Twenty Years at Hull House_ with Autobiographical Notes Jane Addams 1938 downloads.pdf

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Twenty Years at Hull House;
with Autobiographical Notes

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will
have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using
this eBook.

Title: Twenty Years at Hull House; with Autobiographical Notes

Author: Jane Addams

Release date: May 1, 1998 [eBook #1325]
Most recently updated: April 2, 2015

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1325

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TWENTY
YEARS AT HULL HOUSE; WITH AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ***

deHTML from allhull.htm 1998 Apr 10 <alhambra@CapAccess.org>

For Project Gutenberg

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-
HOUSE
WITH AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

BY JANE ADDAMS

HULL-HOUSE, CHICAGO

AUTHOR OF "DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS," "NEWER IDEALS OF PEACE,"
"THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH AND THE CITY STREETS," ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY NORAH HAMILTON

HULL-HOUSE, CHICAGO

TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER

PREFACE

CONTENTS

Preface vii
I. EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS 1
II. INFLUENCE OF LINCOLN 23
III. BOARDING-SCHOOL IDEALS 43
IV. THE SNARE OF PREPARATION 65
V. FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE 89
VI. THE SUBJECTIVE NECESSITY FOR SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS 113
VII. SOME EARLY UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE 129
VIII. PROBLEMS OF POVERTY 154
IX. A DECADE OF ECONOMIC DISCUSSION 177
X. PIONEER LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 198
XI. IMMIGRANTS AND THEIR CHILDREN 231
XII. TOLSTOYISM 259
XIII. PUBLIC ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS 281
XIV. CIVIC COOPERATION 310
XV. THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS 342
XVI. ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE 371
XVII. ECHOES OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 400
XVIII. SOCIALIZED EDUCATION 427

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.

Certainly the need for civic cooperation was obvious in many directions,
and in none more strikingly than in that organized effort which must be
carried on unceasingly if young people are to be protected from the darker
and coarser dangers of the city. The cooperation between Hull-House and
the Juvenile Protective Association came about gradually, and it seems now
almost inevitably. From our earliest days we saw many boys constantly
arrested, and I had a number of most enlightening experiences in the police
station with an Irish lad whose mother upon her deathbed had begged me
"to look after him." We were distressed by the gangs of very little boys who
would sally forth with an enterprising leader in search of old brass and iron,
sometimes breaking into empty houses for the sake of the faucets or lead
pipe which they would sell for a good price to a junk dealer. With the
money thus obtained they would buy cigarettes and beer or even candy,
which could be conspicuously consumed in the alleys where they might
enjoy the excitement of being seen and suspected by the "coppers." From
the third year of Hull-House, one of the residents held a semiofficial
position in the nearest police station; at least, the sergeant agreed to give her
provisional charge of every boy and girl under arrest for a trivial offense.

Mrs. Stevens, who performed this work for several years, became the
first probation officer of the Juvenile Court when it was established in Cook
County in 1899. She was the sole probation officer at first, but at the time of
her death, which occurred at Hull-House in 1900, she was the senior officer
of a corps of six. Her entire experience had fitted her to deal wisely with
wayward children. She had gone into a New England cotton mill at the age
of thirteen, where she had promptly lost the index finger of her right hand,
through "carelessness" she was told, and no one then seemed to understand
that freedom from care was the prerogative of childhood. Later she became

a typesetter and was one of the first women in America to become a
member of the typographical union, retaining her "card" through all the
later years of editorial work. As the Juvenile Court developed, the
committee of public-spirited citizens who first supplied only Mrs. Stevens'
salary later maintained a corps of twenty-two such officers; several of these
were Hull-House residents who brought to the house for many years a sad
little procession of children struggling against all sorts of handicaps. When
legislation was secured which placed the probation officers upon the payroll
of the county, it was a challenge to the efficiency of the civil service method
of appointment to obtain by examination men and women fitted for this
delicate human task. As one of five people asked by the civil service
commission to conduct this first examination for probation officers, I
became convinced that we were but at the beginning of the nonpolitical
method of selecting public servants, but even stiff and unbending as the
examination may be, it is still our hope of political salvation.

In 1907, the Juvenile Court was housed in a model court building of its
own, containing a detention home and equipped with a competent staff. The
committee of citizens largely responsible for this result thereupon turned
their attention to the conditions which the records of the court indicated had
led to the alarming amount of juvenile delinquency and crime. They
organized the Juvenile Protective Association, whose twenty-two officers
meet weekly at Hull-House with their executive committee to report what
they have found and to discuss city conditions affecting the lives of children
and young people.

The association discovers that there are certain temptations into which
children so habitually fall that it is evident that the average child cannot
withstand them. An overwhelming mass of data is accumulated showing the
need of enforcing existing legislation and of securing new legislation, but it
also indicates a hundred other directions in which the young people who so

gaily walk our streets, often to their own destruction, need safeguarding and
protection.

The effort of the association to treat the youth of the city with
consideration and understanding has rallied the most unexpected forces to
its standard. Quite as the basic needs of life are supplied solely by those
who make money out of the business, so the modern city has assumed that
the craving for pleasure must be ministered to only by the sordid. This
assumption, however, in a large measure broke down as soon as the
Juvenile Protective Association courageously put it to the test. After
persistent prosecutions, but also after many friendly interviews, the
Druggists' Association itself prosecutes those of its members who sell
indecent postal cards; the Saloon Keepers' Protective Association not only
declines to protect members who sell liquor to minors, but now takes drastic
action to prevent such sales; the Retail Grocers' Association forbids the
selling of tobacco to minors; the Association of Department Store Managers
not only increased the vigilance in their waiting rooms by supplying more
matrons, but as a body they have become regular contributors to the
association; the special watchmen in all the railroad yards agree not to
arrest trespassing boys but to report them to the association; the firms
manufacturing moving picture films not only submit their films to a
volunteer inspection committee, but ask for suggestions in regard to new
matter; and the Five-Cent Theaters arrange for "stunts" which shall deal
with the subject of public health and morals, when the lecturers provided
are entertaining as well as instructive.

It is not difficult to arouse the impulse of protection for the young, which
would doubtless dictate the daily acts of many a bartender and poolroom
keeper if they could only indulge it without giving their rivals an advantage.
When this difficulty is removed by an even-handed enforcement of the law,
that simple kindliness which the innocent always evoke goes from one to

another like a slowly spreading flame of good will. Doubtless the most
rewarding experience in any such undertaking as that of the Juvenile
Protective Association is the warm and intelligent cooperation coming from
unexpected sources—official and commercial as well as philanthropic.
Upon the suggestion of the association, social centers have been opened in
various parts of the city, disused buildings turned into recreation rooms,
vacant lots made into gardens, hiking parties organized for country
excursions, bathing beaches established on the lake front, and public
schools opened for social purposes. Through the efforts of public-spirited
citizens a medical clinic and a Psychopathic Institute have become
associated with the Juvenile Court of Chicago, in addition to which an
exhaustive study of court-records has been completed. To this carefully
collected data concerning the abnormal child, the Juvenile Protective
Association hopes in time to add knowledge of the normal child who lives
under the most adverse city conditions.

It was not without hope that I might be able to forward in the public
school system the solution of some of these problems of delinquency so
dependent upon truancy and ill-adapted education that I became a member
of the Chicago Board of Education in July, 1905. It is impossible to write of
the situation as it became dramatized in half a dozen strong personalities,
but the entire experience was so illuminating as to the difficulties and
limitations of democratic government that it would be unfair in a chapter on
Civic Cooperation not to attempt an outline.

Even the briefest statement, however, necessitates a review of the
preceding few years. For a decade the Chicago school teachers, or rather a
majority of them who were organized into the Teachers' Federation, had
been engaged in a conflict with the Board of Education both for more
adequate salaries and for more self-direction in the conduct of the schools.
In pursuance of the first object, they had attacked the tax dodger along the

entire line of his defense, from the curbstone to the Supreme Court. They
began with an intricate investigation which uncovered the fact that in 1899,
$235,000,000 of value of public utility corporations paid nothing in taxes.
The Teachers' Federation brought a suit which was prosecuted through the
Supreme Court of Illinois and resulted in an order entered against the State
Board of Equalization, demanding that it tax the corporations mentioned in
the bill. In spite of the fact that the defendant companies sought federal aid
and obtained an order which restrained the payment of a portion of the tax,
each year since 1900, the Chicago Board of Education has benefited to the
extent of more than a quarter of a million dollars. Although this result had
been attained through the unaided efforts of the teachers, to their surprise
and indignation their salaries were not increased. The Teachers' Federation,
therefore, brought a suit against the Board of Education for the advance
which had been promised them three years earlier but never paid. The
decision of the lower court was in their favor, but the Board of Education
appealed the case, and this was the situation when the seven new members
appointed by Mayor Dunne in 1905 took their seats. The conservative
public suspected that these new members were merely representatives of
the Teachers' Federation. This opinion was founded upon the fact that Judge
Dunne had rendered a favorable decision in the teachers' suit and that the
teachers had been very active in the campaign which had resulted in his
election as mayor of the city. It seemed obvious that the teachers had
entered into politics for the sake of securing their own representatives on
the Board of Education. These suspicions were, of course, only confirmed
when the new board voted to withdraw the suit of their predecessors from
the Appellate Court and to act upon the decision of the lower court. The
teachers, on the other hand, defended their long effort in the courts, the
State Board of Equalization, and the Legislature against the charge of
"dragging the schools into politics," and declared that the exposure of the
indifference and cupidity of the politicians was a well-deserved rebuke, and

that it was the politicians who had brought the schools to the verge of
financial ruin; they further insisted that the levy and collection of taxes,
tenure of office, and pensions to civil servants in Chicago were all
entangled with the traction situation, which in their minds at least had come
to be an example of the struggle between the democratic and plutocratic
administration of city affairs. The new appointees to the School Board
represented no concerted policy of any kind, but were for the most part
adherents to the new education. The teachers, confident that their cause was
identical with the principles advocated by such educators as Colonel Parker,
were therefore sure that the plans of the "new education" members would of
necessity coincide with the plans of the Teachers' Federation. In one sense
the situation was an epitome of Mayor Dunne's entire administration, which
was founded upon the belief that if those citizens representing social ideals
and reform principles were but appointed to office, public welfare must be
established.

During my tenure of office I many times talked to the officers of the
Teachers' Federation, but I was seldom able to follow their suggestions and,
although I gladly cooperated in their plans for a better pension system and
other matters, only once did I try to influence the policy of the Federation.
When the withheld salaries were finally paid to the representatives of the
Federation who had brought suit and were divided among the members who
had suffered both financially and professionally during this long legal
struggle, I was most anxious that the division should voluntarily be
extended to all of the teachers who had experienced a loss of salary
although they were not members of the Federation. It seemed to me a
striking opportunity to refute the charge that the Federation was self-
seeking and to put the whole long effort in the minds of the public, exactly
where it belonged, as one of devoted public service. But it was doubtless
much easier for me to urge this altruistic policy than it was for those who
had borne the heat and burden of the day to act upon it.

The second object of the Teachers' Federation also entailed much stress
and storm. At the time of the financial stringency, and largely as a result of
it, the Board had made the first substantial advance in a teacher's salary
dependent upon a so-called promotional examination, half of which was
upon academic subjects entailing a long and severe preparation. The
teachers resented this upon two lines of argument: first, that the scheme was
unprofessional in that the teacher was advanced on her capacity as a student
rather than on her professional ability; and, second, that it added an
intolerable and unnecessary burden to her already overfull day. The
administration, on the other hand, contended with much justice that there
was a constant danger in a great public school system that teachers lose
pliancy and the open mind, and that many of them had obviously grown
mechanical and indifferent. The conservative public approved the
promotional examinations as the symbol of an advancing educational
standard, and their sympathy with the superintendent was increased because
they continually resented the affiliation of the Teachers' Federation with the
Chicago Federation of Labor, which had taken place several years before
the election of Mayor Dunne on his traction platform.

This much talked of affiliation between the teachers and the trades-
unionists had been, at least in the first instance, but one more tactic in the
long struggle against the tax-dodging corporations. The Teachers'
Federation had won in their first skirmish against that public indifference
which is generated in the accumulation of wealth and which has for its
nucleus successful commercial men. When they found themselves in need
of further legislation to keep the offending corporations under control, they
naturally turned for political influence and votes to the organization
representing workingmen. The affiliation had none of the sinister meaning
so often attached to it. The Teachers' Federation never obtained a charter
from the American Federation of Labor, and its main interest always
centered in the legislative committee.

And yet this statement of the difference between the majority of the
grade-school teachers and the Chicago School Board is totally inadequate,
for the difficulties were stubborn and lay far back in the long effort of
public school administration in America to free itself from the rule and
exploitation of politics. In every city for many years the politician had
secured positions for his friends as teachers and janitors; he had received a
rake-off in the contract for every new building or coal supply or adoption of
school-books. In the long struggle against this political corruption, the one
remedy continually advocated was the transfer of authority in all
educational matters from the Board to the superintendent. The one cure for
"pull" and corruption was the authority of the "expert." The rules and
records of the Chicago Board of Education are full of relics of this long
struggle honestly waged by honest men, who unfortunately became content
with the ideals of an "efficient business administration." These businessmen
established an able superintendent with a large salary, with his tenure of
office secured by State law so that he would not be disturbed by the wrath
of the balked politician. They instituted impersonal examinations for the
teachers both as to entrance into the system and promotion, and they
proceeded "to hold the superintendent responsible" for smooth-running
schools. All this, however, dangerously approximated the commercialistic
ideal of high salaries only for the management with the final test of a small
expense account and a large output.

In this long struggle for a quarter of a century to free the public schools
from political interference, in Chicago at least, the high wall of defense
erected around the school system in order "to keep the rascals out"
unfortunately so restricted the teachers inside the system that they had no
space in which to move about freely and the more adventurous of them
fairly panted for light and air. Any attempt to lower the wall for the sake of
the teachers within was regarded as giving an opportunity to the politicians
without, and they were often openly accused, with a show of truth, of being

in league with each other. Whenever the Dunne members of the Board
attempted to secure more liberty for the teachers, we were warned by tales
of former difficulties with the politicians, and it seemed impossible that the
struggle so long the focus of attention should recede into the dullness of the
achieved and allow the energy of the Board to be free for new effort.

The whole situation between the superintendent supported by a majority
of the Board and the Teachers' Federation had become an epitome of the
struggle between efficiency and democracy; on one side a well-intentioned
expression of the bureaucracy necessary in a large system but which under
pressure had become unnecessarily self-assertive, and on the other side a
fairly militant demand for self-government made in the name of freedom.
Both sides inevitably exaggerated the difficulties of the situation, and both
felt that they were standing by important principles.

I certainly played a most inglorious part in this unnecessary conflict; I
was chairman of the School Management Committee during one year when
a majority of the members seemed to me exasperatingly conservative, and
during another year when they were frustratingly radical, and I was of
course highly unsatisfactory to both. Certainly a plan to retain the
undoubted benefit of required study for teachers in such wise as to lessen its
burden, and various schemes devised to shift the emphasis from scholarship
to professional work, were mostly impatiently repudiated by the Teachers'
Federation, and when one badly mutilated plan finally passed the Board, it
was most reluctantly administered by the superintendent.

I at least became convinced that partisans would never tolerate the use of
stepping-stones. They are much too impatient to look on while their beloved
scheme is unstably balanced, and they would rather see it tumble into the
stream at once than to have it brought to dry land in any such half-hearted
fashion. Before my School Board experience, I thought that life had taught

me at least one hard-earned lesson, that existing arrangements and the
hoped for improvements must be mediated and reconciled to each other,
that the new must be dovetailed into the old as it were, if it were to endure;
but on the School Board I discerned that all such efforts were looked upon
as compromising and unworthy, by both partisans. In the general disorder
and public excitement resulting from the illegal dismissal of a majority of
the "Dunne" board and their reinstatement by a court decision, I found
myself belonging to neither party. During the months following the
upheaval and the loss of my most vigorous colleagues, under the regime of
men representing the leading Commercial Club of the city who honestly
believed that they were rescuing the schools from a condition of chaos, I
saw one beloved measure after another withdrawn. Although the new
president scrupulously gave me the floor in the defense of each, it was
impossible to consider them upon their merits in the lurid light which at the
moment enveloped all the plans of the "uplifters." Thus the building of
smaller schoolrooms, such as in New York mechanically avoid
overcrowding, the extension of the truant rooms so successfully
inaugurated, the multiplication of school playgrounds, and many another
cherished plan was thrown out or at least indefinitely postponed.

The final discrediting of Mayor Dunne's appointees to the School Board
affords a very interesting study in social psychology; the newspapers had so
constantly reflected and intensified the ideals of a business Board, and had
so persistently ridiculed various administration plans for the municipal
ownership of street railways, that from the beginning any attempt the new
Board made to discuss educational matters only excited their derision and
contempt. Some of these discussions were lengthy and disorderly and
deserved the discipline of ridicule, but others which were well conducted
and in which educational problems were seriously set forth by men of
authority were ridiculed quite as sharply. I recall the surprise and
indignation of a University professor who had consented to speak at a

meeting arranged in the Board rooms, when next morning his nonpartisan
and careful disquisition had been twisted into the most arrant uplift
nonsense and so connected with a fake newspaper report of a trial marriage
address delivered, not by himself, but by a colleague, that a leading
clergyman of the city, having read the newspaper account, felt impelled to
preach a sermon, calling upon all decent people to rally against the
doctrines which were being taught to the children by an immoral School
Board. As the bewildered professor had lectured in response to my
invitation, I endeavored to find the animus of the complication, but neither
from editor in chief nor from the reporter could I discover anything more
sinister than that the public expected a good story out of these School Board
"talk fests," and that any man who even momentarily allied himself with a
radical administration must expect to be ridiculed by those papers which
considered the traction policy of the administration both foolish and
dangerous.

As I myself was treated with uniform courtesy by the leading papers, I
may perhaps here record my discouragement over this complicated
difficulty of open discussion, for democratic government is founded upon
the assumption that differing policies shall be freely discussed and that each
party shall have an opportunity for at least a partisan presentation of its
contentions. This attitude of the newspapers was doubtless intensified
because the Dunne School Board had instituted a lawsuit challenging the
validity of the lease for the school ground occupied by a newspaper
building. This suit has since been decided in favor of the newspaper, and it
may be that in their resentment they felt justified in doing everything
possible to minimize the prosecuting School Board. I am, however, inclined
to think that the newspapers but reflected an opinion honestly held by many
people, and that their constant and partisan presentation of this opinion
clearly demonstrates one of the greatest difficulties of governmental

administration in a city grown too large for verbal discussions of public
affairs.

It is difficult to close this chapter without a reference to the efforts made
in Chicago to secure the municipal franchise for women. During two long
periods of agitation for a new city charter, a representative body of women
appealed to the public, to the charter convention, and to the Illinois
legislature for this very reasonable provision. During the campaign when I
acted as chairman of the federation of a hundred women's organizations,
nothing impressed me so forcibly as the fact that the response came from
bodies of women representing the most varied traditions. We were joined by
a church society of hundreds of Lutheran women, because Scandinavian
women had exercised the municipal franchise since the seventeenth century
and had found American cities strangely conservative; by organizations of
working women who had keenly felt the need of the municipal franchise in
order to secure for their workshops the most rudimentary sanitation and the
consideration which the vote alone obtains for workingmen; by federations
of mothers' meetings, who were interested in clean milk and the extension
of kindergartens; by property-owning women, who had been powerless to
protest against unjust taxation; by organizations of professional women, of
university students, and of collegiate alumnae; and by women's clubs
interested in municipal reforms. There was a complete absence of the
traditional women's rights clamor, but much impressive testimony from
busy and useful women that they had reached the place where they needed
the franchise in order to carry on their own affairs. A striking witness as to
the need of the ballot, even for the women who are restricted to the most
primitive and traditional activities, occurred when some Russian women
waited upon me to ask whether under the new charter they could vote for
covered markets and so get rid of the shocking Chicago grime upon all their
food; and when some neighboring Italian women sent me word that they
would certainly vote for public washhouses if they ever had the chance to

vote at all. It was all so human, so spontaneous, and so direct that it really
seemed as if the time must be ripe for political expression of that public
concern on the part of women which had so long been forced to seek
indirection. None of these busy women wished to take the place of men nor
to influence them in the direction of men's affairs, but they did seek an
opportunity to cooperate directly in civic life through the use of the ballot in
regard to their own affairs.

A Municipal Museum which was established in the Chicago public
library building several years ago, largely through the activity of a group of
women who had served as jurors in the departments of social economy, of
education, and of sanitation in the World's Fair at St. Louis, showed nothing
more clearly than that it is impossible to divide any of these departments
from the political life of the modern city which is constantly forced to
enlarge the boundary of its activity.

[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 Margaret Sylvia.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter XV: The Value of Social Clubs." 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. 342-370.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

CHAPTER XV

THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS

From the early days at Hull-House, social clubs composed of English
speaking American born young people grew apace. So eager were they for
social life that no mistakes in management could drive them away. I
remember one enthusiastic leader who read aloud to a club a translation of
"Antigone," which she had selected because she believed that the great
themes of the Greek poets were best suited to young people. She came into
the club room one evening in time to hear the president call the restive
members to order with the statement, "You might just as well keep quiet for
she is bound to finish it, and the quicker she gets to reading, the longer time
we'll have for dancing." And yet the same club leader had the pleasure of
lending four copies of the drama to four of the members, and one young
man almost literally committed the entire play to memory.

On the whole we were much impressed by the great desire for self-
improvement, for study and debate, exhibited by many of the young men.
This very tendency, in fact, brought one of the most promising of our earlier
clubs to an untimely end. The young men in the club, twenty in number, had
grown much irritated by the frivolity of the girls during their long debates,
and had finally proposed that three of the most "frivolous" be expelled.
Pending a final vote, the three culprits appealed to certain of their friends

who were members of the Hull-House Men's Club, between whom and the
debating young men the incident became the cause of a quarrel so bitter that
at length it led to a shooting. Fortunately the shot missed fire, or it may
have been true that it was "only intended for a scare," but at any rate, we
were all thoroughly frightened by this manifestation of the hot blood which
the defense of woman has so often evoked. After many efforts to bring
about a reconciliation, the debating club of twenty young men and the
seventeen young women, who either were or pretended to be sober minded,
rented a hall a mile west of Hull-House severing their connection with us
because their ambitious and right-minded efforts had been unappreciated,
basing this on the ground that we had not urged the expulsion of the so-
called "tough" members of the Men's Club, who had been involved in the
difficulty. The seceding club invited me to the first meeting in their new
quarters that I might present to them my version of the situation and set
forth the incident from the standpoint of Hull-House. The discussion I had
with the young people that evening has always remained with me as one of
the moments of illumination which life in a Settlement so often affords. In
response to my position that a desire to avoid all that was "tough" meant to
walk only in the paths of smug self-seeking and personal improvement
leading straight into the pit of self-righteousness and petty achievement and
was exactly what the Settlement did not stand for, they contended with
much justice that ambitious young people were obliged for their own
reputation, if not for their own morals, to avoid all connection with that
which bordered on the tough, and that it was quite another matter for the
Hull-House residents who could afford a more generous judgment. It was in
vain I urged that life teaches us nothing more inevitably than that right and
wrong are most confusingly confounded; that the blackest wrong may be
within our own motives, and that at the best, right will not dazzle us by its
radiant shining and can only be found by exerting patience and

discrimination. They still maintained their wholesome bourgeois position,
which I am now quite ready to admit was most reasonable.

Of course there were many disappointments connected with these clubs
when the rewards of political and commercial life easily drew the members
away from the principles advocated in club meetings. One of the young
men who had been a shining light in the advocacy of municipal reform
deserted in the middle of a reform campaign because he had been offered a
lucrative office in the city hall; another even after a course of lectures on
business morality, "worked" the club itself to secure orders for custom-
made clothing from samples of cloth he displayed, although the orders were
filled by ready-made suits slightly refitted and delivered at double their
original price. But nevertheless, there was much to cheer us as we gradually
became acquainted with the daily living of the vigorous young men and
women who filled to overflowing all the social clubs.

We have been much impressed during our twenty years, by the ready
adaptation of city young people to the prosperity arising from their own
increased wages or from the commercial success of their families. This
quick adaptability is the great gift of the city child, his one reward for the
hurried changing life which he has always led. The working girl has a
distinct advantage in the task of transforming her whole family into the
ways and connections of the prosperous when she works down town and
becomes conversant with the manners and conditions of a cosmopolitan
community. Therefore having lived in a Settlement twenty years, I see
scores of young people who have successfully established themselves in
life, and in my travels in the city and outside, I am constantly cheered by
greetings from the rising young lawyer, the scholarly rabbi, the successful
teacher, the prosperous young matron buying clothes for blooming children.
"Don't you remember me? I used to belong to a Hull-House club." I once
asked one of these young people, a man who held a good position on a

Chicago daily, what special thing Hull-House had meant to him, and he
promptly replied, "It was the first house I had ever been in where books and
magazines just lay around as if there were plenty of them in the world.
Don't you remember how much I used to read at that little round table at the
back of the library? To have people regard reading as a reasonable
occupation changed the whole aspect of life to me and I began to have
confidence in what I could do."

Among the young men of the social clubs a large proportion of the
Jewish ones at least obtain the advantages of a higher education. The
parents make every sacrifice to help them through the high school after
which the young men attend universities and professional schools, largely
through their own efforts. From time to time they come back to us with
their honors thick upon them; I remember one who returned with the prize
in oratory from a contest between several western State universities,
proudly testifying that he had obtained his confidence in our Henry Clay
Club; another came back with a degree from Harvard University saying that
he had made up his mind to go there the summer I read Royce's "Aspects of
Modern Philosophy" with a group of young men who had challenged my
scathing remark that Herbert Spencer was not the only man who had
ventured a solution of the riddles of the universe. Occasionally one of these
learned young folk does not like to be reminded he once lived in our
vicinity, but that happens rarely, and for the most part they are loyal to us in
much the same spirit as they are to their own families and traditions.
Sometimes they go further and tell us that the standards of tastes and code
of manners which Hull-House has enabled them to form, have made a very
great difference in their perceptions and estimates of the larger world as
well as in their own reception there. Five out of one club of twenty-five
young men who had held together for eleven years, entered the University
of Chicago but although the rest of the Club called them the "intellectuals,"
the old friendships still held.

In addition to these rising young people given to debate and dramatics,
and to the members of the public school alumni associations which meet in
our rooms, there are hundreds of others who for years have come to Hull-
House frankly in search of that pleasure and recreation which all young
things crave and which those who have spent long hours in a factory or
shop demand as a right. For these young people all sorts of pleasure clubs
have been cherished, and large dancing classes have been organized. One
supreme gayety has come to be an annual event of such importance that it is
talked of from year to year. For six weeks before St. Patrick's day, a small
group of residents put their best powers of invention and construction into
preparation for a cotillion which is like a pageant in its gayety and vigor.
The parents sit in the gallery, and the mothers appreciate more than anyone
else perhaps, the value of this ball to which an invitation is so highly prized;
although their standards of manners may differ widely from the
conventional, they know full well when the companionship of the young
people is safe and unsullied.

As an illustration of this difference in standard, I may instance an early
Hull-House picnic arranged by a club of young people, who found at the
last moment that the club director could not go and accepted the offer of the
mother of one of the club members to take charge of them. When they
trooped back in the evening, tired and happy, they displayed a photograph
of the group wherein each man's arm was carefully placed about a girl; no
feminine waist lacked an arm save that of the proud chaperon, who sat in
the middle smiling upon all. Seeing that the photograph somewhat surprised
us, the chaperon stoutly explained, "This may look queer to you, but there
wasn't one thing about that picnic that wasn't nice," and her statement was a
perfectly truthful one.

Although more conventional customs are carefully enforced at our many
parties and festivities, and while the dancing classes are as highly prized for

the opportunity they afford for enforcing standards as for their ostensible
aim, the residents at Hull-House, in their efforts to provide opportunities for
clean recreation, receive the most valued help from the experienced wisdom
of the older women of the neighborhood. Bowen Hall is constantly used for
dancing parties with soft drinks established in its foyer. The parties given by
the Hull-House clubs are by invitation and the young people themselves
carefully maintain their standard of entrance so that the most cautious
mother may feel safe when her daughter goes to one of our parties. No club
festivity is permitted without the presence of a director; no young man
under the influence of liquor is allowed; certain types of dancing often
innocently started are strictly prohibited; and above all, early closing is
insisted upon. This standardizing of pleasure has always seemed an
obligation to the residents of Hull-House, but we are, I hope, saved from
that priggishness which young people so heartily resent, by the Mardi Gras
dance and other festivities which the residents themselves arrange and
successfully carry out.

In spite of our belief that the standards of a ball may be almost as
valuable to those without as to those within, the residents are constantly
concerned for those many young people in the neighborhood who are too
hedonistic to submit to the discipline of a dancing class or even to the claim
of a pleasure club, but who go about in freebooter fashion to find pleasure
wherever it may be cheaply on sale.

Such young people, well meaning but impatient of control, become the
easy victims of the worst type of public dance halls, and of even darker
places, whose purposes are hidden under music and dancing. We were
thoroughly frightened when we learned that during the year which ended
last December, more than twenty-five thousand young people under the age
of twenty-five passed through the Juvenile and Municipal Courts of
Chicago—approximately one out of every eighty of the entire population,