of their city as organic, to make an effort to unify it, and to

protest against its over-differentiation.

It is always easy to make all philosophy point one particular

moral and all history adorn one particular tale; but I may be

forgiven the reminder that the best speculative philosophy sets

forth the solidarity of the human race; that the highest moralists

have taught that without the advance and improvement of the whole,

no man can hope for any lasting improvement in his own moral or

material individual condition; and that the subjective necessity

for Social Settlements is therefore identical with that necessity,

which urges us on toward social and individual salvation.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer Diana Camden.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter VII: Some Early Undertakings at Hull-House." by Jane

Addams (1860-1935) From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with

Autobiographical Notes. by Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan

Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 128-153.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

CHAPTER VII

SOME EARLY UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE

If the early American Settlements stood for a more exigent

standard in philanthropic activities, insisting that each new

undertaking should be preceded by carefully ascertained facts,

then certainly Hull-House held to this standard in the opening of

our new coffee-house first started as a public kitchen. An

investigation of the sweatshops had disclosed the fact, that

sewing women during the busy season paid little attention to the

feeding of their families, for it was only by working steadily

through the long day that the scanty pay of five, seven, or nine

cents for finishing a dozen pairs of trousers could be made into

a day's wage; and they bought from the nearest grocery the canned

goods that could be most quickly heated, or gave a few pennies to

the children with which they might secure a lunch from a

neighboring candy shop.

One of the residents made an investigation, at the instance of

the United States Department of Agriculture, into the food values

of the dietaries of the various immigrants, and this was followed

by an investigation made by another resident, for the United

States Department of Labor, into the foods of the Italian colony,

on the supposition that the constant use of imported products

bore a distinct relation to the cost of living. I recall an

Italian who, coming into Hull-House one day as we were sitting at

the dinner table, expressed great surprise that Americans ate a

variety of food, because he believed that they partook only of

potatoes and beer. A little inquiry showed that this conclusion

was drawn from the fact that he lived next to an Irish saloon and

had never seen anything but potatoes going in and beer coming

out.

At that time the New England kitchen was comparatively new in

Boston, and Mrs. Richards, who was largely responsible for its

foundation, hoped that cheaper cuts of meat and simpler

vegetables, if they were subjected to slow and thorough processes

of cooking, might be made attractive and their nutritive value

secured for the people who so sadly needed more nutritious food.

It was felt that this could be best accomplished in public

kitchens, where the advantage of scientific training and careful

supervision could be secured. One of the residents went to

Boston for a training under Mrs. Richards, and when the

Hull-House kitchen was fitted under her guidance and direction,

our hopes ran high for some modification of the food of the

neighborhood. We did not reckon, however, with the wide diversity

in nationality and inherited tastes, and while we sold a certain

amount of the carefully prepared soups and stews in the neigh-

boring factories--a sale which has steadily increased throughout

the years--and were also patronized by a few households, perhaps

the neighborhood estimate was best summed up by the woman who

frankly confessed, that the food was certainly nutritious, but

that she didn't like to eat what was nutritious, that she liked

to eat "what she'd ruther."

If the dietetics were appreciated but slowly, the social value of

the coffee-house and the gymnasium, which were in the same

building, were quickly demonstrated. At that time the saloon

halls were the only places in the neighborhood where the immigrant

could hold his social gatherings, and where he could celebrate

such innocent and legitimate occasions as weddings and christenings.

These halls were rented very cheaply with the understanding that

various sums of money should be "passed across the bar," and it

was considered a mean host or guest who failed to live up to this

implied bargain. The consequence was that many a reputable party

ended with a certain amount of disorder, due solely to the fact

that the social instinct was traded upon and used as a basis for

money making by an adroit host. From the beginning the young

people's clubs had asked for dancing, and nothing was more

popular than the increased space for parties offered by the

gymnasium, with the chance to serve refreshments in the room

below. We tried experiments with every known "soft drink," from

those extracted from an expensive soda water fountain to slender

glasses of grape juice, but so far as drinks were concerned we

never became a rival to the saloon, nor indeed did anyone imagine

that we were trying to do so. I remember one man who looked

about the cozy little room and said, "This would be a nice place

to sit in all day if one could only have beer." But the

coffee-house gradually performed a mission of its own and became

something of a social center to the neighborhood as well as a

real convenience. Business men from the adjacent factories and

school teachers from the nearest public schools, used it

increasingly. The Hull-House students and club members supped

together in little groups or held their reunions and social

banquets, as, to a certain extent, did organizations from all

parts of the town. The experience of the coffee-house taught us

not to hold to preconceived ideas of what the neighborhood ought

to have, but to keep ourselves in readiness to modify and adapt

our undertakings as we discovered those things which the

neighborhood was ready to accept.

Better food was doubtless needed, but more attractive and safer

places for social gatherings were also needed, and the

neighborhood was ready for one and not for the other. We had no

hint then in Chicago of the small parks which were to be

established fifteen years later, containing the halls for dancing

and their own restaurants in buildings where the natural desire

of the young for gayety and social organization, could be safely

indulged. Yet even in that early day a member of the Hull-House

Men's Club who had been appointed superintendent of Douglas Park

had secured there the first public swimming pool, and his fellow

club members were proud of the achievement.

There was in the earliest undertakings at Hull-House a touch of

the artist's enthusiasm when he translates his inner vision

through his chosen material into outward form. Keenly conscious

of the social confusion all about us and the hard economic

struggle, we at times believed that the very struggle itself

might become a source of strength. The devotion of the mothers

to their children, the dread of the men lest they fail to provide

for the family dependent upon their daily exertions, at moments

seemed to us the secret stores of strength from which society is

fed, the invisible array of passion and feeling which are the

surest protectors of the world. We fatuously hoped that we might

pluck from the human tragedy itself a consciousness of a common

destiny which should bring its own healing, that we might extract

from life's very misfortunes a power of cooperation which should

be effective against them.

Of course there was always present the harrowing consciousness of

the difference in economic condition between ourselves and our

neighbors. Even if we had gone to live in the most wretched

tenement, there would have always been an essential difference

between them and ourselves, for we should have had a sense of

security in regard to illness and old age and the lack of these

two securities are the specters which most persistently haunt the

poor. Could we, in spite of this, make their individual efforts

more effective through organization and possibly complement them

by small efforts of our own?

Some such vague hope was in our minds when we started the

Hull-House Cooperative Coal Association, which led a vigorous

life for three years, and developed a large membership under the

skillful advice of its one paid officer, an English workingman

who had had experience in cooperative societies at "'ome." Some

of the meetings of the association, in which people met to

consider together their basic dependence upon fire and warmth,

had a curious challenge of life about them. Because the

cooperators knew what it meant to bring forth children in the

midst of privation and to see the tiny creatures struggle for

life, their recitals cut a cross section, as it were, in that

world-old effort--the "dying to live" which so inevitably

triumphs over poverty and suffering. And yet their very

familiarity with hardship may have been responsible for that

sentiment which traditionally ruins business, for a vote of the

cooperators that the basket buyers be given one basket free out

of every six, that the presentation of five purchase tickets

should entitle the holders to a profit in coal instead of stock

"because it would be a shame to keep them waiting for the

dividend," was always pointed to by the conservative

quarter-of-a-ton buyers as the beginning of the end. At any

rate, at the close of the third winter, although the Association

occupied an imposing coal yard on the southeast corner of the

Hull-House block and its gross receipts were between three and

four hundred dollars a day, it became evident that the concern

could not remain solvent if it continued its philanthropic

policy, and the experiment was terminated by the cooperators

taking up their stock in the remaining coal.

Our next cooperative experiment was much more successful, perhaps

because it was much more spontaneous.

At a meeting of working girls held at Hull-House during a strike

in a large shoe factory, the discussions made it clear that the

strikers who had been most easily frightened, and therefore first

to capitulate, were naturally those girls who were paying board

and were afraid of being put out if they fell too far behind.

After a recital of a case of peculiar hardship one of them

exclaimed: "Wouldn't it be fine if we had a boarding club of our

own, and then we could stand by each other in a time like this?"

After that events moved quickly. We read aloud together Beatrice

Potter's little book on "Cooperation," and discussed all the

difficulties and fascinations of such an undertaking, and on the

first of May, 1891, two comfortable apartments near Hull-House

were rented and furnished. The Settlement was responsible for

the furniture and paid the first month's rent, but beyond that

the members managed the club themselves. The undertaking

"marched," as the French say, from the very first, and always on

its own feet. Although there were difficulties, none of them

proved insurmountable, which was a matter for great satisfaction

in the face of a statement made by the head of the United States

Department of Labor, who, on a visit to the club when it was but

two years old, said that his department had investigated many

cooperative undertakings, and that none founded and managed by

women had ever succeeded. At the end of the third year the club

occupied all of the six apartments which the original building

contained, and numbered fifty members.

It was in connection with our efforts to secure a building for the

Jane Club, that we first found ourselves in the dilemma between

the needs of our neighbors and the kind-hearted response upon

which we had already come to rely for their relief. The adapted

apartments in which the Jane Club was housed were inevitably more

or less uncomfortable, and we felt that the success of the club

justified the erection of a building for its sole use.

Up to that time, our history had been as the minor peace of the

early Church. We had had the most generous interpretation of our

efforts. Of course, many people were indifferent to the idea of

the Settlement; others looked on with tolerant and sometimes

cynical amusement which we would often encounter in a good story

related at our expense; but all this was remote and unreal to us,

and we were sure that if the critics could but touch "the life of

the people," they would understand.

The situation changed markedly after the Pullman strike, and our

efforts to secure factory legislation later brought upon us a

certain amount of distrust and suspicion; until then we had been

considered merely a kindly philanthropic undertaking whose new

form gave us a certain idealistic glamour. But sterner tests

were coming, and one of the first was in connection with the new

building for the Jane Club. A trustee of Hull-House came to see

us one day with the good news that a friend of his was ready to

give twenty thousand dollars with which to build the desired new

clubhouse. When, however, he divulged the name of his generous

friend, it proved to be that of a man who was notorious for

underpaying the girls in his establishment and concerning whom

there were even darker stories. It seemed clearly impossible to

erect a clubhouse for working girls with such money and we at

once said that we must decline the offer. The trustee of

Hull-House was put in the most embarrassing situation; he had, of

course, induced the man to give the money and had had no thought

but that it would be eagerly received; he would now be obliged to

return with the astonishing, not to say insulting, news that the

money was considered unfit.

In the long discussion which followed, it gradually became clear

to all of us that such a refusal could be valuable only as it

might reveal to the man himself and to others, public opinion in

regard to certain methods of money-making, but that from the very

nature of the case our refusal of this money could not be made

public because a representative of Hull-House had asked for it.

However, the basic fact remained that we could not accept the

money, and of this the trustee himself was fully convinced. This

incident occurred during a period of much discussion concerning

"tainted money" and is perhaps typical of the difficulty of

dealing with it. It is impossible to know how far we may blame

the individual for doing that which all of his competitors and

his associates consider legitimate; at the same time, social

changes can only be inaugurated by those who feel the

unrighteousness of contemporary conditions, and the expression of

their scruples may be the one opportunity for pushing forward

moral tests into that dubious area wherein wealth is accumulated.

In the course of time a new clubhouse was built by an old friend of

Hull-House much interested in working girls, and this has been

occupied for twelve years by the very successful cooperating Jane

Club. The incident of the early refusal is associated in my mind

with a long talk upon the subject of questionable money I held with

the warden of Toynbee Hall, whom I visited at Bristol where he was

then canon in the Cathedral. By way of illustration he showed me a

beautiful little church which had been built by the last

slave-trading merchant in Bristol, who had been much disapproved of

by his fellow townsmen and had hoped by this transmutation of

ill-gotten money into exquisite Gothic architecture to reconcile

himself both to God and man. His impulse to build may have been

born from his own scruples or from the quickened consciences of his

neighbors who saw that the world-old iniquity of enslaving men must

at length come to an end. The Abolitionists may have regarded this

beautiful building as the fruit of a contrite heart, or they may

have scorned it as an attempt to magnify the goodness of a slave

trader and thus perplex the doubting citizens of Bristol in regard

to the entire moral issue.

Canon Barnett did not pronounce judgment on the Bristol merchant.

He was, however, quite clear upon the point that a higher moral

standard for industrial life must be embodied in legislation as

rapidly as possible, that it may bear equally upon all, and that

an individual endeavoring to secure this legislation must forbear

harsh judgment. This was doubtless a sound position, but during

all the period of hot discussion concerning tainted money I never

felt clear enough on the general principle involved, to accept the

many invitations to write and speak upon the subject, although I

received much instruction in the many letters of disapproval sent

to me by radicals of various schools because I was a member of the

university extension staff of the then new University of Chicago,

the righteousness of whose foundation they challenged.

A little incident of this time illustrated to me the confusion in

the minds of a least many older men between religious teaching

and advancing morality. One morning I received a letter from the

head of a Settlement in New York expressing his perplexity over

the fact that his board of trustees had asked money from a man

notorious for his unscrupulous business methods. My

correspondent had placed his resignation in the hands of his

board, that they might accept it at any time when they felt his

utterances on the subject of tainted money were offensive, for he

wished to be free to openly discuss a subject of such grave moral

import. The very morning when my mind was full of the questions

raised by this letter, I received a call from the daughter of the

same business man whom my friend considered so unscrupulous. She

was passing through Chicago and came to ask me to give her some

arguments which she might later use with her father to confute

the charge that Settlements were irreligious. She said, "You

see, he has been asked to give money to our Settlement and would

like to do it, if his conscience was only clear; he disapproves

of Settlements because they give no religious instruction; he has

always been a very devout man."

I remember later discussing the incident with Washington Gladden

who was able to parallel it from his own experience. Now that

this discussion upon tainted money has subsided, it is easy to

view it with a certain detachment impossible at the moment, and

it is even difficult to understand why the feeling should have

been so intense, although it doubtless registered genuine moral

concern.

There was room for discouragement in the many unsuccessful

experiments in cooperation which were carried on in Chicago

during the early nineties; a carpenter shop on Van Buren Street

near Halsted, a labor exchange started by the unemployed, not so

paradoxical an arrangement as it seems, and a very ambitious plan

for a country colony which was finally carried out at Ruskin,

Tennessee. In spite of failures, cooperative schemes went on,

some of the same men appearing in one after another with

irrepressible optimism. I remember during a cooperative

congress, which met at Hull-House in the World's Fair summer that

Mr. Henry D. Lloyd, who collected records of cooperative

experiments with the enthusiasm with which other men collect

coins or pictures, put before the congress some of the remarkable

successes in Ireland and North England, which he later embodied

in his book on "Copartnership." One of the old-time cooperators

denounced the modern method as "too much like cut-throat

business" and declared himself in favor of "principles which may

have failed over and over again, but are nevertheless as sound as

the law of gravitation." Mr. Lloyd and I agreed that the fiery

old man presented as fine a spectacle of devotion to a lost cause

as either of us had ever seen, although we both possessed

memories well stored with such romantic attachments.

And yet this dream that men shall cease to waste strength in

competition and shall come to pool their powers of production is

coming to pass all over the face of the earth. Five years later

in the same Hull-House hall in which the cooperative congress was

held, an Italian senator told a large audience of his fellow

countrymen of the successful system of cooperative banks in north

Italy and of their cooperative methods of selling produce to the

value of millions of francs annually; still later Sir Horace

Plunkett related the remarkable successes in cooperation in

Ireland.

I have seldom been more infected by enthusiasm than I once was in

Dulwich at a meeting of English cooperators where I was fairly

overwhelmed by the fervor underlying the businesslike proceedings

of the congress, and certainly when I served as a juror in the

Paris Exposition of 1900, nothing in the entire display in the

department of Social Economy was so imposing as the building

housing the exhibit, which had been erected by cooperative

trades-unions without the assistance of a single contractor.

And so one's faith is kept alive as one occasionally meets a

realized ideal of better human relations. At least traces of

successful cooperation are found even in individualistic America.

I recall my enthusiasm on the day when I set forth to lecture at

New Harmony, Indiana, for I had early been thrilled by the tale

of Robert Owen, as every young person must be who is interested

in social reform; I was delighted to find so much of his spirit

still clinging to the little town which had long ago held one of

his ardent experiments, although the poor old cooperators, who

for many years claimed friendship at Hull-House because they

heard that we "had once tried a cooperative coal association,"

might well have convinced me of the persistency of the

cooperative ideal.

Many experiences in those early years, although vivid, seemed to

contain no illumination; nevertheless they doubtless permanently

affected our judgments concerning what is called crime and vice.

I recall a series of striking episodes on the day when I took the

wife and child, as well as the old godfather, of an Italian

convict to visit him in the State Penitentiary. When we

approached the prison, the sight of its heavy stone walls and

armed sentries threw the godfather into a paroxysm of rage; he

cast his hat upon the ground and stamped upon it, tore his hair,

and loudly fulminated in weird Italian oaths, until one of the

guards, seeing his strange actions, came to inquire if "the

gentleman was having a fit." When we finally saw the convict, his

wife, to my extreme distress, talked of nothing but his striped

clothing, until the poor man wept with chagrin. Upon our return

journey to Chicago, the little son aged eight presented me with

two oranges, so affectionately and gayly that I was filled with

reflections upon the advantage of each generation making a fresh

start, when the train boy, finding the stolen fruit in my lap,

violently threatened to arrest the child. But stranger than any

episode was the fact itself that neither the convict, his wife,

nor his godfather for a moment considered him a criminal. He had

merely gotten excited over cards and had stabbed his adversary

with a knife. "Why should a man who took his luck badly be kept

forever from the sun?" was their reiterated inquiry.

I recall our perplexity over the first girls who had "gone

astray"--the poor, little, forlorn objects, fifteen and sixteen

years old, with their moral natures apparently untouched and

unawakened; one of them whom the police had found in a

professional house and asked us to shelter for a few days until

she could be used as a witness, was clutching a battered doll

which she had kept with her during her six months of an "evil

life." Two of these prematurely aged children came to us one day

directly from the maternity ward of the Cook County hospital,

each with a baby in her arms, asking for protection, because they

did not want to go home for fear of "being licked." For them were

no jewels nor idle living such as the storybooks portrayed. The

first of the older women whom I knew came to Hull-House to ask

that her young sister, who was about to arrive from Germany,

might live near us; she wished to find her respectable work and

wanted her to have the "decent pleasures" that Hull-House

afforded. After the arrangement had been completed and I had in

a measure recovered from my astonishment at the businesslike way

in which she spoke of her own life, I ventured to ask her

history. In a very few words she told me that she had come from

Germany as a music teacher to an American family. At the end of

two years, in order to avoid a scandal involving the head of the

house, she had come to Chicago where her child was born, but when

the remittances ceased after its death, finding herself without

home and resources, she had gradually become involved in her

present mode of life. By dint of utilizing her family

solicitude, we finally induced her to move into decent lodgings

before her sister arrived, and for a difficult year she supported

herself by her exquisite embroidery. At the end of that time,

she gave up the struggle, the more easily as her young sister,

well established in the dressmaking department of a large shop,

had begun to suspect her past life.

But discouraging as these and other similar efforts often were,

nevertheless the difficulties were infinitely less in those days

when we dealt with "fallen girls" than in the years following

when the "white slave traffic" became gradually established and

when agonized parents, as well as the victims themselves, were

totally unable to account for the situation. In the light of

recent disclosures, it seems as if we were unaccountably dull not

to have seen what was happening, especially to the Jewish girls

among whom "the home trade of the white slave traffic" was first

carried on and who were thus made to break through countless

generations of chastity. We early encountered the difficulties

of that old problem of restoring the woman, or even the child,

into the society she has once outraged. I well remember our

perplexity when we attempted to help two girls straight from a

Virginia tobacco factory, who had been decoyed into a

disreputable house when innocently seeking a lodging on the late

evening of their arrival. Although they had been rescued

promptly, the stigma remained, and we found it impossible to

permit them to join any of the social clubs connected with

Hull-House, not so much because there was danger of

contamination, as because the parents of the club members would

have resented their presence most hotly. One of our trustees

succeeded in persuading a repentant girl, fourteen years old,

whom we tried to give a fresh start in another part of the city,

to attend a Sunday School class of a large Chicago church. The

trustee hoped that the contact with nice girls, as well as the

moral training, would help the poor child on her hard road. But

unfortunately tales of her shortcomings reached the

superintendent who felt obliged, in order to protect the other

girls, to forbid her the school. She came back to tell us about

it, defiant as well as discouraged, and had it not been for the

experience with our own clubs, we could easily have joined her

indignation over a church which "acted as if its Sunday School

was a show window for candy kids."

In spite of poignant experiences or, perhaps, because of them,

the memory of the first years at Hull-House is more or less

blurred with fatigue, for we could of course become accustomed

only gradually to the unending activity and to the confusion of a

house constantly filling and refilling with groups of people.

The little children who came to the kindergarten in the morning

were followed by the afternoon clubs of older children, and those

in turn made way for the educational and social organizations of

adults, occupying every room in the house every evening. All

one's habits of living had to be readjusted, and any student's

tendency to sit with a book by the fire was of necessity

definitely abandoned.

To thus renounce "the luxury of personal preference" was,

however, a mere trifle compared to our perplexity over the

problems of an industrial neighborhood situated in an unorganized

city. Life pressed hard in many directions and yet it has always

seemed to me rather interesting that when we were so distressed

over its stern aspects and so impressed with the lack of

municipal regulations, the first building erected for Hull-House

should have been designed for an art gallery, for although it

contained a reading-room on the first floor and a studio above,

the largest space on the second floor was carefully designed and

lighted for art exhibits, which had to do only with the

cultivation of that which appealed to the powers of enjoyment as

over against a wage-earning capacity. It was also significant

that a Chicago business man, fond of pictures himself, responded

to this first appeal of the new and certainly puzzling

undertaking called a Settlement.

The situation was somewhat complicated by the fact that at the time

the building was erected in 1891, our free lease of the land upon

which Hull-House stood expired in 1895. The donor of the building,

however, overcame the difficulty by simply calling his gift a

donation of a thousand dollars a year. This restriction of course

necessitated the simplest sort of a structure, although I remember

on the exciting day when the new building was promised to us, that

I looked up my European notebook which contained the record of my

experience in Ulm, hoping that I might find a description of what I

then thought "a Cathedral of Humanity" ought to be. The

description was "low and widespreading as to include all men in

fellowship and mutual responsibility even as the older pinnacles

and spires indicated communion with God." The description did not

prove of value as an architectural motive I am afraid, although the

architects, who have remained our friends through all the years,

performed marvels with a combination of complicated demands and

little money. At the moment when I read this girlish outbreak it

gave me much comfort, for in those days in addition to our other

perplexities Hull-House was often called irreligious.

These first buildings were very precious to us and it afforded us

the greatest pride and pleasure as one building after another was

added to the Hull-House group. They clothed in brick and mortar

and made visible to the world that which we were trying to do;

they stated to Chicago that education and recreation ought to be

extended to the immigrants. The boys came in great numbers to

our provisional gymnasium fitted up in a former saloon, and it

seemed to us quite as natural that a Chicago man, fond of

athletics, should erect a building for them, as that the boys

should clamor for more room.

I do not wish to give a false impression, for we were often

bitterly pressed for money and worried by the prospect of unpaid

bills, and we gave up one golden scheme after another because we

could not afford it; we cooked the meals and kept the books and

washed the windows without a thought of hardship if we thereby

saved money for the consummation of some ardently desired

undertaking.

But in spite of our financial stringency, I always believed that

money would be given when we had once clearly reduced the

Settlement idea to the actual deed. This chapter, therefore,

would be incomplete if it did not record a certain theory of

nonresistance or rather universal good will which I had worked

out in connection with the Settlement idea and which was later so

often and so rudely disturbed. At that time I had come to

believe that if the activities of Hull-House were ever

misunderstood, it would be either because there was not time to

fully explain or because our motives had become mixed, for I was

convinced that disinterested action was like truth or beauty in

its lucidity and power of appeal.

But more gratifying than any understanding or response from

without could possibly be, was the consciousness that a growing

group of residents was gathering at Hull-House, held together in

that soundest of all social bonds, the companionship of mutual

interests. These residents came primarily because they were

genuinely interested in the social situation and believed that

the Settlement was valuable as a method of approach to it. A

house in which the men residents lived was opened across the

street, and at the end of the first five years the Hull-House

residential force numbered fifteen, a majority of whom still

remain identified with the Settlement.

Even in those early years we caught glimpses of the fact that

certain social sentiments, which are "the difficult and

cumulating product of human growth" and which like all higher

aims live only by communion and fellowship, are cultivated most

easily in the fostering soil of a community life.

Occasionally I obscurely felt as if a demand were being made upon

us for a ritual which should express and carry forward the hope

of the social movement. I was constantly bewildered by the

number of requests I received to officiate at funeral services

and by the curious confessions made to me by total strangers.

For a time I accepted the former and on one awful occasion

furnished "the poetic part" of a wedding ceremony really

performed by a justice of the peace, but I soon learned to

steadfastly refuse such offices, although I saw that for many

people without church affiliations the vague humanitarianism the

Settlement represented was the nearest approach they could find

to an expression of their religious sentiments.

These hints of what the Settlement might mean to at least a few

spirits among its contemporaries became clear to me for the first

time one summer's day in rural England, when I discussed with John

Trevor his attempts to found a labor church and his desire to turn

the toil and danger attached to the life of the workingman into

the means of a universal fellowship. That very year a papyrus

leaf brought to the British Museum from Egypt, containing among

other sayings of Jesus, "Raise the stone, and there thou shalt

find me; cleave the wood and I am there," was a powerful reminder

to all England of the basic relations between daily labor and

Christian teaching.

In those early years at Hull-House we were, however, in no danger

of losing ourselves in mazes of speculation or mysticism, and there

was shrewd penetration in a compliment I received from one of our

Scotch neighbors. He came down Polk Street as I was standing near

the foundations of our new gymnasium, and in response to his

friendly remark that "Hull-House was spreading out," I replied that

"Perhaps we were spreading out too fast." "Oh, no," he rejoined,

"you can afford to spread out wide, you are so well planted in the

mud," giving the compliment, however, a practical turn, as he

glanced at the deep mire on the then unpaved street. It was this

same condition of Polk Street which had caused the crown prince of

Belgium when he was brought upon a visit to Hull-House to shake his

head and meditatively remark, "There is not such a street--no, not

one--in all the territory of Belgium."

At the end of five years the residents of Hull-House published

some first found facts and our reflections thereon in a book

called "Hull-House Maps and Papers." The maps were taken from

information collected by one of the residents for the United

States Bureau of Labor in the investigation into "the slums of

great cities" and the papers treated of various neighborhood

matters with candor and genuine concern if not with skill. The

first edition became exhausted in two years, and apparently the

Boston publisher did not consider the book worthy of a second.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer Jill Thoren.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter VIII: Problems of Poverty." by Jane Addams (1860-1935)

From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by

Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp.

154-176.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

CHAPTER VII

PROBLEMS OF POVERTY

That neglected and forlorn old age is daily brought to the

attention of a Settlement which undertakes to bear its share of

the neighborhood burden imposed by poverty, was pathetically

clear to us during our first months of residence at Hull-House.

One day a boy of ten led a tottering old lady into the House,

saying that she had slept for six weeks in their kitchen on a bed

made up next to the stove; that she had come when her son died,

although none of them had ever seen her before; but because her

son had "once worked in the same shop with Pa she thought of him

when she had nowhere to go." The little fellow concluded by

saying that our house was so much bigger than theirs that he

thought we would have more roomfor beds. The old woman herself

said absolutely nothing, but looking on with that gripping fear

of the poorhouse in her eyes, she was a living embodiment of that

dread which is so heartbreaking that the occupants of the County

Infirmary themselves seem scarcely less wretched than those who

are making their last stand against it.

This look was almost more than I could bear for only a few days

before some frightened women had bidden me come quickly to the

house of an old German woman, whom two men from the country

agent's office were attempting to remove to the County Infirmary.

The poor old creature had thrown herself bodily upon a small and

battered chest of drawers and clung there, clutching it so firmly

that it would have been impossible to remove her without also

taking the piece of furniture . She did not weep nor moan nor

indeed make any human sound, but between her broken gasps for

breath she squealed shrilly like a frightened animal caught in a

trap. The little group of women and children gathered at her

door stood aghast at this realization of the black dread which

always clouds the lives of the very poor when work is slack, but

which constantly grows more imminent and threatening as old age

approaches. The neighborhood women and I hastened to make all

sorts of promises as to the support of the old woman and the

country officials, only too glad to be rid of their unhappy duty,

left her to our ministrations. This dread of the poorhouse, the

result of centuries of deterrent Poor Law administration, seemed

to me not without some justification one summer when I found

myself perpetually distressed by the unnecessary idleness and

forlornness of the old women in the Cook County Infirmary, many

of whom I had known in the years when activity was still a

necessity, and when they yet felt bustlingly important. To take

away from an old woman whose life has been spent in household

cares all the foolish little belongings to which her affections

cling and to which her very fingers have become accustomed, is to

take away her last incentive to activity, almost to life itself.

To give an old woman only a chair and a bed, to leave her no

cupboard in which her treasures may be stowed, not only that she

may take them out when she desires occupation, but that their

mind may dwell upon them in moments of revery, is to reduce

living almost beyond the limit of human endurance.

The poor creature who clung so desperately to her chest of

drawers was really clinging to the last remnant of normal

living--a symbol of all she was asked to renounce. For several

years after this summer I invited five or six old women to take a

two weeks' vacation from the poorhouse which was eagerly and even

gayly accepted. Almost all the old men in the County Infirmary

wander away each summer taking their chances for finding food or

shelter and return much refreshed by the little "tramp," but the

old women cannot do this unless they have some help from the

outside, and yet the expenditure of a very little money secures

for them the coveted vacation. I found that a few pennies paid

their car fare into town, a dollar a week procured lodging with

an old acquaintance; assured of two good meals a day in the

Hull-House coffee-house they could count upon numerous cups of

tea among old friends to whom they would airily state that they

had "come out for a little change" and hadn't yet made up their

minds about "going in again for the winter." They thus enjoyed a

two weeks' vacation to the top of their bent and returned with

wondrous tales of their adventures, with which they regaled the

other paupers during the long winter.

The reminiscences of these old women, their shrewd comments upon

life, their sense of having reached a point where they may at

last speak freely with nothing to lose because of their

frankness, makes them often the most delightful of companions. I

recall one of my guests, the mother of many scattered children,

whose one bright spot through all the dreary years had been the

wedding feast of her son Mike,--a feast which had become

transformed through long meditation into the nectar and ambrosia

of the very gods. As a farewell fling before she went "in"

again, we dined together upon chicken pie, but it did not taste

like the "the chicken pie at Mike's wedding" and she was

disappointed after all.

Even death itself sometimes fails to bring the dignity and

serenity which one would fain associate with old age. I recall

the dying hour of one old Scotchwoman whose long struggle to

"keep respectable" had so embittered her that her last words were

gibes and taunts for those who were trying to minister to her.

"So you came in yourself this morning, did you? You only sent

things yesterday. I guess you knew when the doctor was coming.

Don't try to warm my feet with anything but that old jacket that

I've got there; it belonged to my boy who was drowned at sea nigh

thirty years ago, but it's warmer yet with human feelings than

any of your damned charity hot-water bottles." Suddenly the harsh

gasping voice was stilled in death and I awaited the doctor's

coming shaken and horrified.

The lack of municipal regulation already referred to was, in the

early days of Hull-House, parallelled by the inadequacy of the

charitable efforts of the city and an unfounded optimism that

there was no real poverty among us. Twenty years ago there was no

Charity Organization Society in Chicago and the Visiting Nurse

Association had not yet begun its beneficial work, while the

relief societies, although conscientiously administered, were

inadequate in extent and antiquated in method.

As social reformers gave themselves over to discussion of general

principles, so the poor invariably accused poverty itself of their

destruction. I recall a certain Mrs. Moran, who was returning one

rainy day from the office of the county agent with her arms full of

paper bags containing beans and flour which alone lay between her

children and starvation. Although she had no money she boarded a

street car in order to save her booty from complete destruction by

the rain, and as the burst bags dropped "flour on the ladies'

dresses" and ""beans all over the place," she was sharply

reprimanded by the conductor, who was the further exasperated when

he discovered she had no fare. He put her off, as she had hoped he

would, almost in front of Hull-House. She related to us her state

of mind as she stepped off the car and saw the last of her wares

disappearing; she admitted she forgot the proprieties and "cursed a

little," but, curiously enough, she pronounced her malediction, not

against the rain nor the conductor, nor yet against the worthless

husband who had been set up to the city prison, but, true to the

Chicago spirit of the moment, went to the root of the matter and

roundly "cursed poverty."

This spirit of generalization and lack of organization among the

charitable forces of the city was painfully revealed in that

terrible winter after the World's Fair, when the general

financial depression throughout the country was much intensified

in Chicago by the numbers of unemployed stranded at the close of

the exposition. When the first cold weather came the police

stations and the very corridors of the city hall were crowded by

men who could afford no other lodging. They made huge

demonstrations on the lake front, reminding one of the London

gatherings in Trafalgar Square.

It was the winter in which Mr. Stead wrote his indictment of

Chicago. I can vividly recall his visits to Hull-House, some of

them between eleven and twelve o'clock at night, when he would

come in wet and hungry from an investigation of the levee

district, and while he was drinking hot chocolate before an open

fire, would relate in one of his curious monologues, his

experience as an out-of-door laborer standing in line without an

overcoat for two hours in the sleet, that he might have a chance

to sweep the streets; or his adventures with a crook, who mistook

him for one of this own kind and offered him a place as an agent

for a gambling house, which he promptly accepted. Mr. Stead was

much impressed with the mixed goodness in Chicago, the lack of

rectitude in many high places, the simple kindness of the most

wretched to each other. Before he published "If Christ Came to

Chicago" he made his attempt to rally the diverse moral forces of

the city in a huge mass meeting, which resulted in a temporary

organization, later developing into the Civic Federation. I was

a member of the committee of five appointed to carry out the

suggestions made in this remarkable meeting, and or first concern

was to appoint a committee to deal with the unemployed. But when

has a committee ever dealt satisfactorily with the unemployed?

Relief stations were opened in various part of the city,

temporary lodging houses were established, Hull-House undertaking

to lodge the homeless women who could be received nowhere else;

employment stations were opened giving sewing to the women, and

street sweeping for the men was organized. It was in connection

with the latter that the perplexing question of the danger of

permanently lowering wages at such a crisis, in the praiseworthy

effort to bring speedy relief, was brought home to me. I

insisted that it was better to have the men work half a day for

seventy-five cents than a whole day for a dollar, better that

they should earn three dollars in two days than in three days. I

resigned from the street-cleaning committee in despair of making

the rest of the committee understand that, as our real object was

not street cleaning but the help of the unemployed, we must treat

the situation in such wise that the men would not be worse off

when they returned to their normal occupations. The discussion

opened up situations new to me and carried me far afield in

perhaps the most serious economic reading I have ever done.

A beginning also was then made toward a Bureau of Organized

Charities, the main office being put in charge of a young man

recently come from Boston, who lived at Hull-House. But to

employ scientific methods for the first time at such a moment

involved difficulties, and the most painful episode of the winter

came for me from an attempt on my part to conform to carefully

received instructions. A shipping clerk whom I had known for a

long time had lost his place, as so many people had that year,

and came to the relief station established at Hull-House four or

five times to secure help for his family. I told him one day of

the opportunity for work on the drainage canal and intimated that

if any employment were obtainable, he ought to exhaust that

possibility before asking for help. The man replied that he had

always worked indoors and that he could not endure outside work

in winter. I am grateful to remember that I was too uncertain to

be severe, although I held to my instructions. He did not come

again for relief, but worked for two days digging on the canal,

where he contracted pneumonia and died a week later. I have

never lost trace of the two little children he left behind him,

although I cannot see them without a bitter consciousness that it

was at their expense I learned that life cannot be administered

by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a

man's difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life

and habits as a whole; and that to treat an isolated episode is

almost sure to invite blundering.

It was also during this winter that I became permanently

impressed with the kindness of the poor to each other; the woman

who lives upstairs will willingly share her breakfast with the

family below because she knows they "are hard up"; the man who

boarded with them last winter will give a month's rent because he

knows the father of the family is out of work; the baker across

the street who is fast being pushed to the wall by his downtown

competitors, will send across three loaves of stale bread because

he has seen the children looking longingly into his window and

suspects they are hungry. There are also the families who,

during times of business depression, are obliged to seek help

from the county or some benevolent society, but who are

themselves most anxious not to be confounded with the pauper

class, with whom indeed they do not in the least belong. Charles

Booth, in his brilliant chapter on the unemployed, expresses

regret that the problems of the working class are so often

confounded with the problems of the inefficient and the idle,

that although working people live in the same street with those

in need of charity, to thus confound two problems is to render

the solution of both impossible.

I remember one family in which the father had been out of work

for this same winter, most of the furniture had been pawned, and

as the worn-out shoes could not be replaced the children could

not go to school. The mother was ill and barely able to come for

the supplies and medicines. Two years later she invited me to

supper one Sunday evening in the little home which had been

completely restored, and she gave as a reason for the invitation

that she couldn't bear to have me remember them as they had been

during that one winter, which she insisted had been unique in her

twelve years of married life. She said that it was as if she had

met me, not as I am ordinarily, but as I should appear misshapen

with rheumatism or with a face distorted by neuralgic pain; that

it was not fair to judge poor people that way. She perhaps

unconsciously illustrated the difference between the

relief-station relation to the poor and the Settlement relation

to its neighbors, the latter wishing to know them through all the

varying conditions of life, to stand by when they are in

distress, but by no means to drop intercourse with them when

normal prosperity has returned, enabling the relation to become

more social and free from economic disturbance.

Possibly something of the same effort has to be made within the

Settlement itself to keep its own sense of proportion in regard

to the relation of the crowded city quarter to the rest of the

country. It was in the spring following this terrible winter,

during a journey to meet lecture engagements in California, that

I found myself amazed at the large stretches of open country and

prosperous towns through which we passed day by day, whose

existence I had quite forgotten.

In the latter part of the summer of 1895, I served as a member on

a commission appointed by the mayor of Chicago, to investigate

conditions in the county poorhouse, public attention having

become centered on it through one of those distressing stories,

which exaggerates the wrong in a public institution while at the

same time it reveals conditions which need to be rectified.

However necessary publicity is for securing reformed

administration, however useful such exposures may be for

political purposes, the whole is attended by such a waste of the

most precious human emotions, by such a tearing of living tissue,

that it can scarcely be endured. Every time I entered Hull-House

during the days of the investigation, I would find waiting for me

from twenty to thirty people whose friends and relatives were in

the suspected institution, all in such acute distress of mind

that to see them was to look upon the victims of deliberate

torture. In most cases my visitor would state that it seemed

impossible to put their invalids in any other place, but if these

stories were true, something must be done. Many of the patients

were taken out only to be returned after a few days or weeks to

meet the sullen hostility of their attendants and with their own

attitude changed from confidence to timidity and alarm.

This piteous dependence of the poor upon the good will of public

officials was made clear to us in an early experience with a

peasant woman straight from the fields of Germany, whom we met

during our first six months at Hull-House. Her four years in

America had been spent in patiently carrying water up and down

two flights of stairs, and in washing the heavy flannel suits of

iron foundry workers. For this her pay had averaged thirty-five

cents a day. Three of her daughters had fallen victims to the

vice of the city. The mother was bewildered and distressed, but

understood nothing. We were able to induce the betrayer of one

daughter to marry her; the second, after a tedious lawsuit,

supported his child; with the third we were able to do nothing.

This woman is now living with her family in a little house

seventeen miles from the city. She has made two payments on her

land and is a lesson to all beholders as she pastures her cow up

and down the railroad tracks and makes money from her ten acres.

She did not need charity for she had an immense capacity for hard

work, but she sadly needed the service of the State's attorney

office, enforcing the laws designed for the protection of such

girls as her daughters.

We early found ourselves spending many hours in efforts to secure

support for deserted women, insurance for bewildered widows,

damages for injured operators, furniture from the clutches of the

installment store. The Settlement is valuable as an information

and interpretation bureau. It constantly acts between the

various institutions of the city and the people for whose benefit

these institutions were erected. The hospitals, the county

agencies, and State asylums are often but vague rumors to the

people who need them most. Another function of the Settlement to

its neighborhood resembles that of the big brother whose mere

presence on the playground protects the little one from bullies.

We early learned to know the children of hard-driven mothers who

went out to work all day, sometimes leaving the little things in

the casual care of a neighbor, but often locking them into their

tenement rooms. The first three crippled children we encountered

in the neighborhood had all been injured while their mothers were

at work: one had fallen out of a third-story window, another had

been burned, and the third had a curved spine due to the fact that

for three years he had been tied all day long to the leg of the

kitchen table, only released at noon by his older brother who

hastily ran in from a neighboring factory to share his lunch with

him. When the hot weather came the restless children could not

brook the confinement of the stuffy rooms, and, as it was not

considered safe to leave the doors open because of sneak thieves,

many of the children were locked out. During our first summer an

increasing number of these poor little mites would wander into the

cool hallway of Hull-House. We kept them there and fed them at

noon, in return for which we were sometimes offered a hot penny

which had been held in a tight little fist "ever since mother left

this morning, to buy something to eat with." Out of kindergarten

hours our little guests noisily enjoyed the hospitality of our

bedrooms under the so-called care of any resident who volunteered

to keep an eye on them, but later they were moved into a

neighboring apartment under more systematic supervision.

Hull-House was thus committed to a day nursery which we sustained

for sixteen years first in a little cottage on a side street and

then in a building designed for its use called the Children's

House. It is now carried on by the United Charities of Chicago

in a finely equipped building on our block, where the immigrant

mothers are cared for as well as the children, and where they are

taught the things which will make life in America more possible.

Our early day nursery brought us into natural relations with the

poorest women of the neighborhood, many of whom were bearing the

burden of dissolute and incompetent husbands in addition to the

support of their children. Some of them presented an impressive

manifestation of that miracle of affection which outlives abuse,

neglect, and crime,--the affection which cannot be plucked from

the heart where it has lived, although it may serve only to

torture and torment. "Has your husband come back?" you inquire

of Mrs. S., whom you have known for eight years as an overworked

woman bringing her three delicate children every morning to the

nursery; she is bent under the double burden of earning the money

which supports them and giving them the tender care which alone

keeps them alive. The oldest two children have at last gone to

work, and Mrs. S. has allowed herself the luxury of staying at

home two days a week. And now the worthless husband is back

again--the "gentlemanly gambler" type who, through all

vicissitudes, manages to present a white shirtfront and a gold

watch to the world, but who is dissolute, idle and extravagant.

You dread to think how much his presence will increase the drain

upon the family exchequer, and you know that he stayed away until

he was certain that the children were old enough to earn money

for his luxuries. Mrs. S. does not pretend to take his return

lightly, but she replies in all seriousness and simplicity, "You

know my feeling for him has never changed. You may think me

foolish, but I was always proud of his good looks and educated

appearance. I was lonely and homesick during those eight years

when the children were little and needed so much doctoring, but I

could never bring myself to feel hard toward him, and I used to

pray the good Lord to keep him from harm and bring him back to

us; so, of course, I'm thankful now." She passes on with a

dignity which gives one a new sense of the security of affection.

I recall a similar case of a woman who had supported her three

children for five years, during which time her dissolute husband

constantly demanded money for drink and kept her perpetually

worried and intimidated. One Saturday, before the "blessed

Easter," he came back from a long debauch, ragged and filthy, but

in a state of lachrymose repentance. The poor wife received him

as a returned prodigal, believed that his remorse would prove

lasting, and felt sure that if she and the children went to

church with him on Easter Sunday and he could be induced to take

the pledge before the priest, all their troubles would be ended.

After hours of vigorous effort and the expenditure of all her

savings, he finally sat on the front doorstep the morning of

Easter Sunday, bathed, shaved and arrayed in a fine new suit of

clothes. She left him sitting there in the reluctant spring

sunshine while she finished washing and dressing the children.

When she finally opened the front door with the three shining

children that they might all set forth together, the returned

prodigal had disappeared, and was not seen again until midnight,

when he came back in a glorious state of intoxication from the

proceeds of his pawned clothes and clad once more in the dingiest

attire. She took him in without comment, only to begin again the

wretched cycle. There were of course instances of the criminal

husband as well as of the merely vicious. I recall one woman

who, during seven years, never missed a visiting day at the

penitentiary when she might see her husband, and whose little

children in the nursery proudly reported the messages from father

with no notion that he was in disgrace, so absolutely did they

reflect the gallant spirit of their mother.

While one was filled with admiration for these heroic women,

something was also to be said for some of the husbands, for the

sorry men who, for one reason or another, had failed in the

struggle of life. Sometimes this failure was purely economic and

the men were competent to give the children, whom they were not

able to support, the care and guidance and even education which

were of the highest value. Only a few months ago I met upon the

street one of the early nursery mothers who for five years had

been living in another part of the city, and in response to my

query as to the welfare of her five children, she bitterly

replied, "All of them except Mary have been arrested at one time

or another, thank you." In reply to my remark that I thought her

husband had always had such admirable control over them, she

burst out, "That has been the whole trouble. I got tired taking

care of him and didn't believe that his laziness was all due to

his health, as he said, so I left him and said that I would

support the children, but not him. From that minute the trouble

with the four boys began. I never knew what they were doing, and

after every sort of a scrape I finally put Jack and the twins

into institutions where I pay for them. Joe has gone to work at

last, but with a disgraceful record behind him. I tell you I

ain't so sure that because a woman can make big money that she

can be both father and mother to her children."

As I walked on, I could but wonder in which particular we are

most stupid--to judge a man's worth so solely by his wage-earning

capacity that a good wife feels justified in leaving him, or in

holding fast to that wretched delusion that a woman can both

support and nurture her children.

One of the most piteous revelations of the futility of the latter

attempt came to me through the mother of "Goosie," as the

children for years called a little boy who, because he was

brought to the nursery wrapped up in his mother's shawl, always

had his hair filled with the down and small feathers from the

feather brush factory where she worked. One March morning,

Goosie's mother was hanging out the washing on a shed roof before

she left for the factory. Five-year-old Goosie was trotting at

her heels handing her clothes pins, when he was suddenly blown

off the roof by the high wind into the alley below. His neck was

broken by the fall, and as he lay piteous and limp on a pile of

frozen refuse, his mother cheerily called him to "climb up

again," so confident do overworked mothers become that their

children cannot get hurt. After the funeral, as the poor mother

sat in the nursery postponing the moment when she must go back to

her empty rooms, I asked her, in a futile effort to be of

comfort, if there was anything more we could do for her. The

overworked, sorrow-stricken woman looked up and replied, "If you

could give me my wages for to-morrow, I would not go to work in

the factory at all. I would like to stay at home all day and

hold the baby. Goosie was always asking me to take him and I

never had any time." This statement revealed the condition of

many nursery mothers who are obliged to forego the joys and

solaces which belong to even the most poverty-stricken. The long

hours of factory labor necessary for earning the support of a

child leave no time for the tender care and caressing which may

enrich the life of the most piteous baby.

With all of the efforts made by modern society to nurture and

educate the young, how stupid it is to permit the mothers of

young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the

world! It is curiously inconsistent that with the emphasis which

this generation has placed upon the mother and upon the

prolongation of infancy, we constantly allow the waste of this

most precious material. I cannot recall without indignation a

recent experience. I was detained late one evening in an office

building by a prolonged committee meeting of the Board of

Education. As I came out at eleven o'clock, I met in the

corridor of the fourteenth floor a woman whom I knew, on her

knees scrubbing the marble tiling. As she straightened up to

greet me, she seemed so wet from her feet up to her chin, that I

hastily inquired the cause. Her reply was that she left home at

five o'clock every night and had no opportunity for six hours to

nurse her baby. Her mother's milk mingled with the very water

with which she scrubbed the floors until she should return at

midnight, heated and exhausted, to feed her screaming child with

what remained within her breasts.

These are only a few of the problems connected with the lives of

the poorest people with whom the residents in a Settlement are

constantly brought in contact.

I cannot close this chapter without a reference to that gallant

company of men and women among whom my acquaintance is so large,

who are fairly indifferent to starvation itself because of their

preoccupation with higher ends. Among them are visionaries and

enthusiasts, unsuccessful artists, writers, and reformers. For

many years at Hull-House, we knew a well-bred German woman who was

completely absorbed in the experiment of expressing musical

phrases and melodies by means of colors. Because she was small

and deformed, she stowed herself into her trunk every night, where

she slept on a canvas stretched hammock-wise from the four corners

and her food was of the meagerest; nevertheless if a visitor left

an offering upon her table, it was largely spent for apparatus or

delicately colored silk floss, with which to pursue the

fascinating experiment. Another sadly crippled old woman, the

widow of a sea captain, although living almost exclusively upon

malted milk tablets as affording a cheap form of prepared food,

was always eager to talk of the beautiful illuminated manuscripts

she had sought out in her travels and to show specimens of her own

work as an illuminator. Still another of these impressive old

women was an inveterate inventor. Although she had seen prosperous

days in England, when we knew her, she subsisted largely upon the

samples given away at the demonstration counters of the department

stores, and on bits of food which she cooked on a coal shovel in

the furnace of the apartment house whose basement back room she

occupied. Although her inventions were not practicable, various

experts to whom they were submitted always pronounced them

suggestive and ingenious. I once saw her receive this

complimentary verdict--"this ribbon to stick in her coat"--with

such dignity and gravity that the words of condolence for her

financial disappointment, died upon my lips.

These indomitable souls are but three out of many whom I might

instance to prove that those who are handicapped in the race for

life's goods, sometimes play a magnificent trick upon the jade,

life herself, by ceasing to know whether or not they possess any

of her tawdry goods and chattels.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer Flo Carrierre.

"I am a full-time staff at University, continuing my studies on a

part-time basis. I volunteer in the community, and thank you for

giving me the opportunity to make a difference in the Celebration

of Women Writers by contributing time to enter book

chapters."--Flo Carrierre.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter IX: A Decade of Economic Discussion." by Jane Addams

(1860-1935) From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with

Autobiographical Notes. by Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan

Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 177-197.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

CHAPTER IX

A DECADE OF ECONOMIC DISCUSSION

The Hull-House residents were often bewildered by the desire for

constant discussion which characterized Chicago twenty years ago,

for although the residents in the early Settlements were in many

cases young persons who had sought relief from the consciousness

of social maladjustment in the "anodyne of work" afforded by

philanthropic and civic activities, their former experiences had

not thrown them into company with radicals. The decade between

1890-1900 was, in Chicago, a period of propaganda as over against

constructive social effort; the moment for marching and carrying

banners, for stating general principles and making a

demonstration, rather than the time for uncovering the situation

and for providing the legal measures and the civic organization

through which new social hopes might make themselves felt.

When Hull-House was established in 1889, the events of the

Haymarket riot were already two years old, but during that time

Chicago had apparently gone through the first period of

repressive measures, and in the winter of 1889-1890, by the

advice and with the active participation of its leading citizens,

the city had reached the conclusion that the only cure for the

acts of anarchy was free speech and an open discussion of the

ills of which the opponents of government complained. Great open

meetings were held every Sunday evening in the recital hall of

the then new auditorium, presided over by such representative

citizens as Lyman Gage, and every possible shade of opinion was

freely expressed. A man who spoke constantly at these meetings

used to be pointed out to the visiting stranger as one who had

been involved with the group of convicted anarchists, and who

doubtless would have been arrested and tried, but for the

accident of his having been in Milwaukee when the explosion

occurred. One cannot imagine such meetings being held in Chicago

to-day, nor that such a man should be encouraged to raise his

voice in a public assemblage presided over by a leading banker.

It is hard to tell just what change has come over our philosophy

or over the minds of those citizens who were then convinced that

if these conferences had been established earlier, the Haymarket

riot and all its sensational results might have been avoided.

At any rate, there seemed a further need for smaller clubs, where

men who differed widely in their social theories might meet for

discussion, where representatives of the various economic schools

might modify each other, and at least learn tolerance and the

futility of endeavoring to convince all the world of the truth of

one position. Fanaticism is engendered only when men, finding no

contradiction to their theories, at last believe that the very

universe lends itself as an exemplification of one point of view.

"The Working People's Social Science Club" was organized at

Hull-House in the spring of 1890 by an English workingman, and

for seven years it held a weekly meeting. At eight o'clock every

Wednesday night the secretary called to order from forty to one

hundred people; a chairman for the evening was elected, a speaker

was introduced who was allowed to talk until nine o'clock; his

subject was then thrown open to discussion and a lively debate

ensued until ten o'clock, at which hour the meeting was declared

adjourned. The enthusiasm of this club seldom lagged. Its zest

for discussion was unceasing, and any attempt to turn it into a

study or reading club always met with the strong disapprobation

of the members.

In these weekly discussions in the Hull-House drawing room

everything was thrown back upon general principles and all

discussion save that which "went to the root of things," was

impatiently discarded as an unworthy, halfway measure. I recall

one evening in this club when an exasperated member had thrown out

the statement that "Mr. B. believes that socialism will cure the

toothache." Mr. B. promptly rose to his feet and said that it

certainly would, that when every child's teeth were systematically

cared for from the beginning, toothaches would disappear from the

face of the earth, belonging, as it did, to the extinct

competitive order, as the black plague had disappeared from the

earth with the ill-regulated feudal regime of the Middle Ages.

"But," he added, "why do we spend time discussing trifles like the

toothache when great social changes are to be considered which

will of themselves reform these minor ills?" Even the man who had

been humorous fell into the solemn tone of the gathering. It was,

perhaps, here that the socialist surpassed everyone else in the

fervor of economic discussion. He was usually a German or a

Russian, with a turn for logical presentation, who saw in the

concentration of capital and the growth of monopolies an

inevitable transition to the socialist state. He pointed out that

the concentration of capital in fewer hands but increased the mass

of those whose interests were opposed to a maintenance of its

power, and vastly simplified its final absorption by the

community; that monopoly "when it is finished doth bring forth

socialism." Opposite to him, springing up in every discussion was

the individualist, or, as the socialist called him, the anarchist,

who insisted that we shall never secure just human relations until

we have equality of opportunity; that the sole function of the

state is to maintain the freedom of each, guarded by the like

freedom of all, in order that each man may be able to work out the

problems of his own existence.

That first winter was within three years of the Henry George

campaign in New York, when his adherents all over the country

were carrying on a successful and effective propaganda. When

Henry George himself came to Hull-House one Sunday afternoon, the

gymnasium which was already crowded with men to hear Father

Huntington's address on "Why should a free thinker believe in

Christ," fairly rocked on its foundations under the enthusiastic

and prolonged applause which greeted this great leader and

constantly interrupted his stirring address, filled, as all of

his speeches were, with high moral enthusiasm and humanitarian

fervor. Of the remarkable congresses held in connection with the

World's Fair, perhaps those inaugurated by the advocates of

single tax exceeded all others in vital enthusiasm. It was

possibly significant that all discussions in the department of

social science had to be organized by partisans in separate

groups. The very committee itself on social science composed of

Chicago citizens, of whom I was one, changed from week to week,

as partisan members had their feelings hurt because their cause

did not receive "due recognition." And yet in the same building

adherents of the most diverse religious creeds, eastern and

western, met in amity and good fellowship. Did it perhaps

indicate that their presentation of the eternal problems of life

were cast in an older and less sensitive mold than this

presentation in terms of social experience, or was it rather that

the new social science was not yet a science at all but merely a

name under cover of which we might discuss the perplexing

problems of the industrial situation? Certainly the difficulties

of our committee were not minimized by the fact that the then new

science of sociology had not yet defined its own field. The

University of Chicago, opened only the year before the World's

Fair, was the first great institution of learning to institute a

department of sociology.

In the meantime the Hull-House Social Science Club grew in

numbers and fervor as various distinguished people who were

visiting the World's Fair came to address it. I recall a

brilliant Frenchwoman who was filled with amazement because one

of the shabbiest men reflected a reading of Schopenhauer. She

considered the statement of another member most remarkable--that

when he saw a carriage driving through the streets occupied by a

capitalist who was no longer even an entrepreneur, he felt quite

as sure that his days were numbered and that his very lack of

function to society would speedily bring him to extinction, as he

did when he saw a drunkard reeling along the same street.

The club at any rate convinced the residents that no one so

poignantly realizes the failures in the social structure as the

man at the bottom, who has been most directly in contact with

those failures and has suffered most. I recall the shrewd

comments of a certain sailor who had known the disinherited in

every country; of a Russian who had served his term in Siberia;

of an old Irishman who called himself an atheist but who in

moments of excitement always blamed the good Lord for "setting

supinely" when the world was so horribly out of joint.

It was doubtless owing largely to this club that Hull-House

contracted its early reputation for radicalism. Visitors refused

to distinguish between the sentiments expressed by its members in

the heat of discussion and the opinions held by the residents

themselves. At that moment in Chicago the radical of every shade

of opinion was vigorous and dogmatic; of the sort that could not

resign himself to the slow march of human improvement; of the

type who knew exactly "in what part of the world Utopia standeth."

During this decade Chicago seemed divided into two classes; those

who held that "business is business" and who were therefore

annoyed at the very notion of social control, and the radicals,

who claimed that nothing could be done to really moralize the

industrial situation until society should be reorganized.

A Settlement is above all a place for enthusiasms, a spot to which

those who have a passion for the equalization of human joys and

opportunities are early attracted. It is this type of mind which

is in itself so often obnoxious to the man of conquering business

faculty, to whom the practical world of affairs seems so supremely

rational that he would never vote to change the type of it even if

he could. The man of social enthusiasm is to him an annoyance and

an affront. He does not like to hear him talk and considers him

per se "unsafe." Such a business man would admit, as an abstract

proposition, that society is susceptible of modification and would

even agree that all human institutions imply progressive

development, but at the same time he deeply distrusts those who

seek to reform existing conditions. There is a certain

common-sense foundation for this distrust, for too often the

reformer is the rebel who defies things as they are, because of

the restraints which they impose upon his individual desires

rather than because of the general defects of the system. When

such a rebel poses for a reformer, his shortcomings are heralded

to the world, and his downfall is cherished as an awful warning to

those who refuse to worship "the god of things as they are."

And yet as I recall the members of this early club, even those

who talked the most and the least rationally, seem to me to have

been particularly kindly and "safe." The most pronounced

anarchist among them has long since become a convert to a

religious sect, holding Buddhistic tenets which imply little food

and a distrust of all action; he has become a wraith of his

former self but he still retains his kindly smile.

In the discussion of these themes, Hull-House was of course quite

as much under the suspicion of one side as the other. I remember

one night when I addressed a club of secularists, which met at the

corner of South Halsted and Madison streets, a rough-looking man

called out: "You are all right now, but, mark my words, when you

are subsidized by the millionaires, you will be afraid to talk like

this." The defense of free speech was a sensitive point with me,

and I quickly replied that while I did not intend to be subsidized

by millionaires, neither did I propose to be bullied by workingmen,

and that I should state my honest opinion without consulting either

of them. To my surprise, the audience of radicals broke into

applause, and the discussion turned upon the need of resisting

tyranny wherever found, if democratic institutions were to endure.

This desire to bear independent witness to social righteousness

often resulted in a sense of compromise difficult to endure, and at

many times it seemed to me that we were destined to alienate

everybody. I should have been most grateful at that time to accept

the tenets of socialism, and I conscientiously made my effort, both

by reading and by many discussions with the comrades. I found that

I could easily give an affirmative answer to the heated question

"Don't you see that just as the hand mill created a society with a

feudal lord, so the steam mill creates a society with an industrial

capitalist?" But it was a little harder to give an affirmative

reply to the proposition that the social relation thus established

proceeds to create principles, ideas and categories as merely

historical and transitory products.

Of course I use the term "socialism" technically and do not wish

to confuse it with the growing sensitiveness which recognizes

that no personal comfort, nor individual development can

compensate a man for the misery of his neighbors, nor with the

increasing conviction that social arrangements can be transformed

through man's conscious and deliberate effort. Such a definition

would not have been accepted for a moment by the Russians, who

then dominated the socialist party in Chicago and among whom a

crude interpretation of the class conflict was the test of faith.

During those first years on Halsted Street nothing was more

painfully clear than the fact that pliable human nature is

relentlessly pressed upon by its physical environment. I saw

nowhere a more devoted effort to understand and relieve that

heavy pressure than the socialists were making, and I should have

been glad to have had the comradeship of that gallant company had

they not firmly insisted that fellowship depends upon identity of

creed. They repudiated similarity of aim and social sympathy as

tests which were much too loose and wavering as they did that

vague socialism which for thousands has come to be a philosophy

or rather religion embodying the hope of the world and the

protection of all who suffer.

I also longed for the comfort of a definite social creed, which

should afford at one and the same time an explanation of the

social chaos and the logical steps towards its better ordering. I

came to have an exaggerated sense of responsibility for the

poverty in the midst of which I was living and which the

socialists constantly forced me to defend. My plight was not

unlike that which might have resulted in my old days of

skepticism regarding foreordination, had I then been compelled to

defend the confusion arising from the clashing of free wills as

an alternative to an acceptance of the doctrine. Another

difficulty in the way of accepting this economic determinism, so

baldly dependent upon the theory of class consciousness,

constantly arose when I lectured in country towns and there had

opportunities to read human documents of prosperous people as

well as those of my neighbors who were crowded into the city. The

former were stoutly unconscious of any classes in America, and

the class consciousness of the immigrants was fast being broken

into by the necessity for making new and unprecedented

connections in the industrial life all about them.

In the meantime, although many men of many minds met constantly

at our conferences, it was amazing to find the incorrigible good

nature which prevailed. Radicals are accustomed to hot

discussion and sharp differences of opinion and take it all in

the day's work. I recall that the secretary of the Hull-House

Social Science Club at the anniversary of the seventh year of its

existence read a report in which he stated that, so far as he

could remember, but twice during that time had a speaker lost his

temper, and in each case it had been a college professor who

"wasn't accustomed to being talked back to."

He also added that but once had all the club members united in

applauding the same speaker; only Samuel Jones, who afterwards

became the "golden rule" mayor of Toledo, had been able to

overcome all their dogmatic differences, when he had set forth a

plan of endowing a group of workingmen with a factory plant and a

working capital for experimentation in hours and wages, quite as

groups of scholars are endowed for research.

Chicago continued to devote much time to economic discussion and

remained in a state of youthful glamour throughout the nineties.

I recall a young Methodist minister who, in order to free his

denomination from any entanglement in his discussion of the

economic and social situation, moved from his church building

into a neighboring hall. The congregation and many other people

followed him there, and he later took to the street corners

because he found that the shabbiest men liked that best.

Professor Herron filled to overflowing a downtown hall every noon

with a series of talks entitled "Between Caesar and Jesus"--an

attempt to apply the teachings of the Gospel to the situations of

modern commerce. A half dozen publications edited with some

ability and much moral enthusiasm have passed away, perhaps

because they represented pamphleteering rather than journalism

and came to a natural end when the situation changed. Certainly

their editors suffered criticism and poverty on behalf of the

causes which they represented.

Trades-unionists, unless they were also socialists, were not

prominent in those economic discussions, although they were

steadily making an effort to bring order into the unnecessary

industrial confusion. They belonged to the second of the two

classes into which Mill divides all those who are dissatisfied

with human life as it is, and whose feelings are wholly identified

with its radical amendment. He states that the thoughts of one

class are in the region of ultimate aims, of "the highest ideals

of human life," while the thoughts of the other are in the region

of the "immediately useful, and practically attainable."

The meetings of our Social Science Club were carried on by men of

the former class, many of them with a strong religious bias who

constantly challenged the Church to assuage the human spirit thus

torn and bruised "in the tumult of a time disconsolate." These

men were so serious in their demand for religious fellowship, and

several young clergymen were so ready to respond to the appeal,

that various meetings were arranged at Hull-House, in which a

group of people met together to consider the social question, not

in a spirit of discussion, but in prayer and meditation. These

clergymen were making heroic efforts to induce their churches to

formally consider the labor situation, and during the years which

have elapsed since then, many denominations of the Christian

Church have organized labor committees; but at that time there

was nothing of the sort beyond the society in the established

Church of England "to consider the conditions of labor."

During that decade even the most devoted of that pioneer church

society failed to formulate the fervid desire for juster social

conditions into anything more convincing than a literary statement,

and the Christian Socialists, at least when the American branch

held its annual meeting at Hull-House, afforded but a striking

portrayal of that "between-age mood" in which so many of our

religious contemporaries are forced to live. I remember that I

received the same impression when I attended a meeting called by

the canon of an English cathedral to discuss the relation of the

Church to labor. The men quickly indicted the cathedral for its

uselessness, and the canon asked them what in their minds should be

its future. The men promptly replied that any new social order

would wish, of course, to preserve beautiful historic buildings,

that although they would dismiss the bishop and all the clergy,

they would want to retain one or two scholars as custodians and

interpreters. "And what next?" the imperturbable ecclesiastic

asked. "We would democratize it," replied the men. But when it

came to a more detailed description of such an undertaking, the

discussion broke down into a dozen bits, although illuminated by

much shrewd wisdom and affording a clue, perhaps as to the

destruction of the bishop's palace by the citizens of this same

town, who had attacked it as a symbol of swollen prosperity during

the bread riots of the earlier part of the century.

On the other hand the workingmen who continue to demand help from

the Church thereby acknowledge their kinship, as does the son who

continues to ask bread from the father who gives him a stone. I

recall an incident connected with a prolonged strike in Chicago

on the part of the typographical unions for an eight-hour day.

The strike had been conducted in a most orderly manner and the

union men, convinced of the justice of their cause, had felt

aggrieved because one of the religious publishing houses in

Chicago had constantly opposed them. Some of the younger

clergymen of the denominations who were friendly to the strikers'

cause came to a luncheon at Hull-House, where the situation was

discussed by the representatives of all sides. The clergymen,

becoming much interested in the idealism with which an officer of

the State Federation of Labor presented the cause, drew from him

the story of his search for fraternal relation: he said that at

fourteen years of age he had joined a church, hoping to find it

there; he had later become a member of many fraternal

organizations and mutual benefit societies, and, although much

impressed by their rituals, he was disappointed in the actual

fraternity. He had finally found, so it seemed to him, in the

cause of organized labor, what these other organizations had

failed to give him--an opportunity for sacrificial effort.

Chicago thus took a decade to discuss the problems inherent in

the present industrial organization and to consider what might be

done, not so much against deliberate aggression as against brutal

confusion and neglect; quite as the youth of promise passed

through a mist of rose-colored hope before he settles in the land

of achievement where he becomes all too dull and literal minded.

And yet as I hastily review the decade in Chicago which followed

this one given over to discussion, the actual attainment of these

early hopes, so far as they have been realized at all, seem to

have come from men of affairs rather than from those given to

speculation. Was the whole decade of discussion an illustration

of that striking fact which has been likened to the changing of

swords in Hamlet; that the abstract minds at length yield to the

inevitable or at least grow less ardent in their propaganda,

while the concrete minds, dealing constantly with daily affairs,

in the end demonstrate the reality of abstract notions?

I remember when Frederick Harrison visited Hull-House that I was

much disappointed to find that the Positivists had not made their

ardor for humanity a more potent factor in the English social

movement, as I was surprised during a visit from John Morley to

find that he, representing perhaps the type of man whom political

life seemed to have pulled away from the ideals of his youth, had

yet been such a champion of democracy in the full tide of

reaction. My observations were much too superficial to be of

value and certainly both men were well grounded in philosophy and

theory of social reform and had long before carefully formulated

their principles, as the new English Labor Party, which is

destined to break up the reactionary period, is now being created

by another set of theorists. There were certainly moments during

the heated discussions of this decade when nothing seemed so

important as right theory: this was borne in upon me one brilliant

evening at Hull-House when Benjamin Kidd, author of the much-read

"Social Evolution," was pitted against Victor Berger of Milwaukee,

even then considered a rising man in the Socialist Party.

At any rate the residents of Hull-House discovered that while

their first impact with city poverty allied them to groups given

over to discussion of social theories , their sober efforts to

heal neighborhood ills allied them to general public movements

which were without challenging creeds. But while we discovered

that we most easily secured the smallest of much-needed

improvements by attaching our efforts to those of organized

bodies, nevertheless these very organizations would have been

impossible, had not the public conscience been aroused and the

community sensibility quickened by these same ardent theorists.

As I review these very first impressions of the workers in

unskilled industries, living in a depressed quarter of the city,

I realize how easy it was for us to see exceptional cases of

hardship as typical of the average lot, and yet, in spite of

alleviating philanthropy and labor legislation, the indictment of

Tolstoy applied to Moscow thirty years ago still fits every

American city: "Wherever we may live, if we draw a circle around

us of a hundred thousand, or a thousand, or even of ten miles

circumference, and look at the lives of those men and women who

are inside our circle, we shall find half-starved children, old

people, pregnant women, sick and weak persons, working beyond

their strength, who have neither food nor rest enough to support

them, and who, for this reason, die before their time; we shall

see others, full grown, who are injured and needlessly killed by

dangerous and hurtful tasks."

As the American city is awakening to self-consciousness, it

slowly perceives the civic significance of these industrial

conditions, and perhaps Chicago has been foremost in the effort

to connect the unregulated overgrowth of the huge centers of

population, with the astonishingly rapid development of

industrial enterprises; quite as Chicago was foremost to carry on

the preliminary discussion through which a basis was laid for

likemindedness and the coordination of diverse wills. I remember

an astute English visitor, who had been a guest in a score of

American cities, observed that it was hard to understand the

local pride he constantly encountered; for in spite of the

boasting on the part of leading citizens in the western, eastern,

and southern towns, all American cities seemed to him essentially

alike and all equally the results of an industry totally

unregulated by well-considered legislation.

I am inclined to think that perhaps all this general discussion

was inevitable in connection with the early Settlements, as they

in turn were the inevitable result of theories of social reform,

which in their full enthusiasm reached America by way of England,

only in the last decade of the century. There must have been

tough fiber somewhere; for, although the residents of Hull-House

were often baffled by the radicalism within the Social Science

Club and harassed by the criticism from outside, we still

continued to believe that such discussion should be carried on,

for if the Settlement seeks its expression through social

activity, it must learn the difference between mere social unrest

and spiritual impulse.

The group of Hull-House residents, which by the end of the decade

comprised twenty-five, differed widely in social beliefs, from the

girl direct from the country who looked upon all social unrest as

mere anarchy, to the resident, who had become a socialist when a

student in Zurich, and who had long before translated from the

German Engel's "Conditions of the Working Class in England,"

although at this time she had been read out of the Socialist Party

because the Russian and German Impossibilists suspected her fluent

English, as she always lightly explained. Although thus diversified

in social beliefs, the residents became solidly united through our

mutual experience in an industrial quarter, and we became not only

convinced of the need for social control and protective legislation

but also of the value of this preliminary argument.

This decade of discussion between 1890 and 1900 already seems

remote from the spirit of Chicago of to-day. So far as I have been

able to reproduce this earlier period, it must reflect the

essential provisionality of everything; "the perpetual moving on to

something future which shall supersede the present," that paramount

impression of life itself, which affords us at one and the same

time, ground for despair and for endless and varied anticipation.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer Diana Camden.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration ofWomen Writers]

"Chapter X: Pioneer Labor Legislation in Illinois by Jane Addams

(1860-1935)

From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by

Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp.

198-230.

[Editor: Mary MarkOckerbloom]

CHAPTER X

PIONEER LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS

Our very first Christmas at Hull-House, when we as yet knew

nothing of child labor, a number of little girls refused the

candy which was offered them as part of the Christmas good cheer,

saying simply that they "worked in a candy factory and could not

bear the sight of it." We discovered that for six weeks they had

worked from seven in the morning until nine at night, and they

were exhausted as well as satiated. The sharp consciousness of

stern economic conditions was thus thrust upon us in the midst of

the season of good will.

During the same winter three boys from a Hull-House club were

injured at one machine in a neighboring factory for lack of a

guard which would have cost but a few dollars. When the injury of

one of these boys resulted in his death, we felt quite sure that

the owners of the factory would share our horror and remorse, and

that they would do everything possible to prevent the recurrence

of such a tragedy. To our surprise they did nothing whatever, and

I made my first acquaintance then with those pathetic documents

signed by the parents of working children, that they will make no

claim for damages resulting from "carelessness."

The visits we made in the neighborhood constantly discovered

women sewing upon sweatshop work, and often they were assisted by

incredibly small children. I remember a little girl of four who

pulled out basting threads hour after hour, sitting on a stool at

the feet of her Bohemian mother, a little bunch of human misery.

But even for that there was no legal redress, for the only

child-labor law in Illinois, with any provision for enforcement,

had been secured by the coal miners' unions, and was confined to

children employed in mines.

We learned to know many families in which the working children

contributed to the support of their parents, not only because

they spoke English better than the older immigrants and were

willing to take lower wages, but because their parents gradually

found it easy to live upon their earnings. A South Italian

peasant who has picked olives and packed oranges from his

toddling babyhood cannot see at once the difference between the

outdoor healthy work which he had performed in the varying

seasons, and the long hours of monotonous factory life which his

child encounters when he goes to work in Chicago. An Italian

father came to us in great grief over the death of his eldest

child, a little girl of twelve, who had brought the largest wages

into the family fund. In the midst of his genuine sorrow he

said: "She was the oldest kid I had. Now I shall have to go back

to work again until the next one is able to take care of me." The

man was only thirty-three and had hoped to retire from work at

least during the winters. No foreman cared to have him in a

factory, untrained and unintelligent as he was. It was much

easier for his bright, English-speaking little girl to get a

chance to paste labels on a box than for him to secure an

opportunity to carry pig iron. The effect on the child was what

no one concerned thought about, in the abnormal effort she made

thus prematurely to bear the weight of life. Another little girl

of thirteen, a Russian-Jewish child employed in a laundry at a

heavy task beyond her strength, committed suicide, because she

had borrowed three dollars from a companion which she could not

repay unless she confided the story to her parents and gave up an

entire week's wages--but what could the family live upon that

week in case she did! Her child mind, of course, had no sense of

proportion, and carbolic acid appeared inevitable.

While we found many pathetic cases of child labor and hard-driven

victims of the sweating system who could not possibly earn enough

in the short busy season to support themselves during the rest of

the year, it became evident that we must add carefully collected

information to our general impression of neighborhood conditions

if we would make it of any genuine value.

There was at that time no statistical information on Chicago

industrial conditions, and Mrs. Florence Kelley, an early

resident of Hull-House, suggested to the Illinois State Bureau of

Labor that they investigate the sweating system in Chicago with

its attendant child labor. The head of the Bureau adopted this

suggestion and engaged Mrs. Kelley to make the investigation.

When the report was presented to the Illinois Legislature, a

special committee was appointed to look into the Chicago

conditions. I well recall that on the Sunday the members of this

commission came to dine at Hull-House, our hopes ran high, and we

believed that at last some of the worst ills under which our

neighbors were suffering would be brought to an end.

As a result of its investigations, this committee recommended to

the Legislature the provisions which afterward became those of the

first factory law of Illinois, regulating the sanitary conditions

of the sweatshop and fixing fourteen as the age at which a child

might be employed. Before the passage of the law could be

secured, it was necessary to appeal to all elements of the

community, and a little group of us addressed the open meetings of

trades-unions and of benefit societies, church organizations, and

social clubs literally every evening for three months. Of course

the most energetic help as well as intelligent understanding came

from the trades-unions. The central labor body of Chicago, then

called the Trades and Labor Assembly, had previously appointed a

committee of investigation to inquire into the sweating system.

This committee consisted of five delegates from the unions and

five outside their membership. Two of the latter were residents of

Hull-House, and continued with the unions in their well-conducted

campaign until the passage of Illinois's first Factory Legislation

was secured, a statute which has gradually been built upon by many

public-spirited citizens until Illinois stands well among the

States, at least in the matter of protecting her children. The

Hull-House residents that winter had their first experience in

lobbying. I remember that I very much disliked the word and still

more the prospect of the lobbying itself, and we insisted that

well-known Chicago women should accompany this first little group

of Settlement folk who with trades-unionists moved upon the state

capitol in behalf of factory legislation. The national or, to use

its formal name, The General Federation of Woman's Clubs had been

organized in Chicago only the year before this legislation was

secured. The Federation was then timid in regard to all

legislation because it was anxious not to frighten its new

membership, although its second president, Mrs. Henrotin, was most

untiring in her efforts to secure this law.

It was, perhaps, a premature effort, though certainly founded

upon a genuine need, to urge that a clause limiting the hours of

all women working in factories or workshops to eight a day, or

forty-eight a week, should be inserted in the first factory

legislation of the State. Although we had lived at Hull-House

but three years when we urged this legislation, we had known a

large number of young girls who were constantly exhausted by

night work; for whatever may be said in defense of night work for

men, few women are able to endure it. A man who works by night

sleeps regularly by day, but a woman finds it impossible to put

aside the household duties which crowd upon her, and a

conscientious girl finds it hard to sleep with her mother washing

and scrubbing within a few feet of her bed. One of the most

painful impressions of those first years is that of pale,

listless girls, who worked regularly in a factory of the vicinity

which was then running full night time. These girls also

encountered a special danger in the early morning hours as they

returned from work, debilitated and exhausted, and only too

easily convinced that a drink and a little dancing at the end of

the balls in the saloon dance halls, was what they needed to

brace them. One of the girls whom we then knew, whose name,

Chloe, seemed to fit her delicate charm, craving a drink to

dispel her lassitude before her tired feet should take the long

walk home, had thus been decoyed into a saloon, where the soft

drink was followed by an alcoholic one containing "knockout

drops," and she awoke in a disreputable rooming house--too

frightened and disgraced to return to her mother.

Thus confronted by that old conundrum of the interdependence of

matter and spirit, the conviction was forced upon us that long and

exhausting hours of work are almost sure to be followed by lurid

and exciting pleasures; that the power to overcome temptation

reaches its limit almost automatically with that of physical

resistance. The eight-hour clause in this first factory law met

with much less opposition in the Legislature than was anticipated,

and was enforced for a year before it was pronounced

unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Illinois. During the

halcyon months when it was a law, a large and enthusiastic

Eight-Hour Club of working women met at Hull-House, to read the

literature on the subject and in every way to prepare themselves

to make public sentiment in favor of the measure which meant so

much to them. The adverse decision in the test case, the progress

of which they had most intelligently followed, was a matter of

great disappointment. The entire experience left on my mind a

mistrust of all legislation which was not preceded by full

discussion and understanding. A premature measure may be carried

through a legislature by perfectly legitimate means and still fail

to possess vitality and a sense of maturity. On the other hand,

the administration of an advanced law acts somewhat as a

referendum. The people have an opportunity for two years to see

the effects of its operation. If they choose to reopen the matter

at the next General Assembly, it can be discussed with experience

and conviction; the very operation of the law has performed the

function of the "referendum" in a limited use of the term.

Founded upon some such compunction, the sense that the passage of

the child labor law would in many cases work hardship, was never

absent from my mind during the earliest years of its operation. I

addressed as many mothers' meetings and clubs among working women

as I could, in order to make clear the object of the law and the

ultimate benefit to themselves as well as to their children. I

am happy to remember that I never met with lack of understanding

among the hard-working widows, in whose behalf many prosperous

people were so eloquent. These widowed mothers would say, "Why,

of course, that is what I am working for--to give the children a

chance. I want them to have more education than I had"; or

another, "That is why we came to America, and I don't want to

spoil his start, even although his father is dead"; or "It's

different in America. A boy gets left if he isn't educated."

There was always a willingness, even among the poorest women, to

keep on with the hard night scrubbing or the long days of washing

for the children's sake.

The bitterest opposition to the law came from the large glass

companies, who were so accustomed to use the labor of children

that they were convinced the manufacturing of glass could not be

carried on without it.

Fifteen years ago the State of Illinois, as well as Chicago,

exhibited many characteristics of the pioneer country in which

untrammeled energy and an "early start" were still the most

highly prized generators of success. Although this first labor

legislation was but bringing Illinois into line with the nations

in the modern industrial world, which "have long been obliged for

their own sakes to come to the aid of the workers by which they

live--that the child, the young person and the woman may be

protected from their own weakness and necessity?" nevertheless

from the first it ran counter to the instinct and tradition,

almost to the very religion of the manufacturers of the state,

who were for the most part self-made men.

This first attempt in Illinois for adequate factory legislation

also was associated in the minds of businessmen with radicalism,

because the law was secured during the term of Governor Altgeld

and was first enforced during his administration. While nothing

in its genesis or spirit could be further from "anarchy" than

factory legislation, and while the first law in Illinois was still

far behind Massachusetts and New York, the fact that Governor

Altgeld pardoned from the state's prison the anarchists who had

been sentenced there after the Haymarket riot, gave the opponents

of this most reasonable legislation a quickly utilized opportunity

to couple it with that detested word; the State document which

accompanied Governor Altgeld's pardon gave these ungenerous

critics a further opportunity, because a magnanimous action was

marred by personal rancor, betraying for the moment the infirmity

of a noble mind. For all of these reasons this first modification

of the undisturbed control of the aggressive captains of industry

could not be enforced without resistance marked by dramatic

episodes and revolts. The inception of the law had already become

associated with Hull-House, and when its ministration was also

centered there, we inevitably received all the odium which these

first efforts entailed. Mrs. Kelley was appointed the first

factory inspector with a deputy and a force of twelve inspectors

to enforce the law. Both Mrs. Kelley and her assistant, Mrs.

Stevens, lived at Hull-House; the office was on Polk Street

directly opposite, and one of the most vigorous deputies was the

president of the Jane Club. In addition, one of the early men

residents, since dean of a state law school, acted as prosecutor

in the cases brought against the violators of the law.

Chicago had for years been notoriously lax in the administration

of law, and the enforcement of an unpopular measure was resented

equally by the president of a large manufacturing concern and by

the former victim of a sweatshop who had started a place of his

own. Whatever the sentiments toward the new law on the part of

the employers, there was no doubt of its enthusiastic reception

by the trades-unions, as the securing of the law had already come

from them, and through the years which have elapsed since, the

experience of the Hull-House residents would coincide with that

of an English statesman who said that "a common rule for the

standard of life and the condition of labor may be secured by

legislation, but it must be maintained by trades unionism."

This special value of the trades-unions first became clear to the

residents of Hull-House in connection with the sweating system.

We early found that the women in the sewing trades were sorely in

need of help. The trade was thoroughly disorganized, Russian and

Polish tailors competing against English-speaking tailors,

unskilled Bohemian and Italian women competing against both.

These women seem to have been best helped through the use of the

label when unions of specialized workers in the trade are strong

enough to insist that the manufacturers shall "give out work"

only to those holding union cards. It was certainly impressive

when the garment makers themselves in this way finally succeeded

in organizing six hundred of the Italian women in our immediate

vicinity, who had finished garments at home for the most wretched

and precarious wages. To be sure, the most ignorant women only

knew that "you couldn't get clothes to sew" from the places where

they paid the best, unless "you had a card," but through the

veins of most of them there pulsed the quickened blood of a new

fellowship, a sense of comfort and aid which had been laid out to

them by their fellow-workers.

During the fourth year of our residence at Hull-House we found

ourselves in a large mass meeting ardently advocating the passage

of a Federal measure called the Sulzer Bill. Even in our short

struggle with the evils of the sweating system it did not seem

strange that the center of the effort had shifted to Washington,

for by that time we had realized that the sanitary regulation of

sweatshops by city officials, and a careful enforcement of factory

legislation by state factory inspectors will not avail, unless

each city and State shall be able to pass and enforce a code of

comparatively uniform legislation. Although the Sulzer Act failed

to utilize the Interstate Commerce legislation for its purpose,

many of the national representatives realized for the first time

that only by federal legislation could their constituents in

remote country places be protected from contagious diseases raging

in New York or Chicago, for many country doctors testify as to the

outbreak of scarlet fever in rural neighborhoods after the

children have begun to wear the winter overcoats and cloaks which

have been sent from infected city sweatshops.

Through our efforts to modify the sweating system, the Hull-House

residents gradually became committed to the fortunes of the

Consumers' League, an organization which for years has been

approaching the question of the underpaid sewing woman from the

point of view of the ultimate responsibility lodged in the

consumer. It becomes more reasonable to make the presentation of

the sweatshop situation through this League, as it is more

effectual to work with them for the extension of legal provisions

in the slow upbuilding of that code of legislation which is alone

sufficient to protect the home from the dangers incident to the

sweating system.

The Consumers' League seems to afford the best method of approach

for the protection of girls in department stores; I recall a

group of girls from a neighboring "emporium" who applied to

Hull-House for dancing parties on alternate Sunday afternoons.

In reply to our protest they told us they not only worked late

every evening, in spite of the fact that each was supposed to

have "two nights a week off," and every Sunday morning, but that

on alternate Sunday afternoons they were required "to sort the

stock." Over and over again, meetings called by the Clerks Union

and others have been held at Hull-House protesting against these

incredibly long hours. Little modification has come about,

however, during our twenty years of residence, although one large

store in the Bohemian quarter closes all day on Sunday and many

of the others for three nights a week. In spite of the Sunday

work, these girls prefer the outlying department stores to those

downtown; there is more social intercourse with the customers,

more kindliness and social equality between the saleswomen and

the managers, and above all the girls have the protection

naturally afforded by friends and neighbors and they are free

from that suspicion which so often haunts the girls downtown,

that their fellow workers may not be "nice girls."

In the first years of Hull-House we came across no trades-unions

among the women workers, and I think, perhaps, that only one

union, composed solely of women, was to be found in Chicago

then--that of the bookbinders. I easily recall the evening when

the president of this pioneer organization accepted an invitation

to take dinner at Hull-House. She came in rather a recalcitrant

mood, expecting to be patronized, and so suspicious of our

motives that it was only after she had been persuaded to become a

guest of the house for several weeks in order to find out about

us for herself, that she was convinced of our sincerity and of

the ability of "outsiders" to be of any service to working women.

She afterward became closely identified with Hull-House, and her

hearty cooperation was assured until she moved to Boston and

became a general organizer for the American Federation of Labor.

The women shirt makers and the women cloak makers were both

organized at Hull-House as was also the Dorcas Federal Labor

Union, which had been founded through the efforts of a working

woman, then one of the residents. The latter union met once a

month in our drawing room. It was composed of representatives

from all the unions in the city which included women in their

membership and also received other women in sympathy with

unionism. It was accorded representation in the central labor

body of the city, and later it joined its efforts with those of

others to found the Woman's Union Label League. In what we

considered a praiseworthy effort to unite it with other

organizations, the president of a leading Woman's Club applied

for membership. We were so sure of her election that she stood

just outside of the drawing-room door, or, in trades-union

language, "the wicket gate," while her name was voted upon. To

our chagrin, she did not receive enough votes to secure her

admission, not because the working girls, as they were careful to

state, did not admire her, but because she "seemed to belong to

the other side." Fortunately, the big-minded woman so thoroughly

understood the vote and her interest in working women was so

genuine that it was less than a decade afterward when she was

elected to the presidency of the National Woman's Trades Union

League. The incident and the sequel registers, perhaps, the

change in Chicago toward the labor movement, the recognition of

the fact that it is a general social movement concerning all

members of society and not merely a class struggle.

Some such public estimate of the labor movement was brought home

to Chicago during several conspicuous strikes; at least labor

legislation has twice been inaugurated because its need was thus

made clear. After the Pullman strike various elements in the

community were unexpectedly brought together that they might

soberly consider and rectify the weakness in the legal structure

which the strike had revealed. These citizens arranged for a

large and representative convention to be held in Chicago on

Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration. I served as secretary

of the committee from the new Civic Federation having the matter

in charge, and our hopes ran high when, as a result of the

agitation, the Illinois legislature passed a law creating a State

Board of Conciliation and Arbitration. But even a state board

cannot accomplish more than public sentiment authorizes and

sustains, and we might easily have been discouraged in those

early days could we have foreseen some of the industrial

disturbances which have since disgraced Chicago. This law

embodied the best provisions of the then existing laws for the

arbitration of industrial disputes. At the time the word

arbitration was still a word to conjure with, and many Chicago

citizens were convinced, not only of the danger and futility

involved in the open warfare of opposing social forces, but

further believed that the search for justice and righteousness in

industrial relations was made infinitely more difficult thereby.

The Pullman strike afforded much illumination to many Chicago

people. Before it, there had been nothing in my experience to

reveal that distinct cleavage of society, which a general strike

at least momentarily affords. Certainly, during all those dark

days of the Pullman strike, the growth of class bitterness was

most obvious. The fact that the Settlement maintained avenues of

intercourse with both sides seemed to give it opportunity for

nothing but a realization of the bitterness and division along

class lines. I had known Mr. Pullman and had seen his genuine

pride and pleasure in the model town he had built with so much

care; and I had an opportunity to talk to many of the Pullman

employees during the strike when I was sent from a so-called

"Citizens' Arbitration Committee" to their first meetings held in

a hall in the neighboring village of Kensington, and when I was

invited to the modest supper tables laid in the model houses.

The employees then expected a speedy settlement and no one

doubted but that all the grievances connected with the "straw

bosses" would be quickly remedied and that the benevolence which

had built the model town would not fail them. They were sure

that the "straw bosses" had misrepresented the state of affairs,

for this very first awakening to class consciousness bore many

traces of the servility on one side and the arrogance on the

other which had so long prevailed in the model town. The entire

strike demonstrated how often the outcome of far-reaching

industrial disturbances is dependent upon the personal will of

the employer or the temperament of a strike leader. Those

familiar with strikes know only too well how much they are

influenced by poignant domestic situations, by the troubled

consciences of the minority directors, by the suffering women and

children, by the keen excitement of the struggle, by the

religious scruples sternly suppressed but occasionally asserting

themselves, now on one side and now on the other, and by that

undefined psychology of the crowd which we understand so little.

All of these factors also influence the public and do much to

determine popular sympathy and judgment. In the early days of

the Pullman strike, as I was coming down in the elevator of the

Auditorium hotel from one of the futile meetings of the

Arbitration Committee, I met an acquaintance, who angrily said

"that the strikers ought all to be shot." As I had heard nothing

so bloodthirsty as this either from the most enraged capitalist

or from the most desperate of the men, and was interested to find

the cause of such a senseless outbreak, I finally discovered that

the first ten thousand dollars which my acquaintance had ever

saved, requiring, he said, years of effort from the time he was

twelve years old until he was thirty, had been lost as the result

of a strike; he clinched his argument that he knew what he was

talking about, with the statement that "no one need expect him to

have any sympathy with strikers or with their affairs."

A very intimate and personal experience revealed, at least to

myself, my constant dread of the spreading ill will. At the

height of the sympathetic strike my oldest sister, who was

convalescing from a long illness in a hospital near Chicago,

became suddenly very much worse. While I was able to reach her

at once, every possible obstacle of a delayed and blocked

transportation system interrupted the journey of her husband and

children who were hurrying to her bedside from a distant state.

As the end drew nearer and I was obliged to reply to my sister's

constant inquiries that her family had not yet come, I was filled

with a profound apprehension lest her last hours should be

touched with resentment toward those responsible for the delay;

lest her unutterable longing should at the very end be tinged

with bitterness. She must have divined what was in my mind, for

at last she said each time after the repetition of my sad news:

"I don't blame any one, I am not judging them." My heart was

comforted and heavy at the same time; but how many more such

moments of sorrow and death were being made difficult and lonely

throughout the land, and how much would these experiences add to

the lasting bitterness, that touch of self-righteousness which

makes the spirit of forgiveness well-nigh impossible.

When I returned to Chicago from the quiet country I saw the

Federal troops encamped about the post office; almost everyone on

Halsted Street wearing a white ribbon, the emblem of the

strikers' side; the residents at Hull-House divided in opinion as

to the righteousness of this or that measure; and no one able to

secure any real information as to which side was burning the

cars. After the Pullman strike I made an attempt to analyze in a

paper which I called The Modern King Lear the inevitable revolt

of human nature against the plans Mr. Pullman had made for his

employees, the miscarriage of which appeared to him such black

ingratitude. It seemed to me unendurable not to make some effort

to gather together the social implications of the failure of this

benevolent employer and its relation to the demand for a more

democratic administration of industry. Doubtless the paper

represented a certain "excess of participation," to use a gentle

phrase of Charles Lamb's in preference to a more emphatic one

used by Mr. Pullman himself. The last picture of the Pullman

strike which I distinctly recall was three years later when one

of the strike leaders came to see me. Although out of work for

most of the time since the strike, he had been undisturbed for

six months in the repair shops of a street-car company, under an

assumed name, but he had at that moment been discovered and

dismissed. He was a superior type of English workingman, but as

he stood there, broken and discouraged, believing himself so

black-listed that his skill could never be used again, filled

with sorrow over the loss of his wife who had recently died after

an illness with distressing mental symptoms, realizing keenly the

lack of the respectable way of living he had always until now

been able to maintain, he seemed to me an epitome of the wretched

human waste such a strike implies. I fervently hoped that the

new arbitration law would prohibit in Chicago forever more such

brutal and ineffective methods of settling industrial disputes.

And yet even as early as 1896, we found the greatest difficulty

in applying the arbitration law to the garment workers' strike,

although it was finally accomplished after various mass meetings

had urged it. The cruelty and waste of the strike as an

implement for securing the most reasonable demands came to me at

another time, during the long strike of the clothing cutters.

They had protested, not only against various wrongs of their own,

but against the fact that the tailors employed by the custom

merchants were obliged to furnish their own workshops and thus

bore a burden of rent which belonged to the employer. One of the

leaders in this strike, whom I had known for several years as a

sober, industrious, and unusually intelligent man, I saw

gradually break down during the many trying weeks and at last

suffer a complete moral collapse.

He was a man of sensitive organization under the necessity, as is

every leader during a strike, to address the same body of men day

after day with an appeal sufficiently emotional to respond to

their sense of injury; to receive callers at any hour of the day

or night; to sympathize with all the distress of the strikers who

see their families daily suffering; he must do it all with the

sickening sense of the increasing privation in his own home, and

in this case with the consciousness that failure was approaching

nearer each day. This man, accustomed to the monotony of his

workbench and suddenly thrown into a new situation, showed every

sign of nervous fatigue before the final collapse came. He

disappeared after the strike and I did not see him for ten years,

but when he returned he immediately began talking about the old

grievances which he had repeated so often that he could talk of

nothing else. It was easy to recognize the same nervous symptoms

which the broken-down lecturer exhibits who has depended upon the

exploitation of his own experiences to keep himself going. One

of his stories was indeed pathetic. His employer, during the

busy season, had met him one Sunday afternoon in Lincoln Park

whither he had taken his three youngest children, one of whom had

been ill. The employer scolded him for thus wasting his time and

roughly asked why he had not taken home enough work to keep

himself busy through the day. The story was quite credible

because the residents of Hull-House have had many opportunities

to see the worker driven ruthlessly during the season and left in

idleness for long weeks afterward. We have slowly come to

realize that periodical idleness as well as the payment of wages

insufficient for maintenance of the manual worker in full

industrial and domestic efficiency, stand economically on the

same footing with the "sweated" industries, the overwork of

women, and employment of children.

But of all the aspects of social misery nothing is so

heartbreaking as unemployment, and it was inevitable that we

should see much of it in a neighborhood where low rents attracted

the poorly paid worker and many newly arrived immigrants who were

first employed in gangs upon railroad extensions and similar

undertakings. The sturdy peasants eager for work were either the

victims of the padrone who fleeced them unmercifully, both in

securing a place to work and then in supplying them with food, or

they became the mere sport of unscrupulous employment agencies.

Hull-House made an investigation both of the padrone and of the

agencies in our immediate vicinity, and the outcome confirming

what we already suspected, we eagerly threw ourselves into a

movement to procure free employment bureaus under State control

until a law authorizing such bureaus and giving the officials

intrusted with their management power to regulate private

employment agencies, passed the Illinois Legislature in 1899. The

history of these bureaus demonstrates the tendency we all have to

consider a legal enactment in itself an achievement and to grow

careless in regard to its administration and actual results; for

an investigation into the situation ten years later discovered

that immigrants were still shamefully imposed upon. A group of

Bulgarians were found who had been sent to work in Arkansas where

their services were not needed; they walked back to Chicago only

to secure their next job in Oklahoma and to pay another railroad

fare as well as another commission to the agency. Not only was

there no method by which the men not needed in Arkansas could

know that there was work in Oklahoma unless they came back to

Chicago to find it out, but there was no certainty that they

might not be obliged to walk back from Oklahoma because the

Chicago agency had already sent out too many men.

This investigation of the employment bureau resources of Chicago

was undertaken by the League for the Protection of Immigrants,

with whom it is possible for Hull-House to cooperate whenever an

investigation of the immigrant colonies in our immediate

neighborhood seems necessary, as was recently done in regard to

the Greek colonies of Chicago. The superintendent of this

League, Miss Grace Abbott, is a resident of Hull-House and all of

our later attempts to secure justice and opportunity for

immigrants are much more effective through the League, and when

we speak before a congressional committee in Washington

concerning the needs of Chicago immigrants, we represent the

League as well as our own neighbors.

It is in connection with the first factory employment of newly

arrived immigrants and the innumerable difficulties attached to

their first adjustment that some of the most profound industrial

disturbances in Chicago have come about. Under any attempt at

classification these strikes belong more to the general social

movement than to the industrial conflict, for the strike is an

implement used most rashly by unorganized labor who, after they

are in difficulties, call upon the trades-unions for organization

and direction. They are similar to those strikes which are

inaugurated by the unions on behalf of unskilled labor. In

neither case do the hastily organized unions usually hold after

the excitement of the moment has subsided, and the most valuable

result of such strikes is the expanding consciousness of the

solidarity of the workers. This was certainly the result of the

Chicago stockyard strike in 1905, inaugurated on behalf of the

immigrant laborers and so conspicuously carried on without

violence that, although twenty-two thousand workers were idle

during the entire summer, there were fewer arrests in the

stockyards district than the average summer months afford.

However, the story of this strike should not be told from

Hull-House, but from the University of Chicago Settlement, where

Miss Mary McDowell performed such signal public service during

that trying summer. It would be interesting to trace how much of

the subsequent exposure of conditions and attempts at

governmental control of this huge industry had their genesis in

this first attempt of the unskilled workers to secure a higher

standard of living. Certainly the industrial conflict when

epitomized in a strike, centers public attention on conditions as

nothing else can do. A strike is one of the most exciting

episodes in modern life, and as it assumes the characteristics of

a game, the entire population of a city becomes divided into two

cheering sides. In such moments the fair-minded public, who

ought to be depended upon as a referee, practically disappears.

Anyone who tries to keep the attitude of nonpartisanship, which

is perhaps an impossible one, is quickly under suspicion by both

sides. At least that was the fate of a group of citizens

appointed by the mayor of Chicago to arbitrate during the stormy

teamsters' strike which occurred in 1905. We sat through a long

Sunday afternoon in the mayor's office in the City Hall, talking

first with the labor men and then with the group of capitalists.

The undertaking was the more futile in that we were all

practically the dupes of a new type of "industrial conspiracy"

successfully inaugurated in Chicago by a close compact between

the coal teamsters' union and the coal team owners' association,

who had formed a kind of monopoly hitherto new to a

monopoly-ridden public.

The stormy teamsters' strike, ostensibly undertaken in defense of

the garment workers, but really arising from causes so obscure

and dishonorable that they have never yet been made public, was

the culmination of a type of trades-unions which had developed in

Chicago during the preceding decade in which corruption had

flourished almost as openly as it had previously done in the City

Hall. This corruption sometimes took the form of grafting after

the manner of Samuel Parks in New York; sometimes that of

political deals in the "delivery of the labor vote"; and

sometimes that of a combination between capital and labor hunting

together. At various times during these years the better type of

trades-unionists had made a firm stand against this corruption

and a determined effort to eradicate it from the labor movement,

not unlike the general reform effort of many American cities

against political corruption. This reform movement in the

Chicago Federation of Labor had its martyrs, and more than one

man nearly lost his life through the "slugging" methods employed

by the powerful corruptionists. And yet even in the midst of

these things were found touching examples of fidelity to the

earlier principles of brotherhood totally untouched by the

corruption. At one time the scrubwomen in the downtown office

buildings had a union of their own affiliated with the elevator

men and the janitors. Although the union was used merely as a

weapon in the fight of the coal teamsters against the use of

natural gas in downtown buildings, it did not prevent the women

from getting their first glimpse into the fellowship and the

sense of protection which is the great gift of trades-unionism to

the unskilled, unbefriended worker. I remember in a meeting held

at Hull-House one Sunday afternoon, that the president of a

"local" of scrubwomen stood up to relate her experience. She

told first of the long years in which the fear of losing her job

and the fluctuating pay were harder to bear than the hard work

itself, when she had regarded all the other women who scrubbed in

the same building merely as rivals and was most afraid of the

most miserable, because they offered to work for less and less as

they were pressed harder and harder by debt. Then she told of

the change that had come when the elevator men and even the

lordly janitors had talked to her about an organization and had

said that they must all stand together. She told how gradually

she came to feel sure of her job and of her regular pay, and she

was even starting to buy a house now that she could "calculate"

how much she "could have for sure." Neither she nor any of the

other members knew that the same combination which had organized

the scrubwomen into a union later destroyed it during a strike

inaugurated for their own purposes.

That a Settlement is drawn into the labor issues of its city can

seem remote to its purpose only to those who fail to realize that

so far as the present industrial system thwarts our ethical

demands, not only for social righteousness but for social order,

a Settlement is committed to an effort to understand and, as far

as possible, to alleviate it. That in this effort it should be

drawn into fellowship with the local efforts of trades-unions is

most obvious. This identity of aim apparently commits the

Settlement in the public mind to all the faiths and works of

actual trades-unions. Fellowship has so long implied similarity

of creed that the fact that the Settlement often differs widely

from the policy pursued by trades-unionists and clearly expresses

that difference does not in the least change public opinion in

regard to its identification. This is especially true in periods

of industrial disturbance, although it is exactly at such moments

that the trades-unionists themselves are suspicious of all but

their "own kind." It is during the much longer periods between

strikes that the Settlement's fellowship with trades-unions is

most satisfactory in the agitation for labor legislation and

similar undertakings. The first officers of the Chicago Woman's

Trades Union League were residents of Settlements, although they

can claim little share in the later record the League made in

securing the passage of the Illinois Ten-Hour Law for Women and

in its many other fine undertakings.

Nevertheless the reaction of strikes upon Chicago Settlements

affords an interesting study in social psychology. For whether

Hull-House is in any wise identified with the strike or not,

makes no difference. When "Labor" is in disgrace we are always

regarded as belonging to it and share the opprobrium. In the

public excitement following the Pullman strike Hull-House lost

many friends; later the teamsters' strike caused another such

defection, although my office in both cases had been solely that

of a duly appointed arbitrator.

There is, however, a certain comfort in the assumption I have

often encountered that wherever one's judgment might place the

justice of a given situation, it is understood that one's

sympathy is not alienated by wrongdoing, and that through this

sympathy one is still subject to vicarious suffering. I recall

an incident during a turbulent Chicago strike which brought me

much comfort. On the morning of the day of a luncheon to which I

had accepted an invitation, the waitress, whom I did not know,

said to my prospective hostess that she was sure I could not

come. Upon being asked for her reason she replied that she had

seen in the morning paper that the strikers had killed a "scab"

and she was sure that I would feel quite too badly about such a

thing to be able to keep a social engagement. In spite of the

confused issues, she evidently realized my despair over the

violence in a strike quite as definitely as if she had been told

about it. Perhaps that sort of suffering and the attempt to

interpret opposing forces to each other will long remain a

function of the Settlement, unsatisfactory and difficult as the

role often becomes.

There has gradually developed between the various Settlements of

Chicago a warm fellowship founded upon a like-mindedness

resulting from similar experiences, quite as identity of interest

and endeavor develop an enduring relation between the residents

of the same Settlement. This sense of comradeship is never

stronger than during the hardships and perplexities of a strike

of unskilled workers revolting against the conditions which drag

them even below the level of their European life. At such time

the residents in various Settlements are driven to a standard of

life argument running somewhat in this wise--that as the very

existence of the State depends upon the character of its

citizens, therefore if certain industrial conditions are forcing

the workers below the standard of decency, it becomes possible to

deduce the right of State regulation. Even as late as the

stockyard strike this line of argument was denounced as

"socialism" although it has since been confirmed as wise

statesmanship by a decision of the Supreme Court of the United

States which was apparently secured through the masterly argument

of the Brandeis brief in the Oregon ten-hour case.

In such wise the residents of an industrial neighborhood

gradually comprehend the close connection of their own

difficulties with national and even international movements. The

residents in the Chicago Settlements became pioneer members in

the American branch of the International League for Labor

Legislation, because their neighborhood experiences had made them

only too conscious of the dire need for protective legislation.

In such a league, with its ardent members in every industrial

nation of Europe, with its encouraging reports of the abolition

of all night work for women in six European nations, with its

careful observations on the results of employer's liability

legislation and protection of machinery, one becomes identified

with a movement of world-wide significance and manifold

manifestation.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer Terri Perkins.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration ofWomen Writers]

"Chapter XI: Immigrants and Their Children. by Jane Addams

(1860-1935) From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with

Autobiographical Notes. by Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan

Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 230-258.

[Editor: Mary MarkOckerbloom]

CHAPTER XI

IMMIGRANTS AND THEIR CHILDREN

From our very first months at Hull-House we found it much easier

to deal with the first generation of crowded city life than with

the second or third, because it is more natural and cast in a

simpler mold. The Italian and Bohemian peasants who live in

Chicago still put on their bright holiday clothes on a Sunday and

go to visit their cousins. They tramp along with at least a

suggestion of having once walked over plowed fields and breathed

country air. The second generation of city poor too often have

no holiday clothes and consider their relations a "bad lot." I

have heard a drunken man in a maudlin stage babble of his good

country mother and imagine he was driving the cows home, and I

knew that his little son who laughed loud at him would be drunk

earlier in life and would have no pastoral interlude to his

ravings. Hospitality still survives among foreigners, although it

is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans. One

thing seemed clear in regard to entertaining immigrants; to

preserve and keep whatever of value their past life contained and

to bring them in contact with a better type of Americans. For

several years, every Saturday evening the entire families of our

Italian neighbors were our guests. These evenings were very

popular during our first winters at Hull-House. Many educated

Italians helped us, and the house became known as a place where

Italians were welcome and where national holidays were observed.

They come to us with their petty lawsuits, sad relics of the

vendetta, with their incorrigible boys, with their hospital

cases, with their aspirations for American clothes, and with

their needs for an interpreter.

An editor of an Italian paper made a genuine connection between

us and the Italian colony, not only with the Neapolitans and the

Sicilians of the immediate neighborhood, but with the educated

connazionali throughout the city, until he went south to start an

agricultural colony in Alabama, in the establishment of which

Hull-House heartily cooperated.

Possibly the South Italians more than any other immigrants

represent the pathetic stupidity of agricultural people crowded

into city tenements, and we were much gratified when thirty

peasant families were induced to move upon the land which they

knew so well how to cultivate. The starting of this colony,

however, was a very expensive affair in spite of the fact that

the colonists purchased the land at two dollars an acre; they

needed much more than raw land, and although it was possible to

collect the small sums necessary to sustain them during the hard

time of the first two years, we were fully convinced that

undertakings of this sort could be conducted properly only by

colonization societies such as England has established, or,

better still, by enlarging the functions of the Federal

Department of Immigration.

An evening similar in purpose to the one devoted to the Italians

was organized for the Germans, in our first year. Owing to the

superior education of our Teutonic guests and the clever leading

of a cultivated German woman, these evenings reflected something

of that cozy social intercourse which is found in its perfection

in the fatherland. Our guests sang a great deal in the tender

minor of the German folksong or in the rousing spirit of the

Rhine, and they slowly but persistently pursued a course in

German history and literature, recovering something of that

poetry and romance which they had long since resigned with other

good things. We found strong family affection between them and

their English-speaking children, but their pleasures were not in

common, and they seldom went out together. Perhaps the greatest

value of the Settlement to them was in placing large and pleasant

rooms with musical facilities at their disposal, and in reviving

their almost forgotten enthusiams. I have seen sons and

daughters stand in complete surprise as their mother's knitting

needles softly beat time to the song she was singing, or her worn

face turned rosy under the hand-clapping as she made an

old-fashioned curtsy at the end of a German poem. It was easy to

fancy a growing touch of respect in her children's manner to her,

and a rising enthusiasm for German literature and reminiscence on

the part of all the family, an effort to bring together the old

life and the new, a respect for the older cultivation, and not

quite so much assurance that the new was the best.

This tendency upon the part of the older immigrants to lose the

amenities of European life without sharing those of America has

often been deplored by keen observers from the home countries.

When Professor Masurek of Prague gave a course of lectures in the

University of Chicago, he was much distressed over the

materialism into which the Bohemians of Chicago had fallen. The

early immigrants had been so stirred by the opportunity to own

real estate, an appeal perhaps to the Slavic land hunger, and

their energies had become so completely absorbed in money-making

that all other interests had apparently dropped away. And yet I

recall a very touching incident in connection with a lecture

Professor Masurek gave at Hull-House, in which he had appealed to

his countrymen to arouse themselves from this tendency to fall

below their home civilization and to forget the great enthusiasm

which had united them into the Pan-Slavic Movement. A Bohemian

widow who supported herself and her two children by scrubbing,

hastily sent her youngest child to purchase, with the twenty-five

cents which was to have supplied them with food the next day, a

bunch of red roses which she presented to the lecturer in

appreciation of his testimony to the reality of the things of the

spirit.

An overmastering desire to reveal the humbler immigrant parents

to their own children lay at the base of what has come to be

called the Hull-House Labor Museum. This was first suggested to

my mind one early spring day when I saw an old Italian woman, her

distaff against her homesick face, patiently spinning a thread by

the simple stick spindle so reminiscent of all southern Europe. I

was walking down Polk Street, perturbed in spirit, because it

seemed so difficult to come into genuine relations with the

Italian women and because they themselves so often lost their

hold upon their Americanized children. It seemed to me that

Hull-House ought to be able to devise some educational enterprise

which should build a bridge between European and American

experiences in such wise as to give them both more meaning and a

sense of relation. I meditated that perhaps the power to see

life as a whole is more needed in the immigrant quarter of a

large city than anywhere else, and that the lack of this power is

the most fruitful source of misunderstanding between European

immigrants and their children, as it is between them and their

American neighbors; and why should that chasm between fathers and

sons, yawning at the feet of each generation, be made so

unnecessarily cruel and impassable to these bewildered

immigrants? Suddenly I looked up and saw the old woman with her

distaff, sitting in the sun on the steps of a tenement house. She

might have served as a model for one of Michelangelo's Fates, but

her face brightened as I passed and, holding up her spindle for

me to see, she called out that when she had spun a little more

yarn, she would knit a pair of stockings for her goddaughter.

The occupation of the old woman gave me the clue that was needed.

Could we not interest the young people working in the

neighborhood factories in these older forms of industry, so that,

through their own parents and grandparents, they would find a

dramatic representation of the inherited resources of their daily

occupation. If these young people could actually see that the

complicated machinery of the factory had been evolved from simple

tools, they might at least make a beginning toward that education

which Dr. Dewey defines as "a continuing reconstruction of

experience." They might also lay a foundation for reverence of

the past which Goethe declares to be the basis of all sound

progress.

My exciting walk on Polk Street was followed by many talks with

Dr. Dewey and with one of the teachers in his school who was a

resident at Hull-House. Within a month a room was fitted up to

which we might invite those of our neighbors who were possessed

of old crafts and who were eager to use them.

We found in the immediate neighborhood at least four varieties of

these most primitive methods of spinning and three distinct

variations of the same spindle in connection with wheels. It was

possible to put these seven into historic sequence and order and

to connect the whole with the present method of factory spinning.

The same thing was done for weaving, and on every Saturday

evening a little exhibit was made of these various forms of labor

in the textile industry. Within one room a Syrian woman, a

Greek, an Italian, a Russian, and an Irishwoman enabled even the

most casual observer to see that there is no break in orderly

evolution if we look at history from the industrial standpoint;

that industry develops similarly and peacefully year by year

among the workers of each nation, heedless of differences in

language, religion, and political experiences.

And then we grew ambitious and arranged lectures upon industrial

history. I remember that after an interesting lecture upon the

industrial revolution in England and a portrayal of the appalling

conditions throughout the weaving districts of the north, which

resulted from the hasty gathering of the weavers into the new

towns, a Russian tailor in the audience was moved to make a

speech. He suggested that whereas time had done much to

alleviate the first difficulties in the transition of weaving

from hand work to steam power, that in the application of steam

to sewing we are still in our first stages, illustrated by the

isolated woman who tries to support herself by hand needlework at

home until driven out by starvation, as many of the hand weavers

had been.

The historical analogy seemed to bring a certain comfort to the

tailor, as did a chart upon the wall showing the infinitesimal

amount of time that steam had been applied to manufacturing

processes compared to the centuries of hand labor. Human

progress is slow and perhaps never more cruel than in the advance

of industry, but is not the worker comforted by knowing that

other historical periods have existed similar to the one in which

he finds himself, and that the readjustment may be shortened and

alleviated by judicious action; and is he not entitled to the

solace which an artistic portrayal of the situation might give

him? I remember the evening of the tailor's speech that I felt

reproached because no poet or artist has endeared the sweaters'

victim to us as George Eliot has made us love the belated weaver,

Silas Marner. The textile museum is connected directly with the

basket weaving, sewing, millinery, embroidery, and dressmaking

constantly being taught at Hull-House, and so far as possible

with the other educational departments; we have also been able to

make a collection of products, of early implements, and of

photographs which are full of suggestion. Yet far beyond its

direct educational value, we prize it because it so often puts

the immigrants into the position of teachers, and we imagine that

it affords them a pleasant change from the tutelage in which all

Americans, including their own children, are so apt to hold them.

I recall a number of Russian women working in a sewing room near

Hull-House, who heard one Christmas week that the House was going

to give a party to which they might come. They arrived one

afternoon, when, unfortunately, there was no party on hand and,

although the residents did their best to entertain them with

impromptu music and refreshments, it was quite evident that they

were greatly disappointed. Finally it was suggested that they be

shown the Labor Museum--where gradually the thirty sodden, tired

women were transformed. They knew how to use the spindles and

were delighted to find the Russian spinning frame. Many of them

had never seen the spinning wheel, which has not penetrated to

certain parts of Russia, and they regarded it as a new and

wonderful invention. They turned up their dresses to show their

homespun petticoats; they tried the looms; they explained the

difficulty of the old patterns; in short, from having been

stupidly entertained, they themselves did the entertaining.

Because of a direct appeal to former experiences, the immigrant

visitors were able for the moment to instruct their American

hostesses in an old and honored craft, as was indeed becoming to

their age and experience.

In some such ways as these have the Labor Museum and the shops

pointed out the possibilities which Hull-House has scarcely begun

to develop, of demonstrating that culture is an understanding of

the long-established occupations and thoughts of men, of the arts

with which they have solaced their toil. A yearning to recover

for the household arts something of their early sanctity and

meaning arose strongly within me one evening when I was attending

a Passover Feast to which I had been invited by a Jewish family

in the neighborhood, where the traditional and religious

significance of the woman's daily activity was still retained.

The kosher food the Jewish mother spread before her family had

been prepared according to traditional knowledge and with

constant care in the use of utensils; upon her had fallen the

responsibility to make all ready according to Mosaic instructions

that the great crisis in a religious history might be fittingly

set forth by her husband and son. Aside from the grave religious

significance in the ceremony, my mind was filled with shifting

pictures of woman's labor with which travel makes one familiar;

the Indian women grinding grain outside of their huts as they

sing praises to the sun and rain; a file of white-clad Moorish

women whom I had once seen waiting their turn at a well in

Tangiers; south Italian women kneeling in a row along the stream

and beating their wet clothes against the smooth white stones;

the milking, the gardening, the marketing in thousands of

hamlets, which are such direct expressions of the solicitude and

affection at the basis of all family life.

There has been some testimony that the Labor Museum has revealed

the charm of woman's primitive activities. I recall a certain

Italian girl who came every Saturday evening to a cooking class

in the same building in which her mother spun in the Labor Museum

exhibit; and yet Angelina always left her mother at the front

door while she herself went around to a side door because she did

not wish to be too closely identified in the eyes of the rest of

the cooking class with an Italian woman who wore a kerchief over

her head, uncouth boots, and short petticoats. One evening,

however, Angelina saw her mother surrounded by a group of

visitors from the School of Education who much admired the

spinning, and she concluded from their conversation that her

mother was "the best stick-spindle spinner in America." When she

inquired from me as to the truth of this deduction, I took

occasion to describe the Italian village in which her mother had

lived, something of her free life, and how, because of the

opportunity she and the other women of the village had to drop

their spindles over the edge of a precipice, they had developed a

skill in spinning beyond that of the neighboring towns. I

dilated somewhat on the freedom and beauty of that life--how hard

it must be to exchange it all for a two-room tenement, and to

give up a beautiful homespun kerchief for an ugly department

store hat. I intimated it was most unfair to judge her by these

things alone, and that while she must depend on her daughter to

learn the new ways, she also had a right to expect her daughter

to know something of the old ways.

That which I could not convey to the child, but upon which my own

mind persistently dwelt, was that her mother's whole life had

been spent in a secluded spot under the rule of traditional and

narrowly localized observances, until her very religion clung to

local sanctities--to the shrine before which she had always

prayed, to the pavement and walls of the low vaulted church--and

then suddenly she was torn from it all and literally put out to

sea, straight away from the solid habits of her religious and

domestic life, and she now walked timidly but with poignant

sensibility upon a new and strange shore.

It was easy to see that the thought of her mother with any other

background than that of the tenement was new to Angelina, and at

least two things resulted; she allowed her mother to pull out of

the big box under the bed the beautiful homespun garments which

had been previously hidden away as uncouth; and she openly came

into the Labor Museum by the same door as did her mother, proud

at least of the mastery of the craft which had been so much

admired.

A club of necktie workers formerly meeting at Hull-House

persistently resented any attempt on the part of their director

to improve their minds. The president once said that she

"wouldn't be caught dead at a lecture," that she came to the club

"to get some fun out of it," and indeed it was most natural that

she should crave recreation after a hard day's work. One evening

I saw the entire club listening to quite a stiff lecture in the

Labor Museum and to my rather wicked remark to the president that

I was surprised to see her enjoying a lecture, she replied that

she did not call this a lecture, she called this "getting next to

the stuff you work with all the time." It was perhaps the

sincerest tribute we have ever received as to the success of the

undertaking.

The Labor Museum continually demanded more space as it was

enriched by a fine textile exhibit lent by the Field Museum, and

later by carefully selected specimens of basketry from the

Philippines. The shops have finally included a group of three or

four women, Irish, Italian, Danish, who have become a permanent

working force in the textile department which has developed into

a self-supporting industry through the sale of its homespun

products.

These women and a few men, who come to the museum to utilize

their European skill in pottery, metal, and wood, demonstrate

that immigrant colonies might yield to our American life

something very valuable, if their resources were intelligently

studied and developed. I recall an Italian, who had decorated

the doorposts of his tenement with a beautiful pattern he had

previously used in carving the reredos of a Neapolitan church,

who was "fired" by his landlord on the ground of destroying

property. His feelings were hurt, not so much that he had been

put out of his house, as that his work had been so disregarded;

and he said that when people traveled in Italy they liked to look

at wood carvings but that in America "they only made money out of

you."

Sometimes the suppression of the instinct of workmanship is

followed by more disastrous results. A Bohemian whose little

girl attended classes at Hull-House, in one of his periodic

drunken spells had literally almost choked her to death, and

later had committed suicide when in delirium tremens. His poor

wife, who stayed a week at Hull-House after the disaster until a

new tenement could be arranged for her, one day showed me a gold

ring which her husband had made for their betrothal. It

exhibited the most exquisite workmanship, and she said that

although in the old country he had been a goldsmith, in America

he had for twenty years shoveled coal in a furnace room of a

large manufacturing plant; that whenever she saw one of his

"restless fits," which preceded his drunken periods, "coming on,"

if she could provide him with a bit of metal and persuade him to

stay at home and work at it, he was all right and the time passed

without disaster, but that "nothing else would do it." This story

threw a flood of light upon the dead man's struggle and on the

stupid maladjustment which had broken him down. Why had we never

been told? Why had our interest in the remarkable musical

ability of his child blinded us to the hidden artistic ability of

the father? We had forgotten that a long-established occupation

may form the very foundations of the moral life, that the art

with which a man has solaced his toil may be the salvation of his

uncertain temperament.

There are many examples of touching fidelity to immigrant parents

on the part of their grown children; a young man who day after

day attends ceremonies which no longer express his religious

convictions and who makes his vain effort to interest his Russian

Jewish father in social problems; a daughter who might earn much

more money as a stenographer could she work from Monday morning

till Saturday night, but who quietly and docilely makes neckties

for low wages because she can thus abstain from work Saturdays to

please her father; these young people, like poor Maggie Tulliver,

through many painful experiences have reached the conclusion that

pity, memory, and faithfulness are natural ties with paramount

claims.

This faithfulness, however, is sometimes ruthlessly imposed upon

by immigrant parents who, eager for money and accustomed to the

patriarchal authority of peasant households, hold their children

in a stern bondage which requires a surrender of all their wages

and concedes no time or money for pleasures.

There are many convincing illustrations that this parental

harshness often results in juvenile delinquency. A Polish boy of

seventeen came to Hull-House one day to ask a contribution of

fifty cents "towards a flower piece for the funeral of an old

Hull-House club boy." A few questions made it clear that the

object was fictitious, whereupon the boy broke down and

half-defiantly stated that he wanted to buy two twenty-five cent

tickets, one for his girl and one for himself, to a dance of the

Benevolent Social Twos; that he hadn't a penny of his own

although he had worked in a brass foundry for three years and had

been advanced twice, because he always had to give his pay

envelope unopened to his father; "just look at the clothes he

buys me" was his concluding remark.

Perhaps the girls are held even more rigidly. In a recent

investigation of two hundred working girls it was found that only

five per cent had the use of their own money and that sixty-two

per cent turned in all they earned, literally every penny, to

their mothers. It was through this little investigation that we

first knew Marcella, a pretty young German girl who helped her

widowed mother year after year to care for a large family of

younger children. She was content for the most part although her

mother's old-country notions of dress gave her but an

infinitesimal amount of her own wages to spend on her clothes,

and she was quite sophisticated as to proper dressing because she

sold silk in a neighborhood department store. Her mother

approved of the young man who was showing her various attentions

and agreed that Marcella should accept his invitation to a ball,

but would allow her not a penny toward a new gown to replace one

impossibly plain and shabby. Marcella spent a sleepless night

and wept bitterly, although she well knew that the doctor's bill

for the children's scarlet fever was not yet paid. The next day

as she was cutting off three yards of shining pink silk, the

thought came to her that it would make her a fine new waist to

wear to the ball. She wistfully saw it wrapped in paper and

carelessly stuffed into the muff of the purchaser, when suddenly

the parcel fell upon the floor. No one was looking and quick as

a flash the girl picked it up and pushed it into her blouse. The

theft was discovered by the relentless department store detective

who, for "the sake of example," insisted upon taking the case

into court. The poor mother wept bitter tears over this downfall

of her "frommes Madchen" and no one had the heart to tell her of

her own blindness.

I know a Polish boy whose earnings were all given to his father

who gruffly refused all requests for pocket money. One Christmas

his little sisters, having been told by their mother that they

were too poor to have any Christmas presents, appealed to the big

brother as to one who was earning money of his own. Flattered by

the implication, but at the same time quite impecunious, the

night before Christmas he nonchalantly walked through a

neighboring department store and stole a manicure set for one

little sister and a string of beads for the other. He was caught

at the door by the house detective as one of those children whom

each local department store arrests in the weeks before Christmas

at the daily rate of eight to twenty. The youngest of these

offenders are seldom taken into court but are either sent home

with a warning or turned over to the officers of the Juvenile

Protective Association. Most of these premature law breakers are

in search of Americanized clothing and others are only looking

for playthings. They are all distracted by the profusion and

variety of the display, and their moral sense is confused by the

general air of openhandedness.

These disastrous efforts are not unlike those of many younger

children who are constantly arrested for petty thieving because

they are too eager to take home food or fuel which will relieve

the distress and need they so constantly hear discussed. The

coal on the wagons, the vegetables displayed in front of the

grocery shops, the very wooden blocks in the loosened street

paving are a challenge to their powers to help out at home. A

Bohemian boy who was out on parole from the old detention home of

the Juvenile Court itself, brought back five stolen chickens to

the matron for Sunday dinner, saying that he knew the Committee

were "having a hard time to fill up so many kids and perhaps

these fowl would help out." The honest immigrant parents, totally

ignorant of American laws and municipal regulations, often send a

child to pick up coal on the railroad tracks or to stand at three

o'clock in the morning before the side door of a restaurant which

gives away broken food, or to collect grain for the chickens at

the base of elevators and standing cars. The latter custom

accounts for the large number of boys arrested for breaking the

seals on grain freight cars. It is easy for a child thus trained

to accept the proposition of a junk dealer to bring him bars of

iron stored in freight yards. Four boys quite recently had thus

carried away and sold to one man two tons of iron.

Four fifths of the children brought into the Juvenile Court in

Chicago are the children of foreigners. The Germans are the

greatest offenders, Polish next. Do their children suffer from

the excess of virtue in those parents so eager to own a house and

lot? One often sees a grasping parent in the court, utterly

broken down when the Americanized youth who has been brought to

grief clings as piteously to his peasant father as if he were

still a frightened little boy in the steerage.

Many of these children have come to grief through their premature

fling into city life, having thrown off parental control as they

have impatiently discarded foreign ways. Boys of ten and twelve

will refuse to sleep at home, preferring the freedom of an old

brewery vault or an empty warehouse to the obedience required by

their parents, and for days these boys will live on the milk and

bread which they steal from the back porches after the early

morning delivery. Such children complain that there is "no fun"

at home. One little chap who was given a vacant lot to cultivate

by the City Garden Association insisted upon raising only popcorn

and tried to present the entire crop to Hull-House "to be used

for the parties," with the stipulation that he would have "to be

invited every single time." Then there are little groups of

dissipated young men who pride themselves upon their ability to

live without working and who despise all the honest and sober

ways of their immigrant parents. They are at once a menace and a

center of demoralization. Certainly the bewildered parents,

unable to speak English and ignorant of the city, whose children

have disappeared for days or weeks, have often come to

Hull-House, evincing that agony which fairly separates the marrow

from the bone, as if they had discovered a new type of suffering,

devoid of the healing in familiar sorrows. It is as if they did

not know how to search for the children without the assistance of

the children themselves. Perhaps the most pathetic aspect of

such cases is their revelation of the premature dependence of the

older and wiser upon the young and foolish, which is in itself

often responsible for the situation because it has given the

children an undue sense of their own importance and a false

security that they can take care of themselves.

On the other hand, an Italian girl who has had lessons in cooking

at the public school will help her mother to connect the entire

family with American food and household habits. That the mother

has never baked bread in Italy--only mixed it in her own house

and then taken it out to the village oven--makes all the more

valuable her daughter's understanding of the complicated cooking

stove. The same thing is true of the girl who learns to sew in

the public school, and more than anything else, perhaps, of the

girl who receives the first simple instruction in the care of

little children--that skillful care which every tenement-house

baby requires if he is to be pulled through his second summer. As

a result of this teaching I recall a young girl who carefully

explained to her Italian mother that the reason the babies in

Italy were so healthy and the babies in Chicago were so sickly,

was not, as her mother had firmly insisted, because her babies in

Italy had goat's milk and her babies in America had cow's milk,

but because the milk in Italy was clean and the milk in Chicago

was dirty. She said that when you milked your own goat before

the door, you knew that the milk was clean, but when you bought

milk from the grocery store after it had been carried for many

miles in the country, you couldn't tell whether it was fit for

the baby to drink until the men from the City Hall who had

watched it all the way said that it was all right.

Thus through civic instruction in the public schools, the Italian

woman slowly became urbanized in the sense in which the word was

used by her own Latin ancestors, and thus the habits of her

entire family were modified. The public schools in the immigrant

colonies deserve all the praise as Americanizing agencies which

can be bestowed upon them, and there is little doubt that the

fast-changing curriculum in the direction of the vacation-school

experiments will react more directly upon such households.

It is difficult to write of the relation of the older and most

foreign-looking immigrants to the children of other people--the

Italians whose fruit-carts are upset simply because they are

"dagoes," or the Russian peddlers who are stoned and sometimes

badly injured because it has become a code of honor in a gang of

boys to thus express their derision. The members of a Protective

Association of Jewish Peddlers organized at Hull-House related

daily experiences in which old age had been treated with such

irreverence, cherished dignity with such disrespect, that a

listener caught the passion of Lear in the old texts, as a

platitude enunciated by a man who discovers in it his own

experience thrills us as no unfamiliar phrases can possibly do.

The Greeks are filled with amazed rage when their very name is

flung at them as an opprobrious epithet. Doubtless these

difficulties would be much minimized in America, if we faced our

own race problem with courage and intelligence, and these very

Mediterranean immigrants might give us valuable help. Certainly

they are less conscious than the Anglo-Saxon of color

distinctions, perhaps because of their traditional familiarity

with Carthage and Egypt. They listened with respect and

enthusiasm to a scholarly address delivered by Professor Du Bois

at Hull-House on a Lincoln's birthday, with apparently no

consciousness of that race difference which color seems to

accentuate so absurdly, and upon my return from various

conferences held in the interest of "the advancement of colored

people," I have had many illuminating conversations with my

cosmopolitan neighbors.

The celebration of national events has always been a source of

new understanding and companionship with the members of the

contiguous foreign colonies not only between them and their

American neighbors but between them and their own children. One

of our earliest Italian events was a rousing commemoration of

Garibaldi's birthday, and his imposing bust, presented to

Hull-House that evening, was long the chief ornament of our front

hall. It called forth great enthusiasm from the connazionali

whom Ruskin calls, not the "common people" of Italy, but the

"companion people" because of their power for swift sympathy.

A huge Hellenic meeting held at Hull-House, in which the

achievements of the classic period were set forth both in Greek

and English by scholars of well-known repute, brought us into a

new sense of fellowship with all our Greek neighbors. As the

mayor of Chicago was seated upon the right hand of the dignified

senior priest of the Greek Church and they were greeted

alternately in the national hymns of America and Greece, one felt

a curious sense of the possibility of transplanting to new and

crude Chicago some of the traditions of Athens itself, so deeply

cherished in the hearts of this group of citizens.

The Greeks indeed gravely consider their traditions as their most

precious possession and more than once in meetings of protest

held by the Greek colony against the aggressions of the

Bulgarians in Macedonia, I have heard it urged that the

Bulgarians are trying to establish a protectorate, not only for

their immediate advantage, but that they may claim a glorious

history for the "barbarous country." It is said that on the basis

of this protectorate, they are already teaching in their schools

that Alexander the Great was a Bulgarian and that it will be but

a short time before they claim Aristotle himself, an indignity

the Greeks will never suffer!

To me personally the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of

Mazzini's birth was a matter of great interest. Throughout the

world that day Italians who believed in a United Italy came

together. They recalled the hopes of this man who, with all his

devotion to his country was still more devoted to humanity and

who dedicated to the workingmen of Italy, an appeal so

philosophical, so filled with a yearning for righteousness, that

it transcended all national boundaries and became a bugle call

for "The Duties of Man." A copy of this document was given to

every school child in the public schools of Italy on this one

hundredth anniversary, and as the Chicago branch of the Society

of Young Italy marched into our largest hall and presented to

Hull-House an heroic bust of Mazzini, I found myself devoutly

hoping that the Italian youth, who have committed their future to

America, might indeed become "the Apostles of the fraternity of

nations" and that our American citizenship might be built without

disturbing these foundations which were laid of old time.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer Terri Perkins.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration ofWomen Writers]

"Chapter XII: Tolstoyism." by by Jane Addams (1860-1935) From:

Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by Jane

Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp.

259-280.

[Editor: Mary MarkOckerbloom]

CHAPTER XII

TOLSTOYISM

The administration of charity in Chicago during the winter

following the World's Fair had been of necessity most difficult,

for, although large sums had been given to the temporary relief

organization which endeavored to care for the thousands of

destitute strangers stranded in the city, we all worked under a

sense of desperate need and a paralyzing consciousness that our

best efforts were most inadequate to the situation.

During the many relief visits I paid that winter in tenement

houses and miserable lodgings, I was constantly shadowed by a

certain sense of shame that I should be comfortable in the midst

of such distress. This resulted at times in a curious reaction

against all the educational and philanthropic activities in which

I had been engaged. In the face of the desperate hunger and

need, these could not but seem futile and superficial. The hard

winter in Chicago had turned the thoughts of many of us to these

stern matters. A young friend of mine who came daily to

Hull-House consulted me in regard to going into the paper

warehouse belonging to her father that she might there sort rags

with the Polish girls; another young girl took a place in a

sweatshop for a month, doing her work so simply and thoroughly

that the proprietor had no notion that she had not been driven

there by need; still two others worked in a shoe factory;--and

all this happened before such adventures were undertaken in order

to procure literary material. It was in the following winter

that the pioneer effort in this direction, Walter Wyckoff's

account of his vain attempt to find work in Chicago, compelled

even the sternest businessman to drop his assertion that "any man

can find work if he wants it."

The dealing directly with the simplest human wants may have been

responsible for an impression which I carried about with me

almost constantly for a period of two years and which culminated

finally in a visit to Tolstoy--that the Settlement, or Hull-House

at least, was a mere pretense and travesty of the simple impulse

"to live with the poor," so long as the residents did not share

the common lot of hard labor and scant fare.

Actual experience had left me in much the same state of mind I

had been in after reading Tolstoy's "What to Do," which is a

description of his futile efforts to relieve the unspeakable

distress and want in the Moscow winter of 1881, and his

inevitable conviction that only he who literally shares his own

shelter and food with the needy can claim to have served them.

Doubtless it is much easier to see "what to do" in rural Russia,

where all the conditions tend to make the contrast as broad as

possible between peasant labor and noble idleness, than it is to

see "what to do" in the interdependencies of the modern

industrial city. But for that very reason perhaps, Tolstoy's

clear statement is valuable for that type of conscientious person

in every land who finds it hard, not only to walk in the path of

righteousness, but to discover where the path lies.

I had read the books of Tolstoy steadily all the years since "My

Religion" had come into my hands immediately after I left

college. The reading of that book had made clear that men's poor

little efforts to do right are put forth for the most part in the

chill of self-distrust; I became convinced that if the new social

order ever came, it would come by gathering to itself all the

pathetic human endeavor which had indicated the forward

direction. But I was most eager to know whether Tolstoy's

undertaking to do his daily share of the physical labor of the

world, that labor which is "so disproportionate to the

unnourished strength" of those by whom it is ordinarily

performed, had brought him peace!

I had time to review carefully many things in my mind during the

long days of convalescence following an illness of typhoid fever

which I suffered in the autumn of 1895. The illness was so

prolonged that my health was most unsatisfactory during the

following winter, and the next May I went abroad with my friend,

Miss Smith, to effect if possible a more complete recovery.

The prospect of seeing Tolstoy filled me with the hope of finding

a clue to the tangled affairs of city poverty. I was but one of

thousands of our contemporaries who were turning toward this

Russian, not as to a seer--his message is much too confused and

contradictory for that--but as to a man who has had the ability

to lift his life to the level of his conscience, to translate his

theories into action.

Our first few weeks in England were most stimulating. A dozen

years ago London still showed traces of "that exciting moment in

the life of the nation when its youth is casting about for new

enthusiasms," but it evinced still more of that British capacity

to perform the hard work of careful research and self-examination

which must precede any successful experiments in social reform.

Of the varied groups and individuals whose suggestions remained

with me for years, I recall perhaps as foremost those members of

the new London County Council whose far-reaching plans for the

betterment of London could not but enkindle enthusiasm. It was a

most striking expression of that effort which would place beside

the refinement and pleasure of the rich, a new refinement and a

new pleasure born of the commonwealth and the common joy of all

the citizens, that at this moment they prized the municipal

pleasure boats upon the Thames no less than the extensive schemes

for the municipal housing of the poorest people. Ben Tillet, who

was then an alderman, "the docker sitting beside the duke," took

me in a rowboat down the Thames on a journey made exciting by the

hundreds of dockers who cheered him as we passed one wharf after

another on our way to his home at Greenwich; John Burns showed us

his wonderful civic accomplishments at Battersea, the plant

turning street sweepings into cement pavements, the technical

school teaching boys brick laying and plumbing, and the public

bath in which the children of the Board School were receiving a

swimming lesson--these measures anticipating our achievements in

Chicago by at least a decade and a half. The new Education Bill

which was destined to drag on for twelve years before it

developed into the children's charter, was then a storm center in

the House of Commons. Miss Smith and I were much pleased to be

taken to tea on the Parliament terrace by its author, Sir John

Gorst, although we were quite bewildered by the arguments we

heard there for church schools versus secular.

We heard Keir Hardie before a large audience of workingmen

standing in the open square of Canning Town outline the great

things to be accomplished by the then new Labor Party, and we

joined the vast body of men in the booming hymn

When wilt Thou save the people,

O God of Mercy, when!

finding it hard to realize that we were attending a political

meeting. It seemed that moment as if the hopes of democracy were

more likely to come to pass on English soil than upon our own.

Robert Blatchford's stirring pamphlets were in everyone's hands,

and a reception given by Karl Marx's daughter, Mrs. Aveling, to

Liebknecht before he returned to Germany to serve a prison term

for his lese majeste speech in the Reichstag, gave us a glimpse

of the old-fashioned orthodox Socialist who had not yet begun to

yield to the biting ridicule of Bernard Shaw although he flamed

in their midst that evening.

Octavia Hill kindly demonstrated to us the principles upon which

her well-founded business of rent collecting was established, and

with pardonable pride showed us the Red Cross Square with its

cottages marvelously picturesque and comfortable, on two sides,

and on the third a public hall and common drawing room for the

use of all the tenants; the interior of the latter had been

decorated by pupils of Walter Crane with mural frescoes

portraying the heroism in the life of the modern workingman.

While all this was warmly human, we also had opportunities to see

something of a group of men and women who were approaching the

social problem from the study of economics; among others Mr. and

Mrs. Sidney Webb who were at work on their Industrial Democracy; Mr.

John Hobson who was lecturing on the evolution of modern capitalism.

We followed factory inspectors on a round of duties performed with

a thoroughness and a trained intelligence which were a revelation

of the possibilities of public service. When it came to visiting

Settlements, we were at least reassured that they were not falling

into identical lines of effort. Canon Ingram, who has since

become Bishop of London, was then warden of Oxford House and in

the midst of an experiment which pleased me greatly, the more

because it was carried on by a churchman. Oxford House had hired

all the concert halls--vaudeville shows we later called them in

Chicago--which were found in Bethnal Green, for every Saturday

night. The residents had censored the programs, which they were

careful to keep popular, and any workingman who attended a show in

Bethnal Green on a Saturday night, and thousands of them did,

heard a program the better for this effort.

One evening in University Hall Mrs. Humphry Ward, who had just

returned from Italy, described the effect of the Italian salt tax

in a talk which was evidently one in a series of lectures upon the

economic wrongs which pressed heaviest upon the poor; at Browning

House, at the moment, they were giving prizes to those of their

costermonger neighbors who could present the best cared-for

donkeys, and the warden, Herbert Stead, exhibited almost the

enthusiasm of his well-known brother, for that crop of kindliness

which can be garnered most easily from the acreage where human

beings grow the thickest; at the Bermondsey Settlement they were

rejoicing that their University Extension students had

successfully passed the examinations for the University of London.

The entire impression received in England of research, of

scholarship, of organized public spirit, was in marked contrast to

the impressions of my next visit in 1900, when the South African

War had absorbed the enthusiasm of the nation and the wrongs at

"the heart of the empire" were disregarded and neglected.

London, of course, presented sharp differences to Russia where

social conditions were written in black and white with little

shading, like a demonstration of the Chinese proverb, "Where one

man lives in luxury, another is dying of hunger."

The fair of Nijni-Novgorod seemed to take us to the very edge of

civilization so remote and eastern that the merchants brought

their curious goods upon the backs of camels or on strange craft

riding at anchor on the broad Volga. But even here our letter of

introduction to Korolenko, the novelist, brought us to a

realization of that strange mingling of a remote past and a

self-conscious present which Russia presents on every hand. This

same contrast was also shown by the pilgrims trudging on pious

errands to monasteries, to tombs, and to the Holy Land itself,

with their bleeding feet bound in rags and thrust into bast

sandals, and, on the other hand, by the revolutionists even then

advocating a Republic which should obtain not only in political

but also in industrial affairs.

We had letters of introduction to Mr. and Mrs. Aylmer Maude of

Moscow, since well known as the translators of "Resurrection" and

other of Tolstoy's later works, who at that moment were on the eve

of leaving Russia in order to form an agricultural colony in South

England where they might support themselves by the labor of their

hands. We gladly accepted Mr. Maude's offer to take us to Yasnaya

Polyana and to introduce us to Count Tolstoy, and never did a

disciple journey toward his master with more enthusiasm than did

our guide. When, however, Mr. Maude actually presented Miss Smith

and myself to Count Tolstoy, knowing well his master's attitude

toward philanthropy, he endeavored to make Hull-House appear much

more noble and unique than I should have ventured to do.

Tolstoy, standing by clad in his peasant garb, listened gravely

but, glancing distrustfully at the sleeves of my traveling gown

which unfortunately at that season were monstrous in size, he

took hold of an edge and pulling out one sleeve to an

interminable breadth, said quite simply that "there was enough

stuff on one arm to make a frock for a little girl," and asked me

directly if I did not find "such a dress" a "barrier to the

people." I was too disconcerted to make a very clear explanation,

although I tried to say that monstrous as my sleeves were they

did not compare in size with those of the working girls in

Chicago and that nothing would more effectively separate me from

"the people" than a cotton blouse following the simple lines of

the human form; even if I had wished to imitate him and "dress as

a peasant," it would have been hard to choose which peasant among

the thirty-six nationalities we had recently counted in our ward.

Fortunately the countess came to my rescue with a recital of her

former attempts to clothe hypothetical little girls in yards of

material cut from a train and other superfluous parts of her best

gown until she had been driven to a firm stand which she advised

me to take at once. But neither Countess Tolstoy nor any other

friend was on hand to help me out of my predicament later, when I

was asked who "fed" me, and how did I obtain "shelter"? Upon my

reply that a farm a hundred miles from Chicago supplied me with

the necessities of life, I fairly anticipated the next scathing

question: "So you are an absentee landlord? Do you think you

will help the people more by adding yourself to the crowded city

than you would by tilling your own soil?" This new sense of

discomfort over a failure to till my own soil was increased when

Tolstoy's second daughter appeared at the five-o'clock tea table

set under the trees, coming straight from the harvest field where

she had been working with a group of peasants since five o'clock

in the morning, not pretending to work but really taking the

place of a peasant woman who had hurt her foot. She was plainly

much exhausted, but neither expected nor received sympathy from

the members of a family who were quite accustomed to see each

other carry out their convictions in spite of discomfort and

fatigue. The martyrdom of discomfort, however, was obviously

much easier to bear than that to which, even to the eyes of the

casual visitor, Count Tolstoy daily subjected himself, for his

study in the basement of the conventional dwelling, with its

short shelf of battered books and its scythe and spade leaning

against the wall, had many times lent itself to that ridicule

which is the most difficult form of martyrdom.

That summer evening as we sat in the garden with a group of

visitors from Germany, from England and America, who had traveled

to the remote Russian village that they might learn of this man,

one could not forbear the constant inquiry to one's self, as to

why he was so regarded as sage and saint that this party of

people should be repeated each day of the year. It seemed to me

then that we were all attracted by this sermon of the deed,

because Tolstoy had made the one supreme personal effort, one

might almost say the one frantic personal effort, to put himself

into right relations with the humblest people, with the men who

tilled his soil, blacked his boots, and cleaned his stables.

Doubtless the heaviest burden of our contemporaries is a

consciousness of a divergence between our democratic theory on

the one hand, that working people have a right to the

intellectual resources of society, and the actual fact on the

other hand, that thousands of them are so overburdened with toil

that there is no leisure nor energy left for the cultivation of

the mind. We constantly suffer from the strain and indecision of

believing this theory and acting as if we did not believe it, and

this man who years before had tried "to get off the backs of the

peasants," who had at least simplified his life and worked with

his hands, had come to be a prototype to many of his generation.

Doubtless all of the visitors sitting in the Tolstoy garden that

evening had excused themselves from laboring with their hands

upon the theory that they were doing something more valuable for

society in other ways. No one among our contemporaries has

dissented from this point of view so violently as Tolstoy

himself, and yet no man might so easily have excused himself from

hard and rough work on the basis of his genius and of his

intellectual contributions to the world. So far, however, from

considering his time too valuable to be spent in labor in the

field or in making shoes, our great host was too eager to know

life to be willing to give up this companionship of mutual labor.

One instinctively found reasons why it was easier for a Russian

than for the rest of us to reach this conclusion; the Russian

peasants have a proverb which says: "Labor is the house that love

lives in," by which they mean that no two people nor group of

people can come into affectionate relations with each other

unless they carry on together a mutual task, and when the Russian

peasant talks of labor he means labor on the soil, or, to use the

phrase of the great peasant, Bondereff, "bread labor." Those

monastic orders founded upon agricultural labor, those

philosophical experiments like Brook Farm and many another have

attempted to reduce to action this same truth. Tolstoy himself

has written many times his own convictions and attempts in this

direction, perhaps never more tellingly than in the description

of Lavin's morning spent in the harvest field, when he lost his

sense of grievance and isolation and felt a strange new

brotherhood for the peasants, in proportion as the rhythmic

motion of his scythe became one with theirs.

At the long dinner table laid in the garden were the various

traveling guests, the grown-up daughters, and the younger

children with their governess. The countess presided over the

usual European dinner served by men, but the count and the

daughter, who had worked all day in the fields, ate only porridge

and black bread and drank only kvas, the fare of the hay-making

peasants. Of course we are all accustomed to the fact that those

who perform the heaviest labor eat the coarsest and simplest fare

at the end of the day, but it is not often that we sit at the

same table with them while we ourselves eat the more elaborate

food prepared by someone else's labor. Tolstoy ate his simple

supper without remark or comment upon the food his family and

guests preferred to eat, assuming that they, as well as he, had

settled the matter with their own consciences.

The Tolstoy household that evening was much interested in the fate

of a young Russian spy who had recently come to Tolstoy in the

guise of a country schoolmaster, in order to obtain a copy of

"Life," which had been interdicted by the censor of the press.

After spending the night in talk with Tolstoy, the spy had gone

away with a copy of the forbidden manuscript but, unfortunately for

himself, having become converted to Tolstoy's views he had later

made a full confession to the authorities and had been exiled to

Siberia. Tolstoy, holding that it was most unjust to exile the

disciple while he, the author of the book, remained at large, had

pointed out this inconsistency in an open letter to one of the

Moscow newspapers. The discussion of this incident, of course,

opened up the entire subject of nonresidence, and curiously enough

I was disappointed in Tolstoy's position in the matter. It seemed

to me that he made too great a distinction between the use of

physical force and that moral energy which can override another's

differences and scruples with equal ruthlessness.

With that inner sense of mortification with which one finds one's

self at difference with the great authority, I recalled the

conviction of the early Hull-House residents; that whatever of

good the Settlement had to offer should be put into positive

terms, that we might live with opposition to no man, with

recognition of the good in every man, even the most wretched. We

had often departed from this principle, but had it not in every

case been a confession of weakness, and had we not always found

antagonism a foolish and unwarrantable expenditure of energy?

The conversation at dinner and afterward, although conducted with

animation and sincerity, for the moment stirred vague misgivings

within me. Was Tolstoy more logical than life warrants? Could

the wrongs of life be reduced to the terms of unrequited labor and

all be made right if each person performed the amount necessary to

satisfy his own wants? Was it not always easy to put up a strong

case if one took the naturalistic view of life? But what about the

historic view, the inevitable shadings and modifications which

life itself brings to its own interpretation? Miss Smith and I

took a night train back to Moscow in that tumult of feeling which

is always produced by contact with a conscience making one more of

those determined efforts to probe to the very foundations of the

mysterious world in which we find ourselves. A horde of perplexing

questions, concerning those problems of existence of which in

happier moments we catch but fleeting glimpses and at which we

even then stand aghast, pursued us relentlessly on the long

journey through the great wheat plains of South Russia, through

the crowded Ghetto of Warsaw, and finally into the smiling fields

of Germany where the peasant men and women were harvesting the

grain. I remember that through the sight of those toiling

peasants, I made a curious connection between the bread labor

advocated by Tolstoy and the comfort the harvest fields are said

to have once brought to Luther when, much perturbed by many

theological difficulties, he suddenly forgot them all in a gush of

gratitude for mere bread, exclaiming, "How it stands, that golden

yellow corn, on its fine tapered stem; the meek earth, at God's

kind bidding, has produced it once again!" At least the toiling

poor had this comfort of bread labor, and perhaps it did not

matter that they gained it unknowingly and painfully, if only they

walked in the path of labor. In the exercise of that curious

power possessed by the theorist to inhibit all experiences which

do not enhance his doctrine, I did not permit myself to recall

that which I knew so well--that exigent and unremitting labor

grants the poor no leisure even in the supreme moments of human

suffering and that "all griefs are lighter with bread."

I may have wished to secure this solace for myself at the cost of

the least possible expenditure of time and energy, for during the

next month in Germany, when I read everything of Tolstoy's that

had been translated into English, German, or French, there grew

up in my mind a conviction that what I ought to do upon my return

to Hull-House was to spend at least two hours every morning in

the little bakery which we had recently added to the equipment of

our coffeehouse. Two hours' work would be but a wretched

compromise, but it was hard to see how I could take more time out

of each day. I had been taught to bake bread in my childhood not

only as a household accomplishment, but because my father, true

to his miller's tradition, had insisted that each one of his

daughters on her twelfth birthday must present him with a

satisfactory wheat loaf of her own baking, and he was most

exigent as to the quality of this test loaf. What could be more

in keeping with my training and tradition than baking bread? I

did not quite see how my activity would fit in with that of the

German union baker who presided over the Hull-House bakery, but

all such matters were secondary and certainly could be arranged.

It may be that I had thus to pacify my aroused conscience before

I could settle down to hear Wagner's "Ring" at Beyreuth; it may

be that I had fallen a victim to the phrase, "bread labor"; but

at any rate I held fast to the belief that I should do this,

through the entire journey homeward, on land and sea, until I

actually arrived in Chicago when suddenly the whole scheme seemed

to me as utterly preposterous as it doubtless was. The half

dozen people invariably waiting to see me after breakfast, the

piles of letters to be opened and answered, the demand of actual

and pressing wants--were these all to be pushed aside and asked

to wait while I saved my soul by two hours' work at baking bread?

Although my resolution was abandoned, this may be the best place

to record the efforts of more doughty souls to carry out Tolstoy's

conclusions. It was perhaps inevitable that Tolstoy colonies

should be founded, although Tolstoy himself has always insisted

that each man should live his life as nearly as possible in the

place in which he was born. The visit Miss Smith and I made a

year or two later to a colony in one of the southern States

portrayed for us most vividly both the weakness and the strange

august dignity of the Tolstoy position. The colonists at

Commonwealth held but a short creed. They claimed in fact that

the difficulty is not to state truth but to make moral conviction

operative upon actual life, and they announced it their intention

"to obey the teachings of Jesus in all matters of labor and the

use of property." They would thus transfer the vindication of

creed from the church to the open field, from dogma to experience.

The day Miss Smith and I visited the Commonwealth colony of

threescore souls, they were erecting a house for the family of a

one-legged man, consisting of a wife and nine children who had

come the week before in a forlorn prairie schooner from Arkansas.

As this was the largest family the little colony contained, the

new house was to be the largest yet erected. Upon our surprise

at this literal giving "to him that asketh," we inquired if the

policy of extending food and shelter to all who applied, without

test of creed or ability, might not result in the migration of

all the neighboring poorhouse population into the colony. We

were told that this actually had happened during the winter until

the colony fare of corn meal and cow peas had proved so

unattractive that the paupers had gone back, for even the poorest

of the southern poorhouses occasionally supplied bacon with the

pone if only to prevent scurvy from which the colonists

themselves had suffered. The difficulty of the poorhouse people

had thus settled itself by the sheer poverty of the situation, a

poverty so biting that the only ones willing to face it were

those sustained by a conviction of its righteousness. The fields

and gardens were being worked by an editor, a professor, a

clergyman, as well as by artisans and laborers, the fruit thereof

to be eaten by themselves and their families or by any other

families who might arrive from Arkansas. The colonists were very

conventional in matters of family relationship and had broken

with society only in regard to the conventions pertaining to

labor and property. We had a curious experience at the end of

the day, when we were driven into the nearest town. We had taken

with us as a guest the wife of the president of the colony,

wishing to give her a dinner at the hotel, because she had

girlishly exclaimed during a conversation that at times during

the winter she had become so eager to hear good music that it had

seemed to her as if she were actually hungry for it, almost as

hungry as she was for a beefsteak. Yet as we drove away we had

the curious sensation that while the experiment was obviously

coming to an end, in the midst of its privations it yet embodied

the peace of mind which comes to him who insists upon the logic

of life whether it is reasonable or not--the fanatic's joy in

seeing his own formula translated into action. At any rate, as

we reached the common-place southern town of workaday men and

women, for one moment its substantial buildings, its solid brick

churches, its ordered streets, divided into those of the rich and

those of the poor, seemed much more unreal to us than the little

struggling colony we had left behind. We repeated to each other

that in all the practical judgments and decisions of life, we

must part company with logical demonstration; that if we stop for

it in each case, we can never go on at all; and yet, in spite of

this, when conscience does become the dictator of the daily life

of a group of men, it forces our admiration as no other modern

spectacle has power to do. It seemed but a mere incident that

this group should have lost sight of the facts of life in their

earnest endeavor to put to the test the things of the spirit.

I knew little about the colony started by Mr. Maude at Purleigh

containing several of Tolstoy's followers who were not permitted

to live in Russia, and we did not see Mr. Maude again until he

came to Chicago on his way from Manitoba, whither he had

transported the second group of Dukhobors, a religious sect who

had interested all of Tolstoy's followers because of their

literal acceptance of non-resistance and other Christian

doctrines which are so strenuously advocated by Tolstoy. It was

for their benefit that Tolstoy had finished and published

"Resurrection," breaking through his long-kept resolution against

novel writing. After the Dukhobors were settled in Canada, of

the five hundred dollars left from the "Resurrection" funds, one

half was given to Hull-House. It seemed possible to spend this

fund only for the relief of the most primitive wants of food and

shelter on the part of the most needy families.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer Terri Perkins.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter XIII: Public Activities and Investigations." by by Jane

Addams (1860-1935) From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with

Autobiographical Notes. by Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan

Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 281-309.

[Editor: Mary MarkOckerbloom]

CHAPTER XIII

PUBLIC ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS

One of the striking features of our neighborhood twenty years

ago, and one to which we never became reconciled, was the

presence of huge wooden garbage boxes fastened to the street

pavement in which the undisturbed refuse accumulated day by day.

The system of garbage collecting was inadequate throughout the

city but it became the greatest menace in a ward such as ours,

where the normal amount of waste was much increased by the

decayed fruit and vegetables discarded by the Italian and Greek

fruit peddlers, and by the residuum left over from the piles of

filthy rags which were fished out of the city dumps and brought

to the homes of the rag pickers for further sorting and washing.

The children of our neighborhood twenty years ago played their

games in and around these huge garbage boxes. They were the

first objects that the toddling child learned to climb; their

bulk afforded a barricade and their contents provided missiles in

all the battles of the older boys; and finally they became the

seats upon which absorbed lovers held enchanted converse. We are

obliged to remember that all children eat everything which they

find and that odors have a curious and intimate power of

entwining themselves into our tenderest memories, before even the

residents of Hull-House can understand their own early enthusiasm

for the removal of these boxes and the establishment of a better

system of refuse collection.

It is easy for even the most conscientious citizen of Chicago to

forget the foul smells of the stockyards and the garbage dumps,

when he is living so far from them that he is only occasionally

made conscious of their existence but the residents of a

Settlement are perforce constantly surrounded by them. During

our first three years on Halsted Street, we had established a

small incinerator at Hull-House and we had many times reported

the untoward conditions of the ward to the city hall. We had

also arranged many talks for the immigrants, pointing out that

although a woman may sweep her own doorway in her native village

and allow the reuse to innocently decay in the open air and

sunshine, in a crowded city quarter, if the garbage is not

properly collected and destroyed, a tenement-house mother may see

her children sicken and die, and that the immigrants must

therefore not only keep their own houses clean, but must also

help the authorities to keep the city clean.

Possibly our efforts slightly modified the worst conditions, but

they still remained intolerable, and the fourth summer the

situation became for me absolutely desperate when I realized in a

moment of panic that my delicate little nephew for whom I was

guardian, could not be with me at Hull-House at all unless the

sickening odors were reduced. I may well be ashamed that other

delicate children who were torn from their families, not into

boarding school but into eternity, had not long before driven me

to effective action. Under the direction of the first man who

came as a resident to Hull-House we began a systematic

investigation of the city system of garbage collection, both as

to its efficiency in other wards and its possible connection with

the death rate in the various wards of the city.

The Hull-House Woman's Club had been organized the year before by

the resident kindergartner who had first inaugurated a mother's

meeting. The new members came together, however, in quite a new

way that summer when we discussed with them the high death rate

so persistent in our ward. After several club meetings devoted

to the subject, despite the fact that the death rate rose highest

in the congested foreign colonies and not in the streets in which

most of the Irish American club women lived, twelve of their

number undertook in connection with the residents, to carefully

investigate the conditions of the alleys. During August and

September the substantiated reports of violations of the law sent

in from Hull-House to the health department were one thousand and

thirty-seven. For the club woman who had finished a long day's

work of washing or ironing followed by the cooking of a hot

supper, it would have been much easier to sit on her doorstep

during a summer evening than to go up and down ill-kept alleys

and get into trouble with her neighbors over the condition of

their garbage boxes. It required both civic enterprise and moral

conviction to be willing to do this three evenings a week during

the hottest and most uncomfortable months of the year.

Nevertheless, a certain number of women persisted, as did the

residents, and three city inspectors in succession were

transferred from the ward because of unsatisfactory services.

Still the death rate remained high and the condition seemed

little improved throughout the next winter. In sheer

desperation, the following spring when the city contracts were

awarded for the removal of garbage, with the backing of two

well-known business men, I put in a bid for the garbage removal

of the nineteenth ward. My paper was thrown out on a

technicality but the incident induced the mayor to appoint me the

garbage inspector of the ward.

The salary was a thousand dollars a year, and the loss of that

political "plum" made a great stir among the politicians. The

position was no sinecure whether regarded from the point of view

of getting up at six in the morning to see that the men were

early at work; or of following the loaded wagons, uneasily

dropping their contents at intervals, to their dreary destination

at the dump; or of insisting that the contractor must increase

the number of his wagons from nine to thirteen and from thirteen

to seventeen, although he assured me that he lost money on every

one and that the former inspector had let him off with seven; or

of taking careless landlords into court because they would not

provide the proper garbage receptacles; or of arresting the

tenant who tried to make the garbage wagons carry away the

contents of his stable.

With the two or three residents who nobly stood by, we set up six

of those doleful incinerators which are supposed to burn garbage

with the fuel collected in the alley itself. The one factory in

town which could utilize old tin cans was a window weight

factory, and we deluged that with ten times as many tin cans as

it could use--much less would pay for. We made desperate

attempts to have the dead animals removed by the contractor who

was paid most liberally by the city for that purpose but who, we

slowly discovered, always made the police ambulances do the work,

delivering the carcasses upon freight cars for shipment to a soap

factory in Indiana where they were sold for a good price although

the contractor himself was the largest stockholder in the

concern. Perhaps our greatest achievement was the discovery of a

pavement eighteen inches under the surface in a narrow street,

although after it was found we triumphantly discovered a record

of its existence in the city archives. The Italians living on

the street were much interested but displayed little

astonishment, perhaps because they were accustomed to see buried

cities exhumed. This pavement became the casus belli between

myself and the street commissioner when I insisted that its

restoration belonged to him, after I had removed the first eight

inches of garbage. The matter was finally settled by the mayor

himself, who permitted me to drive him to the entrance of the

street in what the children called my "garbage phaeton" and who

took my side of the controversy.

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, who had done some

excellent volunteer inspection in both Chicago and Pittsburg,

became my deputy and performed the work in a most thoroughgoing

manner for three years. During the last two she was under the

regime of civil service for in 1895, to the great joy of many

citizens, the Illinois legislature made that possible.

Many of the foreign-born women of the ward were much shocked by

this abrupt departure into the ways of men, and it took a great

deal of explanation to convey the idea even remotely that if it

were a womanly task to go about in tenement houses in order to

nurse the sick, it might be quite as womanly to go through the

same district in order to prevent the breeding of so-called

"filth diseases." While some of the women enthusiastically

approved the slowly changing conditions and saw that their

housewifely duties logically extended to the adjacent alleys and

streets, they yet were quite certain that "it was not a lady's

job." A revelation of this attitude was made one day in a

conversation which the inspector heard vigorously carried on in a

laundry. One of the employees was leaving and was expressing her

mind concerning the place in no measured terms, summing up her

contempt for it as follows: "I would rather be the girl who goes

about in the alleys than to stay here any longer!"

And yet the spectacle of eight hours' work for eight hours' pay,

the even-handed justice to all citizens irrespective of "pull,"

the dividing of responsibility between landlord and tenant, and

the readiness to enforce obedience to law from both, was,

perhaps, one of the most valuable demonstrations which could have

been made. Such daily living on the part of the office holder is

of infinitely more value than many talks on civics for, after

all, we credit most easily that which we see. The careful

inspection combined with other causes, brought about a great

improvement in the cleanliness and comfort of the neighborhood

and one happy day, when the death rate of our ward was found to

have dropped from third to seventh in the list of city wards and

was so reported to our Woman's Club, the applause which followed

recorded the genuine sense of participation in the result, and a

public spirit which had "made good." But the cleanliness of the

ward was becoming much too popular to suit our all-powerful

alderman and, although we felt fatuously secure under the regime

of civil service, he found a way to circumvent us by eliminating

the position altogether. He introduced an ordinance into the

city council which combined the collection of refuse with the

cleaning and repairing of the streets, the whole to be placed

under a ward superintendent. The office of course was to be

filled under civil service regulations but only men were eligible

to the examination. Although this latter regulation was

afterwards modified in favor of one woman, it was retained long

enough to put the nineteenth ward inspector out of office.

Of course our experience in inspecting only made us more

conscious of the wretched housing conditions over which we had

been distressed from the first. It was during the World's Fair

summer that one of the Hull-House residents in a public address

upon housing reform used as an example of indifferent landlordism

a large block in the neighborhood occupied by small tenements and

stables unconnected with a street sewer, as was much similar

property in the vicinity. In the lecture the resident spared

neither a description of the property nor the name of the owner.

The young man who owned the property was justly indignant at this

public method of attack and promptly came to investigate the

condition of the property. Together we made a careful tour of

the houses and stables and in the face of the conditions that we

found there, I could not but agree with him that supplying South

Italian peasants with sanitary appliances seemed a difficult

undertaking. Nevertheless he was unwilling that the block should

remain in its deplorable state, and he finally cut through the

dilemma with the rash proposition that he would give a free lease

of the entire tract to Hull-House, accompanying the offer,

however, with the warning remark, that if we should choose to use

the income from the rents in sanitary improvements we should be

throwing our money away.

Even when we decided that the houses were so bad that we could

not undertake the task of improving them, he was game and stuck

to his proposition that we should have a free lease. We finally

submitted a plan that the houses should be torn down and the

entire tract turned into a playground, although cautious advisers

intimated that it would be very inconsistent to ask for

subscriptions for the support of Hull-House when we were known to

have thrown away an income of two thousand dollars a year. We,

however, felt that a spectacle of inconsistency was better than

one of bad landlordism and so the worst of the houses were

demolished, the best three were sold and moved across the street

under careful provision that they might never be used for junk-

shops or saloons, and a public playground was finally

established. Hull-House became responsible for its management

for ten years, at the end of which time it was turned over to the

City Playground Commission although from the first the city

detailed a policeman who was responsible for its general order

and who became a valued adjunct of the House.

During fifteen years this public-spirited owner of the property

paid all the taxes, and when the block was finally sold he made

possible the playground equipment of a near-by schoolyard. On

the other hand, the dispossessed tenants, a group of whom had to

be evicted by legal process before their houses could be torn

down, have never ceased to mourn their former estates. Only the

other day I met upon the street an old Italian harness maker, who

said that he had never succeeded so well anywhere else nor found

a place that "seemed so much like Italy."

Festivities of various sorts were held on this early playground,

always a May day celebration with its Maypole dance and its May

queen. I remember that one year that honor of being queen was

offered to the little girl who should pick up the largest number

of scraps of paper which littered all the streets and alleys. The

children that spring had been organized into a league, and each

member had been provided with a stiff piece of wire upon the

sharpened point of which stray bits of paper were impaled and

later soberly counted off into a large box in the Hull-House

alley. The little Italian girl who thus won the scepter took it

very gravely as the just reward of hard labor, and we were all so

absorbed in the desire for clean and tidy streets that we were

wholly oblivious to the incongruity of thus selecting "the queen

of love and beauty."

It was at the end of the second year that we received a visit from

the warden of Toynbee Hall and his wife, as they were returning to

England from a journey around the world. They had lived in East

London for many years, and had been identified with the public

movements for its betterment. They were much shocked that, in a

new country with conditions still plastic and hopeful, so little

attention had been paid to experiments and methods of amelioration

which had already been tried; and they looked in vain through our

library for blue books and governmental reports which recorded

painstaking study into the conditions of English cities.

They were the first of a long line of English visitors to express

the conviction that many things in Chicago were untoward not

through paucity of public spirit but through a lack of political

machinery adapted to modern city life. This was not all of the

situation but perhaps no casual visitor could be expected to see

that these matters of detail seemed unimportant to a city in the

first flush of youth, impatient of correction and convinced that

all would be well with its future. The most obvious faults were

those connected with the congested housing of the immigrant

population, nine tenths of them from the country, who carried on

all sorts of traditional activities in the crowded tenements.

That a group of Greeks should be permitted to slaughter sheep in

a basement, that Italian women should be allowed to sort over

rags collected from the city dumps, not only within the city

limits but in a court swarming with little children, that

immigrant bakers should continue unmolested to bake bread for

their neighbors in unspeakably filthy spaces under the pavement,

appeared incredible to visitors accustomed to careful city

regulations. I recall two visits made to the Italian quarter by

John Burns--the second, thirteen years after the first. During

the latter visit it seemed to him unbelievable that a certain

house owned by a rich Italian should have been permitted to

survive. He remembered with the greatest minuteness the

positions of the houses on the court, with the exact space

between the front and rear tenements, and he asked at once

whether we had been able to cut a window into a dark hall as he

had recommended thirteen years before. Although we were obliged

to confess that the landlord would not permit the window to be

cut, we were able to report that a City Homes Association had

existed for ten years; that following a careful study of tenement

conditions in Chicago, the text of which had been written by a

Hull-House resident, the association had obtained the enactment

of a model tenement-house code, and that their secretary had

carefully watched the administration of the law for years so that

its operation might not be minimized by the granting of too many

exceptions in the city council. Our progress still seemed slow

to Mr. Burns because in Chicago, the actual houses were quite

unchanged, embodying features long since declared illegal in

London. Only this year could we have reported to him, had he

again come to challenge us, that the provisions of the law had at

last been extended to existing houses and that a conscientious

corps of inspectors under an efficient chief, were fast remedying

the most glaring evils, while a band of nurses and doctors were

following hard upon the "trail of the white hearse."

The mere consistent enforcement of existing laws and efforts for

their advance often placed Hull-House, at least temporarily, into

strained relations with its neighbors. I recall a continuous

warfare against local landlords who would move wrecks of old

houses as a nucleus for new ones in order to evade the provisions

of the building code, and a certain Italian neighbor who was

filled with bitterness because his new rear tenement was

discovered to be illegal. It seemed impossible to make him

understand that the health of the tenants was in any wise as

important as his undisturbed rents.

Nevertheless many evils constantly arise in Chicago from

congested housing which wiser cities forestall and prevent; the

inevitable boarders crowded into a dark tenement already too

small for the use of the immigrant family occupying it; the

surprisingly large number of delinquent girls who have become

criminally involved with their own fathers and uncles; the school

children who cannot find a quiet spot in which to read or study

and who perforce go into the streets each evening; the

tuberculosis superinduced and fostered by the inadequate rooms

and breathing spaces. One of the Hull-House residents, under the

direction of a Chicago physician who stands high as an authority

on tuberculosis and who devotes a large proportion of his time to

our vicinity, made an investigation into housing conditions as

related to tuberculosis with a result as startling as that of the

"lung block" in New York.

It is these subtle evils of wretched and inadequate housing which

are often the most disastrous. In the summer of 1902 during an

epidemic of typhoid fever in which our ward, although containing

but one thirty-sixth of the population of the city, registered

one sixth of the total number of deaths, two of the Hull-House

residents made an investigation of the methods of plumbing in the

houses adjacent to conspicuous groups of fever cases. They

discovered among the people who had been exposed to the

infection, a widow who had lived in the ward for a number of

years, in a comfortable little house of her own. Although the

Italian immigrants were closing in all around her, she was not

willing to sell her property and to move away until she had

finished the education of her children. In the meantime she held

herself quite aloof from her Italian neighbors and could never be

drawn into any of the public efforts to secure a better code of

tenement-house sanitation. Her two daughters were sent to an

eastern college. One June when one of them had graduated and the

other still had two years before she took her degree, they came

to the spotless little house and their self-sacrificing mother

for the summer holiday. They both fell ill with typhoid fever

and one daughter died because the mother's utmost efforts could

not keep the infection out of her own house. The entire disaster

affords, perhaps, a fair illustration of the futility of the

individual conscience which would isolate a family from the rest

of the community and its interests.

The careful information collected concerning the juxtaposition of

the typhoid cases to the various systems of plumbing and

nonplumbing was made the basis of a bacteriological study by

another resident, Dr. Alice Hamilton, as to the possibility of

the infection having been carried by flies. Her researches were

so convincing that they have been incorporated into the body of

scientific data supporting that theory, but there were also

practical results from the investigation. It was discovered that

the wretched sanitary appliances through which alone the

infection could have become so widely spread, would not have been

permitted to remain, unless the city inspector had either been

criminally careless or open to the arguments of favored

landlords.

The agitation finally resulted in a long and stirring trial

before the civil service board of half of the employees in the

Sanitary Bureau, with the final discharge of eleven out of the

entire force of twenty-four. The inspector in our neighborhood

was a kindly old man, greatly distressed over the affair, and

quite unable to understand why he should have not used his

discretion as to the time when a landlord should be forced to put

in modern appliances. If he was "very poor," or "just about to

sell his place," or "sure that the house would be torn down to

make room for a factory," why should one "inconvenience" him? The

old man died soon after the trial, feeling persecuted to the very

last and not in the least understanding what it was all about.

We were amazed at the commercial ramifications which graft in the

city hall involved and at the indignation which interference with

it produced. Hull-House lost some large subscriptions as the

result of this investigation, a loss which, if not easy to bear,

was at least comprehensible. We also uncovered unexpected graft

in connection with the plumbers' unions, and but for the fearless

testimony of one of their members, could never have brought the

trial to a successful issue.

Inevitable misunderstanding also developed in connection with the

attempt on the part of Hull-House residents to prohibit the sale

of cocaine to minors, which brought us into sharp conflict with

many druggists. I recall an Italian druggist living on the edge

of the neighborhood, who finally came with a committee of his

countryman to see what Hull-House wanted of him, thoroughly

convinced that no such effort could be disinterested. One dreary

trial after another had been lost through the inadequacy of the

existing legislation and after many attempts to secure better

legal regulation of its sale, a new law with the cooperation of

many agencies was finally secured in 1907. Through all this the

Italian druggist, who had greatly profited by the sale of cocaine

to boys, only felt outraged and abused. And yet the thought of

this campaign brings before my mind with irresistible force, a

young Italian boy who died,--a victim of the drug at the age of

seventeen. He had been in our kindergarten as a handsome merry

child, in our clubs as a vivacious boy, and then gradually there

was an eclipse of all that was animated and joyous and promising,

and when I at last saw him in his coffin, it was impossible to

connect that haggard shriveled body with what I had known before.

A midwife investigation, undertaken in connection with the

Chicago Medical Society, while showing the great need of further

state regulation in the interest of the most ignorant mothers and

helpless children, brought us into conflict with one of the most

venerable of all customs. Was all this a part of the unending

struggle between the old and new, or were these oppositions so

unexpected and so unlooked for merely a reminder of that old bit

of wisdom that "there is no guarding against interpretations"?

Perhaps more subtle still, they were due to that very

super-refinement of disinterestedness which will not justify

itself, that it may feel superior to public opinion. Some of our

investigations of course had no such untoward results, such as

"An Intensive Study of Truancy" undertaken by a resident of

Hull-House in connection with the compulsory education department

of the Board of Education and the Visiting Nurses Association.

The resident, Mrs. Britton, who, having had charge of our

children's clubs for many years, knew thousands of children in

the neighborhood, made a detailed study of three hundred families

tracing back the habitual truancy of the child to economic and

social causes. This investigation preceded a most interesting

conference on truancy held under a committee of which I was a

member from the Chicago Board of Education. It left lasting

results upon the administration of the truancy law as well as the

cooperation of volunteer bodies.

We continually conduct small but careful investigations at

Hull-House, which may guide us in our immediate doings such as two

recently undertaken by Mrs. Britton, one upon the reading of school

children before new books were bought for the children's club

libraries, and another on the proportion of tuberculosis among

school children, before we opened a little experimental outdoor

school on one of our balconies. Some of the Hull-House

investigations are purely negative in result; we once made an

attempt to test the fatigue of factory girls in order to determine

how far overwork superinduced the tuberculosis to which such a

surprising number of them were victims. The one scientific

instrument it seemed possible to use was an ergograph, a

complicated and expensive instrument kindly lent to us from the

physiological laboratory of the University of Chicago. I remember

the imposing procession we made from Hull-House to the factory full

of working women, in which the proprietor allowed us to make the

tests; first there was the precious instrument on a hand truck

guarded by an anxious student and the young physician who was going

to take the tests every afternoon; then there was Dr. Hamilton the

resident in charge of the investigation, walking with a scientist

who was interested to see that the instrument was properly

installed; I followed in the rear to talk once more to the

proprietor of the factory to be quite sure that he would permit the

experiment to go on. The result of all this preparation, however,

was to have the instrument record less fatigue at the end of the

day than at the beginning, not because the girls had not worked

hard and were not "dog tired" as they confessed, but because the

instrument was not fitted to find it out.

For many years we have administered a branch station of the federal

post office at Hull-House, which we applied for in the first

instance because our neighbors lost such a large percentage of the

money they sent to Europe, through the commissions to middle men.

The experience in the post office constantly gave us data for

urging the establishment of postal savings as we saw one perplexed

immigrant after another turning away in bewilderment when he was

told that the United States post office did not receive savings.

We find increasingly, however, that the best results are to be

obtained in investigations as in other undertakings, by combining

our researches with those of other public bodies or with the

State itself. When all the Chicago Settlements found themselves

distressed over the condition of the newsboys who, because they

are merchants and not employees, do not come under the provisions

of the Illinois child labor law, they united in the investigation

of a thousand young newsboys, who were all interviewed on the

streets during the same twenty-four hours. Their school and

domestic status was easily determined later, for many of the boys

lived in the immediate neighborhoods of the ten Settlements which

had undertaken the investigation. The report embodying the

results of the investigation recommended a city ordinance

containing features from the Boston and Buffalo regulations, and

although an ordinance was drawn up and a strenuous effort was

made to bring it to the attention of the aldermen, none of them

would introduce it into the city council without newspaper

backing. We were able to agitate for it again at the annual

meeting of the National Child Labor Committee which was held in

Chicago in 1908, and which was of course reported in papers

throughout the entire country. This meeting also demonstrated

that local measures can sometimes be urged most effectively when

joined to the efforts of a national body. Undoubtedly the best

discussions ever held upon the operation and status of the

Illinois law were those which took place then. The needs of the

Illinois children were regarded in connection with the children

of the nation and advanced health measures for Illinois were

compared with those of other states.

The investigations of Hull-House thus tend to be merged with

those of larger organizations, from the investigation of the

social value of saloons made for the Committee of Fifty in 1896,

to the one on infant mortality in relation to nationality, made

for the American Academy of Science in 1909. This is also true

of Hull-House activities in regard to public movements, some of

which are inaugurated by the residents of other Settlements, as

the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, founded by the

splendid efforts of Dr. Graham Taylor for many years head of

Chicago Commons. All of our recent investigations into housing

have been under the department of investigation of this school

with which several of the Hull-House residents are identified,

quite as our active measures to secure better housing conditions

have been carried on with the City Homes Association and through

the cooperation of one of our residents who several years ago was

appointed a sanitary inspector on the city staff.

Perhaps Dr. Taylor himself offers the best possible example of

the value of Settlement experience to public undertakings, in his

manifold public activities of which one might instance his work

at the moment upon a commission recently appointed by the

governor of Illinois to report upon the best method of Industrial

Insurance or Employer's Liability Acts, and his influence in

securing another to study into the subject of Industrial

Diseases. The actual factory investigation under the latter is

in charge of Dr. Hamilton, of Hull-House, whose long residence in

an industrial neighborhood as well as her scientific attainment,

give her peculiar qualifications for the undertaking.

And so a Settlement is led along from the concrete to the

abstract, as may easily be illustrated. Many years ago a tailors'

union meeting at Hull-House asked our cooperation in tagging the

various parts of a man's coat in such wise as to show the money

paid to the people who had made it; one tag for the cutting and

another for the buttonholes, another for the finishing and so on,

the resulting total to be compared with the selling price of the

coat itself. It quickly became evident that we had no way of

computing how much of this larger balance was spent for salesmen,

commercial travelers, rent and management, and the poor tagged

coat was finally left hanging limply in a closet as if discouraged

with the attempt. But the desire of the manual worker to know the

relation of his own labor to the whole is not only legitimate but

must form the basis of any intelligent action for his improvement.

It was therefore with the hope of reform in the sewing trades

that the Hull-House residents testified before the Federal

Industrial Commission in 1900, and much later with genuine

enthusiasm joined with trades-unionists and other public-spirited

citizens in an industrial exhibit which made a graphic

presentation of the conditions and rewards of labor. The large

casino building in which it was held was filled every day and

evening for two weeks, showing how popular such information is, if

it can be presented graphically. As an illustration of this same

moving from the smaller to the larger, I might instance the

efforts of Miss McDowell of the University of Chicago Settlement

and others in urging upon Congress the necessity for a special

investigation into the conditions of women and children in

industry because we had discovered the insuperable difficulties of

smaller investigations, notably one undertaken for the Illinois

Bureau of Labor by Mrs. Van der Vaart of Neighborhood House and by

Miss Breckinridge of the University of Chicago. This

investigation made clear that it was as impossible to detach the

girls working in the stockyards from their sisters in industry as

it was to urge special legislation on their behalf.

In the earlier years of the American Settlements, the residents

were sometimes impatient with the accepted methods of charitable

administration and hoped, through residence in an industrial

neighborhood, to discover more cooperative and advanced methods

of dealing with the problems of poverty which are so dependent

upon industrial maladjustment. But during twenty years, the

Settlements have seen the charitable people, through their very

knowledge of the poor, constantly approach nearer to those

methods formerly designated as radical. The residents, so far

from holding aloof from organized charity, find testimony,

certainly in the National Conferences, that out of the most

persistent and intelligent efforts to alleviate poverty will in

all probability arise the most significant suggestions for

eradicating poverty. In the hearing before a congressional

committee for the establishment of a Children's Bureau, residents

in American Settlements joined their fellow philanthropists in

urging the need of this indispensable instrument for collecting

and disseminating information which would make possible concerted

intelligent action on behalf of children.

Mr. Howells has said that we are all so besotted with our novel

reading that we have lost the power of seeing certain aspects of

life with any sense of reality because we are continually looking

for the possible romance. The description might apply to the

earlier years of the American settlement, but certainly the later

years are filled with discoveries in actual life as romantic as

they are unexpected. If I may illustrate one of these romantic

discoveries from my own experience, I would cite the indications

of an internationalism as sturdy and virile as it is unprecedented

which I have seen in our cosmopolitan neighborhood: when a South

Italian Catholic is forced by the very exigencies of the situation

to make friends with an Austrian Jew representing another

nationality and another religion, both of which cut into all his

most cherished prejudices, he finds it harder to utilize them a

second time and gradually loses them. He thus modifies his

provincialism, for if an old enemy working by his side has turned

into a friend, almost anything may happen. When, therefore, I

became identified with the peace movement both in its

International and National Conventions, I hoped that this

internationalism engendered in the immigrant quarters of American

cities might be recognized as an effective instrument in the cause

of peace. I first set it forth with some misgiving before the

Convention held in Boston in 1904 and it is always a pleasure to

recall the hearty assent given to it by Professor William James.

I have always objected to the phrase "sociological laboratory"

applied to us, because Settlements should be something much more

human and spontaneous than such a phrase connotes, and yet it is

inevitable that the residents should know their own neighborhoods

more thoroughly than any other, and that their experiences there

should affect their convictions.

Years ago I was much entertained by a story told at the Chicago

Woman's Club by one of its ablest members in the discussion

following a paper of mine on "The Outgrowths of Toynbee Hall."

She said that when she was a little girl playing in her mother's

garden, she one day discovered a small toad who seemed to her

very forlorn and lonely, although she did not in the least know

how to comfort him, she reluctantly left him to his fate; later

in the day, quite at the other end of the garden, she found a

large toad, also apparently without family and friends. With a

heart full of tender sympathy, she took a stick and by exercising

infinite patience and some skill, she finally pushed the little

toad through the entire length of the garden into the company of

the big toad, when, to her inexpressible horror and surprise, the

big toad opened his mouth and swallowed the little one. The

moral of the tale was clear applied to people who lived "where

they did not naturally belong," although I protested that was

exactly what we wanted--to be swallowed and digested, to

disappear into the bulk of the people.

Twenty years later I am willing to testify that something of the

sort does take place after years of identification with an

industrial community.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer Adrienne Fermoyle.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter XIV: Civic Cooperation." by by Jane Addams (1860-1935)

From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by

Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp.

310-341.

[Editor: Mary MarkOckerbloom]

CHAPTER XIV

CIVIC COOPERATION

One of the first lessons we learned at Hull-House was that private

beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of

the city's disinherited. We also quickly came to realize that

there are certain types of wretchedness from which every private

philanthropy shrinks and which are cared for only in those wards

of the county hospital provided for the wrecks of vicious living

or in the city's isolation hospital for smallpox patients.

I have heard a broken-hearted mother exclaim when her erring

daughter came home at last too broken and diseased to be taken

into the family she had disgraced, "There is no place for her but

the top floor of the County Hospital; they will have to take her

there," and this only after every possible expedient had been

tried or suggested. This aspect of governmental responsibility

was unforgettably borne in upon me during the smallpox epidemic

following the World's Fair, when one of the residents, Mrs.

Kelley, as State Factory Inspector, was much concerned in

discovering and destroying clothing which was being finished in

houses containing unreported cases of smallpox. The deputy most

successful in locating such cases lived at Hull-House during the

epidemic because he did not wish to expose his own family.

Another resident, Miss Lathrop, as a member of the State Board of

Charities, went back and forth to the crowded pest house which

had been hastily constructed on a stretch of prairie west of the

city. As Hull-House was already so exposed, it seemed best for

the special smallpox inspectors from the Board of Health to take

their meals and change their clothing there before they went to

their respective homes. All of these officials had accepted

without question and as implicit in public office the obligation

to carry on the dangerous and difficult undertakings for which

private philanthropy is unfitted, as if the commonalty of

compassion represented by the State was more comprehending than

that of any individual group.

It was as early as our second winter on Halsted Street that one

of the Hull-House residents received an appointment from the Cook

County agent as a county visitor. She reported at the agency

each morning, and all the cases within a radius of ten blocks

from Hull-House were given to her for investigation. This gave

her a legitimate opportunity for knowing the poorest people in

the neighborhood and also for understanding the county method of

outdoor relief. The commissioners were at first dubious of the

value of such a visitor and predicted that a woman would be a

perfect "coal chute" for giving away county supplies, but they

gradually came to depend upon her suggestion and advice.

In 1893 this same resident, Miss Julia C. Lathrop, was appointed

by the governor a member of the Illinois State Board of

Charities. She served in this capacity for two consecutive terms

and was later reappointed to a third term. Perhaps her most

valuable contribution toward the enlargement and reorganization

of the charitable institutions of the State came through her

intimate knowledge of the beneficiaries, and her experience

demonstrated that it is only through long residence among the

poor that an official could have learned to view public

institutions as she did, from the standpoint of the inmates

rather than from that of the managers. Since that early day,

residents of Hull-House have spent much time in working for the

civil service methods of appointment for employees in the county

and State institutions; for the establishment of State colonies

for the care of epileptics; and for a dozen other enterprises

which occupy that borderland between charitable effort and

legislation. In this borderland we cooperate in many civic

enterprises for I think we may claim that Hull-House has always

held its activities lightly, ready to hand them over to whosoever

would carry them on properly.

Miss Starr had early made a collection of framed photographs,

largely of the paintings studied in her art class, which became

the basis of a loan collection first used by the Hull-House

students and later extended to the public schools. It may be

fair to suggest that this effort was the nucleus of the Public

School Art Society which was later formed in the city and of

which Miss Starr was the first president.

In our first two summers we had maintained three baths in the

basement of our own house for the use of the neighborhood, and

they afforded some experience and argument for the erection of

the first public bathhouse in Chicago, which was built on a

neighboring street and opened under the city Board of Health. The

lot upon which it was erected belonged to a friend of Hull-House

who offered it to the city without rent, and this enabled the

city to erect the first public bath from the small appropriation

of ten thousand dollars. Great fear was expressed by the public

authorities that the baths would not be used, and the old story

of the bathtubs in model tenements which had been turned into

coal bins was often quoted to us. We were supplied, however,

with the incontrovertible argument that in our adjacent third

square mile there were in 1892 but three bathtubs and that this

fact was much complained of by many of the tenement-house

dwellers. Our contention was justified by the immediate and

overflowing use of the public baths, as we had before been

sustained in the contention that an immigrant population would

respond to opportunities for reading when the Public Library

Board had established a branch reading room at Hull-House.

We also quickly discovered that nothing brought us so absolutely

into comradeship with our neighbors as mutual and sustained

effort such as the paving of a street, the closing of a gambling

house, or the restoration of a veteran police sergeant.

Several of these earlier attempts at civic cooperation were

undertaken in connection with the Hull-House Men's Club, which

had been organized in the spring of 1893, had been incorporated

under a State charter of its own, and had occupied a club room in

the gymnasium building. This club obtained an early success in

one of the political struggles in the ward and thus fastened upon

itself a specious reputation for political power. It was at last

so torn by the dissensions of two political factions which

attempted to capture it that, although it is still an existing

organization, it has never regained the prestige of its first

five years. Its early political success came in a campaign

Hull-House had instigated against a powerful alderman who has

held office for more than twenty years in the nineteenth ward,

and who, although notoriously corrupt, is still firmly intrenched

among his constituents.

Hull-House has had to do with three campaigns organized against

him. In the first one he was apparently only amused at our

"Sunday School" effort and did little to oppose the election to

the aldermanic office of a member of the Hull-House Men's Club

who thus became his colleague in the city council. When

Hull-House, however, made an effort in the following spring

against the re-election of the alderman himself, we encountered

the most determined and skillful opposition. In these campaigns

we doubtless depended too much upon the idealistic appeal for we

did not yet comprehend the element of reality always brought into

the political struggle in such a neighborhood where politics deal

so directly with getting a job and earning a living.

We soon discovered that approximately one out of every five

voters in the nineteenth ward at that time held a job dependent

upon the good will of the alderman. There were no civil service

rules to interfere, and the unskilled voter swept the street and

dug the sewer, as secure in his position as the more

sophisticated voter who tended a bridge or occupied an office

chair in the city hall. The alderman was even more fortunate in

finding places with the franchise-seeking corporations; it took

us some time to understand why so large a proportion of our

neighbors were street-car employees and why we had such a large

club composed solely of telephone girls. Our powerful alderman

had various methods of entrenching himself. Many people were

indebted to him for his kindly services in the police station and

the justice courts, for in those days Irish constituents easily

broke the peace, and before the establishment of the Juvenile

Court, boys were arrested for very trivial offenses; added to

these were hundreds of constituents indebted to him for personal

kindness, from the peddler who received a free license to the

businessman who had a railroad pass to New York. Our third

campaign against him, when we succeeded in making a serious

impression upon his majority, evoked from his henchmen the same

sort of hostility which a striker so inevitably feels against the

man who would take his job, even sharpened by the sense that the

movement for reform came from an alien source.

Another result of the campaign was an expectation on the part of

our new political friends that Hull-House would perform like

offices for them, and there resulted endless confusion and

misunderstanding because in many cases we could not even attempt

to do what the alderman constantly did with a right good will.

When he protected a law breaker from the legal consequences of

his act, his kindness appeared, not only to himself but to all

beholders, like the deed of a powerful and kindly statesman. When

Hull-House on the other hand insisted that a law must be

enforced, it could but appear like the persecution of the

offender. We were certainly not anxious for consistency nor for

individual achievement, but in a desire to foster a higher

political morality and not to lower our standards, we constantly

clashed with the existing political code. We also unwittingly

stumbled upon a powerful combination of which our alderman was

the political head, with its banking, its ecclesiastical, and its

journalistic representatives, and as we followed up the clue and

naively told all we discovered, we of course laid the foundations

for opposition which has manifested itself in many forms; the

most striking expression of it was an attack upon Hull-House

lasting through weeks and months by a Chicago daily newspaper

which has since ceased publication.

During the third campaign I received many anonymous

letters--those from the men often obscene, those from the women

revealing that curious connection between prostitution and the

lowest type of politics which every city tries in vain to hide.

I had offers from the men in the city prison to vote properly if

released; various communications from lodging-house keepers as to

the prices of the vote they were ready to deliver; everywhere

appeared that animosity which is evoked only when a man feels

that his means of livelihood is threatened.

As I look back, I am reminded of the state of mind of Kipling's

newspapermen who witnessed a volcanic eruption at sea, in which

unbelievable deep-sea creatures were expelled to the surface,

among them an enormous white serpent, blind and smelling of musk,

whose death throes thrashed the sea into a fury. With

professional instinct unimpaired, the journalists carefully

observed the uncanny creature never designed for the eyes of men;

but a few days later, when they found themselves in a comfortable

second-class carriage, traveling from Southampton to London

between trim hedgerows and smug English villages, they concluded

that the experience was too sensational to be put before the

British public, and it became improbable even to themselves.

Many subsequent years of living in kindly neighborhood fashion

with the people of the nineteenth ward has produced upon my

memory the soothing effect of the second-class railroad carriage

and many of these political experiences have not only become

remote but already seem improbable. On the other hand, these

campaigns were not without their rewards; one of them was a

quickened friendship both with the more substantial citizens in

the ward and with a group of fine young voters whose devotion to

Hull-House has never since failed; another was a sense of

identification with public-spirited men throughout the city who

contributed money and time to what they considered a gallant

effort against political corruption. I remember a young

professor from the University of Chicago who with his wife came

to live at Hull-House, traveling the long distance every day

throughout the autumn and winter that he might qualify as a

nineteenth-ward voter in the spring campaign. He served as a

watcher at the polls and it was but a poor reward for his

devotion that he was literally set upon and beaten up, for in

those good old days such things frequently occurred. Many another

case of devotion to our standard so recklessly raised might be

cited, but perhaps more valuable than any of these was the sense

of identification we obtained with the rest of Chicago.

So far as a Settlement can discern and bring to local

consciousness neighborhood needs which are common needs, and can

give vigorous help to the municipal measures through which such

needs shall be met, it fulfills its most valuable function. To

illustrate from our first effort to improve the street paving in

the vicinity, we found that when we had secured the consent of

the majority of the property owners on a given street for a new

paving, the alderman checked the entire plan through his kindly

service to one man who had appealed to him to keep the

assessments down. The street long remained a shocking mass of

wet, dilapidated cedar blocks, where children were sometimes

mired as they floated a surviving block in the water which

speedily filled the holes whence other blocks had been extracted

for fuel. And yet when we were able to demonstrate that the

street paving had thus been reduced into cedar pulp by the

heavily loaded wagons of an adjacent factory, that the expense of

its repaving should be borne from a general fund and not by the

poor property owners, we found that we could all unite in

advocating reform in the method of repaving assessments, and the

alderman himself was obliged to come into such a popular

movement. The Nineteenth Ward Improvement Association which met

at Hull-House during two winters, was the first body of citizens

able to make a real impression upon the local paving situation.

They secured an expert to watch the paving as it went down to be

sure that their half of the paving money was well expended. In

the belief that property values would be thus enhanced, the

common aim brought together the more prosperous people of the

vicinity, somewhat as the Hull-House Cooperative Coal Association

brought together the poorer ones.

I remember that during the second campaign against our alderman,

Governor Pingree of Michigan came to visit at Hull-House. He said

that the stronghold of such a man was not the place in which to

start municipal regeneration; that good aldermen should be elected

from the promising wards first, until a majority of honest men in

the city council should make politics unprofitable for corrupt

men. We replied that it was difficult to divide Chicago into good

and bad wards, but that a new organization called the Municipal

Voters' League was attempting to give to the well-meaning voter in

each ward throughout the city accurate information concerning the

candidates and their relation, past and present, to vital issues.

One of our trustees who was most active in inaugurating this

League always said that his nineteenth-ward experience had

convinced him of the unity of city politics, and that he

constantly used our campaign as a challenge to the unaroused

citizens living in wards less conspicuously corrupt.