Twenty years at Hull-house, with autobiographical notes

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TWENTY YEARS
rlULL-HOUSE

JANE ADDAMS

EX DONO

Richard J Nelson

1978

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I'M]

TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

WITH

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO
SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

Jane Addams.

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

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1911

^11 rights reserved

Copyright, 1910,
Bv THE PHILLIPS PUBLISHING COMPANY.

Copyright, 1910,
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1910. Reprinted
November, December, 1910 ; January, March, July, 1911.

T^TorfooDti ^ress :

J. 8. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Go,

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

TO

THE MEMORY OF
MY FATHER

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 reminis-
cences, 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 inci-
dents and experiences should be selected for re-
cital, 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

vii

viii PREFACE

faithful record of the years since the autumn of
1889 when without any preconceived social theo-
ries or economic views, I came to live in an indus-
trial 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 super-
ficiality. The unworthy motive was a desire to
start a "backfire," as it were, to extinguish two
biographies of myself, one of which had been sub-
mitted to me in outline, that made life in a Settle-
ment all too smooth and charming.

The earlier chapters present influences and per-
sonal motives with a detail which will be quite
unpardonable if they fail to make clear the per-
sonality 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 when 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

PREFACE 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 simi-
lar 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 ex-
perience, whereas this volume endeavors to trace
the experiences through which various conclusions
were forced upon me.

CONTENTS

Preface . • . . •

CHAPTER

I. Earliest Impressions

II. Influence of Lincoln

III. Boarding-school Ideals

IV. The Snare of Preparation
V. First Days at Hull-House

VI. The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements

VII. Some Early Undertakings at Hull-House

VIII. Problems of Poverty

IX. A Decade of Economic Discussion

X. Pioneer Labor Legislation in Illinci

XI. Immigrants and their Children

XII. TOLSTOYISM ....

XIII. Public Activities and Investigations

XIV. Civic Cooperation .
XV. The Value of Social Clubs

XVI. Arts at Hull-House

XVII. Echoes of the Russian Revolution

XVIII. Socialized Education

PAGB

vii

I

23

43

65

89

113
129

154

177

198

231

259

281

310

342

371
400

427

XI

PLATES

Jane Addams, from a photograph taken in 1899

John H. Addams, from a photograph taken in 1880

aken

in 1906

Ellen Gates Starr, from a photograph

A Hull-House Interior

A View from a Hull-House Window

A Spent Old Man .

Sweatshop Workers

Chicago River at Halsted Street

Polk Street opposite Hull-House

Julia C. Lathrop

A Studio in Hull-House Court .

A View between Hull-House Gymnasium and Theater

Frontispiece

FACING PAGE
22

64

88
1 12

154
198

258

280

310

370
426

xm

ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

Birthplace, Jane Addams, Cedarville, Illinois

Jane Addams, aged Seven, from a Photograph of 1867

Mill at Cedarville, Illinois

Stream at Cedarville, Illinois

Old Abe ....

Rockford College, Rockford, Illinois

Porto del Popolo, Rome .

View of St. Peter's

Polk Street opposite Hull-House

South Halsted Street opposite Hull-House

Consulting the Hull-House Bulletin Board, from a Photograph

by Lewis W. Hine .
A Boys' Club Member .
An Italian Woman with Grandchild
Portrait, Jane Addams, from a Charcoal Drawing by Alice Kel

logg Tyler of 1892 .

Main Entrance to Hull-House .

Head of Slavic Woman

Head of Italian Woman .

A Doorway in Hull-House Court

Woman and Child in Hull-House Reception Room

XV

PAGE

4

7

10

22
42

44
76

88

95
96

104
105
1 1 1

114

128

134
135
149

154

xvl ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

In a Tenement House, Sick Mother and Children .

A Row of Nursery Babies ....

A Neighborhood Alley

Hull-House on Halsted Street, Apartment House in Foreground

An Italian Sweatshop Worker ....

Out of Work, from a Drawing by Alice Kellogg Tyler

Head of Immigrant Woman ....

Aniello ......

Irish Spinner in the Hull-House Labor Museum .

Scandinavian Weaver in the Hull-House Labor Museum

Italian Spinner in the Hull-House Labor Museum ,

An Italian Grocery opposite Hull-House

Sketches of Tolstoy Mowing ....

Head of Russian Immigrant . * .

Rear Tenement in Hull-House Neighborhood

An Alley near Hull-House ....

A View from Hull-House Window .
Alley between Hull-House Buildings .
A Window in the Hull-House Library
An Italian Mother and Child ....

Fa9ade of Bowen Hall .....

A Club Child listening to a Story
In the Hull-House Studio, from a Photograph by Lewis W
Hine .......

Exterior Hull-House Music School
In the Hull-House Music School
Terrace in the Hull-House Court
South Halsted Street

164
168
181

197
208
220
226

235
238

-39
241

258

271

275

282

293

3H
321

346

354

3^3

367

374
379
383
398
401

ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT xvii

PAGE

Russian Immigrant on Halsted Street, from a Photograph by

Lewis W. Hine . . . , . . .416

Entrance to Hull-House Courtyard ..... 426

Boy at Forge, Hull-House Boys' Club, from a Photograph by

Lewis W. Hine . . . , . , ,439

Steps to Hull-House Terrace ...... 447

Waiting in the Hull-House Hall . . , . -453

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 im-
pressions 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 mem-
bers of a large family and an eager participant in
the village life, but because my father was so dis-
tinctly the dominant influence and because it is
quite impossible to set forth all of one's early im-
pressions, 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
affection, but also first drew me into the moral
concerns of life, and later afforded a clew there to.

2 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 men-
tioned 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, compli-
cated 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, invariably re-

EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS 3

ceived 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 afterwards." No absolu-
tion was asked for nor received, but apparently the
sense that the knowledge of my wickedness was
shared, or an obscure understanding of the affec-
tion 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 neighbor-
ing 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 attrac-
tive 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 ex-
planation I declared with much firmness when I
grew up I should, of course, have a large house,

4 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

1 r-i-»-«r;j;j53-r"^,s^:^!as.

V-.

J I '%

\

I
i

- u

Homestead at Cedarville.

EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS s

but It would not be built among the other large
houses, but right in the midst of horrid little
houses like these.

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 re-
mained 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 ceme-
tery, 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 night-
mare 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 com-
pounded in equal parts of a childish version of

6 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

Robinson Crusoe and of the end-of-the-world pre-
dictions 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 some-
times 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 left-
hand corner of the church next to the pulpit, and
to my eyes at least, was a most imposing figure in

EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS

his Sunday frock coat, his fine head rising high
above all the others. I imagined that the stran-
gers 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 unat-
tached that troublesome questions might identify
an Ugly Duckling with her imposing parent. My
uncle, who had many children of his own, must

8 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

have been mildly surprised at this unwonted atten-
tion, 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

EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS 9

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 un-
less 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 ap-
proached 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,

lo TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

Mill at Cedarville.

EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS ii

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 associa-
tion of the mill with my father's activities, for doubt-
less at that time I centered upon him all that care-
ful 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 possess 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 desper-
ately than I wanted my right thumb to be flat-
tened, 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 mill-
stones. 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 pro-
cured at all costs. Even when playing in our house
or yard, I could always tell when the millstones were

12 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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
millstones in the hope that the little hard flints
flying from 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 affec-
tion 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 far-
away 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

EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS 13

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 per-
plexities to my father, there are only a few occa-
sions on which I remember having received direct
advice or admonition ; it may easily be true, how-
ever, that I have forgotten the latter, in the
manner of many seekers after advice who enjoy-
ably 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,

14 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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, how-
ever, 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 per-
plexed my childish mind. After setting the diffi-
culty 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-

EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS 15

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 : —

1 6 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

"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 round 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 testi-
mony 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 cru-
sades which lasted week after week, and even sum-
mer 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

EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS 17

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 elabo-
rate "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 horse-play, 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 na-
ture, but certainly it is much too unconscious and
intimate to come under the head of aesthetic appre-
ciation or anything of the sort. When we said
that the purple wind-flowers — the anemone pat-
ens— "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 twi-
light, 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-

1 8 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 wal-
nuts 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 chil-
dren 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 be-
fore my eyes was a most outrageous picture which
adorned a song-book used in Sunday School, por-
traying 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, espe-
cially when moments of terror compelled me to
ask protection from the heavenly powers.

EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS 19

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 these 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

20 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 pass-
ing 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 far-
ing 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 fellow-
ship 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

EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS 21

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 impos-
sible 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 relation-
ship 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

22 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 conversa-
tions 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."

kC-^v.

'\'^'^- V'C' ^ *' ^'

\. ' '

"^

John H. Addams.

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 gate posts 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, some-
thing 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 bap-
tism, as it were, into the thrilling and solemn
interests of a world lying quite outside the two white
gate posts. 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

23

24 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 in-
terested 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

INFLUENCE OF LINCOLN 25

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 Til die here." Of
course after that every man in the hospital worked
for it, and in two weeks he was honorably dis-
charged. 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 fol-
lowed his return, with the windows open 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

26 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 Anderson-
vllle 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 accidentally
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 *Hhe Inexplicable shortcoming or mis-
adventure on the part of life Itself" ; we were over-

INFLUENCE OF LINCOLN 27

whelmingly 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 in-
justice, 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 capitol 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 Wis-
consin, 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

28 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 har-
vest fields in which the stubble glinted from bronze
to gold and the heavy-headed grain rested luxuri-
ously 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 through
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 unac-
countably 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

INFLUENCE OF LINCOLN 29

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. Cer-
tainly the utmost rim of my first dome was filled
with the tumultuous impression of soldiers march-
ing to death for freedom's sake, of pioneers stream-
ing 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 unresponsive space" under the vaulting sky
itself. But through all my vivid sensations there
persisted the image of the eagle in the corridor be-
low 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 Univer-
sity, which was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary,

30 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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
a 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 understand-
ing 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 con-
versation 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 legis-
lature would always have enough votes to keep lUi-

INFLUENCE OF LINCOLN 31

nols from seceding. I heard with breathless in-
terest 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 Presi-
dent 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, per-
haps 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 personal-
ity. 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 cer-
tain 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 con-
science "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 compara-
tive 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

32 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

father's room, and one in our old-fashioned up-
stairs 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 sym-
pathetic strikes — in order to look at and gain
magnanimous counsel, if I might, from the mar-
velous St. Gaudens statue which had been but
recently 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 demoraliz-
ing reconstruction days that followed, had never
accepted a bribe, he wished to bear testimony

INFLUENCE OF LINCOLN 33

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 Illi-
nois 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 sweat shop 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 oc-
curred unless a weakness in myself had permitted
it, withheld me at least from an heroic 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 insti-
tution 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 accom-
plish this the destruction of Hull-House was neces-
sary, that we would cheerfully sing a Te Deum oa

D

34 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 over the awkward situation by that scurry-
ing 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
the members of the Young Citizens' 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 re-
member 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 under-
stand the greatness of the people. There was
something in the admiration of Lincoln's contem-
poraries, 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

INFLUENCE OF LINCOLN 35

in order that the raw prairie crops might be trans-
ported to market; they too had realized that if
this last tremendous experiment in self-govern-
ment 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 convic-
tion 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 to 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

36 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 enthu-
siasm Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero Worship," but
on the evening of "Old Settlers' Day," to my sur-
prise, 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 resolu-
tion to give at least twenty-five copies of this book
each year to noble young people of my acquaint-
ance. It is perhaps fitting to record 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

INFLUENCE OF LINCOLN 37

often distressed by the children of immigrant par-
ents 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 that group of scholars
we all identify with the beginnings of the Settle-
ment movement. It was easy to claim the phi-
losophy of Thomas Hill Green, the road-building

38 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

episode of Ruskin, the experimental living In the
east end by Frederick Maurice, the London Work-
ingmen's College of Edward Dennison, as founda-
tions laid by university men for the establishment
of Toynbee Hall. I was naturally much interested
in the beginnings of a 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 im-
possible. Always on the alert lest American
Settlements should become mere echoes and imita-
tions 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 Inside 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
Ruskln's teaching for the bettering of the common
life, when all the country roads in America were
mended each spring by self-respecting citizens,

INFLUENCE OF LINCOLN 39

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 drawing-
room of the Master of Baliol. Edward Caird's
"Evolution of Religion," which I had read but a
year or two before, had been of unspeakable com-
fort 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 tim-
idly 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

40 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 remem-
bered, 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
'Svho 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 un-
ceasing 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

INFLUENCE OF LINCOLN 41

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 Baliol, 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 re-
quest 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 diffi-
cult surroundings. The word still implies migrating
from one condition of life to another totally unlike it,
and against this implication the resident of an Ameri-
can settlement takes alarm.

We do not like to acknowledge that Americans are
divided into two nations, as her prime minister once
admitted of England. \Ve are not willing, openly and
professedly, to assume that American citizens are broken

42 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 phi-
lanthropy.

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 com-
mon people, still remains the most valuable contri-
bution America has made to the moral life of the
world.

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, al-
though 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 fol-
lowed by travel abroad in lieu of the wider advan-
tages which an 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 disap-
pointed 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

43

44 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 mis-

sionaries 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

BOARDING-SCHOOL IDEALS 45

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 state-
ment 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 rever-
ence, let us hope, for the two ponderous names
associated with it ; at least I have enough confi-
dence 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 con-
temporary group by looking over many documents,
I find nothing more amusing than a plaint regis-
tered 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

46 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 sympatheti-
cally, by drugging ourselves with opium. We
solemnly consumed small white powders at inter-
vals during an entire long holiday, but no mental
reorientation took place, and the suspense and ex-
citement 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, administered an emetic to
each of the five aspirants for sympathetic under-
standing 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 chances to write, we took, of
course, large themes, usually from the Greek be-
cause they were the most stirring to the imagina-
tion. 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

BOARDING-SCHOOL IDEALS 47

upon Bellerophon and his successful fight with the
Minotaur, 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 painstak-
ingly studied ''Mental" and ''Moral" Philosophy,
which, though far from dry in the classroom, be-
came 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 gentle-
man 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 his-
toric 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 Wash-
ington."

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

48 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 with
a sort of rough-and-tumble examination, in which
no quarter was given or received ; but the suspicion
was finally removed that any one 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 grew
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 that it finally seemed like an idea of our own,
although of course none of us had ever seen a Euro-
pean 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 such 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

BOARDING-SCHOOL IDEALS 49

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 sym-
pathetic and comprehending visitors we have ever
had at Hull-House have been returned mission-
aries ; 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 even-

so TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

ing and which was never broken into, even by a
rhember of the faculty, unless the errand was one
of grave import. I found these occasional inter-
views 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 enthu-
siastic members of the faculty, in which the desira-
bility 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 per-
sonal 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 read-

BOARDING-SCHOOL IDEALS 51

ing 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 ap-
proximated in my own experience to a faint realiza-
tion 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 disputatious 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

52 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 pre-
sented 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 com-
fort 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 w^here 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 realiza-
tion that it was but a drop in that "torrent of
sorrow and anguish and terror which flows under
all the footsteps of man." This realization of

BOARDING-SCHOOL IDEALS 53

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 ex-
cellent.

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-fash-
ioned 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 oppor-
tunity 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

54 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

new and glorious undertaking. We gravely de-
cided that it was important that some of the stu-
dents 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 work-
ing 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 pos-
sesses 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

BOARDING-SCHOOL IDEALS 55

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 possi-
bilities 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 drop-
ping 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 pro-
phetic 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

56 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

the Deaf and Dumb. Doctor 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 an 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 explana-
tions of the fifth place were haughtily considered
insufficient before that golden Bar of Youth, so
absurdly inflexible !

To return to my last year at school, it was inevi-
table that the pressure toward religious profession
should increase as graduating day approached.
So curious, however, are the paths of moral de-
veloprnent 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,

BOARDING-SCHOOL IDEALS 57

it was felt by propagandists of divers 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 con-
version 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 indirect 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 talk-
ing 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 pos-

S8 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

sibly 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
any one of sound mind must see the Inevitable con-
clusions of such master reasonings.

I could multiply these two Instances a hundred-
fold, 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 solici-
tude, 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 percep-
tion, 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."

BOARDING-SCHOOL IDEALS 59

This schoolgirl receipt has been tested In many
later experiences, the most dramatic of which came
when I was called upon by a manufacturing com-
pany to act as one of three arbitrators in a perplex-
ing 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
the refusal of the trade-unionists to receive as one
of their members the old crippled employee, whose
spirit was broken at 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
every one concerned had finally agreed to abide
without appeal by the decision of the three arbi-
trators. The chairman of our little arbitration

6o TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

committee, a venerable judge, quickly demon-
strated that it was impossible to collect trustworthy
evidence in regard 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 weari-
some effort to secure the inner consent of all con-
cerned, upon which alone the ''mystery of justice"
as Maeterlinck has told us, ultimately depends.
I am not quite sure that in the end we admin-
istered justice, but certainly employers, trades-
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 re-
mained with me, that however long a time might
be required to establish justice in the new relation-
ships 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

BOARDING-SCHOOL IDEALS 6i

settled in my mind that I should study medicine
and 'Mive with the poor." This conclusion of
course was the result of many things, perhaps epito-
mized 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 per-
ception 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
woman can only "grow accurate and intelligible
by the thorough study of at least one branch of
physical science, for only with eyes thus accus-
tomed 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

62 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 approximat-
ing the new method, and yet when my step-
brother who was becoming a real scientist, tried
to carry me along with him into the merest out-
skirts 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 an heroic eflFort, 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

BOARDING-SCHOOL IDEALS 63

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 com-
plexity 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 tumultu-
ous 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.

64 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

Whatever may have been the perils of self-tradi-
tion, 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 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 aes-
thetic reflection of it.

Ellen Gates Starr.

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 prose-
cution 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

F 6s

66 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 ex-
haustion 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 ine-
radicable impression of the wretchedness of East
London, and also saw for the first time the over-

THE SNARE OF PREPARATION 6^

crowded 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 A/[onday, 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 momen-
tary 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

68 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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, nerve-
less and workworn, showing white in the uncer-
tain 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 re-
sponse to a teacher's query, without a certain re-
vival 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

THE SNARE OF PREPARATION 69

unable to determine which is real, the inner pang
or the outward seeming. In time all huge Lon-
don 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 saltminers
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 hun-
dreds of men and women who had gallantly iden-
tified 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 con-
science 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 re-
forms 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,

yo TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

and the painful impression was increased because
at the very moment of looking down the East Lon-
don 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 ab-
sorbed 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 sud-
denly 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

THE SNARE OF PREPARATION 71

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 '^Welt-
schmerz," 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 sud-
denly 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 pres-
ence 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

72 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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, gayly 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 acquire-
ments, and only at ease when in the familiar recep-
tive attitude afforded by the art gallery and the
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 famil-
iar atmosphere of the classroom which had, as it
were, become sublimated and romanticized.

I remember a happy busy mother who, compla-
cent 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

THE SNARE OF PREPARATION 73

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 in-
dustry and extenuating obstacles, with undis-
turbed 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 re-
moved ! I am simply smothered and sickened
with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert
the first thing in the morning."

This, then, w^as 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 litera-
ture 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, look-

74 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

ing 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 In-
cident 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 phleg-
matic 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 Al-
bert" *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

THE SNARE OF PREPARATION 75

conditions of life for the multitude of humble,
hard-working folk. We were spending two months
in Dresden that winter, given over to much read-
ing of ''The History of Art" and to much visiting
of its art gallery and opera house, 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 Diirer, taking his won-
derful 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 can-
vases intimated the coming religious and social
changes of the Reformation and the peasants' wars,
that they were surcharged with pity for the down-
trodden, that his sad knights, gravely standing
guard, were longing to avert that shedding of blood
which is sure to occur when men forget how com-
plicated 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 Diirer plate. There is
little doubt, I am afraid, that the background as

^6 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 eifort

when disconnected
from the ultimate test
of the conduct it in-
spired. The serene
and soothing touch of
history also aroused
old enthusiasms, al-
though some of their
manifestations were
such as one smiles over
'-- — ~^ . IT^ more easily in retro-

spection 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.

THE SNARE OF PREPARATION ^^

Peter's dome. This melodramatic entrance into
Rome, or rather pretended entrance, was the pre-
lude 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 systemati-
cally study the Catacombs. In spite of my dis-
trust 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 depres-
sion 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 contempla-
tion 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 de-
velopment.

The summers were spent in the old home in
northern Illinois, and one Sunday morning I

7^ TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 push-
ing 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 con-
scious of any emotional "conversion," I took upon
myself the outward expressions of the religious
life with all humility and sincerity. It was doubt-
less 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 as-
sured me that while both the ministr}^ and the
officers of his church were obliged to subscribe to
doctrines of well-known severity, the faith required
of the laity was almost early Christian in its sim-
plicity. 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,

THE SNARE OF PREPARATION 79

some bond of peace, some blessed spot where unity
of spirit might claim right of way over all differ-
ences. There was also growing within me an al-
most 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 mort-
gages. I was much horrified by the wretched
conditions among the farmers, which had resulted
from a long period of drought, and one forlorn, pic-
ture 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

8o TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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, al-
though 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 pos-
sible I withdrew all my investment. But some-
thing 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 occu-
pation, 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

THE SNARE OF PREPARATION 8i

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 for-
tunate series of sales of mutton, wool, and farm
enabled the partners to end the enterprise w^ithout
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 w^ell-known labor men of London.
The low wages that were reported at the meetings,
the phossy jaw which was described and occa-
sionally 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 w^ith 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

82 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

a young person persistently believes that behind
all suffering, behind sin and want, must lie redeem-
ing 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 Positlvists
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 enor-
mously interested In the Positlvists 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 horded
a medieval statement of the Positlvists' final syn-
thesis, 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 SNARE OF PREPARATION 83

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 "beau-
tiful enough to persuade men to hold fast to the
vision of human solidarity." It is quite impos-
sible 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 fellow-
ship 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

84 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 re-
mained 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 graduat-
ing class of Home and Foreign Missionaries, and
at the end of the third year she invited me to be-
come 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 ob-
jected 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

THE SNARE OF PREPARATION 85

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 bal-
ance 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 any one 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,

86 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 con-
demned, 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. Noth-
ing less than the moral reaction following the expe-
rience at a bull-fight 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.

THE SNARE OF PREPARATION 87

I had made up my mind that next day, what-
ever 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 disheart-
ening 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 w^e 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 what-

88 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

ever 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 difiiculties,
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.

A Hull-House Interior.

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 utlHzed every opportunity to set forth the
meaning of the settlement as it had been embodied
in 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 discus-
sion, 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 Eng-
lishman who was a member of the then new Fabian
society and to whom a peculiar glamour was at-
tached because he had scoured knives all summer
in a camp of high-minded philosophers in the
Adirondacks. Our new little plan met with criti-
cism, not to say disapproval, from Mr. Davidson,

89

90 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 ex-
penses, 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, essen-
tially 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 phi-
losophy and was much touched by their intelli-
gent interest and absorbed devotion. I think
that time has also justified our early contention

FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE 91

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 recipro-
cal ; 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
'.'ducation department, with city missionaries and
with the newspaper reporters whom I recall as
a much older set of men than one ordinarily asso-
ciates 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 newspaper man, who did
not understand German, asked me what abomi-

92 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

nable 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 ag-
gressions 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

FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE 93

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 the 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 furni-
ture 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 interpre-
tation was only my eagerness for finding folklore.

The fine old house responded kindly to repairs,
its wide hall and open fireplaces always insuring
it a gracious aspect. Its generous owner. Miss
Helen Culver, in the following spring gave us a free

94 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 establish-
ment 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 fur-
nished 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 care-
ful 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 culti-
vated man regards as good and suggestive of the
best life of the past.

On the 1 8th of September, 1889, Miss Starr and
I moved into it, with Miss Mary Keyser, who be-

FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE 95

gan by performing the housework, but who quickly
developed into a very Important factor in the life

) ''

of the vicinity as well as in 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 for-
got not only to lock but to close a side door opening

96 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

on Polk Street, and were much pleased in the
morning to find that we possessed a fine illustra-
tion 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 mi-
utely concerning "these people" without once
suspecting that they were talking to one who had
been identified with the neighborhood from child-
hood. 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 con-
sciousness that I had an auditor who knew the

FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE 97

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 re-
call 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 sym-
pathetic 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
ship-building 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 estab-
lishments 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

H

98 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 occa-
sional 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 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 under-
lying 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

FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE 99

civic duties. This substitution of the older inhabit-
ants 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 work-
room, 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 for 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 inade-
quate. 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 pave-

loo TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

merits. 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 en-
tails 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 any one con-
cerned. 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 carica-
tures 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

FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE loi

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 gayly 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

I02 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

in the drawing-room, coming regularly every morn-
ing 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 impos-
sible for us to become too solemn and self-conscious
in our strenuous routine, for her mirth and buoy-
ancy 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 lunch-
eon she gayly 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 uncon-
scious 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

FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE 103

reassuringly, *'See, I have brought you the true
American drink." The recital ended In seriocomic
despair, with the rueful statement that "the im-
pression I probably made upon her darkened mind
was, that it is 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 chlvalric tales, set
forth so dramatically and vividly that checkers and
jackstraws were abandoned by all the other clubs

I04 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

on Boys' Day, that their members might form a
listening fringe to " The Young Heroes."

I met a member
of the latter club
one day as he flung
himself out of the
House in the rage
by which an emo-
tional 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 some-

what fatuously be-
lieved 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

FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE 105

until now, with its five-story building, its splendid
equipment of shops, of recreation and study
rooms, that group alone is successful which com-
mands 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 initia-
tive and for independent
social relationships. The public schools then con-
tained 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 that 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.

io6 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

As these clubs have been continued during the
twenty years they have developed classes in the
many forms of handicraft which the newer educa-
tion is so rapidly adapting for the delight of chil-
dren ; but they still keep their essentially social
character and still minister to that large number
of children who leave school the very wxek 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 instruction in man-
ual 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 kinder-
garten, we were very insistent that the Settle-
ment should not be primarily for the children, and
that it was absurd to suppose that grown people

FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE 107

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
weeks' 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 formerly taken in
demolishing them. Fortunately the landlord had
never heard the aesthetic principle that the expo-
sure of basic construction is more desirable than
gaudy decoration. In course of time it was dis-
covered 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 refu-
tation 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-

io8 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 pros-
perity has carried into more desirable neighbor-
hoods, come back to these meetings and often con-
fess to each other that they have never since found
such kindness as in early Chicago when all its citi-
zens 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 immi-
grants 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 through-
out the years have given genuine help to our vari-
ous enterprises for neighborhood improvement, and
from their own memories of earlier hardships have

FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE 109

made many shrewd suggestions for alleviating the
difficulties of that first sharp struggle with un-
toward 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 spon-
taneous 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 serv-
ices. 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."

no TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

Occasionally these neighborly offices unexpect-
edly 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

FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE iii

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 her-
self, and noonehad
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 kind-
ness 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 which make men
alike are finer and better than the things that keep

112 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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
a 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."

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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 one golden summer afternoon dur-
ing 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
I 113

114 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

forms of social endeavor preceding and contempo-
raneous 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 avoid-
ed the extrava-
gance of state-
ment which
characterizes
youth, and yet
^-~- I doubt if any-
where 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 clew 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 con-
stancy, as so often happens ; and yet it is Interest-
ing to note that all of the people whom I have

SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS 115

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 which 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 dis-
covered that the Settlement was too valuable as a
method as a way of approach to the social question
to be abandoned, although they had long since
discovered that 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 of 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 un-
nourished, 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

ii6 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 perma-
nently 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 fos-
tered save through common intercourse ; that the bless-
ings 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 over-
bold 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 op-
portunities 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

SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS 117

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 human-
ity 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 "Intima-
tions 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 occa-
sionally 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 win-
dow 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

ii8 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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, indi-
gence 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 inno-
cent 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 "do-
ing 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 with birth itself. We treat them as children who,
with strong-growing limbs, are allowed to use their legs

SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS 119

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." Par-
ents 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 unjus-
tified, 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 exclu-

I20 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

siveness 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 culti-
vated 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 use-
lessness 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 eco-
nomic study, but they are sustaining this shock of inac-
tion. 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 suc-
cess 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

SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS 121

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 com-
munication 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 con-
strained 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

122 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 grotesque-
ness 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

SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS 123

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 hu-
manity, 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 icono-
clasm 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 Chris-
tians 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 happi-
ness 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

124 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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

I

SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS 125

the leading voices, but the differences of training and
cultivation between them and the voices of 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 cul-
tivation 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 humanitarian-
ism. It is difficult to analyze a living thing ; the analy-
sis 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 imagina-
tion, 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

126 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

one end of society and the destitution at the other ;
but it assumes that this overaccumulation and destitu-
tion is most sorely felt in the things that pertain to so-
cial and educational advantages. 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 one 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 de-
mand from its residents a scientific patience in the ac-
cumulation of facts and the steady holding of their
sympathies as one of the best instruments for that ac-
cumulation. 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 neigh-
bors, until they grow into a sense of relationship and mu-
tual interests. Their neighbors are held apart by differ-
ences 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 legisla-
tion, and to use their influence to secure it. In short, resi-
dents are pledged to devote themselves to the duties of
good citizenship and to the arousing of the social energies

SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS 127

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-differen-
tiation.

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 there-
fore identical with that necessity, which urges us on
toward social and individual salvation.

128 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 cer-
tainly 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

K 129

I30 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 com-
paratively 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-

UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE 131

boring factories — a sale which has steadily in-
creased 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 'Svhat
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 legiti-
mate 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 in-
stinct was traded upon and used as a basis for
money making by an adroit host. From the be-
ginning the young people's clubs had asked for
dancing, and nothing was more popular than the
increased space for parties offered by the gym-
nasium, with the chance to serve refreshments In
the room below. We tried experiments with

132 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 any one 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

UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE 133

buildings where the natural desire of the young
for gavety 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 achieve-
ment.

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 pro-
vide 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 efiPective against them.

Of course there was always present the harrowing
consciousness of the difference in economic condi-
tion between ourselves and our neighbors. Even

134 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

if we had gone to live in the most wretched tene-
ment, there would have always been an essential
difference between them and ourselves, for we should

have had a sense of secu-
rity 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 organ-
ization and possibly com-
plement them by small
efforts of our own ?

Some such vague hope
was in our minds when
we started the Hull-House Cooperative Coal Asso-
ciation, which led a vigorous life for three years,
and developed a large membership under the skill-
ful advice of its one paid officer, an English work-
ingman who had had experience in cooperative
societies at "'ome." Some of the meetings of the
association, in which people met to consider to-
gether 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

UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE 135

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 im-
posing coal yard on the south-
east corner of the Hull-House
block and its gross receipts
were between three and four
hundred dollars a day, it be- ,
came evident that the con- ^
cern could not remain solvent
if it continued its philan-
thropic policy, and the exper-
iment 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.

136 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

At a meeting of working girls held at Hull-House
during a strike in a large shoe factory, the discus-
sions made it clear that the strikers who had been
most easily frightened, and therefore first to capitu-
late, 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 "Coopera-
tion," and discussed all the difficulties and fascina-
tions of such an undertaking, and on the first of
May, 1 89 1, 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. Al-
though 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

UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE 137

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 our-
selves 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 under-
stand.

The situation changed markedly after the Pull-
man strike, and our efforts to secure factory legis-
lation later brought upon us a certain amount of
distrust and suspicion ; until then we had been
considered merely a kindly philanthropic under-
taking 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

138 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 gen-
erous friend, it proved to be that of a man who
was notorious for underpaying the girls in his estab-
lishment 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 embar-
rassing 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 consid-
ered unfit.

In the long discussion which followed, it gradu-
ally 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 repre-
sentative 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"

UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE 139

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 legiti-
mate ; at the same time, social changes can only
be inaugurated by those who feel the unrighteous-
ness of contemporary conditions, and the expres-
sion 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 club house was built by
an old friend of Hull-House much interested in work-
ing 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 question-
able 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 recon-
cile 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 Aboli-
tionists may have regarded this beautiful building

I40 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 right-
eousness of whose foundation they challenged.

A little incident of this time illustrated to me
the confusion in the minds of at 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 corre-

UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE 141

spondent 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 Set-
tlements 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 nine-
ties ; a carpenter shop on Van Buren Street near

142 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

Halsted, a labor exchange started by the unem-
ployed, 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 re-
member 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 mem-
ories 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

I

UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE 143

audience of his fellow countrymen of the success-
ful 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 trade-
unions without the assistance of a single contractor.

And so one's faith is kept alive as one occasion-
ally meets a realized ideal of better human rela-
tions. 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, al-
though the poor old cooperators, who for many
years claimed friendship at Hull-House because
they heard that we "had once tried a cooperative

144 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 ; neverthe-
less they doubtless permanently affected our judg-
ments 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 god-
father, 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 con-
vict, 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 con-
vict, his wife nor his godfather for a moment con-
sidered him a criminal. He had merely gotten
excited over cards and had stabbed his adversary

UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE 145

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 pro-
fessional 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 story-
books 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 Ger-
many, 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 Ger-
many as a music teacher to an American family.

146 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 sup-
ported 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 infi-
nitely 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 them-
selves, 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.

UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE 147

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, be-
cause 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

148 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 prefer-
ence" 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 regu-
lations, 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 cultiva-
tion of that which appealed to the powers of enjoy-
ment as over against a wage-earning capacity. It
was also significant that a Chicago business man,
fond of pictures himself, responded to this first ap-
peal of the new and certainly puzzling undertaking
called a Settlement.

UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE 149

The situation was somewhat complicated by the
fact that at the time the building was erected in
1 891, 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 build-
ing was promised to
us, that I looked up
my European note-
book which contained
the record of my expe-
rience in Ulm, hoping
that I might find a
description of what I
then thought '' sl
Cathedral of Human-
ity" ought to be.
The description was "low and widespreading as to
include all men in fellowship and mutual responsi-
bility 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

ISO TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 con-
summation 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

' UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE 151

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 mis-
understood, it would be either because there was
not time to fully explain or because our motives
had become mixed, for I was convinced that dis-
interested 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 valu-
able 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

1 52 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

•

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 re-
quests 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 stead-
fastly 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 expres-
sion 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

UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE 153

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 investi-
gation 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 con-
sider the book worthy of a second.

CHAPTER VIII
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-

,T_^^.^ 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 room

154

A Spent Old Man.

PROBLEMS OF POVERTY 155

for 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 embodi-
ment of that dread which is so heart-breaking
that the occupants of the County Infirmary them-
selves 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
county 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 threat-
ening 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 county
ofiicials, only too glad to be rid of their unhappy
duty, left her to our ministrations. This dread of

156 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 her 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
they 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

PROBLEMS OF POVERTY 157

they have some help from the outside, and yet the
expenditure of a very Httle money secures for them
the coveted vacation. I found that a few pennies
paid their car fare into town, a dollar a week pro-
cured a 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 trans-
formed 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
chicken pie at Mike's wedding" and she was
disappointed after all.

iS8 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 re-
spectable" 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 your-
self this morning, did you 1 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 w^ith
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, paralleled
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 beneficent work, while the relief societies,
although conscientiously administered, were inade-
quate in extent and antiquated in method.

As social reformers gave themselves over to dis-
cussion of general principles, so the poor invariably
accused poverty itself of their destruction. I re-

PROBLEMS OF POVERTY .159

call 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 rep-
rimanded by the conductor, who was further ex-
asperated 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 sent 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 organ-
ization among the charitable forces of the city was
painfully revealed in that terrible winter after the
Wofld'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

i6o TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 choc-
olate 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 his 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 our first concern was to appoint a
committee to deal with the unemployed. But

PROBLEMS OF POVERTY i6i

when has a committee ever dealt satisfactorily with
the unemployed ? Relief stations were opened in
various parts 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 sew-
ing 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 com-
mittee in dispair of making the rest of the com-
mittee 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 ofiice 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 in-

M

1 62 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

volved difficulties, and the most painful episode of
the winter for me came 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 ex-
haust 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 per-
manently impressed with the kindness of the poor
to each other ; the woman who lives upstairs will
willingly share her breakfast with the family below

PROBLEMS OF POVERTY 163

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 down-
town 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 con-
founded 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 in-
efficient 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 re-
stored, and she gave as a reason for the invitation

i64 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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

\ \ I

misshapen with rheumatism or with a face dis-
torted by neuralgic pain ; that it was not fair to
judge poor people that way. She perhaps un-
consciously illustrated the difference between the
relief-station relation to the poor and the Settle-
ment relation to its neighbors, the latter wishing

PROBLEMS OF POVERTY 165

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 rela-
tion to become more social and free from economic
disturbance.

Possibly something of the same eflPort 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 ex-
istence 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 condi-
tions which need to be rectified. However neces-
sary publicity is for securing reformed administra-
tion, 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 dur-

1 66 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

ing the days of the investigation, I would find wait-
ing for me from twenty to thirty people whose
friends and relatives were in the suspected insti-
tution, 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 under-
stood nothing. We were able to induce the be-
trayer 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 seven-

PROBLEMS OF POVERTY 167

teen miles from the city. She has made two pay-
ments 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 ca-
pacity for hard work, but she sadly needed the
service of the State's attorney ofHce, 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, in-
surance for bewildered widows, damages for injured
operators, furniture from the clutches of the in-
stallment store. The Settlement is valuable as an
information and interpretation bureau. It con-
stantly acts between the various institutions of
the city and the people for whose benefit these in-
stitutions 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 re-
sembles 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

i68 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 be-
cause of sneak
thieves, many
of the children
were locked
out. During
our first sum-
mer an increas-
ing 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 some-
thing 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

PROBLEMS OF POVERTY 169

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 de-
signed for its use called the Children's House. It
is now carried on by the United Charities of Chi-
cago 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 pos-
sible. 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 aifection which outlives abuse,
neglect, and crime, — the affection w^hich 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 over-
worked 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 her-
self the luxury of staying at home two days a week.

I70 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 sup-
ported 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 de-
bauch, ragged and filthy, but in a state of lachry-
mose repentance. The poor wife received him as

PROBLEMS OF POVERTY 171

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 door-
step 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 sun-
shine 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 dis-
appeared, and was not seen again until midnight,
when he came back in a glorious state of intoxica-
tion 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 peniten-
tiary 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

172 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 fivQ children, she bitterly replied, ''All of
them except Alary 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 par-
ticular we are most stupid, — to judge a man's worth
so solely by his wage-earning capacity that a good

PROBLEMS OF POVERTY 173

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 at six o'clock, doing
it thus early before she left for the factory. Five-
year-old Goosie was trotting at her heels handing
her clothespins, 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 pite-
ous and limp on a pile of frozen refuse, his mother
cheerily called him to "climb up again," so confi-
dent 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

174 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

take him and I never had any time." This state-
ment revealed the condition of many nursery
mothers who are obHged to forego the joys and
solaces which belong to even the most poverty-
stricken. The long hours of factory labor neces-
sary 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 con-
stantly allow the waste of this most precious ma-
terial. 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 four-
teenth 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

PROBLEMS OF POVERTY 175

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 meager-
est ; nevertheless if a visitor left an offering upon
her table, it was largely spent for apparatus or deli-
cately 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 illumi-

176 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

nator. 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 depart-
ment 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 al-
ways 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.

CHAPTER IX
A Decade of Economic Discussion

The Hull-House residents were often bewildered
by the desire for constant discussion which char-
acterized 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 ''ano-
dyne of work" afforded by philanthropic and civic
activities, their former experiences had not thrown
them into company with radicals. The decade
between 1 890-1900 was, in Chicago, a period of
propaganda as over against constructive social
eifort ; the moment for marching and carrying
banners, for stating general principles and making
a demonstration, rather than the time for uncover-
ing the situation and for providing the legal meas-
ures 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 ap-
parently gone through the first period of repressive
measures, and in the winter of 1 889-1 890, by the
advice and with the active participation of its lead-
N 177

178 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

ing 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, pre-
sided 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 lead-
ing 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 con-

ECONOMIC DISCUSSION 179

vince 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 exemplifi-
cation 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 hun-
dred people ; a chairman for the evening v/as 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 dis-
carded as an unworthy, halfway measure. I re-
call 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

i8o TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

systematically cared for from the beginning, tooth-
ache 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 every one else in the
fervor of economic discussion. He was usually a
German or a Russian with a turn for logical presen-
tation, who saw in the concentration of capital and
the growth of monoplies an inevitable transition to
the socialistic state. He pointed out that the con-
centration 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 ever}^ discussion
was the individualist, or, as the socialist called him,
the anarchist, who insisted that we shall never se-
cure 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.

ECONOMIC DISCUSSION

i8i

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 gymna-
sium 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 pro-
longed applause which
greeted this great leader
and constantly inter-
rupted his stirring ad-
dress, 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 de-
partment of social science had to be organized
by partisans in separate groups. The very com-

/>^"

1 82 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

mittee 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 causes did not receive "due rec-
ognition." And yet in the same building ad-
herents 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 dis-
cuss the perplexing problems of the industrial situa-
tion ^ 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 be-
fore 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 dis-
tinguished people who were visiting the World's
Fair came to address it. I recall a brilliant French-
woman who was filled with amazement because
one of the shabbiest men reflected a reading of
Schopenhauer. She considered the statement of an-
other member most remarkable — that when he saw
a carriage driving through the streets occupied by a
capitalist who was no longer even an entrepreneur,

ECONOMIC DISCUSSION 183

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
suifered 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 him-
self an atheist but who in moments of excitement
always blamed the good Lord for ''setting su-
pinely" 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 be-
tween 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 busi-
ness " and who were therefore annoyed at the very

1 84 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

notion of social control, and the radicals, who
claimed that nothing could be done to really moral-
ize 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 annoy-
ance 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 proposi-
tion, 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 re-
former 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."

ECONOMIC DISCUSSION 185

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 anar-
chist 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 subsi-
dized by the millionaires, you will be afraid to talk
like this." The defense of free speech was a sensi-
tive 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 tyr-
anny 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

1 86 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

alienate everybody. I should have been most
grateful at that time to accept the tenets of so-
cialism, 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 sensi-
tiveness which recognizes that no personal comfort
nor individual development can compensate a man
for the misery of his neighbors, nor with the in-
creasing 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 the faith.

During those first years on Halsted Street noth-
ing 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

ECONOMIC DISCUSSION 187

heavy pressure than the socialists were making,
and I should have been glad to have had the com-
radeship of that gallant company had they not
firmly insisted that fellowship depends upon iden-
tity of creed. They repudiated similarity of aim
and social sympathy as tests which were much too
loose and wavering as they did that vague social-
ism which for thousands has come to be a philos-
ophy 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 de-'
fend the confusion arising from the clashing of free
wills as an alternative to an acceptance of the doc-
trine. 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

i88 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 dis-
cussion 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 an-
niversary 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 col-
lege 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 work-
ing capital for experimentation in hours and
wages, quite as groups of scholars are endowed
for research.

Chicago continued to devote much time to eco-
nomic discussion and remained in a state of youth-
ful glamour throughout the nineties. I recall a

ECONOMIC DISCUSSION 189

young Methodist minister who, in order to free his
denomination from any entanglement in his dis-
cussion 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
the best. Professor Herron filled to overflowing a
downtown hall every noon with a series of talks en-
titled '' Between Csesar 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 enthu-
siasm have passed away, perhaps because they
represented pamphleteering rather than journal-
ism and came to a natural end when the situation
changed. Certainly their editors suffered criti-
cism and poverty on behalf of the causes which they
represented.

Trade-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 confu-
sion. They b'elonged to the second of the two
classes into which Mill divides all those who are dis-
satisfied 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

I90 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 dis-
consolate." 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 dis-
cussion, 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 con-

ECONOMIC DISCUSSION 191

temporaries 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 useless-
ness, 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 al-
though they would dismiss the bishop and all the
clergy, they would want to retain one or two schol-
ars 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 into a dozen bits,
although illuminated by much shrewd wisdom
and affording a clew, 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 acknowl-
edge 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 pro-
longed strike in Chicago on the part of the typo-
graphical unions for an eight-hour day. The
strike had been conducted in a most orderly manner

192 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

and the union men, convinced of the justice of
their cause, had felt aggrieved because one of the
religious publishing houses in Chicago had con-
stantly 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, becom-
ing 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 prob-
lems inherent in the present industrial organization
and to consider what might be done, not so much
against deliberate aggression as against brutal con-
fusion and neglect ; quite as the youth of promise
passes 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

ECONOMIC DISCUSSION 193

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, deal-
ing constantly with daily affairs, in the end demon-
strate the reality of abstract notions ?

I remember when Frederic 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 formu-
lated their principles, as the new English Labor
Party, which is destined to break up the reaction-
ary period, is now being created by another set of
theorists. There were certainly moments during
the heated discussions of this decade when nothing

194 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 ris-
ing man in the Socialist Party.

At any rate the residents at Hull-House dis-
covered that while their first impact with city
poverty allied them to groups given over to dis-
cussion 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 at-
taching 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

ECONOMIC DISCUSSION 195

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-con-
sciousness, it slowly perceives the civic significance
of these industrial conditions, and perhaps Chicago
has been foremost in the effort to connect the un-
regulated overgrowth of the huge centers of popu-
lation, 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 like-mindedness
and the coordination of divers 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 en-
countered ; 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

196 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 spirit-
ual 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

ECONOMIC DISCUSSION

197

to-day. So far as I have been able to reproduce
this earlier period, it must reflect the essential
provisionality of everything; "the perpetual mov-
ing on to something future which shall supersede

1 ill S Mr f ^- iiii

— !.__

the present," that paramount impression of life
itself, which aflPords us at one and the same time,
ground for despair and for endless and varied an-
ticipation.

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 con-
sciousness 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 noth-
ing whatever, and I made my first acquaintance
then with those pathetic documents signed by the

198

Sweatshop Workers.

LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 199

parents of working children, that they will make
no claim for damages resulting from "carelessness."

The visits we made in the neighborhood con-
stantly 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 has performed in the vary-
ing 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

200 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 pre-
maturely 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 re-
pay 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 im-
pression of neighborhood conditions if we would
make it of any genuine value.

LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 201

There was at that time no statistical information
on Chicago industrial conditions, and Airs. 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 com-
mittee 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 afterwards 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 neces-
sary 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 even-
ing for three months. Of course the most energetic
help as well as intelligent understanding came from
the trades-unions. The central labor bodv of Chi-

202 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

cago, then called the Trades and Labor Assembly,
had previously appointed a committee of investi-
gation 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 Fac-
tory 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 trade-
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 legisla-
tion 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 cer-
tainly founded upon a genuine need, to urge that a

LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 203

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 legis-
lation 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 house-
hold duties which crowd upon her, and a conscien-
tious 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 regu-
larly in a factory of the vicinity which was then
running full night time. These girls also encoun-
tered 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 de-
coyed into a saloon, where the soft drink was fol-
lowed by an alcoholic one containing ''knockout
drops, " and she awoke in a disreputable rooming

204 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 pro-
nounced 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 pre-
pare 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 ex-
perience left on my mind a distrust of all legislation
which was not preceded by full discussion and
understanding. A premature measure may be
carried through a legislature by perfectly legiti-
mate means and still fail to possess vitality and a
sense of maturity. On the other hand, the adminis-
tration of an advanced law acts somewhat as a
referendum. The people have an opportunity for

LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 205

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 per-
formed 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 lawwould in many
cases work hardship, was never absent from my mind
during the earliest years of its operation. I ad-
dressed 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 under-
standing 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

2o6 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

to use the labor of children, that they were con-
vinced 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
business men with radicalism, because the law was
secured during the term of Governor Altgelt 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 Massachu-
setts and New York, the fact that Governor Altgelt
pardoned from the state's prison the anarchists
who had been sentenced there after the Haymarket
riot, gave the opponents of this most reasonable

LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 207

legislation a quickly utilized opportunity to couple
it with that detested word ; the State document
which accompanied Governor Altgelt's pardon
gave these ungenerous critics a further opportu-
nity, because a magnanimous action was marred by
personal rancor, betraying for the moment the in-
firmity 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 alreadv 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 earlv 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

2o8 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

towards 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 condi-
tion of labor may be
secured by legisla-
tion, 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

LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 209

against English-speaking tailors, unskilled Bo-
hemian and Italian women competing against both.
These women seem to have been best helped
through the use of the label when unions of special-
ized workers in the trade are strong enough to
insist that the manufacturers shall ''give out work"
only to those holding union cards. It was cer-
tainly impressive when the garment makers them-
selves 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 held out to them
by their fellow- workers.

During the fourth year of our residence at Hull-
House w^e found ourselves in a large mass meeting
ardently advocating the passage of a Federal meas-
ure 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 sweat-
shops 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

2IO TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

to pass and enforce a code of comparatively uni-
form 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 legis-
lation 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 re-
sponsibility 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 pro-
tect 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-

LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 211

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 Bo-
hemian 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 sales-
women and the managers, and above all the girls
have the protection naturally afforded by friends
and neighbors and they are free from that suspi-
cion 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 even-
ing when the president of this pioneer organization
accepted an invitation to take dinner at Hull-House.

212 TWENTY YEARS 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 member-
ship 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 out-
side of the drawing-room door, or, in trade-union
language, "the wicket gate," while her name was

LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 213

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 towards
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 move-
ment 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 ele-
ments in the community were unexpectedly brought
together that they might soberly consider and
rectify the weaknesses 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 com-
mittee 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

214 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 dis-
couraged in those early days could we have fore-
seen 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 righteous-
ness 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 dis-
tinct 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 m_ost 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 divi-
sion 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 Pull-

LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 215

man 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 neighbor-
ing 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 benevo-
lence 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 minor-
ity directors, by the suffering women and children,
by the keen excitement of the struggle, by the reli-
gious 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

2i6 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 Arbi-
tration Committee, I met an acquaintance, who
angrily said 'Hhat 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 inter-
ested to find the cause of such a senseless outbreak,
I finally discovered that the first ten thousand dol-
lars which my acquaintance had ever saved, requir-
ing, he said, years of efiPort 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 spread-
ing 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 in-
terrupted 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 pro-

LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 217

found apprehension lest her last hours should be
touched with resentment towards 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 judg-
ing them." My heart was comforted and heavy
at the same time ; but how many more such mo-
ments of sorrow and death were being made diffi-
cult and lonely throughout the land, and how much
would these experiences add to the lasting bitter-
ness, 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 every one 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 Pull-
man 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. Pull-
man 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 fail-
ure of this benevolent employer and its relation to

21 8 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 undis-
turbed 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 worklngman, 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

LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 219

the most reasonable demands, came to me at an-
other 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, indus-
trious and unusually intelligent man, I saw grad-
ually 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 dis-
tress 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, accus-
tomed to the monotony of his workbench and sud-
denly 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

220 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 em-
ployer, 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 em-
ployer 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 at Hull-House have had
many opportunities to see the worker driven ruth-
lessly 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,

LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 221

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 heart-breaking as unemployment, and it was
inevitable that we should see much of it in a neigh-
borhood where low rents attracted the poorly paid
worker and many newly arrived immigrants who
were first employed in gangs upon railroad exten-
sions and similar undertakings. The sturdy peas-
ants 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 unscru-
pulous employment agencies. Hull-House made
an investigation both of the padrone and of the
agencies in our immediate vicinity, and the out-
come confirming what we already suspected, we
eagerly threw ourselves into a movement to pro-
cure 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 tend-
ency 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 shame-

222 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

fully 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 Okla-
homa 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 oppor-
tunity 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 employ-
ment of newly arrived immigrants and the innum-

LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 223

erable difficulties attached to their first adjust-
ment, 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 ex-
panding 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 conspicu-
ously 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 govern-
mental control of this huge industry had their

224 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 dis-
appears. Any one 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 ap-
pointed by the mayor of Chicago to arbitrate dur-
ing 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 in-
augurated 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 under-
taken in defense of the garment workers, but really
arising from causes so obscure and dishonorable
that they have never yet been made public, was

LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 225

the culmination of a type of trades-unions which
had developed in Chicago during the preceding
decade in which corruption had flourished al-
most 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 some-
times 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 de-
termined effort to eradicate it from the labor move-
ment, 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 prin-
ciples of brotherhood totally untouched by the
corruption. At one time the scrub women in the
downtown office buildings had a union of their own
afiiliated 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

Q

226 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 scrub women 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 miser-
able, 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 mem-
bers knew that the same combination which had
organized the scrub women into a union, later
destroyed it during a strike inaugurated for their
own purposes.

LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 227

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 under-
stand and, as far as possible, to alleviate it. That
in this eifort 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 Settle-
ment's fellowship with trades-unions is most satis-
factory in the agitation for labor legislation and
similar undertakings. The first officers of the
Chicago Woman's Trades Union League were resi-
dents of Settlements, although they can claim little
share in the later record the League made in se-
curing the passage of the Illinois Ten-Hour Law for
Women and in its many other fine undertakings.

228 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 de-
fection, 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 morn-
ing 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 real-
ized my despair over the violence in a strike quite
as definitely as if she had been told about it. Per-

LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 229

haps 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 vari-
ous 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 hard-
ships 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
times 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 de-
pends 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 argu-
ment of the Brandeis brief in the Oregon ten-hour
case.

In such wise the residents of an industrial neigh-
borhood gradually comprehend the close connection

230 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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.

CHAPTER XI

Immigrants and Their Children

From our very first months at Hull-House we
found it much easier to deal with the first genera-
tion of crowded city life than with the second or
third, because it is more natural and cast in a sim-
pler 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 such pastoral interlude to his ravings.
Hospitality still survives among foreigners, al-
though 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

231

232 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

Americans. For several years, every Saturday
evening the entire families of our Italian neighbors
were our guests. These evenings were very popu-
lar 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 cooper-
ated.

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

IMMIGRANTS, THEIR CHILDREN 233

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 socie-
ties such as England has established, or, better
still, by enlarging the functions of the Federal De-
partment 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 dis-
posal, and in reviving their almost forgotten enthu-
siasms. 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

234 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

she made an old-fashioned courtsey 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 immi-
grants 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 sup-
ported herself and her two children by scrubbing,
hastily sent her youngest child to purchase, with

IMMIGRANTS, THEIR CHILDREN 235

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 south-
ern Europe. I was walk-
ing down Polk Street,
perturbed in spirit, be-
cause 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 edu-
cational enterprise, which should build a bridge
between European and American experiences In
such wise as to give them both more meaning and

236 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 Euro-
pean 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 unneces-
sarily 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 Michael Angelo'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 clew
that was needed. Could we not interest the young
people working in the neighboring factories, in these
older forms of industry, so that, through their
own parents and grandparents, they w^ould 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 towards that
education which Dr. Dewey defines as ''a continu-
ing reconstruction of experience." They might

IMMIGRANTS, THEIR CHILDREN 237

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 Irish-
woman 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 lec-
tures upon industrial history. I remember that

238 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

after an Interesting lecture upon the industrial
revolution in England and a portrayal of the

appalling conditions throughout the weaving dis-
tricts of the north, which resulted from the hasty-
gathering of the weavers into the new towns, a

IMMIGRANTS, THEIR CHILDREN 239

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 transi-
tion of weaving from hand work to steam power,
that in the application of steam to sewing we are
still in the first stages, illustrated by the isolated
woman who tries to support herself by hand needle-

240 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

work 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 short-
ened 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, sew-
ing, millinery, embroidery, and dressmaking con-
stantly 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 prod-
ucts, 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,

IMMIGRANTS, THEIR CHILDREN 241

including their own children, are so apt to hold
them. I recall a number of Russian women work-
ing 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

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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

242 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 enter-
tained, they themselves did the entertaining. Be-
cause 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 possibili-
ties 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
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

IMMIGRANTS, THEIR CHILDREN 243

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 cere-
mony, my mind was filled with shifting pictures of
woman's labor with which travel makes one fa-
miliar; 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 Tan-
giers ; 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, An-
gelina saw her mother surrounded by a group of
visitors from the School of Education, who much
admired the spinning, and she concluded from their

244 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 de-
partment 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 ex-
pect 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 re-
ligion 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

IMMIGRANTS, THEIR CHILDREN 245

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 tene-
ment 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

246 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

lent by the Field Museum, and later by carefully
selected specimens of basketry from the Philip-
pines. 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 carv-
ing 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 re-
sults. 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.

IMMIGRANTS, THEIR CHILDREN 247

His poor wife, who stayed a week at Hull-House
after the disaster until a new tenement could be ar-
ranged 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 manu-
facturing 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 in-
terest 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, at-
tends ceremonies which no longer express his re-
ligious convictions and who makes his vain effort

248 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

to interest his Russian Jewish father in social prob-
lems ; 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 ex-
periences have reached the conclusion that pity,
memory, and faithfulness are natural ties with
paramount claims.

This faithfulness, however, is sometimes ruth-
lessly 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 m.any convincing illustrations that this
parental harshness often results in juvenile de-
linquency. 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 Benev-
olent Social Twos ; that he hadn't a penny of his
own although he had worked in a brass foundry

IMMIGRANTS, THEIR CHILDREN 249

for three years and had been advanced twice, be-
cause he always had to give his pay envelope un-
opened 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 investi-
gation 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 al-
though 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 show-
ing her various attentions and agreed that Marcella
should accept his invitation to a ball, but would
allow her not a penny towards a new gown to re-
place 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

250 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 relent-
less department store detective who, for "the sake
of the 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 neigh-
boring 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 Christ-
mas 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

IMMIGRANTS, THEIR CHILDREN 251

are only looking for playthings. They are all dis-
tracted by the profusion and variety of the display,
and their moral sense is confused by the general air
of open-handedness.

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 dis-
tress 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

252 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 Juve-
nile 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 impa-
tiently 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 ware-
house 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 mornmg delivery. Such children com-
plain 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

IMMIGRANTS, THEIR CHILDREN 253

dissipated young men who pride themselves upon
their ability to live without working, and who de-
spise all the honest and sober ways of their immi-
grant parents. They are at once a menace and a
center of demoralization. Certainly the bewil-
dered 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 them-
selves.

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

254 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 skill-
ful 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 or not 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 urban-
ized 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 im-
migrant colonies deserve all the praise as Ameri-
canizing agencies which can be bestowed upon
them, and there is little doubt that the fast-
changing curriculum in the direction of the vaca-

IMMIGRANTS, THEIR CHILDREN 255

tion-school experiments, will react still more directly
upon such households.

It is difficult to write of the relation of the older
and most foreign-looking immigrants to the chil-
dren of other people, — the Italians whose fruit-
carts are upset simply because they are "dagoes,"
or the Russian peddlers who are stoned and some-
times 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 Associa-
tion 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 pas-
sion of Lear in the old texts, as a platitude enun-
ciated by a man who discovers in it his own expe-
rience, thrills us as no unfamiliar phrases can pos-
sibly do. The Greeks are filled with amazed rage
when their very name is flung at them as an oppro-
brious 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 Car-
thage 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

256 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

race difference which color seems to accentuate so
absurdly, and upon my return from various confer-
ences 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 com-
panionship 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 birth-
day, 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 "com-
panion 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

IMMIGRANTS, THEIR CHILDREN 257

itself, so deeply cherished in the hearts of this
group of citizens.

The Greeks indeed gravely consider their tradi-
tions 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 Bul-
garians are trying to establish a protectorate, not
only for their immediate advantage, but that they
may claim a glorious history for their "barbarous
country." It is said that on the basis of this pro-
tectorate, 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 Aris-
totle himself, an indignity the Greeks will never
suffer !

To me personally the celebration of the hun-
dredth anniversary of Mazzini's birth was a matter
of great interest. Throughout the world that day
Italians who believed in a United Italy came to-
gether. 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

258 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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.

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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 par-
alyzing consciousness that our best efforts were most
inadequate to the situation.

During the many relief visits I paid that w^inter
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 re-
action 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

259

26o TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 un-
dertaken 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, com-
pelled even the sternest business man 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.

TOLSTOYISM 261

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 rea-
son perhaps, Tolstoy's clear statement is valu-
able 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 read-
ing 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 direc-
tion. 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 fol-
lowing an illness of typhoid fever which I suffered in
the autumn of 1895. The illness was so prolonged

262 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 clew to the tangled affairs of city
poverty. I was but 'one of thousands of our con-
temporaries who were turning towards this Russian,
not as to a seer — his message is much too con-
fused 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 stimu-
lating. 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 en-
thusiasm's," but it evinced still more of that British
capacity to perform the hard work of careful re-
search and self-examination which must precede
any successful experiments in social reform. Of
the varied groups and individuals whose sugges-
tions 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 re-
finement and pleasure of the rich, a new refine-
jnent and a new pleasure born of the commonwealth

TOLSTOYISM 263

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 pave-
ments, 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 bewil-
dered 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 ac-
complished by the then new Labor Party, and we

264 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

joined the vast body of men in the booming hymn

When wilt Thou save the people,
O God of Mercy, when 1

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 every one's
hands, and a reception given by Karl Marx's daugh-
ter, 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 even-
ing.

Octavia Hill kindly demonstrated to us the prin-
ciples upon which her well-founded business of rent
collecting was established, and with pardonable
pride showed us the Red Cross Square with its cot-
tages marvelously picturesque and comfortable, on
two sides, and on the third a public hall and com-
mon 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 por-
traying the heroism in the life of the modern work-
ingman.

While all this was warmly human, we also had
opportunities to see something of a group of men

TOLSTOYISM 265

and women who were approaching the social prob-
lem 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 possi-
bilities 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 con-
cert halls — vaudeville shows we later called them
in Chicago — which were found in Bethnal Green,
for every Saturday night. The residents had cen-
sored 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 eco-
nomic wrongs which pressed heaviest upon the poor ;

266 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

at Browning House, at the moment, they were
giving prizes to those of their costermonger neigh-
bors 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 suc-
cessfully passed the examinations for the University
of London. The entire impression received in Eng-
land 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 dis-
regarded and neglected.

London, of course, presented sharp differences
to Russia where social conditions were written in
black and white with little shading, like a demon-
stration 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 a 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

TOLSTOYISM 267

Russia presents on every hand. This same con-
trast was also shown by the pilgrims trudging on
pious errands to monasteries, to tombs and to the
Hply 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 Tol-
stoy's later works, who at that moment were on the
eve of leaving Russia in order to form an agricul-
tural 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 towards
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 en-
deavored 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 intermin-

268 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

able 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 dis-
concerted 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 work-
ing 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 na-
tionalities we had recently counted in our ward.
Fortunately the countess came to my rescue with
a recital of her former attempts to clothe hypotheti-
cal 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 ad-
vised 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 J 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

TOLSTOYISM 269

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 w^ho 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, how-
ever, 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 Eng-
land 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 per-

270 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

sonal 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 over-
burdened with toil that there is no leisure nor en-
ergy 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 con-
temporaries 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

TOLSTOYISM

271

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

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people nor group of people, can come into affec-
tionate 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 experi-
ments like Brook Farm and many another, have
attempted to reduce to action this same truth. Tol-
stoy himself has written many times his own con-

272 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

victions 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 daugh-
ters, 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 some one 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

TOLSTOYISM 273

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. Tol-
stoy 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 non-resistance, 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 ruth-
lessness.

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 oflPer 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 unwarrant-
able expenditure of energy ?

274 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

The conversation at dinner and afterwards,
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 per-
son performed the amount necessary to satisfy
his own wants ? W^as 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 inevi-
table shadings and modifications which life itself
brings to its own interpretation ? Aliss 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 mo-
ments 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

TOLSTOYISM

275

Luther when, much perturbed by many theologi-
cal 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 pain-
fully, if only they walked
in the path of labor. In
the exercise of that curi-
ous power possessed by
the theorists 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 my-
self 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

276 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

that what I ought to do upon my return to Hull-
House, was to spend at least two hours every morn-
ing in the little bakery which we had recently
added to the equipment of our coffee-house. 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 accom-
plishment, 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 preposter-
ous 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

TOLSTOYISM 277

demand of actual and pressing human 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 teach-
ings of Jesus In all matters of labor and the use of
property." They would thus transfer the vindi-
cation of creed from the church to the open field,
from dogma to experience.

The day Miss Smith and I visited the Com-
monwealth 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

278 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

family the little colony contained, the new house
was to be the largest yet erected. Upon our sur-
prise 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 unattrac-
tive 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 convic-
tion 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 conven-
tional in matters of family relationship and had
broken with society only in regard to the conven-
tions 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

TOLSTOYISM 279

colony, wishing to give her a dinner at the hotel, be-
cause she had girlishly exclaimed during a conver-
sation that at times during the winter she had be-
come 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 fa-
natic'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 demonstra-
tion ; that if we stop for it in each case, we can never
go on at all ; and yet, in spite of this, when con-
science 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.

28o TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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.

Polk Street, opposite Hull-House.

CHAPTER XIII
Public Activities and Investigations

One of the striking features of our neighborhood
twenty years ago, and one to which we never be-
came 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 in-
adequate 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 re-
siduum 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 heldenchanted converse. We are obliged

281

282 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE .

to remember that all children eat everything
which they find and that odors have a curious

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and intimate power of entwining themselves into
our tenderest memories, before even the residents

ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS 283

of Hull-House can understand their own early
enthusiasm for the removal of these boxes and the
establishment of a better system of refuse collec-
tion.

It is easy for even the most conscientious citizen
of Chicago to forget the foul smells of the stock-
yards 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 refuse to innocently decay in the
open air and sunshine, in a crowded city quarter,
if the garbage is not properly collected and de-
stroyed, 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

284 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

I was guardian, could not be with me at Hull-
House at all unless the sickening odors were re-
duced. I may well be ashamed that other deli-
cate 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 resi-
dent to Hull-House we began a systematic investi-
gation of the city system of garbage collection,
both as to its efficiency in other wards and its pos-
sible connection with the death rate in the various
wards of the city.

The Hull-House Woman's Club had been or-
ganized the year before by the resident kinder-
gartner who had first inaugurated a mothers'
meeting. The members came together, however,
in quite a new way that summer when we dis-
cussed 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 Ameri-
can club women lived, twelve of their number
undertook in connection with the residents, to
carefully investigate the condition 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 thou-
sand and thirty-seven. For the club woman who
had finished a long day's work of washing or ironing

ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS 285

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 un-
comfortable 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 un-
satisfactory services. Still the death rate re-
mained high and the condition seemed little im-
proved throughout the next winter. In sheer
desperation, the following spring when the city
contracts were aw^arded for the removal of gar-
bage, 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

286 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

dump ; or of insisting that the contractor must in-
crease 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 pur-
pose 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 tri-
umphantly discovered a record of its existence in

ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS 287

the city archives. The Italians living on the street
were much interested but displayed little astonish-
ment, perhaps because they were accustomed to
see buried cities exhumed. This pavement became
the casus belli between myself and the street com-
missioner when I insisted that its restoration be-
longed 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 chil-
dren 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 leg-
islature 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 ex-
planation 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 ''iilth
diseases." While some of the women enthu-
siastically approved the slowly changing condi-

288 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

tions 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 dem-
onstrations 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 re-
corded the genuine sense of participation in the
result, and a public spirit which had ''made good."

ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS 289

But the cleanliness of the ward was becoming
much too popular to suit our all-powerful alder-
man and, although we felt fatuously secure under
the regime of civil service, he found a way to cir-
cumvent 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
u

290 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

property. Together we made a careful tour of
the houses and stables and in the face of the con-
ditions that we found there, I could not but agree
with him that supplying South Italian peasants
with sanitary appliances seemed a difficult under-
taking. 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 im-
proving them, he was game and stuck to his propo-
sition 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 play-
ground, although cautious advisers intimated that
it would be very inconsistent to ask for sub-
scriptions 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 pro-
vision that they might never be used for junk-

ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS 291

shops or saloons, and a public playground was
finally established. Hull-House became respon-
sible 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 play-
ground equipment of a near-by school yard. 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 suc-
ceeded 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 the honor of being queen
was offered to the little girl who should pick up
the largest number of scraps of paper which lit-
tered 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

292 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 better-
ment. 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 condi-
tions 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

ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS 293

'--^

294 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

flush of youth, Impatient of correction and con-
vinced 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 coun-
try, who carried on all sorts of traditional activi-
ties 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 unbeliev-
able that a certain house owned by a rich Italian
should have been permitted to survive. He re-
membered with the greatest minuteness the posi-
tions 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 recom-
mended 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

ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS 295

for ten years ; that following a careful study of
tenement conditions in Chicago, the text of which
had been wTitten 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 mini-
mized 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, wxre 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

296 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 in-
volved 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 super-
induced and fostered by the inadequate rooms and
breathing spaces. One of the Hull-House resi-
dents, 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 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

ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS 297

the methods of plumbing in the houses adjacent
to conspicuous groups of fever cases. They dis-
covered 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 im-
migrants were closing in all round her, she was
not willing to sell her property and to move away
until she had finished the education of her chil-
dren. 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
to their self-sacrificing mother for the summer holi-
day. 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

298 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 ap-
pliances 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 stir-
ring 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 not have 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 com-
m.ercial ramifications which graft in the city hall
involved and at the indignation which interfer-
ence with it produced. Hull-House lost some large

ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS 299

subscriptions as the result of this investigation, a
loss which, if not easy to bear, was at least com-
prehensible. 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 liv-
ing on the edge of the neighborhood, who finally
came with a committee of his fellow countrymen
to see what Hull-House wanted of him, thoroughly
convinced that no such effort could be disinter-
ested. One dreary trial after another had been
lost through the inadequacy of the existing legis-
lation 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 to 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

300 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 connec-
tion 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 un-
expected and so unlooked for merely a reminder
of that old bit of wisdom that ''there is no guard-
ing 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 un-
toward results, such as "An Intensive Study of
Truancy" undertaken by a resident of Hull-
House in connection with the compulsory educa-
tion 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 children to economic
and social causes. This investigation preceded a

ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS 301

most interesting conference on truancy held under
a committee of which I was a member from the
Chicago Board of Education. It left lasting re-
sults upon the administration of the truancy law
as well as the cooperation of volunteer bodies.

We continually conduct small but careful in-
vestigations at Hull-House, which may guide us
in our immediate doings such as two recently
undertaken by Mrs. Britton, one upon the read-
ing of school children before new books were
bought for the children's club libraries, and an-
other on the proportion of tuberculosis among
school children, before we opened a little experi-
mental 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 deter-
mine how far overwork superinduced the tuber-
culosis to which such a surprising number of
them were victims. The one scientific instrument
it seemed possible to use was an ergograph, a com-
plicated and expensive instrument kindly lent to
us from the physiological laboratory of the Uni-
versity 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

302 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 instru-
ment 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 commis-
sions to middle men. The experience in the post
office constantly gave us data for urging the estab-
lishment of postal savings as we saw one per-
plexed 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

ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS 303

and not employees, do not come under the pro-
visions 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 em-
bodying the results of the investigation recom-
mended 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 alder-
men, 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 re-
ported in papers throughout the entire country.
This meeting also demonstrated that local meas-
ures can sometimes be urged most effectively when
joined to the efforts of a national body. Undoubt-
edly the best discussions ever held upon the opera-
tion 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 Illi-
nois were compared with those of other states.
The investigations of Hull-House thus tend to be

304 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 inaugu-
rated 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 resi-
dents 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 ex-
perience 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 Em-
ployer's Liability Acts, and his influence in securing
another to study into the subject of Industrial
Diseases. The actual factory investigation under

ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS 305

the latter is in charge of Dr. Hamilton, of Hull-
House, whose long residence in an industrial neigh-
borhood as well as her scientific attainment, give
her peculiar qualifications for the undertaking.

And so a Settlement is led along from the con-
crete to the abstract, as may easily be illustrated.
Many years ago a tailors' union meeting at Hull-
House asked our cooperation in tagging the vari-
ous 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 button-
holes, another for the finishing and so on, the
resulting total to be compared with the selling
price of the coat itself. It quickly became evi-
dent 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 at-
tempt. 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 w4th the hope of reform in the sewing
trades that the Hull-House residents testified be-
fore the Federal Industrial Commission in 1900,
and much later with genuine enthusiasm joined
with trades-unionists and other public-spirited citi-
zens in an industrial exhibit which made a graphic
presentation of the conditions and rewards of labor.

3o6 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

The large casino building in which it was held was
filled every day and evening for two weeks, show-
ing 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 condition 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 neighbor-
hood, to discover more cooperative and advanced
methods of dealing with the problems of poverty
which are so dependent upon industrial maladjust-
ment. 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

ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS 307

organized charity, find testimony, certainly in the
National Conferences, that out of the most persist-
ent and intelligent efforts to alleviate poverty, will
in all probability arise the most significant sug-
gestions for eradicating poverty. In the hearing
before a congressional committee for the estab-
lishment of a Children's Bureau, residents in
American Settlements joined their fellow philan-
thropists in urging the need of this indispensable
instrument for collecting and disseminating in-
formation 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 indica-
tions of an internationalism as sturdy and virile as
it is unprecedented which I have seen in our cos-
mopolitan 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 re-
ligion, both of which cut into all his most cherished
prejudices, he finds it harder to utilize them a

3o8 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

second time and gradually loses them. He thus
modifies his provincialism for if an old enemy work-
ing 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 immi-
grant quarters of American cities might be recog-
nized 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 ''socio-
logical laboratory" applied to us, because Settle-
ments 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 as she did not in the least know
how to comfort him, she reluctantly left him to

ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS 309

his fate ; later in the day, quite at the other end
of the garden, she found a large toad, also ap-
parently 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
w^as clear applied to people who lived ''where they
did not naturally belong," although I protested
that was exactly what we wanted — to be swal-
lowed and digested, to disappear into the bulk of
the people.

Tw^enty years later I am willing to testify that
something of the sort does take place after years
of identification with an industrial community.

CHAPTER XIV
Civic Cooperation

One of the first lessons we learned at Hull-
House was that private beneficence is totally in-
adequate to deal with the vast numbers of the
city's disinherited. We also quickly came to
realize that there are certain types of wretched-
ness 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 sug-
gested. This aspect of governmental responsi-
bility was unforgetably 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 dis-
covering and destroying clothing which was being

310

Julia C. Lathrop.

CIVIC COOPERATION 311

finished in houses containing unreported cases of
smallpox. The deputy most successful in locat-
ing 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 Hal-
sted 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 legiti-
mate opportunity for knowing the poorest people
in the neighborhood and also for understanding
the county method of outdoor relief. The com-

312 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

missioners 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 mem-
ber of the Illinois State Board of Charities. She
served in this capacity for two consecutive terms
and was later reappointed to a third term. Per-
haps her most valuable contribution towards the
enlargement and reorganization of the charitable
institutions of the State came through her in-
timate 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.

CIVIC COOPERATION 313

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 tene-
ments 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

314 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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.

CIVIC COOPERATION 315

We also quickly discovered that nothing brought
us so absolutely into comradeship with our neigh-
bors 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 co-
operation 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 ob-
tained 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 po-
litical 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 cam-
paigns organized against him. In the first one
he was apparently only amused at our "Sunday
School" effort and did little to oppose the elec-
tion to the aldermanic office of a member of the
Hull-House Men's Club who thus became his

3i6 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

colleague in the city council. When Hull-House,
however, made an effort in the following spring
against the reelection of the alderman himself, we
encountered the most determined and skillful
opposition. In these campaigns we doubtless de-
pended 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 tended a bridge or occu-
pied 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 tele-
phone girls. Our powerful alderman had various
methods of intrenching 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

CIVIC COOPERATION 317

to these were hundreds of constituents indebted to
him for personal kindness from the peddler who
received a free license, to the business man who
had a railroad pass to New York. Our third cam-
paign 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 expecta-
tion on the part of our new political friends that
Hull-House would perform like offices for them,
and there resulted endless confusion and mis-
understanding because in many cases we could
not even attempt to do what the alderman con-
stantly did with a right good will. When he pro-
tected a law breaker from the legal consequences
of his act, his kindness appeared, not only to him-
self 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 con-
sistency 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

3i8 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

our alderman was the political head, with its bank-
ing, its ecclesiastical, and its journalistic represent-
atives, and as we followed up the clew and naively
told all we discovered, we of course laid the foun-
dations 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 newspaper men 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

civic COOPERATION 319

men ; but a few days later, when they found them-
selves 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 sub-
stantial 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

320 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

up, for in those good old days such things fre-
quently 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 eifort 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

CIVIC COOPERATION

321

the alderman himself was obliged to come into
such a popular movement. The Nineteenth Ward

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Improvement Association which met at Hull-House
during two winters, was the first body of citizens

322 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 Michi-
gan 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 promis-
ing 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 every ward throughout the
city, accurate information concerning the candi-
dates 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.

CIVIC COOPERATION 323

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 inevi-
tably. 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 semi-official 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

324 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

the Juvenile Court when it was established in
Cook County in 1899. She was the sole proba-
tion 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 way-
ward 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 be-
came a typesetter and was one of the first women
in America to become a member of the typo-
graphical 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 pay roll 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

CIVIC COOPERATION 325

officers, I became convinced that we were but at
the beginning of the nonpolitical method of select-
ing 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 respon-
sible for this result, thereupon turned their atten-
tion to the conditions which the records of the
court indicated had led to the alarming amount
of juvenile delinquency and crime. They organ-
ized the Juvenile Protective Association, w^hose
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 gayly w^alk our
streets, often to their own destruction, need safe-
guarding and protection.

The effort of the association to treat the youth
of the city with consideration and understanding,

326 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 Keep-
ers' 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 contribu-
tors to the association ; the special watchmen in
all the railroad yards agree not to arrest trespass-
ing boys but to report them to the association ; the
firms manufacturing moving picture films not only
submit their films to a volunteer inspection com-
mittee, 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 pro-
vided are entertaining as well as instructive.

CIVIC COOPERATION 327

It is not difficult to arouse the impulse of pro-
tection for the young, which would doubtless dic-
tate the daily acts of many a bartender and pool-
room keeper if they could only indulge it without
thereby giving their rivals an advantage. When
this difficulty is removed by an even-handed en-
forcement 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 coopera-
tion 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 In-
stitute have become associated with the Juvenile
Court of Chicago, in addition to which an exhaus-
tive study of court-records has just 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

328 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

to forward in the public school system the solu-
tion of some of these problems of delinquency so
dependent upon truancy and ill-adapted educa-
tion, that I became a member of the Chicago
Board of Education in July, 1905. It is impossi-
ble to write of the situation as it became drama-
tized in half a dozen strong personalities, but the
entire experience was so illuminating as to the
difficulties and limitations of democratic govern-
ment, that it would be unfair in a chapter on Civic
Cooperation not to attempt an outline.

Even the briefest statement, however, necessi-
tates 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 curb-
stone 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

CIVIC COOPERATION 329

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' Fed-
eration, 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

330 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 serv-
ants in Chicago were all entangled with the trac-
tion 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 there-
fore 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

CIVIC COOPERATION 331

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 Fed-
eration. 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 Federa-
tion 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 sub-
stantial 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 re-
sented this upon two lines of argument : first, that

332 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 ad-
ministration, 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 indiffer-
ent. The conservative public approved the pro-
motional examinations as the symbol of an advanc-
ing 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 teach-
ers 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 corpora-
tions under control, they naturally turned for
political influence and votes to the organization

CIVIC COOPERATION 333

representing worklngmen. 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 be-
tween the majority of the grade school teachers
and the Chicago School Board is totally inade-
quate, for the difficulties were stubborn and lay
far back in the long effort of public school ad-
ministration 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 po-
litical corruption, the one remedy continually
advocated was the transfer of authority in all
educational matters from the Board to the super-
intendent. The one cure for "pull" and corrup-
tion was the authority of the "expert." The
rules and records of the Chicago Board of Educa-
tion 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 business men established
an able superintendent with a large salary, with,
his tenure of office secured by State law so that

334 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

he would not be disturbed by the wrath of the
balked politician. They instituted impersonal ex-
aminations for the teachers both as to entrance
into the system and promotion, and they pro-
ceeded "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 adven-
turous 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 oppor-
tunity 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.

CIVIC COOPERATION 335

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 mili-
tant demand for self-government made in the
name of freedom. Both sides inevitably exagger-
ated 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. Cer-
tainly a plan to retain the undoubted benefit of re-
quired 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 most 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

336 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 par-
tisans. In the general disorder and public excite-
ment resulting from the illegal dismissal of a
majority of the "Dunne" board and their re-
instatement 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 rep-
resenting the leading Commercial Club of the city
who honestly believed that they were rescuing the
schools from a condition of chaos, I saw one be-
loved measure after another withdrawn. Although
the new president scrupulously gave me the floor
in the defense of each, it was impossible to con-
sider them upon their merits in the lurid light which
at the moment enveloped all the plans of the
"uplifters." Thus the building of smaller school-
rooms, such as in New York mechanically avoid
overcrowding; the extension of the truant rooms

I

CIVIC COOPERATION 337

so successfully inaugurated, the multiplication of
school playgrounds and many another cherished
plan was thrown out or at least indefinitely post-
poned.

The final discrediting of Mayor Dunne's ap-
pointees to the School Board affords a very in-
teresting study in social psychology; the news-
papers had so constantly reflected and intensified
the ideals of a business Board, and had so per-
sistently 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 dis-
cussions were lengthy and disorderly and deserved
the discipline of ridicule, but others which w^ere
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 col-
league, 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

338 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 him-
self 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 diffi-
culty of open discussion, for democratic govern-
ment is founded upon the assumption that differ-
ing 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 intensi-
fied because the Dunne School Board had insti-
tuted 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 pro'secuting School Board.
I am, however, inclined to think that the news-
papers but reflected an opinion honestly held by

CIVIC COOPERATION 339

many people, and that their constant and partisan
presentation of this opinion clearly demonstrates
one of the greatest difficulties of governmental ad-
ministration 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 pro-
vision. 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 taxa-

340 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

tlon ; 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 testi-
mony 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 has 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

CIVIC COOPERATION 341

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.

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

342

THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS 343

end. The young men in the club, twenty in num-
ber, had grown much irritated by the frivoHty 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
w^hom 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 manifesta-
tion of the hot blood w^hich 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

344 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 shin-
ing, 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 mem-
bers away from the principles advocated in club
meetings. One of the young men who had been
a shining light in the advocacy of municipal re-
form, deserted in the middle of a reform campaign

THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS 345

because he had been offered a lucrative office in
the city hall ; another even after a course of lec-
tures 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 re-
fitted 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 Settle-
ment 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

346 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

clothes for her 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 rea-
sonable occupa-
tion 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
miake every sacrifice to help them through the high
school after which the young men attend uni-
versities and professional schools, largely through
their own efforts. From time to time they come

i

.2- V^I>i-'l. i ililtiSSrvl.^':' .V

»^ ^-

THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS 347

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 that 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 man-
ners which Hull-House has enabled them to form,
have made a very great difference in their percep-
tions 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

348 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 appre-
ciate more than any one 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 ar-
ranged 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

THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS 349

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 photo-
graph 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 care-
fully 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 opportu-
nities for clean recreation, receive the most valued
help from the experienced wisdom of the older
women of the neighborhood. Bowen Hall is con-
stantly 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 stand-
ard 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 pro-
hibited ; and above all, early closing is insisted
upon. This standardizing of pleasure has always

350 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

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, or one out
of every fifty-two of those under twenty-five years
of age. One's heart aches for these young people
caught by the outside glitter of city gayety, who
make such a feverish attempt to snatch it for

THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS 351

themselves. The young people in our clubs are
comparatively safe, but many instances come to
the knowledge of Hull-House residents which
make us long for the time when the city, through
more small parks, municipal gymnasiums and
schoolrooms open for recreation, can guard from
disaster these young people who walk so care-
lessly on the edge of the pit.

The heedless girls believe that if they lived in
big houses and possessed pianos and jewelry, the
coveted social life would come to them. I know
a Bohemian girl who surreptitiously saved her over-
time wages until she had enough money to hire for
a week a room with a piano in it where young
men might come to call, as they could not do in
her crowded untidy home. Of course she had no
way of knowing the sort of young men who quickly
discover an unprotected girl.

Another girl of American parentage who had
come to Chicago to seek her fortune, found at the
end of a year that sorting shipping receipts in a
dark corner of a warehouse not only failed of
accumulate riches but did not even bring the
"attentions" which her quiet country home
afforded. By dint of long sacrifice she had saved
fifteen dollars ; with five she bought an imitation
sapphire necklace, and the balance she changed
into a ten dollar bill. The evening her pathetic
little snare was set, she walked home with one of
the clerks in the establishment, told him that she

352 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

had come into a fortune, and was obliged to wear
the heirloom necklace to insure its safety, per-
mitted him to see that she carried ten dollars in
her glove for carfare and conducted him to a
handsome Prairie Avenue residence. There she
gayly bade him good-by and ran up the steps shut-
ting herself in the vestibule from which she did
not emerge until the dazzled and bewildered young
man had vanished down the street.

Then there is the ever recurring difficulty about
dress ; the insistence of the young to be gayly be-
decked to the utter consternation of the hard-
working parents who are paying for a house and
lot. The Polish girl who stole five dollars from
her employer's till with which to buy a white
dress for a church picnic was turned away from
home by her indignant father who replaced the
money to save the family honor, but would harbor
no ''thief" in a household of growing children
who, in spite of the sister's revolt, continued to be
dressed in dark heavy clothes through all the hot
summer. There are a multitude of working girls
who for hours carry hair ribbons and jewelry in
their pockets or stockings, for they can wear them
only during the journey to and from work. Some-
times this desire to taste pleasure, to escape into
a world of congenial companionship takes more
elaborate forms and often ends disastrously. I
recall a charming young girl, the oldest daughter
of a respectable German family, whom I first saw

THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS 353

one spring afternoon issuing from a tall factory.
She wore a blue print gown which so deepened the
blue of her eyes that Wordsworth's line fairly sung
itself : —

The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze
On some gray rock.

I was grimly reminded of that moment a year
later when I heard the tale of this seventeen-year-
old girl, who had worked steadily in the same
factory for four years before she resolved "to see
life." In order not to arouse her parents' sus-
picions, she borrowed thirty dollars from one
of those loan sharks who require no security from
a pretty girl, so that she might start from home
every morning as if to go to work. For three
weeks she spent the first part of each dearly
bought day In a department store where she
lunched and unfortunately made some dubious
acquaintances ; in the afternoon she established
herself in a theater and sat contentedly hour
after hour watching the endless vaudeville until
the usual time for returning home. At the end
of each week she gave her parents her usual wage,
but when her thirty dollars was exhausted it
seemed unendurable that she should return to the
monotony of the factory. In the light of her
newly acquired experience she had learned that
possibility which the city ever holds open to the
restless girl.

2A

354 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

That more such girls do not come to grief is
due to those mothers who understand the in-
satiable demand for a good time, and if all of the
mothers did understand, those pathetic statistics
which show that four fifths of all prostitutes are

under twenty
years of age would
be marvelously
changed. We are
told that ''the will
to live " is aroused
in each baby by
his mother's ir-
resistible desire to
p) play with him,
the physiological
value of joy that
a child is born,
and that the high
death rate in in-
stitutions is in-
creased by " the
discontented
babies" whom no one persuades into living.
Something of the same sort is necessary in that
second birth at adolescence. The young people
need affection and understanding each one for
himself, if they are to be induced to live in an
inheritance of decorum and safety and to under-
stand the foundations upon which this orderly

THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS 355

world rests. No one comprehends their needs so
sympathetically as those mothers who iron the
flimsy starched finery of their grown-up daughters
late into the night, and who pay for a red velvet
parlor set on the installment plan, although the
younger children may sadly need new shoes.
These mothers apparently understand the sharp
demand for social pleasure and do their best to
respond to it, although at the same time they
constantly minister to all the physical needs of an
exigent family of little children. We often come
to a realization of the truth of Walt Whitman's
statement, that one of the surest sources of wis-
dom is the mother of a large family.

It is but natural, perhaps, that the members of
the Hull-House Woman's Club whose prosperity
has given them some leisure and a chance to re-
move their own families to neighborhoods less
full of temptations, should have offered their
assistance in our attempt to provide recreation for
these restless young people. In many instances
their experience in the club itself has enabled
them to perceive these needs. One day a Juvenile
Court officer told me that a woman's club mem-
ber, who has a large family of her own and one
boy sufficiently difficult, had undertaken to care
for a ward of the Juvenile Court who lived only
a block from her house, and that she had kept
him in the path of rectitude for six months. In
reply to my congratulations upon this successful

3S6 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

bit of reform to the club woman herself, she said
that she was quite ashamed that she had not
undertaken the task earlier for she had for years
known the boy's mother who scrubbed a down-
town office building, leaving home every evening
at five and returning at eleven during the very
time the boy could most easily find opportunities
for wrongdoing. She said that her obligation
toward this boy had not occurred to her until one
day when the club members were making pillow-
cases for the Detention Home of the Juvenile
Court, it suddenly seemed perfectly obvious that
her share in the salvation of wayward children
was to care for this particular boy and she had
asked the Juvenile Court officer to commit him to
her. She invited the boy to her house to supper
every day that she might know just where he
was at the crucial moment of twilight, and she
adroitly managed to keep him under her own roof
for the evening if she did not approve of the
plans he had made. She concluded with the
remark that it was queer that the sight of
the boy himself hadn't appealed to her but that
the suggestion had come to her in such a round-
about way.

She was, of course, reflecting upon a common
trait in human nature, — that we much more easily
see the duty at hand when we see it in relation
to the social duty of which it is a part. When
she knew that an effort was being made through-

/

THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS 357

out all the large cities in the United States to
reclaim the wayward boy, to provide him with
reasonable amusement, to give him his chance for
growth and development, and when she became
ready to take her share in that movement, she
suddenly saw the concrete case which she had not
recognized before.

We are slowly learning that social advance de-
pends quite as much upon an increase in moral
sensibility as it does upon a sense of duty, and of
this one could cite many illustrations. I was at
one time chairman of the Child Labor Committee
in the General Federation of Woman's Clubs,
which sent out a schedule asking each club in the
United States to report as nearly as possible all
the w^orking children under fourteen living in its
vicinity. A Florida club filled out the schedule
w^ith an astonishing number of Cuban children who
were at work in sugar mills, and the club members
registered a complaint that our committee had sent
the schedule too late, for if they had realized the
conditions earlier, they might have presented a
bill to the legislature which had now adjourned.
Of course the children had been working in the
sugar mills for years, and had probably gone back
and forth under the very eyes of the club women,
but the women had never seen them, much less
felt any obligation to protect them, until they
joined a club, and the club joined a Federation,
and the Federation appointed a Child Labor

3S8 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

Committee who sent them a schedule. With
their quickened perceptions they then saw the
rescue of these familiar children in the light of a
social obligation. Through some such experi-
ences the members of the Hull-House Women's
Club have obtained the power of seeing the con-
crete through the general and have entered into
various undertakings.

Very early in its history the club formed what
was called "A Social Extension Committee."
Once a month this committee gives parties to
people in the neighborhood who for any reason
seem forlorn and without much social pleasure.
One evening they invited only Italian women,
thereby crossing a distinct social ''gulf," for there
certainly exists as great a sense of social difference
between the prosperous Irish-American women and
the South-Italian peasants as between any two sets
of people in the city of Chicago. The Italian
women, who were almost eastern in their habits,
all stayed at home and sent their husbands, and
the social extension committee entered the drawing-
room to find it occupied by rows of Italian work-
ingmen, who seemed to prefer to sit in chairs along
the wall. They were quite ready to be "socially
extended," but plainly puzzled as to what it was
all about. The evening finally developed into a
very successful party, not so much because the
committee were equal to it, as because the Italian
men rose to the occasion.

THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS 359

Untiring pairs of them danced the tarantella ;
they sang Neapolitan songs ; one of them per-
formed some of those wonderful sleight-of-hand
tricks so often seen on the streets of Naples ; they
explained the coral finger of St. Januarius which
they wore ; they politely ate the strange American
refreshments ; and when the evening was over,
one of the committee said to me, ''Do you know
I am ashamed of the way I have always talked
about 'dagos,' they are quite like other people,
only one must take a little more pains with them.
I have been nagging my husband to move off
M Street because they are moving in, but I am going
to try staying awhile and see if I can make a real
acquaintance with some of them." To my mind
at that moment the speaker had passed from the
region of the uncultivated person into the possi-
bilities of the cultivated person. The former is
bounded by a narrow outlook on life, unable to
overcome differences of dress and habit, and his
interests are slowly contracting within a circum-
scribed area ; while the latter constantly tends to
be more a citizen of the world because of his
growing understanding of all kinds of people
with their varying experiences. We send our
young people to Europe that they may lose
their provincialism and be able to judge their
fellows by a more universal test, as we send
them to college that they may attain the cul-
tural background and a larger outlook ; all of

36o TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

these it is possible to acquire in other ways, as
this member of the woman's club had discovered
for herself.

This social extension committee under the leader-
ship of an ex-president of the Club, a Hull-House
resident with a wide acquaintance, also discover
many of those lonely people of which every city
contains so large a number. We are only slowly
apprehending the very real danger to the individual
who fails to establish some sort of genuine relation
with the people who surround him. We are all
more or less familiar with the results of isolation
in rural districts ; the Bronte sisters have portrayed
the hideous immorality and savagery of the remote
dwellers on the bleak moorlands of northern Eng-
land ; Miss Wilkins has written of the overdevel-
oped will of the solitary New Englander ; but tales
still wait to be told of the isolated city dweller. In
addition to the lonely young man recently come to
town, and the country family who have not yet
made their connections, are many other people
who, because of temperament or from an estimate
of themselves which will not permit them to make
friends with the "people around here," or who,
because they are victims to a combination of cir-
cumstances, lead a life as lonely and untouched by
the city about them as if they were in remote
country districts. The very fact that it requires
an effort to preserve isolation from the tenement-
house life which flows all about them, makes the

THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS 361

character stiffer and harsher than mere country
solitude could do.

Many instances of this come into my mind :
the faded, ladylike hairdresser, who came and
went to her work for twenty years, carefully con-
cealing her dwelling place from the '^ other people
in the shop," moving whenever they seemed too
curious about it, and priding herself that no
neighbor had ever "stepped inside her door," and
yet when discovered through an asthma which
forced her to crave friendly offices, she was most
responsive and even gay in a social atmosphere.
Another woman made a long effort to conceal
the poverty resulting from her husband's inveter-
ate gambling and to secure for her children the
educational advantages to which her family had
always been accustomed. Her five children, who
are now university graduates, do not realize how
hard and solitary was her early married life when
we first knew her, and she was beginning to regret
the isolation in which her children were being
reared, for she saw that their lack of early compan-
ionship would always cripple their power to make
friends. She was glad to avail herself of the social
resources of Hull-House for them, and at last
even for herself.

The leader of the social extension committee
has also been able, through her connection wdth
the vacant lot garden movement in Chicago, to
maintain a most flourishing ''friendly club" largely

362 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

composed of people who cultivate these garden
plots. During the club evening at least, they re-
gain something of the ease of the man who is
being estimated by the bushels per acre of potatoes
he has raised,, and not by that flimsy city judg-
ment so often based upon store clothes. Their
jollity and enthusiasm are unbounded, expressing
itself in clog dances and rousing old songs often
in sharp contrast to the overworked, worn aspects
of the members.

Of course there are surprising possibilities dis-
covered through other clubs, in one of Greek
women or in the "circolo Italiano," for a social
club often affords a sheltered space in which the
gentler social usages may be exercised, as the
more vigorous clubs afford a point of departure
into larger social concerns.

The experiences of the Hull-House Woman's
Club constantly react upon the family life of the
members. Their husbands come with them to the
annual midwinter reception, to club concerts and
entertainments ; the little children come to the
May party, with its dancing and games ; the
older children, to the day in June when prizes are
given to those sons and daughters of the members
who present a good school record as graduates
either from the eighth grade or from a high school.

It seemed, therefore, but a fit recognition of
their efforts when the president of the club
erected a building planned especially for their

THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS 363

needs, with their own library and a hall large
enough for their various social undertakings,

although of course Bowen Hall is constantly put
to many other uses.

It was under the leadership of this same able
president that the club achieved its wider purposes
and took its place with the other forces for city

364 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

betterment. The club had begun, as nearly all
women's clubs do, upon the basis of self-improve-
ment, although the foundations for this later devel-
opment had been laid by one of their earliest presi-
dents, who was the first probation officer of the
Juvenile Court, and who had so shared her experi-
ences with the club that each member felt the truth
as well as the pathos of the lines inscribed on her
memorial tablet erected in their club library: —

"As more exposed to sufTering and distress
Thence also more alive to tenderness."

Each woman had discovered opportunities in her
own experience for this same tender understand-
ing, and under its succeeding president, Mrs.
Pelham, in its determination to be of use to the
needy and distressed, the club developed many
philanthropic undertakings from the humble be-
ginnings of a linen chest kept constantly filled
with clothing for the sick and poor. It required,
however, an adequate knowledge of adverse city
conditions so productive of juvenile delinquency
and a sympathy which could enkindle itself in
many others of divers faiths and training, to
arouse the club to its finest public spirit. This
was done by a later president, Mrs. Bowen, who,
as head of the Juvenile Protective Association,
had learned that the moralized energy of a group
is best fitted to cope with the complicated prob-
lems of a city; but it required ability of an un-

THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS 365

usual order to evoke a sense of social obligation
from the very knowledge of adverse city condi-
tions which the club members possessed, and to
connect it with the many civic and philanthropic
organizations of the city in such wise as to make
it socially useful. This financial and representa-
tive connection with outside organizations, is
valuable to the club only as it expresses its sym-
pathy and kindliness at the same time in concrete
form. A group of members who lunch with Mrs.
Bowen each week at Hull-House discuss, not only
topics of public interest, sometimes with experts
whom they have long known through their mutual
undertakings, but also their own club affairs in
the light of this larger knowledge.

Thus the value of social clubs broadens out in
one's mind to an instrument of companionship
through which many may be led from a sense
of isolation to one of civic responsibility, even as
another type of club provides recreational facili-
ties for those who have had only meaningless
excitements, or, as a third type, opens new and
interesting vistas of life to those who are ambitious.

The entire organization of the social life at
Hull-House, while it has been fostered and directed
by residents and others, has been largely pushed
and vitalized from within by the club members
themselves. Sir Walter Besant once told me that
Hull-House stood in his mind more nearly for the
ideal of the "Palace of Delight" than did the

366 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

"London People's Palace" because we had de-
pended upon the social resources of the people
using it. He begged me not to allow Hull-House
to become too educational. He believed it much
easier to develop a polytechnic institute than a
large recreational center, but he doubted whether
the former was as useful.

The social clubs form a basis of acquaintance-
ship for many people living in other parts of the
city. Through friendly relations with individuals,
which is perhaps the sanest method of approach,
they are thus brought into contact, many of them
for the first time, with the industrial and social
problems challenging the moral resources of our
contemporary life. During our twenty years hun-
dreds of these non-residents have directed clubs and
classes, and have increased the number of Chicago
citizens who are conversant with adverse social
conditions and conscious that only by the un-
ceasing devotion of each, according to his strength,
shall the compulsions and hardships, the stupidi-
ties and cruelties of life be overcome. The num-
ber of people thus informed is constantly increas-
ing in all our American cities, and they may in
time remove the reproach of social neglect and
indifference which has so long rested upon the
citizens of the new world. I recall the experience
of an Englishman who, not only because he was a
member of the Queen's Cabinet and bore a title,
but also because he was an able statesman, was

THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS 367

entertained with great enthusiasm by the leading
citizens of Chicago. At a large dinner party he
asked the lady sitting next to him what our tene-
ment-house legislation was in regard to the cubic
feet of air required for each occupant of a tene-
ment bedroom;
upon her disclaim-
ing any knowl-
edge of the sub-
ject, the inquiry
was put to all the
diners at the lono:
table, all of whom
showed surprise
that they should
be expected to
possess this in-
formation. In
telling me the in-
cident afterward,
the English guect
said that such in-
difference could
not have been found among the leading citizens
of London, whose public spirit had been aroused to
provide such housing conditions as should protect
tenement dwellers at least from wanton loss of vital-
ity and lowered industrial efficiency. When I met
the same Englishman in London five years after-
wards, he immediately asked me whether Chicago

368 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

citizens were still so indifferent to the conditions of
the poor that they took no interest in their proper
housing. I was quick with that defense which an
American is obliged to use so often in Europe, that
our very democracy so long presupposed that each
citizen could care for himself that we are slow to
develop a sense of social obligation. He smiled at
the familiar phrases and was still inclined to attrib-
ute our indifference to sheer ignorance of social
conditions.

The entire social development of Hull-House is
so unlike what I predicted twenty years ago, that
I venture to quote from that ancient writing as
an end to this chapter.

The social organism has broken down through large
districts of our great cities. Many of the people
living there are very poor, the majority of them with-
out leisure or energy for anything but the gain of
subsistence.

They live for the moment side by side, many of
them without knowledge of each other, without fellow-
ship, without local tradition or public spirit, without
social organization of any kind. Practically nothing is
done to remedy this. The people who might do it,
who have the social tact and training, the large houses,
and the traditions and customs of hospitality, live in
other parts of the city. The club houses, libraries,
galleries and semi-public conveniences for social life
are also blocks away. We find workingmen organ-
ized into armies of producers because men of executive
ability and business sagacity have found it to their

THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS 369

interests thus to organize them. But these working
men are not organized socially ; although lodging in
crowded tenement houses, they are living without a
corresponding social contact. The chaos is as great as
it would be were they working in huge factories with-
out foreman or superintendent. Their ideas and re-
sources are cramped, and the desire for higher social
pleasure becomes extinct. They have no share in the
traditions and social energy which make for progress.
Too often their only place of meeting is a saloon, their
only host a bartender; a local demagogue forms their
public opinion. Men of ability and refinement, of
social power and university cultivation, stay away
from them. Personally, I believe the men who lose
most are those who thus stay away. But the paradox
is here : when cultivated people do stay away from a
certain portion of the population, when all social ad-
vantages are persistently withheld, it may be for years,
the result itself is pointed to as a reason and is used as
an argument, for the continued withholding.

It is constantlv said that because the masses have
never had social advantages, they do not want them,
that they are heavy and dull, and that it will take
political or philanthropic machinery to change them.
This divides a city into rich and poor ; into the favored,
who express their sense of the social obligation by gifts
of money, and into the unfavored, who express it by
clamoring for a "share" — both of them actuated by a
vague sense of justice. This division of the city
would be more justifiable, however, if the people who
thus isolate themselves on certain streets and use their
social ability for each other, gained enough thereby and
added sufficient to the sum total of social progress to

2 £

370 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

justify the withholding of the pleasures and results of
that progress, from so many people who ought to have
them. But they cannot accomplish this for the social
spirit discharges itself in many forms, and no one
form is adequate to its total expression.

A Hull-House Studio.

CHAPTER XVI
Arts at Hull-House

The first building erected for Hull-House con-
tained an art gallery well lighted for day and even-
ing use and our first exhibit of loaned pictures was
opened in June, 1891, by Mr. and Mrs. Barnett of
London. It is always pleasant to associate their
hearty sympathy with that first exhibit, and thus
to connect it with their pioneer efforts at Toynbee
Hall to secure for working people the opportunity
to know the best art, and with their establishment
of the first permanent art gallery in an industrial
quarter.

We took pride in the fact that our first exhibit
contained some of the best pictures Chicago af-
forded, and we conscientiously insured them against
fire and carefully guarded them by night and day.

We had five of these exhibits during two years,
after the gallery was completed : two of oil paint-
ings, one of old engravings and etchings, one of
water colors, and one of pictures especially selected
for use in the public schools. These exhibits were
surprisingly well attended and thousands of votes
were cast for the most popular pictures. Their value
to the neighborhood of course had to be deter-

371

372 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

mined by each one of us according to the value he
attached to beauty and the escape it offers from
dreary reality into the realm of the imagination.
Miss Starr always insisted that the arts should
receive adequate recognition at Hull-House and
urged that one must always remember "the hungry
individual soul which without art will have passed
unsolaced and unfed, followed by other souls who
lack the impulse his should have given."

The exhibits afforded pathetic evidence that the
older immigrants do not expect the solace of art
in this country; an Italian expressed great sur-
prise when he found that we, although Americans,
still liked pictures, and said quite naively that he
didn't know that Americans cared for anything
but dollars — that looking at pictures was some-
thing people only did in Italy.

The extreme isolation of the Italian colony was
demonstrated by the fact that he did not know that
there was a public art gallery in the city nor any
houses in which pictures were regarded as treasures.

A Greek was much surprised to see a photograph
of the Acropolis at Hull-House because he had lived
in Chicago for thirteen years and had never before
met any Americans who knew about this foremost
glory of the w^orld. Before he left Greece he had
imagined that Americans would be most eager to
see pictures of Athens, and as he was a graduate of a
school of technology, he had prepared a book of
colored drawings and had made a collection of

ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE 373

photographs which he was sure Americans would
enjoy. But although from his fruit stand near one
of the large railroad stations he had conversed with
many Americans and had often tried to lead the
conversation back to ancient Greece, no one had
responded, and he had at last concluded that ''the
people of Chicago knew nothing of ancient times."

The loan exhibits were continued until the Chi-
cago Art Institute was opened free to the public on
Sunday afternoons and parties were arranged at
Hull-House and conducted there by a guide. In
time even these parties were discontinued as the
galleries became better known in all parts of the
city and the Art Institute management did much
to make pictures popular.

From the first a studio was maintained at Hull-
House which has developed through the changing
years under the direction of Miss Benedict, one of
the residents who is a member of the faculty in the
Art Institute. Buildings on the Hull-House quad-
rangle furnish studios for artists who find something
of the same spirit in the contiguous Italian colony
that the French artist is traditionally supposed to
discover in his beloved Latin Quarter. These
artists uncover something of the picturesque in the
foreign colonies, which they have reproduced in
painting, etching, and lithography. They find
their classes filled not only by young people pos-
sessing facility and sometimes talent, but also by
older people to whom the studio affords the one

374 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

opportunity of escape from dreariness ; a widow
with four children who supplemented a very inade-
quate Income by teaching the piano, for six years
never missed her weekly painting lesson because it

cc

was "her one pleasure"; another woman whose
youth and strength had gone into the care of an
invalid father, poured into her afternoon in the
studio once a week, all of the longing for self-ex-
pression which she habitually suppressed.

Perhaps the most satisfactory results of the studio

ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE 375

have been obtained through the classes of young
men who are engaged in the commercial arts, and
who are glad to have an opportunity to work out
their own ideas. This is true of young engravers
and lithographers ; of the men who have to do with
posters and illustrations in various ways. The
little pile of stones and the lithographer's hand-
press in a corner of the studio have been used in
many an experiment, as has a set of beautiful
type loaned to Hull-House by a bibliophile.

The work of the studio almost imperceptibly
merged into the crafts and well within the first
decade a shop was opened at Hull-House under
the direction of several residents who were also
members of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society.
This shop is not merely a school where people are
taught and then sent forth to use their teaching
in art according to their individual initiative and
opportunity, but where those who have already
been carefully trained, may express the best they
can in wood or metal. The Settlement soon dis-
covers how difficult it is to put a fringe of art on the
end of a day spent in a factory. We constantly
see young people doing overhurried work. Wrap-
ping bars of soap in pieces of paper might at least
give the pleasure of accuracy and repetition if it
could be done at a normal pace, but when paid for
by the piece, speed becomes the sole requirement
and the last suggestion of human interest is taken
away. In contrast to this the Hull-House shop

376 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

affords many examples of the restorative power In
the exercise of a genuine craft ; a young Russian
who, like too many of his countrymen, had made a
desperate effort to fit himself for a learned profes-
sion, and who had almost finished his course in a
night law school, used to watch constantly the
work being done in the metal shop at Hull-House.
One evening in a moment of sudden resolve, he
took off his coat, sat down at one of the benches,
and began to work, obviously as a very clever
silversmith. He had long concealed his craft
because he thought it would hurt his efforts as a
lawyer and because he imagined an office more
honorable and ''more American" than a shop.
As he worked on during his two leisure evenings
each week, his entire bearing and conversation
registered the relief of one who abandons the effort
he is not fitted for and becomes a man on his own
feet, expressing himself through a familiar and deli-
cate technique.

Miss Starr at length found herself quite impatient
with her role of lecturer on the arts, while all the
handicraft about her was untouched by beauty
and did not even reflect the interest of the v/orkman.
She took a training in bookbinding in London under
Mr. Cobden-Sanderson and established her bind-
ery at Hull-House in which design and workman-
ship, beauty and thoroughness are taught to a
small number of apprentices.

From the very first winter, concerts which are

ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE 377

still continued were given every Sunday after-
noon in the Hull-House drawing-room and later,
as the audiences increased, in the larger halls. For
these we are indebted to musicians from every
part of the city. Mr. William Tomlins early
trained large choruses of adults as his assistants
did of children, and the response to all of these
showed that while the number of people in our
vicinity caring for the best music was not large,
they constituted a steady and appreciative group.
It was in connection with these first choruses that
a public-spirited citizen of Chicago offered a prize
for the best labor song, competition to be open to
the entire country. The responses to the offer
literally filled three large barrels and speaking at
least for myself as one of the bewildered judges,
we were more disheartened by their quality than
even by their overwhelming bulk. Apparently
the workers of America are not yet ready to sing,
although I recall a creditable chorus trained at
Hull-House for a large meeting in sympathy with
the anthracite coal strike in which the swinging

lines

" Who was it made the coal }
Our God as well as theirs."

seemed to relieve the tension of the moment.
Miss Eleanor Smith, the head of the Hull-House
Music School, who had put the words to music,
performed the same office for the ''Sweatshop"
of the Yiddish poet, the translation of which

378 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

presents so graphically the bewilderment and
tedium of the New York shop that it might be
applied to almost any other machine industry as
the first verse indicates : —

"The roaring of the wheels has filled my ears,
The clashing and the clamor shut me in,
Myself, my soul, in chaos disappears,
I cannot think or feel amid the din."

It may be that this plaint explains the lack of
labor songs in this period of industrial malad-
justment when the worker is overmastered by his
very tools. In addition to sharing with our neigh-
borhood the best music we could procure, we have
conscientiously provided careful musical instruc-
tion that at least a few young people might under-
stand those old usages of art; that they might
master its trade secrets, for after all it is only
through a careful technique that artistic ability
can express itself and be preserved.

From the beginning we had classes in music,
and the Hull-House Music School, which is housed
in quarters of its own in our quieter court, was
opened in 1893. The school is designed to give
a thorough musical instruction to a limited num-
ber of children. From the first lessons they are
taught to compose and to reduce to order the
musical suggestions which may come to them,
and in this wise the school has sometimes been
able to recover the songs of the immigrants through
their children. Some of these folk songs have

ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE

379

(J

38o TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

never been committed to paper, but have survived
through the centuries because of a touch of undy-
ing poetry which the world has always cherished ;
as in the song of a Russian who is digging a
post hole and finds his task dull and difficult until
he strikes a stratum of red sand, which, in ad-
dition to making digging easy, reminds him of the
red hair of his sweetheart, and all goes merrily as
the song lifts into a joyous melody. I recall
again the almost hilarious enjoyment of the adult
audience to whom it was sung by the children
who had revived it, as well as the more sober
appreciation of the hymns taken from the lips of
the cantor, whose father before him had officiated
in the synagogue.

The recitals and concerts given by the school
are attended by large and appreciative audiences.
On the Sunday before Christmas the program of
Christmas songs draws together people of the most
diverging faiths. In the deep tones of the me-
morial organ erected at Hull-House, we realize
that music is perhaps the most potent agent for
making the universal appeal and inducing men to
forget their differences.

Some of the pupils in the music school have
developed during the years into trained musicians
and are supporting themselves in their chosen
profession. On the other hand, we constantly see
the most promising musical ability extinguished
when the young people enter industries which so

ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE 381

sap their vitality that they cannot carry on serious
study in the scanty hours outside of factory work.
Many cases indisputably illustrate this : a Bo-
hemian girl, who, in order to earn money for press-
ing family needs, first ruined her voice in a six
months' constant vaudeville engagement, returned
to her trade working overtime in a vain effort to
continue the vaudeville income ; another young girl
whom Hull-House had sent to the high school so
long as her parents consented, because we realized
that a beautiful voice is often unavailable through
lack of the informing mind, later extinguished her
promise in a tobacco factory ; a third girl who
had supported her little sisters since she was
fourteen, eagerly used her fine voice for earning
money at entertainments held late after her day's
work, until exposure and fatigue ruined her
health as well as a musician's future ; a young
man whose music-loving family gave him every
possible opportunity, and who produced some
charming and even joyous songs during the long
struggle with tuberculosis which preceded his
death, had made a brave beginning, not only as a
teacher of music but as a composer. In the little
service held at Hull-House in his memory, when
the children sang his composition, ''How Sweet is
the Shepherd's Sweet Lot," it was hard to realize
that such an interpretive pastoral could have been
produced by one whose childhood had been passed
in a crowded city quarter.

382 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

Even that bitter experience did not prepare us
for the sorrowful year when six promising pupils
out of a class of fifteen, developed tuberculosis.
It required but little penetration to see that during
the eight years the class of fifteen school children
had come together to the music school, they had
approximately an even chance, but as soon as they
reached the legal working age only a scanty moiety
of those who became self-supporting could endure
the strain of long hours and bad air. Thus the
average human youth, ''With all the sweetness
of the common dawn," is flung into the vortex of
industrial life wherein the everyday tragedy escapes
us save when one of them becomes conspicuously
unfortunate. Twice in one year we were com-
pelled

"To find the inheritance of this poor child
His little kingdom of a forced grave."

It has been pointed out many times that Art
lives by devouring her own offspring and the
world has come to justify even that sacrifice, but
we are unfortified and unsolaced when we see
the children of Art devoured, not by her, but by
the uncouth stranger. Modern Industry, who,
needlessly ruthless and brutal to her own children,
is quickly fatal to the offspring of the gentler
mother. And so schools in art for those who go
to work at the age when more fortunate young
people are still sheltered and educated, constantly
epitomize one of the haunting problems of life;

ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE

383

why do we permit the waste of this most precious
human faculty, this consummate possession of civil-
ization ? When we fail to provide the vessel in
which it may be treasured, it runs out upon the
ground and is irretrievably lost.

The universal desire for the portrayal of life
lying quite outside of personal experience evinces

Itself in many forms. One of the conspicuous
features of our neighborhood, as of all industrial
quarters, is the persistency with which the entire
population attends the theater. The very first
day I saw Halsted Street a long line of young
men and boys stood outside the gallery entrance
of the Bijou Theater, waiting for the Sunday
matinee to begin at two o'clock, although it was
only high noon. This waiting crowd might have

384 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

been seen every Sunday afternoon during the
twenty years which have elapsed since then. Our
first Sunday evening in Hull-House, when a group
of small boys sat on our piazza and told us "about
things around here," their talk was all of the
theater and of the astonishing things they had
seen that afternoon.

But quite as it was difficult to discover the habits
and purposes of this group of boys because they
much preferred talking about the theater to contem-
plating their own lives, so it was all along the
line ; the young men told us their ambitions in the
phrases of stage heroes, and the girls, so far as their
romantic dreams could be shyly put into words,
possessed no others but those soiled by long use
in the melodrama. All of these young people
looked upon an afternoon a week in the gallery of
a Halsted Street theater as their one opportunity
to see life. The sort of melodrama they see there
has recently been described as ''the ten command-
ments written in red fire." Certainly the villain
always comes to a violent end, and the young and
handsome hero is rewarded by marriage with a
beautiful girl, usually the daughter of a millionaire,
but after all that is not a portrayal of the morality
of the ten commandments any more than of life
itself.

Nevertheless the theater, such as it was, appeared
to be the one agency which freed the boys and girls
from that destructive isolation of those who drag

ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE 385

themselves up to maturity by themselves, and It
gave them a glimpse of that order and beauty into
which even the poorest drama endeavors to restore
the bewildering facts of life. The most prosaic
young people bear testimony to this overmastering
desire. A striking illustration of this came to us
during our second year's residence on Halsted
Street through an incident in the Italian colony,
where the men have always boasted that they were
able to guard their daughters from the dangers of
city life, and until evil Italians entered the business
of the "white slave traffic," their boast was well
founded. The first Italian girl to go astray known
to the residents of Hull-House, was so fascinated
by the stage that on her way home from work
she always loitered outside a theater before the en-
ticing posters. Three months after her elopement
with an actor, her distracted mother received a
picture of her dressed in the men's clothes in which
she appeared in vaudeville. Her family mourned
her as dead and her name was never mentioned
among them nor in the entire colony. In further
illustration of an overmastering desire to see life as
portrayed on the stage are two young girls whose
sober parents did not approve of the theater and
would allow no money for such foolish purposes.
In sheer desperation the sisters evolved a plot that
one of them would feign a toothache, and while she
was having her tooth pulled by a neighboring den-
tist the other would steal the gold crowns from his
2 c

386 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

table, and with the money thus procured they could
attend the vaudeville theater every night on their
way home from work. Apparently the pain and
wrongdoing did not weigh for a moment against
the anticipated pleasure. The plan was carried out
to the point of selling the gold crowns to a pawn-
broker when the disappointed girls were arrested.

All this effort to see the play took place in the
years before the five-cent theaters had become a
feature of every crowded city thoroughfare and
before their popularity had induced the attendance
of two and a quarter million people in the United
States every twenty-four hours. The eagerness of
the penniless children to get into these magic
spaces is responsible for an entire crop of petty
crimes made more easy because two children are
admitted for one nickel at the last performance
when the hour is late and the theater nearly de-
serted. The Hull-House residents were aghast
at the early popularity of these mimic shows,
and in the days before the inspection of films and
the present regulations for the five-cent theaters
we established at Hull-House a moving picture
show. Although its success justified its existence,
it was so obviously but one in the midst of hundreds
that it seemed much more advisable to turn our
attention to the improvement of all of them or
rather to assist as best we could, the successful
efforts in this direction by the Juvenile Protective
Association.

ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE 387

However, long before the five-cent theater was
even heard of, we had accumulated much testimony
as to the power of the drama, and we would have
been dull indeed if we had not availed ourselves of
the use of the play at Hull-House, not only as an
agent of recreation and education, but as a vehicle
of self-expression for the teeming young life all
about us.

Long before the Hull-House theater was built
we had many plays, first in the drawing-room and
later in the gymnasium. The young people's
clubs never tired of rehearsing and preparing for
these dramatic occasions, and we also discovered
that older people were almost equally ready and
talented. We quickly learned that no celebration
at Thanksgiving was so popular as a graphic por-
trayal on the stage of the Pilgrim Fathers, and we
were often put to it to reduce to dramatic effects
the great days of patriotism and religion.

At one of our early Christmas celebrations
Longfellow's "Golden Legend" was given, the
actors portraying it with the touch of the miracle
play spirit which it reflects. I remember an old
blind man, who took the part of a shepherd, said,
at the end of the last performance, ''Kind Heart,"
a name by which he always addressed me, "it
seems to me that I have been waiting all my life
to hear some of these things said. I am glad we
had so many performances, for I think I can re-
member them to the end. It is getting hard for

388 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

me to listen to reading, but the different voices and
all made this very plain." Had he not perhaps
made a legitimate demand upon the drama, that
it shall express for us that which we have not been
able to formulate for ourselves, that it shall warm
us with a sense of companionship with the experi-
ences of others ; does not every genuine drama
present our relations to each other and to the world
in which we find ourselves in such wise as may
fortify us to the end of the journey ?

The immigrants in the neighborhood of Hull-
House have utilized our little stage in an endeavor
to reproduce the past of their own nations through
those immortal dramas which have escaped from
the restraining bond of one country into the land
of the universal.

A large colony of Greeks near Hull-House, who
often feel that their history and classic back-
ground are completely ignored by Americans,
and that they are easily confused with the more
ignorant immigrants from other parts of south-
eastern Europe, welcome an occasion to present
Greek plays in the ancient text. With expert
help in the difficulties of staging and rehearsing a
classic play, they reproduced the Aj ax of Sophocles
upon the Hull-House stage. It was a genuine
triumph to the actors who felt that they were
''showing forth the glory of Greece" to ''ignorant
Americans." The scholar who came with a copy
of Sophocles in hand and followed the play with

ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE 389

real enjoyment, did not in the least realize that the
revelation of the love of Greek poets was mutual
between the audience and the actors. The Greeks
have quite recently assisted an enthusiast in pro-
ducing ''Electra," while the Lithuanians, the
Poles, and other Russian subjects often use the
Hull-House stage to present plays in their own
tongue, which shall at one and the same time
keep alive their sense of participation in the great
Russian revolution and relieve their feelings in
regard to it. There is something still more appeal-
ing in the yearning efforts the immigrants some-
times make to formulate their situation in America.
I recall a play written by an Italian playwright of
our neighborhood, which depicted the insolent
break between Americanized sons and old coun-
try parents, so touchingly that it moved to tears
all the older Italians in the audience. Did the
tears of each express relief in finding that others
had had the same experience as himself, and did
the knowledge free each one from a sense of isola-
tion and an injured belief that his children were
the worst of all ^

This effort to understand life through its dra-
matic portrayal, to see one's own participation
intelligibly set forth, becomes difficult when one
enters the field of social development, but even
here it is not impossible if a Settlement group is
constantly searching for new material.

A labor story appearing in the Atlantic Monthly

390 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

was kindly dramatized for us by the author who
also superintended its presentation upon the
Hull-House stage. The little drama presented the
untutored effort of a trades-union man to secure
for his side the beauty of self-sacrifice, the glamour
of martyrdom, which so often seems to belong
solely to the nonunion forces. The presentation
of the play was attended by an audience of trades-
unionists and employers and those other people
who are supposed to make public opinion. To-
gether they felt the moral beauty of the man's
conclusion that "it's the side that suffers most
that will win out in this war — the saints is the
only ones that has got the world under their feet
— we've got to do the way they done if the unions
is to stand," so completely that it seemed quite
natural that he should forfeit his life upon the
truth of this statement.

The dramatic arts have gradually been de-
veloped at Hull-House through amateur com-
panies, one of which has held together for more
than fifteen years. The members were originally
selected from the young people who had evinced
talent in the plays the social clubs were always
giving, but the association now adds to itself only
as a vacancy occurs. Some of them have de-
veloped almost a professional ability, although
contrary to all predictions and in spite of several
offers, none of them have taken to a stage career.
They present all sorts of plays from melodrama

ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE 391

and comedy to those of Shaw, Ibsen, and Gals-
worthy. The latter are surprisingly popular, per-
haps because of their sincere attempt to expose
the shams and pretenses of contemporary life and
to penetrate into some of its perplexing social and
domestic situations. Through such plays the
stage may become a pioneer teacher of social
righteousness.

I have come to believe, however, that the stage
may do more than teach, that much of our current
moral instruction will not endure the test of being
cast into a lifelike mold, and when presented in
dramatic form will reveal itself as platitudinous
and effete. That which may have sounded like
righteous teaching w^hen it was remote and wordy,
will be challenged afresh w^hen it is obliged to
simulate life itself.

This function of the stage, as a reconstructing
and reorganizing agent of accepted moral truths,
came to me with overwhelming force as I listened
to the Passion Play at Oberammergau one beau-
tiful summer's day in 1900. The peasants who
portrayed exactly the successive scenes of the
wonderful Life, who used only the very words
found in the accepted version of the Gospels, yet
curiously modernized and reorientated the mes-
sage. They made clear that the opposition to the
young Teacher sprang from the merchants w^hose
traffic in the temple He had disturbed and from
the Pharisees who were dependent upon therri for

392 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

support. Their query was curiously familiar, as
they demanded the antecedents of the Radical
who dared to touch vested interests, who presumed
to dictate the morality of trade, and who insulted
the marts of honest merchants by calling them
"a den of thieves." As the play developed, it
became clear that this powerful opposition had
friends in Church and State, that they controlled
influences which ramified in all directions. They
obviously believed in their statement of the case
and their very wealth and position in the com-
munity gave their words such weight that finally
all of their hearers were convinced that the young
Agitator must be done away with in order that
the highest interests of society might be con-
served. These simple peasants made it clear that
it was the money power which induced one of the
Agitator's closest friends to betray him, and the
villain of the piece, Judas himself, was only a
man who was so dazzled by money, so under the
domination of all it represented, that he was
perpetually blind to the spiritual vision unrolling
before him. As I sat through the long summer
day, seeing the shadows on the beautiful moun-
tain back of the open stage shift from one side to
the other and finally grow long and pointed in
the soft evening light, my mind was filled with
perplexing questions. Did the dramatization of
the life of Jesus set forth its meaning more clearly
and conclusively than talking and preaching could

ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE 393

possibly do as a shadowy following of the com-
mand ''to do the will" ?

The peasant actors whom I had seen returning
from mass that morning had prayed only to por-
tray the life as He had lived it and, behold, out of
their simplicity and piety arose this modern version
which even Harnack was only then venturing to
suggest to his advanced colleagues in Berlin. Yet
the Oberammergau folk were very like thousands
of immigrant men and women of Chicago, both in
their experiences and in their familiarity with the
hard facts of life, and throughout that day as my
mind dwelt on my far-away neighbors, I was re-
proached with the sense of an ungarnered harvest.

Of course such a generally uplifted state comes
only at rare moments, while the development of
the little theater at Hull-House has not depended
upon the moods of any one, but upon the genuine
enthusiasm and sustained effort of a group of resi-
dents, several of them artists who have ungrudg-
ingly given their time to it year after year. This
group has long fostered junior dramatic associa-
tions, through which it seems possible to give a
training in manners and morals more directly than
through any other medium. They have learned to
determine very cleverly the ages at which various
types of the drama are most congruous and expres-
sive of the sentiments of the little troupes, from the
fairy plays such as "Snow-White" and "Puss-in-
Boots" which appeal to the youngest children, to

394 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

the heroic plays of "William Tell," ''King John,"
and ''Wat Tyler" for the older lads, and to the
romances and comedies which set forth in stately
fashion the elaborated life which so many young
people admire. A group of Jewish boys gave a
dramatic version of the story of Joseph and his
brethren and again of Queen Esther. They had
almost a sense of proprietorship in the fine old lines
and were pleased to bring from home bits of Tal-
mudic lore for the stage setting. The same club of
boys at one time will buoyantly give a roaring com-
edy and five years later will solemnly demand a
drama dealing with modern industrial conditions.
The Hull-House theater is also rented from time to
time to members of the Young People's Socialist
League who give plays both in Yiddish and English
which reduce their propaganda to conversation.
Through such humble experiments as the Hull-
House stage, as well as through the more ambitious
reforms which are attempted in various parts of
the country, the theater may at last be restored to
its rightful place in the community.

There have been times when our little stage was
able to serve the theatre libre. A Chicago troupe,
finding it difficult to break into a trust theater,
used it one winter twice a week for the presenta-
tion of Ibsen and old French comedy. A visit
from the Irish poet Yeats inspired us to do our
share towards freeing the stage from its slavery to
expensive scene setting, and a forest of stiff con-

ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE 395

ventional trees against a gilt sky still remains with
us as a reminder of an attempt not wholly unsuc-
cessful, in this direction.

This group of Hull-House artists have filled our
little foyer with a series of charming playbills and
by dint of painting their own scenery and making
their own costumes have obtained beguiling re-
sults in stage setting. Sometimes all the artistic
resources of the House unite in a Wagnerian combi-
nation; thus the text of the "Troll's Holiday" was
written by one resident, set to music by another ;
sung by the Music School, and placed upon the
stage under the careful direction and training of
the dramatic committee ; and the little brown
trolls could never have tumbled about so grace-
fully in their gleaming caves unless they had been
taught in the gymnasium.

Some such synthesis takes place every year at
the Hull-House annual exhibition, when an effort
is made to bring together in a spirit of holiday the
nine thousand people who come to the House every
week during duller times. Curiously enough the
central feature at the annual exhibition seems to be
the brass band of the boys' club which apparently
dominates the situation by sheer size and noise, but
perhaps their fresh boyish enthusiasm expresses
that which the older people take more soberly.

As the stage of our little theater had attempted to
portray the heroes of many lands, so we planned
one early spring seven years ago, to carry out a

396 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

scheme of mural decoration upon the walls of the
theater itself, which should portray those cosmo-
politan heroes who have become great through
identification with the common lot, in preference
to the heroes of mere achievement. In addition to
the group of artists living at Hull-House several
others were in temporary residence, and they all
threw themselves enthusiastically into the plan.
The series began with Tolstoy plowing his field
which was painted by an artist of the Glasgow
school, and the next was of the young Lincoln
pushing his flatboat down the Mississippi River
at the moment he received his first impression of
the "great iniquity." This was done by a promis-
ing young artist of Chicago, and the wall spaces
nearest to the two selected heroes were quickly
filled with their immortal sayings.

A spirited discussion thereupon ensued in regard
to the heroes for the two remaining large wall
spaces, when to the surprise of all of us the group
of twenty-five residents who had lived in un-
broken harmony for more than ten years, suddenly
broke up into cults and even camps of hero wor-
ship. Each cult exhibited drawings of its own
hero in his most heroic moment, and of course
each drawing received enthusiastic backing from
the neighborhood, each according to the nation-
ality of the hero. Thus Phidias standing high on
his scaifold as he finished the heroic head of
Athene; the young David dreamily playing his

ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE 397

harp as he tended his father's sheep at Bethle-
hem ; St. Francis washing the feet of the leper ;
the young slave Patrick guiding his master through
the bogs of Ireland, which he later rid of their
dangers ; the poet Hans Sachs cobbling shoes ;
Jeanne d'Arc dropping her spindle in startled won-
der before the heavenly visitants, naturally all
obtained such enthusiastic following from our
cosmopolitan neighborhood that it was certain to
give offense if any two were selected. Then there
was the cult of residents who wished to keep the
series contemporaneous with the two heroes al-
ready painted, and they advocated William Morris
at his loom, Walt Whitman tramping the open
road, Pasteur in his laboratory, or Florence Night-
ingale seeking the wounded on the field of battle.
But beyond the socialists, few of the neighbors
had heard of William Morris, and the fame of Walt
Whitman was still more apocryphal ; Pasteur
was considered merely a clever scientist without
the romance which evokes popular aifection and
in the provisional drawing submitted for votes,
gentle Florence Nightingale was said "to look
more as if she were robbing the dead than succor-
ing the wounded." The remark shows how high the
feeling ran, and then, as something must be done
quickly, we tried to unite upon strictly local heroes
such as the famous fire marshal who had lived
for many years in our neighborhood, — but why
prolong this description which demonstrates once

398 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

more that art, if not always the handmaid of
religion, yet insists upon serving those deeper
sentiments for which we unexpectedly find our-
selves ready to fight. When we were all fatigued
and hopeless of compromise, we took refuge in a

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series of landscapes connected with our two heroes
by a quotation from Wordsworth slightly dis-
torted to meet our dire need, but still stating his
impassioned belief in the efficacious spirit capable
of companionship with man which resides in
particular spots." Certainly peace emanates

a

ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE 399

from the particular folding of the hills in one of
our treasured mural landscapes, yet occasionally
when a guest with a bewildered air looks from one
side of the theater to the other, we are forced to
conclude that the connection is not convincing.

In spite of its stormy career this attempt at
mural decoration connects itself quite naturally
with the spirit of our earlier efforts to make Hull-
House as beautiful as we could, which had in it a
desire to embody in the outward aspect of the
House something of the reminiscence and aspira-
tion of the neighborhood life.

As the House enlarged for new needs and
mellowed through slow-growing associations, we
endeavpred to fashion it from without, as it were,
as well as from within. A tiny wall fountain
modeled in classic pattern, for us penetrates into
the world of the past, but for the Italian immi-
grant it may defy distance and barriers as he
dimly responds to that typical beauty in which
Italy has ever written its message, even as classic
art knew no region of the gods which was not also
sensuous, and as the art of Dante mysteriously
blended the material and the spiritual.

Perhaps the early devotion of the Hull-House
residents to the pre-Raphaelites recognized that
they above all English speaking poets and painters
reveal 'Hhe sense of the expressiveness of out-
ward things" which is at once the glory and the
limitation of the arts.

CHAPTER XVII

Echoes of the Russian Revolution

The residents of Hull-House have always seen
many evidences of the Russian Revolution ; a
forlorn family of little children whose parents
have been massacred at Kishinev are received and
supported by their relatives in our Chicago neigh-
borhood ; or a Russian woman, her face streaming
with tears of indignation and pity, asks you to
look at the scarred back of her sister, a ^ young
girl, who has escaped with her life from the whips
of the Cossack soldiers ; or a studious young
woman suddenly disappears from the Hull-House
classes because she has returned to Kiev to be
near her brother while he is in prison, that she
may earn money for the nourishing food which
alone will keep him from contracting tuberculosis ;
or we attend a protest meeting against the newest
outrages of the Russian government in which the
speeches are interrupted by the groans of those
whose sons have been sacrified and by the hisses
of others who cannot repress their indignation.
At such moments an American is acutelv con-
scious of our ignorance of this greatest tragedy of
modern times, and at our indifference to the

400

ECHOES OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 401

2D

402 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

waste of perhaps the noblest human material
among our contemporaries. Certain it is, as the
distinguished Russian revolutionists have come to
Chicago, they have impressed me, as no one else
ever has done, as belonging to that noble com-
pany of martyrs who have ever and again poured
forth blood that human progress might be ad-
vanced. Sometimes these men and women have
addressed audiences gathered quite outside the
Russian colony and have filled to overflowing
Chicago's largest halls with American citizens
deeply touched by this message of martyrdom.
One significant meeting was addressed by a mem-
ber of the Russian Duma and by one. of Russia's
oldest and sanest revolutionists ; another by
Madame Breshkovsky, who later languished a
prisoner in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul.

In this wonderful procession of revolutionists.
Prince Kropotkin, or, as he prefers to be called,
Peter Kropotkin, was doubtless the most dis-
tinguished. When he came to America to lecture,
he was heard throughout the country with great
interest and respect ; that he was a guest of Hull-
House during his stay in Chicago attracted little
attention at tjie time, but two years later, when the
assassination of President McKinley occurred, the
visit of this kindly scholar, who had always called
himself an "anarchist" and had certainly written
fiery tracts in his younger manhood, was made the
basis of an attack upon Hull-House by a daily

ECHOES OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 403

newspaper, which ignored the fact that while
Prince Kropotkin had addressed the Chicago Arts
and Crafts Society at Hull-House, giving a digest
of his remarkable book on "Fields, Factories, and
Workshops," he had also spoken at the State Uni-
versities of Illinois and Wisconsin and before the
leading literary and scientific societies of Chicago.
These institutions and societies were not, therefore,
called anarchistic. Hull-House had doubtless laid
itself open to this attack through an incident con-
nected with the imprisonment of the editor of an
anarchistic paper, who was arrested in Chicago
immediately after the assassination of President
McKinley. In the excitement following the na-
tional calamity and the avowal by the assassin of
the influence of the anarchistic lecture to which he
had listened, arrests were made in Chicago of every
one suspected of anarchy, in the belief that a wide-
spread plot would be uncovered. The editor's
house was searched for incriminating literature, his
wife and daughter taken to a police station, and
his son and himself, with several other suspected
anarchists, were placed in the disused cells in the
basement of the city hall.

It is impossible to overstate the public excite-
ment of the moment and the unfathomable sense
of horror with which the community regarded an
attack upon the chief executive of the nation, as a
crime against government itself which compels
an instinctive recoil from all law-abiding citizens.

404 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

Doubtless both the horror and recoil have their
roots deep down in human experience ; the earliest
forms of government implied a group which offered
competent resistance to outsiders, but assuming
no protection was necessary between any two of its
own members, promptly punished with death the
traitor who had assaulted any one within. An
anarchistic attack against an official thus furnishes
an accredited basis both for unreasoning hatred and
for prompt punishment. Both the hatred and the
determination to punish reached the highest pitch
in Chicago after the assassination of President
McKinley, and the group of wretched men detained
in the old-fashioned, scarcely habitable cells, had
not the least idea of their ultimate fate. They were
not allowed to see an attorney and were kept "in
communicado" as their excited friends called it.
I had seen the editor and his family only during
Prince Kropotkin's stay at Hull-House, when they
had come to visit him several times. The editor
had impressed me as a quiet, scholarly man, chal-
lenging the social order by the philosophic touch-
stone of Bakunin and of Herbert Spencer, somewhat
startled by the radicalism of his fiery young son and
much comforted by the German domesticity of his
wife and daughter. Perhaps it was but my hys-
terical symptom of the universal excitement, but
it certainly seemed to me more than I could bear
when a group of his individualistic friends, who had
come to ask for help, said : "You see what becomes

ECHOES OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 405

of your boasted law; the authorities won't even
allow an attorney, nor will they accept bail for these
men, against whom nothing can be proved, al-
though the veriest criminals are not denied such a
right." Challenged by an anarchist, one is always
sensitive for the honor of legally constituted society,
and I replied that of course the men could have an
attorney, that the assassin himself would eventually
be furnished with one, that the fact that a man was
an anarchist had nothing to do with his rights be-
fore the law ! I was met with the retort that that
might do for a theory, but that the fact still re-
mained that these men had been absolutely iso-
lated, seeing no one but policemen, who constantly
frightened them with tales of public clamor and
threatened lynching.

This conversation took place on Saturday night
and, as the final police authority rests in the mayor,
with a friend who was equally disturbed over the
situation, I repaired to his house on Sunday morn-
ing to appeal to him in the interest of a law and
order that should not yield to panic. We con-
tended that to the anarchist above all men it must
be demonstrated that law is impartial and stands
the test of every strain. The mayor heard us
through with the ready sympathy of the successful
politician. He insisted, however, that the men
thus far had merely been properly protected against
lynching, but that it might now be safe to allow
them to see some one ; he would not yet, however,

4o6 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

take the responsibility of permitting an attorney,
but if I myself chose to see them on the humani-
tarian errand of an assurance of fair play, he would
write me a permit at once. I promptly fell into the
trap, if trap it was, and within half an hour was
in a corridor in the city hall basement, talking
to the distracted editor and surrounded by a cordon
of police, who assured me that it was not safe to per-
mit him out of his cell. The editor, who had grown
thin and haggard under his suspense, asked imme-
diately as to the whereabouts of his wife and
daughter, concerning whom he had heard not a
word since he had seen them arrested. Gradually
he became composed as he learned, not that his
testimony had been believed to the effect that he
had never seen the assassin but once, and had
then considered him a foolish half-witted creature,
but that the most thoroughgoing "dragnet" in-
vestigations on the part of the united police of
the country had failed to discover a plot and that
the public was gradually becoming convinced that
the dastardly act was that of a solitary man with
no political or social affiliations.

The entire conversation was simple and did not
seem to me unlike, in motive or character, interviews
I had had with many another forlorn man who had
fallen into prison. I had scarce returned to Hull-
House, however, before it was filled with reporters,
and I at once discovered that whether or not I
had helped a brother out of a pit, I had fallen into a

ECHOES OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 407

deep one myself. A period of sharp public oppro-
brium followed, traces of which, I suppose, will
always remain. And yet in the midst of the letters
of protest and accusation which made my mail a
horror every morning came a few letters of another
sort, one from a federal judge whom I had never
seen and another from a distinguished professor in
constitutional law, who congratulated me on what
they termed a sane attempt to uphold the law in
time of panic.

Although one or two ardent young people rushed
into print to defend me from the charge of "abet-
ting anarchy," it seemed to me at the time that mere
words would not avail. I had felt that the pro-
tection of the law itself extended to the most un-
popular citizen was the only reply to the anarchistic
argument, to the effect that this moment of panic
revealed the truth of their theory of government ;
that the custodians of law and order have become
the government itself quite as the armed men hired
by the medieval guilds to protect them in the peace-
ful pursuit of their avocations, through sheer
possession of arms finally made themselves rulers
of the city. At that moment I was firmly convinced
that the public could only be convicted of the blind-
ness of its course, when a body of people with a
hundred-fold of the moral energy possessed by a
Settlement group, should make clear that there is
no method by which any community can be
guarded against sporadic efforts on the part of half-

4o8 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

crazed, discouraged men, save by a sense of mutual
rights and securities which will Include the veriest
outcast.

It seemed to me then that In the millions of
words uttered and written at that time, no one
adequately urged that public-spirited citizens set
themselves the task of patiently discovering how
these sporadic acts of violence against govern-
ment may be understood and averted. We do
not know whether they occur among the dis-
couraged and unasslmllated Immigrants who might
be cared for In such a way as enormously to lessen
the probability of these acts, or whether they are
the result of anarchistic teaching. By hastily
concluding that the latter Is the sole explanation
for them, we make no attempt to heal and cure
the situation. Failure to make a proper diagnosis
may mean treatment of a disease which does not
exist, or It may furthermore mean that the dire
malady from which the patient Is suffering be
permitted to develop unchecked. And yet as the
details of the meager life of the President's as-
sassin were disclosed, they were a challenge to the
forces for social betterment In American cities.
Was It not an Indictment to all those whose busi-
ness It Is to Interpret and solace the wretched,
that a boy should have grown up In an American
city so uncared for, so untouched by higher Issues,
his wounds of life so unhealed by religion that the
first talk he ever heard dealing with life's wrongs,

ECHOES OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 409

although anarchistic and violent, should yet ap-
pear to point a way of relief ?

The conviction that a sense of fellowship is
the only implement which will break into the
locked purpose of a half-crazed creature bent
upon destruction in the name of justice, came to
me through an experience recited to me at this
time by an old anarchist.

He was a German cobbler who, through all the
changes in the manufacturing of shoes, had
steadily clung to his little shop on a Chicago
thoroughfare, partly as an expression of his in-
dividualism and partly because he preferred bitter
poverty in a place of his own to good wages under
a disciplinary foreman. The assassin of President
McKinley on his way through Chicago only a
few days before he committed his dastardly deed,
had visited all the anarchists whom he could find
in the city, asking them for "the password" as
he called it. They, of course, possessed no such
thing, and had turned him away, some with dis-
gust and all with a certain degree of impatience,
as a type of the ill-balanced man who, as they
put it, was always "hanging around the move-
ment, without the slightest conception of its
meaning." Among other people, he visited the
German cobbler, who treated him much as the
others had done, but who, after the event had
made clear the identity of his visitor, was filled
with the most bitter remorse that he had failed

4IO TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

to utilize his chance meeting with the assassin to
deter him from his purpose. He knew as well as
any psychologist who has read the history of such
solitary men that the only possible way to break
down such a persistent and secretive purpose, was
by the kindliness which might have induced con-
fession, which might have restored the future
assassin into fellowship with normal men.

In the midst of his remorse, the cobbler told
me a tale of his own youth ; that years before,
when an ardent young fellow in Germany, newly
converted to the philosophy of anarchism, as he
called it, he had made up his mind that the Church,
as much as the State, was responsible for human
oppression, and that this fact could best be set
forth "in the deed" by the public destruction of
a clergyman or priest ; that he had carried fire-
arms for a year with this purpose in mind, but
that one pleasant summer evening, in a moment
of weakness, he had confided his intention to a
friend, and that from that moment he not only
lost all desire to carry it out, but it seemed to
him the most preposterous thing imaginable. In
concluding the story he said : " That poor fellow
sat just beside me on my bench ; if I had only
put my hand on his shoulder and said, 'Now, look
here, brother, what is on your mind ? What
makes you talk such nonsense ^ Tell me. I
have seen much of life, and understand all kinds
of men. I have been young and hot-headed and

ECHOES OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. 411

foolish myself;' if he had told me of his purpose
then and there, he would never have carried it
out. The whole nation would have been spared
this horror." As he concluded he shook his gray
head and sighed as if the whole incident were
more than he could bear — one of those terrible
sins of omission; one of the things he "ought to
have done," the memory of which is so hard to
endure.

The attempt a Settlement makes to interpret
American institutions to those who are bewildered
concerning them either because of their personal
experiences, or because of preconceived theories,
would seem to lie in the direct path of its public
obligation, and yet it is apparently impossible for
the overwrought community to distinguish between
the excitement the Settlements are endeavoring to
understand and to allay and the attitude of the
Settlement itself. At times of public panic, fervid
denunciation is held to be the duty of every good
citizen, and if a Settlement is convinced that the
incident should be used to vindicate the law and
does not at the moment give its strength to de-
nunciation, Its attitude is at once taken to imply
a championship of anarchy itself.

The public mind at such a moment falls into
the old medieval confusion — he who feeds or
shelters a heretic is upon prima facie evidence a
heretic himself — he who knows intimately people
among whom anarchists arise, is therefore an

412 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

anarchist. I personally am convinced that an-
archy as a philosophy is dying down, not only in
Chicago, but everywhere ; that their leading organs
have discontinued publication, and that their
most eminent men in America have deserted
them. Even those groups which have continued
to meet are dividing, and the major half in almost
every instance calls itself socialist-anarchists, an
apparent contradiction of terms, whose members
insist that the socialistic organization of society
must be the next stage of social development and
must be gone through with, so to speak, before
the ideal state of society can be reached, so nearly
begging the question that some orthodox social-
ists are willing to recognize them. It is certainly
true that just because anarchy questions the very
foundations of society, the most elemental sense of
protection demands that the method of meeting
the challenge should be intelligently considered.

Whether or not Hull-House has accomplished
anything by its method of meeting such a situa-
tion, or at least attempting to treat it in a way
which will not destroy confidence in the American
institutions so adored by refugees from foreign
governmental oppression, it is of course impossible
for me to say.

And yet it was in connection with an effort to
pursue an intelligent policy in regard to a so-
called "foreign anarchist" that Hull-House again
became associated with that creed six years later.

ECHOES OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 413

This again was an echo of the Russian revolution,
but in connection with one of its humblest repre-
sentatives. A young Russian Jew named Aver-
buch appeared in the early morning at the house
of the Chicago chief of police upon an obscure
errand. It was a moment of panic everyw^here in
regard to anarchists because of a recent murder
in Denver which had been charged to an Italian
anarchist, and the chief of police, assuming that
the dark young man standing in his hallway was
an anarchist bent upon his assassination, hastily
called for help. In a panic born of fear and self-
defense, young Averbuch was shot to death. The
members of the Russian-Jewish colony on the west
side of Chicago were thrown into a state of intense
excitement as soon as the nationality of the
young man became known. They were filled with
dark forebodings from a swift prescience of what
it would mean to them were the odium of an-
archy rightly or wrongly attached to one of their
members. It seemed to the residents of Hull-
House most important that every effort should
be made to ascertain just what did happen,
that every means of securing information should
be exhausted before a final opinion should be
formed, and this odium fastened upon a colony
of law-abiding citizens. The police might be
right or wrong in their assertion that the man
was an anarchist. It was, to our minds, also most
unfortunate that the Chicago police in the deter-

414 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

mination to uncover an anarchistic plot should
have utilized the most drastic methods of search
within the Russian-Jewish colony composed of
families only too familiar with the methods of
the Russian police. Therefore, when the Chicago
police ransacked all the printing offices they could
locate in the colony, when they raided a restaurant
which they regarded as suspicious because it had
been supplying food at cost to the unemployed,
when they searched through private houses for
papers and photographs of revolutionaries, when
they seized the library of the Edelstadt group and
carried the books, including Shakespeare and Her-
bert Spencer, to the city hall, when they arrested
two friends of young Averbuch and kept them in
the police station forty-eight hours, when they
mercilessly "sweated" the sister, Olga, that she
might be startled into a confession — all these
things so poignantly reminded them of Russian
methods, that indignation fed both by old memory
and bitter disappointment in America, swept over
the entire colony. The older men asked whether
constitutional rights gave no guarantee against
such violent aggression of police power, and the
hot-headed younger ones cried out at once that
the only way to deal with the police was to defy
them, which was true of police the world over.
It was said many times that those who are with-
out influence and protection in a strange country
fare exactly as hard as do the poor in Europe;

ECHOES OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 415

that all the talk of guaranteed protection through
political institutions Is nonsense.

Every Settlement has classes In citizenship In
which the principles of American institutions are
expounded and of these the community, as a whole,
approves. But the Settlements know better than
any one else that while these classes and lectures
are useful, nothing can possibly give lessons In
citizenship so effectively and make so clear the
constitutional basis of a self-governing community
as the current event itself. The treatment at a
given moment of that foreign colony which feels
Itself outraged and misunderstood, either makes
Its constitutional rights clear to It, or forever con-
fuses it on the subject.

The only method by which a reasonable and loyal
conception of government may be substituted for
the one formed upon Russian experiences. Is that
the actual experience of refugees with government
in America shall gradually demonstrate what a
very different thing government means here. Such
an event as the Averbuch aif air affords an unprece-
dented opportunity to make clear this diiference
and to demonstrate beyond the possibility of mis-
understanding that the guarantee of constitutional
rights Implies that officialism shall be restrained
and guarded at every point, that the official repre-
sents, not the will of a small administrative body,
but the will of the entire people, and that methods
therefore have been constituted by which official

4i6 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

aggression may be restrained. The Averbuch Inci-
dent gave an opportunity to demonstrate this to
that very body of people who need it most ; to
those who have lived in Russia where autocratic
officers represent autocratic power and where gov-

,,„.., ernment is officialism.

if/ ,,..in''"" .{ J-t seemed to the resi-
■'£0n . '■ dents in the Settle-
ments nearest the
Russian-Jewish col-
ony that it was an
obvious piece of pub-
lic spirit to try out
all the legal value
involved, to insist
that American in-
stitutions were stout
enough not to break
down in times of
stress and public
panic.

The belief of many
Russians that the
Averbuch incident would be made a prelude to the
constant use of the extradition treaty for the sake
of terrorizing revolutionists both at home and
abroad, received a certain corroboration when an
attempt was made in 1908 to extradite a Russian
revolutionist named Rudovitz who was living in
Chicago. The first hearing before a United States

ECHOES OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 417

Commissioner gave a verdict favorable to the
Russian Government although this was afterwards
reversed by the Department of State in Wash-
ington. Partly to educate American sentiment,
partly to express sympathy with the Russian
refugees in their dire need, a series of public
meetings was arranged in which the operations
of the extradition treaty were discussed by many
of us who had spoken at a meeting held in pro-
test against its ratification fifteen years before.
It is impossible for any one unacquainted with
the Russian colony to realize the consternation
produced by this attempted extradition. I acted
as treasurer of the fund collected to defray the
expenses of halls and printing in the campaign
against the policy of extradition and had many
opportunities to talk with members of the colony,
One old man, tearing his hair and beard as he spoke,
declared that all his sons and grandsons might thus
be sent back to Russia ; in fact, all of the younger
men in the colony might be extradited, for every
high-spirited young Russian was, in a sense, a
revolutionist.

Would it not provoke to Ironic laughter that
very nemesis which presides over the destinies of
nations, if the most autocratic government yet
remaining in civilization should succeed in utilizing
for its own autocratic methods the youngest and
most daring experiment in democratic government
which the world has ever seen ? Stranger results

2£

4i8 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

have followed a course of stupidity and injustice
resulting from blindness and panic !

It is certainly true that if the decision of the
federal office in Chicago had not been reversed by
the department of state in Washington, the United
States government would have been committed
to return thousands of spirited young refugees to
the punishments of the Russian autocracy.

It was perhaps significant of our need of what
Napoleon called a ''revival of civic morals" that
the public appeal against such a reversal of our
traditions had to be based largely upon the con-
tributions to American progress made from other
revolutions ; the Puritans from the English, La-
fayette from the French, Carl Schurz and many
another able man from the German upheavals in
the middle of the century.

A distinguished German scholar writing at the
end of his long life a description of his friends of
1848 who made a gallant although premature effort
to unite the German states and to secure a consti-
tutional government, thus concludes : ''But not a
few saw the whole of their lives wrecked, either in
prison or poverty, though they had done no wrong,
and in many cases were the finest characters it has
been my good fortune to know. They were before
their time ; the fruit was not ripe, as it was in 1871,
and Germany but lost her best sons in those miser-
able years." When the time is ripe in Russia,
when she finally yields to those great forces which

ECHOES OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 419

are molding and renovating contemporary life,
when her Cavour and her Bismarck finally throw
into the first governmental forms all that yearning
for juster human relations which the idealistic
Russian revolutionists embody, we may look back
upon these ''miserable years" with a sense of
chagrin at our lack of sympathy and understanding.
Again it is far from easy to comprehend the great
Russian struggle. I recall a visit from the famous
revolutionist Gershuni, who had escaped from
Siberia in a barrel of cabbage rolled under the very
fortress of the commandant himself, had made his
way through Manchuria and China to San Fran-
cisco, and on his way back to Russia had stopped
in Chicago for a few days. Three months later we
heard of his death, and whenever I recall the con-
versation held with him, I find it invested with that
dignity which last words imply. Upon the request
of a comrade, Gershuni had repeated the substance
of the famous speech he had made to the court
which sentenced him to Siberia. As representing
the government against which he had rebelled, he
told the court that he might in time be able to for-
give all of their outrages and injustices save one ; the
unforgivable outrage would remain that hundreds
of men like himself, who were vegetarians because
they were not willing to participate in the destruc-
tion of living creatures, who had never struck a
child even in punishment, who were so consumed
with tenderness for the outcast and oppressed that

420 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

they had lived for weeks among starving peasants
only that they might cheer and solace them, — that
these men should have been driven into terrorism,
until impelled to "execute," as they call it, — '* assas-
sinate " the Anglo-Saxon would term it, — public ofE-
cials, was something for which he would never for-
give the Russian government. It was, perhaps, the
heat of the argument, as much as conviction, which
led me to reply that it would be equally difficult
for society to forgive these very revolutionists for
one thing they had done, their institution of the use
of force in such wise that it would inevitably be
imitated by men of less scruple and restraint ; that
to have revived such a method in civilization, to
have justified it by their disinterestedness of pur-
pose and nobility of character, was perhaps the
gravest responsibility that any group of men could
assume. With a smile of indulgent pity such as
one might grant to a mistaken child, he replied
that such Tolstoyan principles were as fitted to
Russia as "these toilettes," pointing to the thin
summer gowns of his listeners, "were fitted to a
Siberian winter." And yet I held the belief then,
as I certainly do now, that when the sense of justice
seeks to express itself quite outside the regular chan-
nels of established government, it has set forth on
a dangerous journey inevitably ending in disaster,
and that this is true In spite of the fact that the ad-
venture may have been inspired by noble motives.
Still more perplexing than the use of force by

ECHOES OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 421

the revolutionists Is the employment of the agent-
provacateur on the part of the Russian government.
The visit of Vladimir Bourtzeif to Chicago just
after his exposure of the famous secret agent, Azeff,
filled one with perplexity In regard to a government
which would connive at the violent death of a
faithful official and that of a member of the royal
household for the sake of bringing opprobrium and
punishment to the revolutionists and credit to the
secret police.

The Settlement has also suffered through its ef-
fort to secure open discussion of the methods of
the Russian government. During the excitement
connected with the visit of Gorki to this coun-
try, three different committees of Russians came
to Hull-House begging that I would secure a
statement In at least one of the Chicago dallies of
their own view, that the agents of the Czar had
cleverly centered public attention upon Gorki's
private life and had fomented a scandal so success-
fully that the object of Gorki's visit to America
had been foiled ; he who had known intimately
the most wretched of the Czar's subjects, who
was best able to sympathetically portray their
wretchedness, not only failed to get a hearing
before an American audience, but could scarcely
find the shelter of a roof. I told two of the Rus-
sian committees that It was hopeless to undertake
any explanation of the bitter attack until public ex-
citement had somewhat subsided ; but one Sunday

422 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

afternoon when a third committee arrived, I said
that I would endeavor to have reprinted in a
Chicago daily the few scattered articles written
for the magazines which tried to explain the situa-
tion, one by the head professor in political economy
of a leading university, and others by publicists
well informed as to Russian affairs.

I hoped that a cosmopolitan newspaper might
feel an obligation to recognize the desire for fair
play on the part of thousands of its readers among
the Russians, Poles, and Finns, at least to the
extent of reproducing these magazine articles
under a noncommittal caption. That same Sun-
day evening in company with one of the residents,
I visited a newspaper office only to hear its repre-
sentative say that my plan was quite out of the
question, as the whole subject was what news-
paper men called "a sacred cow." He said, how-
ever, that he would willingly print an article
which I myself should write and sign. I declined
this offer with the statement that one who had
my opportunities to see the struggles of poor
women in securing support for their children,
found it impossible to write anything which would
however remotely justify the loosening of mar-
riage bonds, even if the defense of Gorki made
by the Russian committees was sound. We left
the newspaper office somewhat discouraged with
what we thought one more unsuccessful effort to
procure a hearing for the immigrants.

ECHOES OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 423

I had considered the incident closed, when to
my horror and surprise several months afterwards
it was made the basis of a story with every pos-
sible vicious interpretation. One of the Chicago
newspapers had been indicted by Mayor Dunne
for what he considered an actionable attack upon
his appointees to the Chicago School Board of
whom I was one, and the incident enlarged and
coarsened was submitted as evidence to the
Grand Jury in regard to my views and influence.
Although the evidence was thrown out, an attempt
was again made to revive this story by the mana-
gers of Mayor Dunne's second campaign, this
time to show how ''the protector of the oppressed"
was traduced. The incident is related here as an
example of the clever use of that old device which
throws upon the radical in religion, in education, and
in social reform, the odium of encouraging "harlots
and sinners" and of defending their doctrines.

If the under dog were always right, one might
quite easily try to defend him. The trouble is
that very often he is but obscurely right, some-
times only partially right, and often quite wrong ;
but perhaps he is never so altogether wrong and
pig-headed and utterly reprehensible as he is
represented to be by those who add the possession
of prejudices to the other almost insuperable diffi-
culties of understanding him. It was, perhaps, not
surprising that with these excellent opportunities
for misjudging Hull-House, we should have suffered

424 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

attack from time to time whenever any untoward
event gave an opening as when an Italian immi-
grant murdered a priest in Denver, Colorado.
Although the wretched man had never been in
Chicago, much less at Hull-House, a Chicago eccle-
siastic asserted that he had learned hatred of the
Church as a member of the Giordano Bruno Club,
an Italian Club, one of whose members lived at
Hull-House, and which had occasionally met there,
although it had long maintained clubrooms of its
own. This club had its origin in the old struggles
of united Italy against the temporal power of the
Pope, one of the European echoes with which
Chicago resounds. The Italian resident, as the
editor of a paper representing new Italy, had
come in sharp conflict with the Chicago ecclesi-
astic, first in regard to naming a public school of
the vicinity after Garibaldi, which was of course
not tolerated by the Church, and then in regard
to many another issue arising in anticlericalism,
which, although a political party, is constantly in-
volved, from the very nature of the case, in theo-
logical difficulties. The contest had been carried
on with a bitterness impossible for an American
to understand, but its origin and implications were
so obvious that it did not occur to any of us that
it could be associated with Hull-House either in
its motive or direction.

The ecclesiastic himself had lived for years in
Rome, and as I had often discussed the prob-

ECHOES OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 425

lems of Italian politics with him, I was quite
sure he understood the raison d'etre for the Gior-
dano Bruno Club. Fortunately in the midst of
the rhetorical attack, our friendly relations re-
mained unbroken with the neighboring priests
from whom we continued to receive uniform cour-
tesy as we cooperated in cases of sorrow and need.
Hundreds of devout communicants identified with
the various Hull-House clubs and classes were
deeply distressed by the incident, but assured us
it was all a misunderstanding. Easter came soon
afterwards, and it was not difficult to make a con-
nection between the attack and the myriad of
Easter cards which filled my mail.

Thus a Settlement becomes involved in the
many difficulties of its neighbors as its experiences
make vivid the consciousness of modern inter-
nationalism. And yet the very fact that the
sense of reality is so keen and the obligation of
the Settlement so obvious, may perhaps in itself
explain the opposition Hull-House has encountered
when it expressed its sympathy with the Russian
revolution. We were much entertained, although
somewhat ruefully, when a Chicago woman with-
drew from us a large annual subscription because
Hull-House had defended a Russian refugee while
she, who had seen much of the Russian aristoc-
racy in Europe, knew from them that all the revo-
lutionary agitation was both unreasonable and
unnecessary !

426 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

It is, of course, Impossible to say whether these
oppositions were inevitable or whether they were
indications that Hull-House had somehow bungled
at its task. Many times I have been driven to
the confession of the blundering Amiel : "It re-
quires ability to make what we seem agree with
what we are."

A View between Hull-House Gymnasium and Theater.

, CHAPTER XVIII

Socialized Education

In a paper written years ago I deplored at some
length the fact that educational matters are more
democratic in their political than in their social
aspect, and I quote the following extract from it
as throwing some light upon the earlier educa-
tional undertakings at Hull-House: —

Teaching in a Settlement requires distinct methods,
for it is true of people who have been allowed to re-
main undeveloped and whose faculties are inert and
sterile, that they cannot take their learning heavily.
It has to be diffused in a social atmosphere, informa-
tion must be held in solution, in a medium of fellowship
and good will.

Intellectual life requires for its expansion and
manifestation the influence and assimilation of the
interests and affections of others. Mazzini, that
greatest of all democrats, who broke his heart over
the condition of the South European peasantry, said :
"Education is not merely a necessity of true life by
which the individual renews his vital force in the vital
force of humanity; it is a Holy Communion with
generations dead and living, by which he fecundates
all his faculties. When he is withheld from this Com-
munion for generations, as the Italian peasant has

427

428 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

been, we say, 'He is like a beast of the field; he must
be controlled by force.'" Even to this it is some-
times added that it is absurd to educate him, immoral
to disturb his content. We stupidly use the effect as
an argument for a continuance of the cause. It is
needless to say that a Settlement is a protest against a
restricted view of education.

In line with this declaration, 'Hull-House in the
very beginning opened what we called College
Extension Classes with a faculty finally numbering
thirty-five college men and women, many of whom
held their pupils for consecutive years. As these
classes antedated in Chicago the University Exten-
sion and Normal Extension classes and supplied a
demand for stimulating instruction, the attend-
ance strained to their utmost capacity the spacious
rooms in the old house. The relation of students
and faculty to each other and to the residents
was that of guest and hostess and at the close of
each term the residents gave a reception to stu-
dents and faculty which was one of the chief
social events of the season. Upon this comfort-
able social basis some very good work was done.

In connection with these classes a Hull-House
summer school was instituted at Rockford Col-
lege, which was most generously placed at our
disposal by the trustees. For ten years one hun-
dred women gathered there for six weeks, in addi-
tion there were^ always men on the faculty, and a
small group of young men among the students

SOCIALIZED EDUCATION 429

who were lodged in the gymnasium building. The
outdoor classes in bird study and botany, the
serious reading of literary masterpieces, the boat
excursions on the Rock River, the cooperative
spirit of doing the housework together, the satirical
commencements in parti-colored caps and gowns,
lent themselves toward a reproduction of the
comradeship which college life fosters.

As each member of the faculty, as well as the
students, paid three dollars a week, and as we
had little outlay beyond the actual cost of food,
we easily defrayed our expenses. The under-
taking w^as so simple and gratifying in results that
it might w^ell be reproduced in many college build-
ings which are set in the midst of beautiful sur-
roundings, unused during the two months of the
year, when hundreds of people, able to pay only a
moderate price for lodgings in the country, can
find nothing comfortable and no mental food
more satisfying than piazza gossip.

Every Thursday evening during the first years,
a public lecture came to be an expected event in
the neighborhood, and Hull-House became one of
the early University Extension centers, first in
connection with an independent society and later
with the University of Chicago. One of the Hull-
House trustees was so impressed with the value of
this orderly and continuous presentation of eco-
nomic subjects that he endowed three courses in a
downtown center, in which the lectures were free

430 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

to any one who chose to come. He was much
pleased that these lectures were largely attended
by workingmen who ordinarily prefer that an eco-
nomic subject shall be presented by a partisan,
and who are supremely indifferent to examinations
and credits. They also dislike the balancing of
pro and con which scholarly instruction implies,
and prefer to be "inebriated on raw truth" rather
than to sip a carefully prepared draught of knowl-
edge.

Nevertheless Bowen Hall, which seats seven
hundred and fifty people, is often none too large
to hold the audiences of men who come to Hull-
House every Sunday evening during the winter to
attend the illustrated lectures provided by the
faculty of the University of Chicago, and others
who kindly give their services. These courses
differ enormously in their popularity : one on
European capitals and their social significance was
followed with the most vivid attention and sense
of participation indicated by groans and hisses
when the audience was reminded of an unforget-
able feud between Austria and her Slavic subjects,
or when they wildly applauded a Polish hero
endeared through his tragic failure.

In spite of the success of these Sunday evening
courses, it has never been an easy undertaking to
find acceptable lecturers. A course of lectures on
astronomy illustrated by stereopticon slides will
attract a large audience the first week, who hope

SOCIALIZED EDUCATION 431

to hear of the wonders of the heavens and the
relation of our earth thereto, but Instead are
treated to spectrum analyses of star dust, or the
latest theory concerning the milky way. The
habit of research and the desire to say the latest
word upon any subject often overcomes the sym-
pathetic understanding of his audience which the
lecturer might otherwise develop, and he insensibly
drops into the dull terminology of the classroom.
There are, of course, notable exceptions ; we had
twelve gloriously popular talks on organic evolu-
tion, but the lecturer was not yet a professor
— merely a university instructor — and his mind
was still eager over the marvel of It all. Fortu-
nately there are an increasing number of lecturers
whose matter is so real, so definite and so valu-
able, that In an attempt to give it an exact equiva-
lence in words, they utilize the most direct forms
of expression.

It sometimes seems as if the men of substantial
scholarship were content to leave to the charletan
the teaching of those things which deeply concern
the welfare of mankind, and that the mass of men
get their Intellectual food from the outcasts of
scholarship, who provide millions of books, pic-
tures, and shows, not to instruct and guide, but
for the sake of their own financial profit. A Settle-
ment soon discovers that simple people are Inter-
ested In large and vital subjects and the Hull-
House residents themselves at one time, with only

432 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

partial success, undertook to give a series of lec-
tures on the history of the world, beginning with
the nebular hypothesis and reaching Chicago itself
in the twenty-fifth lecture ! Absurd as the hasty
review appears, there is no doubt that the beginner
in knowledge is always eager for the general state-
ment, as those wise old teachers of the people well
knew, when they put the history of creation on the
stage and the monks themselves became the actors.
I recall that in planning my first European journey
I had soberly hoped in two years to trace the entire
pattern of human excellence as we passed from one
country to another, in the shrines popular affection
had consecrated to the saints, in the frequented
statues erected to heroes, and in the "worn bla-
sonry of funeral brasses," — an illustration that
when we are young we all long for those mountain
tops upon which we may soberly stand and dream
of our own ephemeral and uncertain attempts at
righteousness. I have had many other illustrations
of this ; a statement was recently made to me by a
member of the Hull-House Boys' club, who had
been unjustly arrested as an accomplice to a young
thief and held in the police station for three days,
that during his detention he "had remembered the
way Jean Valjean behaved when he was everlast-
ingly pursued by that policeman who was only
trying to do right" ; "I kept seeing the pictures in
that illustrated lecture you gave about him, and I
thought it would be queer if I couldn't behave

SOCIALIZED EDUCATION 433

well for three days when he had kept it up for
years."

The power of dramatic action may unfortunately
be illustrated in other ways. During the weeks
when all the daily papers were full of the details
of a notorious murder trial in New York and all
the hideous events which preceded the crime, one
evening I saw in the street cars a knot of working
girls leaning over a newspaper, admiring the
clothes, the beauty, and "sorrowful expression"
of the unhappy heroine. In the midst of the trial
a woman whom I had known for years came to
talk to me about her daughter, shamefacedly con-
fessing that the girl was trying to dress and look
like the notorious girl in New York, and that she
had even said to her mother in a moment of
defiance, ''Some day I shall be taken into court
and then I shall dress just as Evelyn did and face
my accusers as she did in innocence and beauty."

If one makes calls on a Sunday afternoon in the
homes of the immigrant colonies near Hull-House,
one finds the family absorbed in the Sunday edition
of a sensational daily newspaper, even those who
cannot read, quite easily following, the comic
adventures portrayed in the colored pictures of the
supplement or tracing the clew of a murderer
carefully depicted by a black line drawn through a
plan of the houses and streets.

Sometimes lessons in the great loyalties and group
affections come through life itself and yet in such

2F

434 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

a manner that one cannot but deplore it. During
the teamsters' strike in Chicago several years ago
when class bitterness rose to a dramatic climax, I
remember going to visit a neighborhood boy who
had been severely injured when he had taken the
place of a union driver upon a coal wagon. As I
approached the house in which he lived, a large
group of boys and girls, some of them very little
children, surrounded me to convey the exciting in-
formation that "Jack T. was a 'scab,'" and that I
couldn't go in there. I explained to the excited
children that his mother, who was a friend of mine,
was in trouble, quite irrespective of the way her boy
had been hurt. The crowd around me outside of
the house of the "scab" constantly grew larger
and I, finally abandoning my attempt at explana-
tion, walked in only to have the mother say :
"Please don't come here. You will only get hurt,
too." Of course I did not get hurt, but the epi-
sode left upon my mind one of the most painful
impressions I have ever received in connection w4th
the children of the neighborhood. In addition to
all else are the lessons of loyalty and comradeship
to come to them as the mere reversals of class
antagonism } And yet it was but a trifling inci-
dent out of the general spirit of bitterness and
strife which filled the city.

Therefore the residents of Hull-House place
increasing emphasis upon the great inspirations
and solaces of literature and are unwilling that it

SOCIALIZED EDUCATION 435

should ever languish as a subject for class instruc-
tion or for reading parties. The Shakespeare
club has lived a continuous existence at Hull-
House for sixteen years during which time its
members have heard the leading interpreters of
Shakespeare, both among scholars and players. I
recall that one of its earliest members said that her
mind was peopled with Shakespeare characters
during her long hours of sewing in a shop, that she
couldn't remember what she thought about before
she joined the club, and concluded that she hadn't
thought about anything at all. To feed the mind
of the worker, to lift it above the monotony of his
task, and to connect it with the larger world, outside
of his immediate surroundings, has always been
the object of art, perhaps never more nobly fulfilled
than by the great English bard. Miss Starr has
held classes in Dante and Browning for many
years and the great lines are conned with never
failing enthusiasm. I recall Miss Lathrop's Plato
club and an audience who listened to a series of lec-
tures by Dr. John Dewey on "Social Psychology,"
as genuine intellectual groups consisting largely of
people from the immediate neighborhood, who were
willing to make "that effort from which we all
shrink, the effort of thought." But while we
prize these classes as we do the help we are able
to give to the exceptional young man or woman
who reaches the college and university and leaves
the neighborhood of his childhood behind him, the

436 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

residents of Hull-House feel increasingly that the
educational efforts of a Settlement should not be
directed primarily to reproduce the college type of
culture, but to work out a method and an Ideal
adapted to the Immediate situation. They feel
that they should promote a culture which will not
set Its possessor aside In a class with others like
himself, but which will, on the contrary, connect
him with all sorts of people by his ability to under-
stand them as well as by his power to supplement
their present surroundings with the historic back-
ground. Among the hundreds of Immigrants who
have for years attended classes at Hull-House
designed primarily to teach the English language,
dozens of them have struggled to express In the
newly acquired tongue some of those hopes and
longings which had so much to do with their emi-
gration.

A series of plays was thus written by a young
Bohemian ; essays by a Russian youth, outpouring
sorrows rivaling Werther himself and yet. contain-
ing the precious stuff of youth's perennial revolt
against accepted wrong ; stories of Russian oppres-
sion and petty Injustices throughout which the
desire for free America became a crystallized hope ;
an attempt to portray the Jewish day of Atone-
ment, In such wise that even individualistic Ameri-
cans may catch a glimpse of that deeper national
life which has survived all transplanting and ex-
presses Itself in forms so ancient that they appear

SOCIALIZED EDUCATION 437

grotesque to the Ignorant spectator. I remember
a pathetic effort on the part of a young Russian
Jewess to describe the vivid inner life of an old
Talmud scholar, probably her uncle or father, as of
one persistently occupied with the grave and im-
portant things of the spirit, although when brought
into sharp contact with busy and overworked people,
he inevitably appeared self-absorbed and slothful.
Certainly no one who had read her paper could
again see such an old man in his praying shawl bent
over his crabbed book, without a sense of under-
standing.

On the other hand, one of the most pitiful
periods in the drama of the much-praised young
American who attempts to rise in life, is the time
when his educational requirements seem to have
locked him up and made him rigid. He fancies
himself shut off from his uneducated family and
misunderstood by his friends. He is bowed down
by his mental accumulations and often gets no
farther than to carry them through life as a great
burden, and not once does he obtain a glimpse of
the delights of knowledge.

The teacher in a Settlement is constantly put
upon his mettle to discover methods of instruction
which shall make knowledge quickly available to
his pupils, and I should like here to pay my tribute
of admiration to the dean of our educational de-
partment, Miss Landsberg, and to the many men
and women who every winter come regularly to

438 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

Hull-House, putting untiring energy into the end-
less task of teaching the newly arrived immigrant
the first use of a language of which he has such
desperate need. Even a meager knowledge of
English may mean an opportunity to work in a
factory versus nonemployment, or it may mean
a question of life or death when a sharp com-
mand must be understood in order to avoid the
danger of a descending crane.

In response to a demand for an education
which should be immediately available, classes
have been established and grown apace in cook-
ing, dressmaking, and millinery. A girl who at-
tends them will often say that she "expects to
marry a workingman next spring," and because
she has worked in a factory so long she knows
"little about a house." Sometimes classes are
composed of young matrons of like factory ex-
periences. I recall one of them whose husband
had become so desperate after two years of her
unskilled cooking that he had threatened to desert
her and go where he could get "decent food," as
she confided to me in a tearful interview, when
she followed my advice to take the Hull-House
courses in cooking, and at the end of six months
reported a united and happy home.

Two distinct trends are found in response to
these classes ; the first is for domestic training,
and the other is for trade teaching which shall
enable the poor little milliner and dressmaker

SOCIALIZED EDUCATION

439

apprentices to shorten the two years of errand
running which is supposed to teach them their
trade.

The beginning of trade instruction has been
already evolved in connection with the Hull-
House Boys' club. The ample Boys' club build-
ing presented to Hull-House three years ago by
one. of our trustees has afforded well-equipped
shops for work in wood, iron, and brass ; for
smithing in
copper and tin;
for commercial
photography,
for printing,
for telegraphy,
and electrical
construction.
These shops
have been filled
with bovs who
are eager for that which seems to give them a
clew to the industrial life all about them. These
classes meet twice a week and are taught by in-
telligent workingmen who apparently give the
boys what they want better than do the strictly
professional teachers. While these classes in no
sense provide a trade training, they often enable a
boy to discover his aptitude and help him in the
selection of what he 'Svants to be" by reducing
the trades to embryonic forms. The factories are

440 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

so complicated that the boy brought in contact
with them, unless he has some preliminary prepa-
ration, is apt to become confused. In pedagogical
terms, he loses his "power of orderly reaction"
and is often so discouraged or so overstimulated in
his very first years of factory life that his future
usefulness is seriously impaired.

One of Chicago's most significant experiments in
the direction of correlating the schools with actual
industry was for several years carried on in a
public school building situated near Hull-House,
in which the bricklayers' apprentices were taught
eight hours a day in special classes during the
non-bricklaying season. This early public school
venture anticipated the very successful arrange-
ment later carried on in Cincinnati, in Pittsburg,
and in Chicago itself, whereby a group of boys
at work in a factory alternate month by month
with another group who are in school and are
thus intelligently conducted into the complicated
processes of modern industry. But for a certain
type of boy who has been demoralized by the
constant change and excitement of street life,
even these apprenticeship classes are too strenu-
ous, and he has to be lured into the path of knowl-
edge by all sorts of appeals.

It sometimes happens that boys are held in the
Hull-House classes for weeks by their desire for
the excitement of placing burglar alarms under the
door mats. But to enable the possessor of even a

SOCIALIZED EDUCATION 441

little knowledge to thus play with it, is to decoy his
feet at least through the first steps of the long,
hard road of learning, although even in this, the
teacher must proceed warily. A typical street boy
who was utterly absorbed in a wood-carving class,
abruptly left never to return when he was told
to use some simple calculations in the laying out
of the points. He evidently scented the approach
of his old enemy, arithmetic, and fled the field.
On the other hand, we have come across many
cases in which boys have vainly tried to secure
such opportunities for themselves. During the
trial of a boy of ten recently arrested for truancy,
it developed that he had spent many hours watch-
ing the electrical construction in a downtown
building, and many others in the public library
'^ reading about electricity." Another boy who
was taken from school early, when his father lost
both of his legs in a factory accident, tried in
vain to find a place for himself "with machinery."
He was declared too small for any such position,
and for four years worked as an errand boy, during
which time he steadily turned in his unopened
pay envelope for the use of the household. At
the end of the fourth year the boy disappeared,
to the great distress of his invalid father and his
poor mother whose day washings became the
sole support of the family. He had beaten his
way to Kansas City, hoping ''they wouldn't be
so particular there about a fellow's size." He came

442 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

back at the end of six weeks because he felt sorry
for his mother who, aroused at last to a realiza-
tion of his unbending purpose, applied for help to
the Juvenile Protective Association. They found
a position for the boy in a machine shop and an
opportunity for evening classes.

Out of the fifteen hundred members of the
Hull-House Boys' club, hundreds seem to respond
only to the opportunities for recreation, and many
of the older ones apparently care only for the
bowling and the billiards. And yet tournaments
and match games under supervision and regulated
hours are a great advance over the sensual and
exhausting pleasures to be found so easily outside
the club. These organized sports readily connect
themselves with the Hull-House gymnasium and
with all those enthusiasms which are so mys-
teriously aroused by athletics.

Our gymnasium has been filled with large and
enthusiastic classes for eighteen years in spite of
the popularity of dancing and other possible sub-
stitutes, while the Saturday evening athletic con-
tests have become a feature of the neighborhood.
The Settlement strives for that type of gymnastics
which is at least partly a matter of character, for
that training which presupposes abstinence and
the curbing of impulse, as well as for those ath-
letic contests in which the mind of the contestant
must be vigilant to keep the body closely to the
rules of the game. As one sees in rhythmic motion

SOCIALIZED EDUCATION 443

the slim bodies of a class of lads, "that scrupulous
and uncontaminate purity of form which recom-
mended itself even to the Greeks as befitting
messengers from the gods, if such messengers
should come, " one offers up in awkward prosaic
form the very essence of that old prayer, '^ Grant
them with feet so light to pass through life."
But while the glory stored up for Olympian win-
ners was at most a handful of parsley, an ode,
fame for family and city, on the other hand,
when the men and boys from the Hull-House
gymnasium bring back their cups and medals,
one's mind is filled with something like foreboding
in the reflection that too much success may lead
the winners into that professionalism which is so
associated with betting and so close to pugilism.
Candor, however, compels me to state that a long
acquaintance with the acrobatic folk who have
to do with the circus, a large number of whom
practice in our gymnasium every winter, has raised
our estimate of that profession.

Young people who work long hours at sedentary
occupations, factories and offices, need perhaps
more than anything else the freedom and ease to
be acquired from a symmetrical muscular develop-
ment and are quick to respond to that fellowship
which athletics apparently afford more easily than
anything else. The Greek immigrants form large
classes and are eager to reproduce the remnants
of old methods of wrestling, and other bits of classic

444 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

lore which they still possess, and when one of the
Greeks won a medal in a wrestling match which
represented the championship of the entire city,
it was quite impossible that he should present it to
the Hull-House trophy chest without a classic phrase
which he recited most gravely and charmingly.

It was in connection with a large association of
Greek lads that Hull-House finally lifted its long
restriction against military drill. If athletic con-
tests are the residuum of warfare first waged against
the conqueror without and then against the
tyrants within the State, the modern Greek youth
is still in the first stage so far as his inherited
attitude against the Turk is concerned. Each lad
believes that at any moment he may be called
home to fight this long time enemy of Greece.
With such a genuine motive at hand, it seemed
mere affectation to deny the use of our boys' club
building and gymnasium for organized drill, al-
though happily it forms but a small part of the
activities of the Greek Educational Association.

Having thus confessed to military drill coun-
tenanced if not encouraged at Hull-House, it is
perhaps only fair to relate an early experience of
mine with the "Columbian Guards," an organiza-
tion of the World's Fair summer. Although the
Hull-House squad was organized as the others
were with the motto of a clean city, it was
very anxious for military drill. This request not
only shocked my nonresistant principles, but

SOCIALIZED EDUCATION 445

seemed to afford an opportunity to find a sub-
stitute for the military tactics which were used in
the boys' brigades everywhere, even in those
connected with churches. As the cleaning of the
filthy streets and alleys was the ostensible pur-
pose of the Columbian guards, I suggested to the
boys that we work out a drill with sewer spades,
which with their long narrow blades and shortened
handles were not so unlike bayoneted guns in size,
weight, and general appearance, but that much
of the usual military drill could be readapted.
While I myself was present at the gymnasium to
explain that it was nobler to drill in imitation of
removing disease-breeding filth than to drill in
simulation of warfare ; while I distractedly re-
adapted tales of chivalry to this modern rescuing
of the endangered and distressed, the new drill
went forward in some sort of fashion, but so surely
as I withdrew, the drillmaster would complain
that our troops would first grow self-conscious,
then demoralized and finally flatly refuse to go on.
Throughout the years since the failure of this
Quixotic experiment, I occasionally find one of
these sewer spades in a Hull-House storeroom,
too truncated to be used for its original purpose
and too prosaic to serve the purpose for which it
was bought. I can only look at it in the forlorn
hope that it may foreshadow that piping time
when the weapons of warfare shall be turned into
the implements of civic salvation.

446 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

Before closing this chapter on Socialized Educa-
tion, it is only fair to speak of the education accruing
to the Hull-House residents themselves during
their years of living in what at least purports to
be a center for social and educational activity.

While a certain number of the residents are
primarily interested in charitable administration
and the amelioration which can be suggested only
by those who know actual conditions, there are
other residents identified with the House from its
earlier years to whom the groups of immigrants
make the historic appeal, and who use, not only their
linguistic ability, but all the resource they can com-
mand of travel and reading to qualify themselves
for intelligent living in the immigrant quarter of
the city. I remember one resident lately returned
from a visit in Sicily, who was able to interpret to a
bewildered judge the ancient privilege of a jilted
lover to scratch the cheek of his faithless sweetheart
with the edge of a coin. Although the custom in
America had degenerated into a knife slashing
after the manner of foreign customs here, and al-
though the Sicilian deserved punishment, the inci-
dent was yet lifted out of the slough of mere brutal
assault, and the interpretation won the gratitude of
many Sicilians.

There is no doubt that residents in a Settlement
too often move towards their ends "with hurried
and ignoble gait," putting forth thorns in their
eagerness to bear grapes. It is always easy for

SOCIALIZED EDUCATION

447

those in pursuit of ends which they consider of
overwhelming importance to become themselves
thin and impoverished in spirit and temper, to
gradually develop a dark mistaken eagerness al-

■Ji'

'^'J',*!-^

r

I

f

^ ...::i ..■^MMfW^T'^^'^^ ' <

ternating with fatigue, which supersedes *Hhe great
and gracious ways" so much more congruous
with worthy aims.

Partly because of this universal tendency, partly
because a Settlement shares the perplexities of its
times and is never too dogmatic concerning the

448 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

final truth, the residents would be glad to make the
daily life at the Settlement " conform to every
shape and mode of excellence."
It may not be true

"That the good are always the merry
Save by an evil chance,"

but a Settlement would make clear that one need
not be heartless and flippant in order to be merry,
nor solemn in order to be wise. Therefore quite
as Hull-House tries to redeem billiard tables from
the association of gambling, and dancing from the
temptations of the public dance halls, so it would
associate with a life of upright purpose those more
engaging qualities which in the experience of the
neighborhood are too often connected with dubious
aims.

Throughout the history of Hull-House many
inquiries have been made concerning the religion
of the residents, and the reply that they are as di-
versified in belief and in the ardor of the inner life
as any like number of people in a college or similar
group, apparently does not carry conviction. I
recall that after a house for men residents had been
opened on Polk Street and the residential force at
Hull-House numbered twenty, we made an effort
to come together on Sunday evenings in a household
service, hoping thus to express our moral unity in
spite of the fact that we represented many creeds.
But although all of us reverently knelt when the

SOCIALIZED EDUCATION 449

High Church resident read the evening service and
bowed our heads when the evangelical resident led
in prayer after his chapter, and although we sat
respectfully through the twilight when a resident
read her favorite passages from Plato and another
from Abt Vogler, we concluded at the end of the
winter that this was not religious fellowship and
that we did not care for another reading club. So
it was reluctantly given up, and we found that it
was quite as necessary to come together on the basis
of the deed and our common aim inside the house-
hold as it was in the neighborhood itself. I once
had a conversation on the subject with the warden
of Oxford House, who kindly invited me to the even-
ing service held for the residents in a little chapel
on the top floor of the Settlement. All the resi-
dents were High Churchmen to whom the service
was an important and reverent part of the day.
Upon my reply to a query of the warden that the
residents of Hull-House could not come together
for religious worship because there were among
us Jews, Roman Catholics, English Churchmen,
Dissenters, and a few agnostics, and that we had
found unsatisfactory the diluted form of worship
which we could carry on together, he replied that
it must be most difl[icult to work with a group so
diversified, for he depended upon the evening
service to clear away any difliculties which the day
had involved and to bring the residents to a religious
consciousness of their common aim. I replied that

2 G

4SO TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

this diversity of creed was part of the situation
in American Settlements, as it was our task to live
in a neighborhood of many nationalities and faiths,
and that it might be possible that among such
diversified people it was better that the Settle-
ment corp should also represent varying religious
beliefs.

A wise man has told us that "men are once for
all so made that they prefer a rational world to
believe in and to live in," but that it is no easy
matter to find a world rational as to its intellectual,
aesthetic, moral, and practical aspects. Certainly
it is no easy matter if the place selected is of the
very sort where the four aspects are apparently
furthest from perfection, but an undertaking resem-
bling this is what the Settlement gradually becomes
committed to, as its function is revealed through the
reaction on its consciousness of its own experiences.
Because of this fourfold undertaking, the Settle-
ment has gathered into residence people of widely
diversified tastes and interests and in Hull-House,
at least, the group has been surprisingly permanent.
The majority of the present corp of forty residents
support themselves by their business and profes-
sional occupations in the city giving only their
leisure time to Settlement undertakings. This in
itself tends to continuity of residence and has
certain advantages. Among the present staff of
whom the larger number have been in residence for
more than twelve years, there are the secretary of

SOCIALIZED EDUCATION 451

the City club, two practicing physicians, several
attorneys, newspaper men, business men, teachers,
scientists, artists, musicians, lecturers in the School
of Civics and Philanthropy, officers in The Juve-
nile Protective Association and in The League for
the Protection of Immigrants, a visiting nurse, a
sanitary inspector and others.

We have also worked out during our years of
residence a plan of living which may be called
cooperative, for the families and individuals who
rent the Hull-House apartments have the use of
the central kitchen and dining room so far as they
care for them ; many of them work for hours every
week in the studios and shops ; the theater and
drawing-rooms are available for such social or-
ganization as they care to form ; the entire group
of thirteen buildings is heated and lighted from a
central plant. During the years, the common
human experiences have gathered about the House ;
funeral services have been held there, marriages
and christenings, and many memories hold us to
each other as well as to our neighbors. Each
resident, of course, carefully defrays his own ex-
penses, and his relations to his fellow residents are
not unlike those of a college professor to his col-
leagues. The depth and strength of his relation
to the neighborhood must depend very largely
upon himself and upon the genuine friendships he
has been able to make. His relation to the city
as a whole comes largely through his identification

452 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

with those groups who are carrying forward the re-
forms which a Settlement neighborhood so sadly
needs and with which residence has made him
familiar.

Life In the Settlement discovers above all what
has been called "the extraordinary pliability of
human nature," and It seems Impossible to set
any bounds to the moral capabilities which might
unfold under Ideal civic and educational con-
ditions. But in order to obtain these conditions,
the Settlement recognizes the need of cooperation,
both with the radical and the conservative, and
from the very nature of the case the Settlement
cannot limit Its friends to any one political party
or economic school.

The Settlement casts aside none of those things
which cultivated men have come to consider reason-
able and goodly, but It Insists that those belong
as well to that great body of people who, because
of toilsome and underpaid labor, are unable to
procure them for themselves. Added to this Is a
profound conviction that the common stock of
intellectual enjoyment should not be difficult of
access because of the economic position of him who
would approach it, that those "best results of
civilization" upon which depend the finer and freer
aspects of living must be Incorporated into our
common life and have free mobility through all
elements of society If we would have our democracy
endure.

SOCIALIZED EDUCATION

453

The educational activities of a Settlement, as
well as Its philanthropic, civic, and social under-
takings, are but differing manifestations of the
attempt to socialize democracy, as Is the very exist-
ence of the Settlement itself.

INDEX

Abbott, Grace, 222.
Addams, John H.,

early impressions of, i.

imitation of, 9.

social views of, 13.

religious discussion with, 14.

discussion on death with, 20.

cosmopolitanism of, 21.

sense of fellowship with, 22.

his estimate of Lincoln, 23.

member of State Senate, 30.

letters of Lincoln to, 31.

address to Old Settlers' meeting, 35.

death of, 52.
Alcott, Bronson, 50.
Altgelt, Governor, 206, 207.
x\narchist,

Sunday school, 91.

his solution of injustice, 180.

a safe type of, 185.

newspaper editor arrested, 403, 406.

attitude of Chicago police toward,

413-
Anarchy, cure for, 178.

and Hull- House, 412.

attitude of public toward, 407, 411.

dying down of, 412.
Andover House, 113.
Arbitration Law, 218.
Aristotle, quotation from, 45.
Averbuch, 413.
Azeff, 421.

B

Ball, Sidney, 37.
Barnett, Canon,

reasons for Living in a Settlement,
112.

founder of Toynbee Hall, 121.

warden of Toynbee Hall, 139.

views on tainted money, 140.

visit to Hull-House, 292.

art exhibit opened by, 371.
Benedict, Enella, 373.
Berger, Victor, 194.
Bermondsey Settlement, 266.
Besant, Sir Walter, 121, 365.
Blaisdell, Professor of Beloit College,

52, 53-
Blatchford, Robert, 264.
Board of Education,

compulsory department of, 300.

Jane Addams member of, 301.

conflict with Teachers' Federation,

328-338-
Jane Addams, chairman School
Management Committee of,

335-
newspaper attitude toward, 338,

423-

Booth, Charles, 163.

Bourtzeff, Vladirir, 421.

Bowen, Lou'se de Koven,

president of Hull-House Woman's

Club, 362, 364.
president of the Juvenile Protec-
tive Association, 365.

" Bread Labor," 271, 276.

Breckinridge, Sophronisba P., 306.

Breshkovsky, Mme., 402,

Britton, Mrs. Gertrude Howe, 300,
301.

Browning, Elizabeth, 22.

Browning, Robert, 47.

Browning House, 265.

BuU fight, 85-86.

Bums, John, 263, 294, 295.

455

4S6

INDEX

Caird, Edward, 39, 40.
Carlyle, Thomas,

"Heroes and Hero Worship," 36.

quotation from, 45.

" Frederick the Great," 65.
Catacombs, study of, 77.

lectures on, 8^.

an interpretation of early Chris-
tianity, 84.
Cathedrals,

at Ulm, 82-83.

of Humanit}'-, 83, 149.
Charity Organization Society, 158,

161,307.
Chicago Arts and Crafts Society,

375-
Chicago Federation of Labor, 225.
Chicago Pohce, methods of, 414.
Chicago School of Civics and Philan-
thropy, 304.
Chicago Woman's Trades-Union

League, 227.
Child Labor, 198-200.

investigations, 201.

annual meeting of National Com-
mittee, 303.

Committee on, 357.
Child Labor Law,

in Illinois, 199, 201, 303.

hardship worked by, 205.

attitude of mothers toward, 205.

bitter opposition to, 205.
Christian Socialists, 190.
Church and the workingman, 191.
City Gardens Association, 252.
City Homes Association, 294, 304.
City Missionaries, 91.
Civic Cooperation,

public baths, 313.

public librar}% 314.

and Hull-House Men's Club, 315.

paying, 320,

Nineteenth Ward Improvement
Association, 321.

need of, 323.
Civic Federation, 160, 213.
Civic significance of industrial condi-
tions, 195.
Civil Service, 289, 312, 316.

methods, 324.
Civil War, recollections of, 23-27.
Commonwealth Colony, 277-279.
Consumers' League, 210.
Culver, Miss Helen, 93, 94.

D

Davidson, Thomas, 89, 90.
Death,

first contact with, 19, 20.

protest against shielding children
from knowledge of, 20, 21.

as a universal experience, 53.
Denver priest, murder of, 424.
De Quincey,

influence of, 46.

"Vision of Sudden Death," 70.
Dewey, John, 236, 237.

lectures on social psychology, 435.
DuBois, Professor W. E. B., 255.
Dudley, Helena, 114.
Dukhobors, 280.
Dunne, Mayor, 329, 330, 332, 337,

423-
Diirer, Albrecht, his social message,

75-

E

East London market on Saturday

night, 66-68.
Economic discussion, 177, 188.
Economic experiments, 79-81.
Education Bill, Enghsh, 263.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 50.
Employment bureaus, State, 221, 222.
Extradition, 416,

INDEX

4S7

Factory law, :^:^, 201, 202.

eight-hour clause, 204.

associated with radicalism, 206.

Sulzer Bill, 209.
Free speech, defense of, 185.
Fremantle, Canon, 87.

Gage, Lyman, 178.
Garbage collecting,

investigation of, 281.

death rate and, 284.

civil ser\'ice and, 287, 289.

neighborhood women's attitude
toward, 287.

result of, 288.
Garbage inspector, Jane Addams'

experiences as, 285.
Garibaldi, 256, 424.
George, Henry, 181.
Gershuni, 419.
Gillette, Dr., 56.
Giordano Bruno Club, 424.
Gladden, Washington, 141.
Gorki's visit to America, 421.

newspaper attitude toward, 422.
Gorst, Sir John, 263.
Green, Thomas Hill, 37.

H

Halsted Street, description of, 97.
Hamilton, Ahce, 297, 302, 305.
Hardie, James Keir, 263.
Harrison, Frederic, 193.
Haymarket riot, 177, 178, 206.
Henrotin, Mrs. Ellen, 202.
Herron, Professor, 189.
Hill, Octavia, 264.
Hobson, John, 265.
Housing conditions,

pubHc authorities and, 98, 100.

investigation of, 289.

congested, 294-296.
Howells, Wm. D., 307.
Hull, Charles J., 93.
Hull-House,

attempt to bribe, 33.

Lincoln as inspiration to, 31.

reputation for irreligion, 84, 150.

theory of, 91.

renting of, 93.

history of, 93.

furnishing of, 94.

first guest of, 96.

neighborhood of, 98.

first resident of, loi.

first kindergarten teacher at, 102.

first kindergarten at, 103.

Old Settlers' Party, 107.

neighborhood services of, 109.

motives for opening, 125.

first coffee house at, 128, 131, 132.

Cooperative Coal Association, 134,
144.

test of, 137.

art at, 148.

ideal of Hull-House, 149.

finances of, 150.

residents of, loi, 131, 151, 177, 194,
196, 208, 210, 217, 273, 311, 386,

449, 450-
day nursery at, 169.
establishment of, 177.
reputation for radicalism, 183.
and theorists, 194, 196.
unions organized at, 212.
and law enforcement, 295.
celebration of national events at,

256-258.
playground of, 290-291.
attitude of, misunderstood, 299,

407, 423, 425.
post-office at, 302.
in politics, 315, 318, 344.
influence on individuals, 346.

458

INDEX

Hull House, — Contimied.
pleasures at, 348.
art exhibitions at, 371.
studio at, 373.
shops at, 375.
concerts at, 376.
chorus, 377.

music school, 377, 380, 395.
theater, 387, 393, 395.
newspaper attack on, 402.
college extension, 428, 429.
summer school, 428.
gymnasium, 442,
military drill at, 444.
economic lectures at, 429.
University Extension at, 429.
Sunday evening at, 430.
classes at, 435, 438.
religion at, 448.
cooperative living at, 451.
Hull-House Buildings,
Jane Club, 137.
Butler Gallery, 148, 371.
Children's House, 169.
Bowen Hall, 349, 362, 430.
Music School, 378.
Theater, 387,
Boys' Club, 439.
Gymnasium, 442.
Hull-House Clubs,

"The Young Heroes," 104.

Boys' Club, 105, 442.

Children's Clubs, 105, 106.

Young People's Clubs, 131.

Men's Club, 133, 31 5, 343-

Jane Club, 136, 139, 207.

"The Working People's Social

Science Club," 179, 182, 185,

188, 190, 196.
Eight-Hour Club, 204.
Woman's Club, 284, 288, 355, 357,

362.
Social Clubs, aims of, 342, 366.
standards of, 343, 348.

adaptability of members, 345.

rules of, 349.

value of, 365, 366.
Friendly Club, 361.
Circolo Italiano, 362.
Dramatic Association, 390.
Shakespeare Club, 434.
Hull-House Cooperative Activities,
employment agencies investiga-
tion, 221.
newsboy investigation, 303.
infant mortality, 304.
School of Civics and Philanthropy,

social value of saloons investiga-
tion, 304.

industrial exhibition, 305.

public baths, 313.
Hull-House Investigations,

garbage collection, 284.

housing, 290.

typhoid epidemic, 296.

tuberculosis, 296.

cocaine, 299.

midwifery, 300.

truancy, 300.

children's reading, 301.

fatigue, 301.
Hull-House Labor Museum, 235-245.
"Hull-House ]\Iaps and Papers," 153.
Hull-House theater, 387.

plays given in, 378, 388, 389, 391,

393, 394, 395-
mural decoration of, 396.
Huntington, Father, 181.

Illinois Ten- Hour Law for Women,

227.
Immigrants,

differing creeds and standards of, 39.
contrast between first and second
generation of, 231.

INDEX

459

Immigrants, — Continued.

colonization of, 232.

Italian neighbors, 232, 246, 372.

German neighbors, 233.

Bohemian neighbors, 234, 246.

parents and children, 235, 243,
247.

in the Labor Museum, 240-242.

their contribution to American
life, 246.

public school and, 253, 254.

Greek neighbors, 372.

Hull-House theater and, 388-390.
Ingram, Canon, 265.
International League for Labor Legis-
lation, 230.
Isolation in the city, 117, 360.
Italian agricultural colony, 232.

James, Professor Wm., 308.
Jane Club, 137-139.
Jones, Samuel, 188.
Juvenile Court, 251, 252, 316.
establishment of, 324.
building of, 325.
psychopathic institute of, 327.
cooperation of Hull-House Wo-
man's Club with, 355.
Juvenile Protective Association,
yoimgest offenders, and, 250.
cooperation with Hull-House, 323.
organization of, 325.
cooperation with Druggists' Asso-
ciation, Saloonkeepers' Pro-
tective Association, Retail
Grocers' Association, Associa-
tion of Department Store
Managers, Five-Cent Thea-
ters, 326.
and the abnormal child, 327.
and the Hull-House Woman's
Club, 364.

and the Five-Cent Theater, 386.
application to, 442.

K

Kelley, Florence, 201.

and child labor, 201.

first factory inspector, 207.

State factory inspector, 310.
Keyser, Mary, 94.
Kidd, Benjamin, 194.
Korolenko, 266.
Kropotkin, Peter, 402, 403, 405.

Lathrop, Julia C,

at Plymouth, 114.

memlDer of State Board of Chari-
ties, 311, 312.

Plato Club, 435.
League for the Protection of Immi-
grants, 222.
Liebknecht, 264.
Lincoln, Abraham,

death of, 23.

letters from, 31.

pictures of, 31.

inspiration of, 32.

admiration of contemporaries, 34.

"appreciation of," 36.

his power of utilizing past ex-
periences, 37.

interpretation, 40.

and democracy, 42.
Lloyd, Henry D., 142.
London County Council, 262.
Longfellow, " Golden Legend," 387.

M

Mason, Colonel, 92.
Masurek, Professor, 234.

460

INDEX

Maude, Mr. and Mrs. Aylmer, 267,

280.
Maurice, Frederick Denison, ^8.
Marx, Karl, daughter, 264.
Mazzini, Joseph,

death of, 21.

influence of, 77,

hundredth anniversary of birth
of, 257, 426.
McDowell, Mary, 223, 306.
McKinley, President,

assassination of, 403.

assassin of, 408, 409.
Military drill,

Greek, 444.

Columbian Guards, 444.
Mill,

situation of, 3.

early associations with, 9-12.

old Settlers' meeting beside the, 35.
Mill, John Stuart, 189.
Missionaries,

classmates, 48.

at Hull-House, 49.

pressure at college, 49.
Morley, John, 193.
Municipal Voters' League, 322.
Municipal Franchise for Women, 339.

N

National Woman 's Trades-Union

League, 213.
Neighborly ofi&ces, in early days, 109-

IIO.

Night work for women, 203.
Nineteenth Ward Improvement As-
sociation, 321.
Nonresistance, 273.

O

Oglesby, Governor,
visit of, 30.

Old Settlers' Party, 107.
Oxford,

visit to, 37.

call on Edward Caird at, 39-41.
Oxford House, 265, 449.

Paris Exposition, juror at, 143.
Passion Play at Oberammergau, 391.
Pater, Walter, quotation from, 26.
Peace convention, 308.
Peddlers, Protective Association of

Jewish, 255.
Pelham, Laura Dainty, 364.
Pingree, Governor, 322.
Plato, 53.
Play,

of country children, 16-18.

contrasted with city children, 17.
Plunkett, Sir Horace, 143.
Plutarch's " Lives," 47.
Plymouth, the summer school at,

113-
Port Royalists, 51.
Poverty,

first sight oi,Sj-

in East London, 66-68.

in Europe, 69.

on lUinois farm, 79.

London match girls, 81.

old age and, 154.

bitterness of, 158, 159.

heroism and, 169, 175-176.

tragedies of, 173, 381.

problem of, 307.
Public school and the immigrant,

153-254.
Pullman strike, 137.

weakness revealed by, 213.

class bitterness revealed by, 214-

218.
reaction on Settlements, 228.
Purleigh, colony at, 280.

INDEX

461

R

Race problems, 255, 307,
Recreation, need for, 351.
Richards, Mrs Ellen H., 130.
Rockford, College, 43.

atmosphere of intensity, 44.

attitude toward life at, 45.

De Quincey's "Dreams," 46.

reading at, 47.

class motto, 48.

careers of classmates, 48.

missionary appeal at, 49.

evangelical pressure at, 49-50.

Bronson Alcott's lecture at, 50.

Greek testament reading at, 51.

daily regime at, 51.

philosophical reflections at, 58.

deciding on career at, 61.

graduating essay, 61.

veneration for science at, 61-6^

degree of B.A., 63.
Rome, the enchantment of, 77,

second visit to, 84.
Rudovitz, Christian, 416.
Ruskin, John,

road-building episode of, 38-39.

reading of, 47.

Schurz, Carl, 36, 418.
Scudder, Vida D., 114.
Settlement,

meaning of the term, 41.

first plan of, 85.

collective Living at, 90.

subjective need for, 115.

originated in England, 121.

spiritual force in, 1 24.

analysis of, 125.

attitude toward, 137.

no religious instruction in, 141.

humanitarianism of, 152.

relation to neighbors, 164.
functions of, 166-167, 41 1-
distrust of, 184, 448.
and Chicago Woman's Trades-
Union League, 227.
and strikes, 228.
and the International League of

Labor Legislation, 230.
teaching in, 427.
as interpreters, 411, 446.
Small parks, 132, 351.
Smith, Eleanor, 377.
Smith, Mary Rozet, 262, 263, 267,

274, 277.
Social Extension Committee of Hull-
House Woman's Club, 358,
361.
Social maladjustment, 120, 177, 259,

409.
Social obligation in America, sense

of, 367-370.
Social theor>' and practice, 276.
Socialism, a cure for toothache,
179.
inability to accept tenets of, 186.
Settlements and, 229.
Socialists,

methods of attack of, 57.
enthusiasm of, 180.
devoted efforts of, 186.
social responsibility of, 187.
Starr, Ellen Gates, 87, 89, 94.
reading from George Eliot, loi.
president Public School Art Society,

313-
pupil of Cobden-Sanderson, 376.
Dante and Bro\\Tiing Classes of,

435-
State Board of Conciliation and

Arbitration, 214.
Stead, Herbert, 266.
Stead, Wm. T., 160.
Stevens, Alzina Parsons, 207, 323,

324-

462

INDEX

Strikes,

London match girls, 81.

shoe factory, 213-218.

typographical, 191.

Pullman, 213-218.

garment workers, 218.

cutters, 219.

Chicago stock yards, 223, 228, 229.

teamsters, 224, 228, 434.

value of, 224.
Swing, Professor David, 88.

"Tainted money," 138-141.

Taylor, Dr. Graham, 304.

Teachers' Federation, law suit of, 328,

331-

promotional examinations opposed
by, 331.

affiliated with Chicago Federation
of Labor, 332.

demand for self-government, 335.
Theater and life, popularity of, 383.

Five-Cent, 386.

functions of, 391.
Tillet, Ben, 263.
Tolstoy, Count Leo,

"The Snare of Preparation," 88.

indictment of Moscow, 194.

"what to do," 260-262.

visit to, 267-273.

and nonresistance, 273.

bread labor, 274.

colonies, 277.

"Resurrection" fund, 280.
Tomlins, Wm., 377.
Toynbee, Arnold, 37, 41.
Toynbee Hall, 87, 89, 90, 113, 121,

139, 371-
Trades-Unions,

arbitration for, 59-60.
attempt at bettering conditions,
189.

and sweating system, 202, 208.

garment makers, 202, 208.

label, 209.

women's, 211.

Dorcas Federal Union, 212.

Woman's Union Label League, 212.

National Woman's League, 213.
corruption in, 225.

Scrub Woman's Union, 226.

Settlements and, 227, 228.

tailor's, 305.

and industrial exhibit, 305.
Trevor, John, 152.

Trumbull, Lyman, talk at Hull-
House, 34.

U

Unemployment, 160, 221.
University of Chicago, 140, 182, 429.
University of Chicago Settlement, 223.

Van der Vaart, Harriet, 306.
Visiting Nurse Association, 158, 300.

W

Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 265.
Webb, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney, 265.
Wilmarth, Mrs. Mary, 89.
Wisconsin, University of,

Doctor's Degree, 30.
Woman's Medical College, 65.
Woman's suffrage, 54.

Municipal franchise, 339.

Scandinavian women and, 339.
Woman's Trades-Union League, 227.
Woods, Robert A., 113.
World's Fair,

winter after the, 159-165.

congresses of, 181.
Wyckoff, Walter, 260.

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