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Jane Addams
Twenty Years at Hull House
CHAPTER 6 SUBJECTIVE NECESSITY FOR SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS
The Ethical Culture Societies held a summer school at Ply- mouth, Massachusetts, in 1892, to which they invited several peoplerepresenting the then new Settlement movement, that they mightdiscuss with others the general theme of Philanthropy and SocialProgress.
I venture to produce here parts of a lecture I delivered in Ply- mouth, both because I have found it impossible to formulate withthe same freshness those early motives and strivings, and because,when published with other papers given that summer, it was re-ceived by the Settlement people themselves as a satisfactory state-ment.
I remember on golden summer afternoon during the sessions of the summer school that several of us met on the shores of a pond ina pine wood a few miles from Plymouth, to discuss our new move-ment. The natural leader of the group was Robert A. Woods. Hehad recently returned from a residence in Toynbee Hall, London, toopen Andover House in Boston, and had just issued a book, “Eng-lish Social Movements,” in which he had gathered together and fo-cused the many 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 As-sociation, Miss Julia C. Lathrop and myself from Hull-House. Someof us had numbered our years as far as thirty, and we all carefullyavoided the extravagance of statement which characterizes youth,and yet I doubt if anywhere on the continent that summer could
have been found a group of people more genuinely interested in so-cial development or more sincerely convinced that they had found aclue by which the conditions in crowded cities might be understoodand 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 en-ergy in vows of constancy, as so often happens; and yet it isinteresting to note that of all the people whom I have recalled as theenthusiasts at that little conference have remained attached toSettlements in actual residence for longer or shorter periods eachyear
during
the
eighteen
years
that
have
elapsed
since
then,
although they have also been closely identified as publicists orgovernmental officials with movements outside. It is as if they haddiscovered that the Settlement was too valuable as a method as away of approach to the social question to abandoned, although theyhad long since discovered it was not a “social movement” in itself.This, however, is anticipating the future, whereas the followingpaper on “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements” shouldhave a chance to speak for itself. It is perhaps too late in the day toexpress 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 emo-tion, wherever educated young people are seeking an outlet for thatsentiment for universal brotherhood, which the best spirit of ourtimes is forcing from an emotion into a motive. These young peopleaccomplish little toward the solution of this social problem, andbear the brunt of being cultivated into unnourished, oversensitivelives. They have been shut off from the common labor by whichthey live which is a great source of moral and physical health. Theyfeel a fatal want of harmony between their theory and their lives, alack of coordination between thought and action. I think it is hardfor us to realize how seriously many of them are taking to the no-tion of human brotherhood, how eagerly they long to give tangibleexpression to the democratic ideal. These young men and women,longing to socialize their democracy, are animated by certain hopeswhich may be thus loosely formulated; that if in a democratic coun-try nothing can be permanently achieved save through the masses
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Twenty Years^ Page 1 of 20
of the people, it will be impossible to establish a higher political lifethan the people themselves crave; that it is difficult to see how thenotion of a higher civic life can be fostered save through commonintercourse; that the blessings which we associate with a life of re-finement and cultivation can be made universal and must be madeuniversal if they are to be permanent; that the good we secure forourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until itis secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life. It iseasier to state these hopes than to formulate the line of motives,which I believe to constitute the trend of the subjective pressuretoward the Settlement. There is something primordial about thesemotives, but I am perhaps overbold in designating them as a greatdesire to share the race life. We all bear traces of the starvationstruggle which for so long made up the life of the race. Our veryorganism holds memories and glimpses of that long life of our an-cestors, which still goes on among so many of our contemporaries.Nothing so deadens the sympathies and shrivels the power of en-joyment as the persistent keeping away from the great opportuni-ties for helpfulness and a continual ignoring of the starvationstruggle which makes up the life of at least half the race. To shutone’s self away from that half of the race life is to shut one’s selfaway from the most vital part of it; it is to live out but half the hu-manity to which we have been born heir and to use but half our fac-ulties. We have all had longings for a fuller life which should in-clude the use of these faculties. These longings are the physicalcomplement of the “Intimations of Immortality,” on which no odehas yet been written. To portray these would be the work of a poet,and it is hazardous for any but a poet to attempt it.
You may remember the forlorn feeling which occasionally seizes you when you arrive early in the morning a stranger in a great city:the stream of laboring people goes past you as you gaze through theplate-glass window of your hotel; you see hard working men liftinggreat burdens; you hear the driving and jostling of huge carts andyour heart sinks with a sudden sense of futility. The door opens be-hind you and you turn to the man who brings you in your breakfastwith a quick sense of human fellowship. You find yourself prayingthat 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 bewithheld from you. You turn helplessly to the waiter and feel that itwould be almost grotesque to claim from him the sympathy youcrave because civilization has placed you apart, but you resent yourposition with a sudden sense of snobbery. Literature is full of por-trayals of these glimpses: they come to shipwrecked men on rafts;they overcome the differences of an incongruous multitude when inthe presence of a great danger or when moved by a common enthu-siasm. They are not, however, confined to such moments, and if wewere in the habit of telling them to each other, the recital would beas long as the tales of children are, when they sit down on the greengrass and confide to each other how many times they have remem-bered that they lived once before. If these childish tales are the stir-ring of inherited impressions, just so surely is the other the strivingof inherited powers.
“It is true that there is nothing after disease, indigence and a sense of guilt, so fatal to health and to life itself as the want of aproper outlet for active faculties.” I have seen young girls suffer andgrow sensibly lowered in vitality in the first years after they leaveschool. In our attempt then to give a girl pleasure and freedom fromcare we succeed, for the most part, in making her pitifully miserable.She finds “life” so different from what she expected it to be. She isbesotted with innocent little ambitions, and does not understandthis apparent waste of herself, this elaborate preparation, if no workis provided for her. There is a heritage of noble obligation whichyoung 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 it-self. The wrong to them begins even farther back, when we restrainthe first childish desires for “doing good”, and tell them that theymust wait until they are older and better fitted. We intimate thatsocial obligation begins at a fixed date, forgetting that it begins atbirth itself. We treat them as children who, with strong-growinglimbs, are allowed to use their legs but not their arms, or whoselegs are daily carefully exercised that after a while their arms maybe put to high use. We do this in spite of the protest of the best edu-
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young people feel nervously the need of putting theory into action,and respond quickly to the Settlement form of activity.
Other motives which I believe make toward the Settlement are the result of a certain renaissance going forward in Christianity.The impulse to share the lives of the poor, the desire to make socialservice, irrespective of propaganda, express the spirit of Christ, is asold as Christianity itself. We have no proof from the records them-selves that the early Roman Christians, who strained their simpleart to the point of grotesqueness in their eagerness to record a“good news” on the walls of the catacombs, considered this goodnews a religion. Jesus had no set of truths labeled Religious. On thecontrary, his doctrine was that all truth is one, that the appropria-tion of it is freedom. His teaching had no dogma to mark it off fromtruth and action in general. He himself called it a revelation--a life.These early Roman Christians received the Gospel message, acommand to love all men, with a certain joyous simplicity. The im-age of the Good Shepherd is blithe and gay beyond the gentlestshepherd of Greek mythology; the hart no longer pants, but rushesto the water brooks. The Christians looked for the continuous reve-lation, but believed what Jesus said, that this revelation, to be re-tained and made manifest, must be put into terms of action; that ac-tion is the only medium man has for receiving and appropriatingtruth; 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’saction is found in his social relationships in the way in which heconnects with his fellows; that his motives for action are the zealand affection with which he regards his fellows. By this simple proc-ess was created a deep enthusiasm for humanity; which regardedman as at once the organ and the object of revelation; and by thisprocess came about the wonderful fellowship, the true democracy ofthe early Church, that so captivates the imagination. The earlyChristians were preeminently nonresistant. They believed in love asa cosmic force. There was no iconoclasm during the minor peace ofthe Church. They did not yet denounce nor tear down temples, norpreach the end of the world. They grew to a mighty number, but itnever
occurred
to
them,
either
in
their
weakness
or
in
their
strength, to regard other men for an instant as their foes or asaliens. The spectacle of the Christians loving all men was the mostastounding Rome had ever seen. They were eager to sacrifice them-selves for the weak, for children, and for the aged; they identifiedthemselves with slaves and did not avoid the plague; they longed toshare the common lot that they might receive the constant revela-tion. It was a new treasure which the early Christians added to thesum of all treasures, a joy hitherto unknown in the world--the joy offinding the Christ which lieth in each man, but which no man canunfold save in fellowship. A happiness ranging from the heroic tothe pastoral enveloped them. They were to possess a revelation aslong as life had new meaning to unfold, new action to propose.
I believe that there is a distinct turning among many young men and women toward this simple acceptance of Christ’s message.They resent the assumption that Christianity is a set of ideas whichbelong to the religious consciousness, whatever that may be. Theyinsist that it cannot be proclaimed and instituted apart from the so-cial life of the community and that it must seek a simple and naturalexpression in the social organism itself. The Settlement movementis only one manifestation of that wider humanitarian movementwhich throughout Christendom, but pre-eminently in England, isendeavoring 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 actionthe spirit of Christ. Certain it is that spiritual force is found in theSettlement movement, and it is also true that this force must beevoked and must be called into play before the success of any Set-tlement is assured. There must be the overmastering belief that allthat is noblest in life is common to men as men, in order to accentu-ate the likenesses and ignore the differences which are found amongthe people whom the Settlement constantly brings into juxtaposi-tion. It may be true, as the Positivists insist, that the very religiousfervor of man can be turned into love for his race, and his desire fora future life into content to live in the echo of his deeds; Paul’s for-
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mula of seeking for the Christ which lieth in each man and foundingour likenesses on him, seems a simpler formula to many of us.
In a thousand voices singing the Hallelujah Chorus in Handel’s “Messiah,” it is possible to distinguish the leading voices, but thedifferences of training and cultivation between them and the voicesin the chorus, are lost in the unity of purpose and in the fact thatthey are all human voices lifted by a high motive. This is a weak il-lustration of what a Settlement attempts to do. It aims, in a meas-ure, 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 re-sults of cultivation and training; but it receives in exchange for themusic of isolated voices the volume and strength of the chorus. It isquite impossible for me to say in what proportion or degree the sub-jective necessity which led to the opening of Hull-House combinedthe three trends: first, the desire to interpret democracy in socialterms; secondly, the impulse beating at the very source of our lives,urging us to aid in the race progress; and, thirdly, the Christianmovement toward humanitarianism. It is difficult to analyze a livingthing; the analysis is at best imperfect. Many more motives mayblend with the three trends; possibly the desire for a new form ofsocial
success due
to
the
nicety
of
imagination,
which
refuses
worldly pleasures unmixed with the joys of self-sacrifice; possibly alove of approbation, so vast that it is not content with the trebleclapping of delicate hands, but wishes also to hear the bass notesfrom toughened palms, may mingle with these.
The Settlement then, is an experimental effort to aid in the solu- tion of the social and industrial problems which are engendered bythe modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that theseproblems are not confined to any one portion of a city. It is an at-tempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one endof society and the destitution at the other; but it assumes that thisoveraccumulation and destitution is most sorely felt in the thingsthat pertain to social and educational privileges. From its very na-ture it can stand for no political or social propaganda. It must, in asense, give the warm welcome of an inn to all such propaganda, ifperchance one of them be found an angel. The only thing to bedreaded in the Settlement is that it lose its flexibility, its power of
quick adaptation, its readiness to change its methods as its envi-ronment may demand. It must be open to conviction and must havea deep and abiding sense of tolerance. It must be hospitable andready for experiment. It should demand from its residents a scien-tific patience in the accumulation of facts and the steady holding oftheir sympathies as one of the best instruments for that accumula-tion. It must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is onthe solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waverwhen the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or anidiot boy. Its residents must be emptied of all conceit of opinion andall self-assertion, and ready to arouse and interpret the public opin-ion of their neighborhood. They must be content to live quietly sideby side with their neighbors, until they grow into a sense of rela-tionship and mutual interests. Their neighbors are held apart by dif-ferences of race and language which the residents can more easilyovercome. They are bound to see the needs of their neighborhood asa whole, to furnish data for legislation, and to use their influence tosecure it. In short, residents are pledged to devote themselves to theduties of good citizenship and to the arousing of the social energieswhich too largely lie dormant in every neighborhood given over toindustrialism. They are bound to regard the entire life of their cityas organic, to make an effort to unify it, and to protest against itsover-differentiation.
It is always easy to make all philosophy point one particular moral and all history adorn one particular tale; but I may be for-given the reminder that the best speculative philosophy sets forththe solidarity of the human race; that the highest moralists havetaught that without the advance and improvement of the whole, noman can hope for any lasting improvement in his own moral or ma-terial individual condition; and that the subjective necessity for So-cial Settlements is therefore identical with that necessity, whichurges us on toward social and individual salvation.
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my guests, the mother of many scattered children, whose one brightspot through all the dreary years had been the wedding feast of herson Mike,--a feast which had become transformed through longmeditation into the nectar and ambrosia of the very gods. As afarewell fling before she went “in” again, we dined together uponchicken pie, but it did not taste like the “the chicken pie at Mike’swedding” and she was disappointed after all.
Even death itself sometimes fails to bring the dignity and seren- ity which one would fain associate with old age. I recall the dyinghour of one old Scotchwoman whose long struggle to “keep respect-able” had so embittered her that her last words were gibes andtaunts for those who were trying to minister to her. “So you came inyourself this morning, did you? You only sent things yesterday. Iguess you knew when the doctor was coming. Don’t try to warmmy feet with anything but that old jacket that I’ve got there; it be-longed to my boy who was drowned at sea nigh thirty years ago,but it’s warmer yet with human feelings than any of your damnedcharity hot-water bottles.” Suddenly the harsh gasping voice wasstilled in death and I awaited the doctor’s coming shaken and horri-fied.
The lack of municipal regulation already referred to was, in the early days of Hull-House, paralleled by the inadequacy of the chari-table efforts of the city and an unfounded optimism that there wasno real poverty among us. Twenty years ago there was no CharityOrganization Society in Chicago and the Visiting Nurse Associationhad not yet begun its beneficial work, while the relief societies, al-though conscientiously administered, were inadequate in extent andantiquated in method.
As social reformers gave themselves over to discussion of gen- eral principles, so the poor invariably accused poverty itself of theirdestruction. I recall a certain Mrs. Moran, who was returning onerainy day from the office of the county agent with her arms full ofpaper bags containing beans and flour which alone lay between herchildren and starvation. Although she had no money she boarded astreet car in order to save her booty from complete destruction bythe rain, and as the burst bags dropped “flour on the ladies’ dresses”
and ““beans all over the place,” she was sharply reprimanded by theconductor, who was the further exasperated when he discovered shehad no fare. He put her off, as she had hoped he would, almost infront of Hull-House. She related to us her state of mind as shestepped off the car and saw the last of her wares disappearing; sheadmitted she forgot the proprieties and “cursed a little,” but, curi-ously enough, she pronounced her malediction, not against the rainnor the conductor, nor yet against the worthless husband who hadbeen set up to the city prison, but, true to the Chicago spirit of themoment, went to the root of the matter and roundly “cursed pov-erty.”
This spirit of generalization and lack of organization among the charitable forces of the city was painfully revealed in that terriblewinter after the World’s Fair, when the general financial depressionthroughout the country was much intensified in Chicago by thenumbers of unemployed stranded at the close of the exposition.When the first cold weather came the police stations and the verycorridors of the city hall were crowded by men who could afford noother 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 thembetween eleven and twelve o’clock at night, when he would come inwet and hungry from an investigation of the levee district, andwhile he was drinking hot chocolate before an open fire, would re-late in one of his curious monologues, his experience as an out-of-door laborer standing in line without an overcoat for two hours inthe sleet, that he might have a chance to sweep the streets; or hisadventures with a crook, who mistook him for one of this own kindand offered him a place as an agent for a gambling house, which hepromptly accepted. Mr. Stead was much impressed with the mixedgoodness in Chicago, the lack of rectitude in many high places, thesimple kindness of the most wretched to each other. Before he pub-lished “If Christ Came to Chicago” he made his attempt to rally thediverse moral forces of the city in a huge mass meeting, which re-sulted in a temporary organization, later developing into the CivicFederation. I was a member of the committee of five appointed to
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carry out the suggestions made in this remarkable meeting, and orfirst concern was to appoint a committee to deal with the unem-ployed. But when has a committee ever dealt satisfactorily with theunemployed? Relief stations were opened in various part of the city,temporary lodging houses were established, Hull-House undertak-ing to lodge the homeless women who could be received nowhereelse;
employment
stations
were
opened
giving
sewing
to
the
women, and street sweeping for the men was organized. It was inconnection with the latter that the perplexing question of the dan-ger of permanently lowering wages at such a crisis, in the praise-worthy effort to bring speedy relief, was brought home to me. I in-sisted that it was better to have the men work half a day for sev-enty-five cents than a whole day for a dollar, better that they shouldearn three dollars in two days than in three days. I resigned fromthe street-cleaning committee in despair of making the rest of thecommittee understand that, as our real object was not street clean-ing but the help of the unemployed, we must treat the situation insuch wise that the men would not be worse off when they returnedto their normal occupations. The discussion opened up situationsnew to me and carried me far afield in perhaps the most seriouseconomic reading I have ever done.
A beginning also was then made toward a Bureau of Organized Charities, the main office being put in charge of a young man re-cently come from Boston, who lived at Hull-House. But to employscientific methods for the first time at such a moment involved diffi-culties, and the most painful episode of the winter came for me froman attempt on my part to conform to carefully received instructions.A shipping clerk whom I had known for a long time had lost hisplace, as so many people had that year, and came to the relief stationestablished at Hull-House four or five times to secure help for hisfamily. I told him one day of the opportunity for work on the drain-age canal and intimated that if any employment were obtainable, heought to exhaust that possibility before asking for help. The manreplied that he had always worked indoors and that he could notendure outside work in winter. I am grateful to remember that Iwas 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 itwas at their expense I learned that life cannot be administered bydefinite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a man’s dif-ficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habitsas a whole; and that to treat an isolated episode is almost sure to in-vite blundering.
It was also during this winter that I became permanently im- pressed with the kindness of the poor to each other; the woman wholives upstairs will willingly share her breakfast with the family be-low because she knows they “are hard up”; the man who boardedwith them last winter will give a month’s rent because he knows thefather of the family is out of work; the baker across the street who isfast being pushed to the wall by his downtown competitors, willsend across three loaves of stale bread because he has seen the chil-dren looking longingly into his window and suspects they are hun-gry. There are also the families who, during times of business de-pression, are obliged to seek help from the county or some benevo-lent society, but who are themselves most anxious not to be con-founded with the pauper class, with whom indeed they do not in theleast belong. Charles Booth, in his brilliant chapter on the unem-ployed, expresses regret that the problems of the working class areso often confounded with the problems of the inefficient and theidle, that although working people live in the same street with thosein need of charity, to thus confound two problems is to render thesolution 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 asthe worn-out shoes could not be replaced the children could not goto school. The mother was ill and barely able to come for the sup-plies and medicines. Two years later she invited me to supper oneSunday evening in the little home which had been completely re-stored, and she gave as a reason for the invitation that she couldn’tbear to have me remember them as they had been during that onewinter, which she insisted had been unique in her twelve years ofmarried life. She said that it was as if she had met me, not as I am
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for three years he had been tied all day long to the leg of the kitchentable, only released at noon by his older brother who hastily ran infrom a neighboring factory to share his lunch with him. When thehot weather came the restless children could not brook the con-finement of the stuffy rooms, and, as it was not considered safe toleave the doors open because of sneak thieves, many of the childrenwere locked out. During our first summer an increasing number ofthese poor little mites would wander into the cool hallway of Hull-House. We kept them there and fed them at noon, in return forwhich we were sometimes offered a hot penny which had been heldin a tight little fist “ever since mother left this morning, to buysomething to eat with.” Out of kindergarten hours our little guestsnoisily enjoyed the hospitality of our bedrooms under the so-calledcare of any resident who volunteered to keep an eye on them, butlater they were moved into a neighboring apartment under moresystematic supervision.
Hull-House was thus committed to a day nursery which we sus- tained for sixteen years first in a little cottage on a side street andthen in a building designed for its use called the Children’s House.It is now carried on by the United Charities of Chicago in a finelyequipped building on our block, where the immigrant mothers arecared for as well as the children, and where they are taught thethings which will make life in America more possible. Our early daynursery brought us into natural relations with the poorest womenof the neighborhood, many of whom were bearing the burden of dis-solute and incompetent husbands in addition to the support of theirchildren. Some of them presented an impressive manifestation ofthat miracle of affection which outlives abuse, neglect, and crime,--the affection which cannot be plucked from the heart where it haslived, although it may serve only to torture and torment. “Has yourhusband come back?” you inquire of Mrs. S., whom you have knownfor eight years as an overworked woman bringing her three delicatechildren every morning to the nursery; she is bent under the doubleburden of earning the money which supports them and giving themthe tender care which alone keeps them alive. The oldest two chil-dren have at last gone to work, and Mrs. S. has allowed herself theluxury of staying at home two days a week. And now the worthless
husband
is
back
again--the
“gentlemanly
gambler”
type
who,
through all vicissitudes, manages to present a white shirtfront and agold watch to the world, but who is dissolute, idle and extravagant.You dread to think how much his presence will increase the drainupon the family exchequer, and you know that he stayed away untilhe was certain that the children were old enough to earn money forhis luxuries. Mrs. S. does not pretend to take his return lightly, butshe replies in all seriousness and simplicity, “You know my feelingfor him has never changed. You may think me foolish, but I was al-ways proud of his good looks and educated appearance. I was lonelyand homesick during those eight years when the children were littleand needed so much doctoring, but I could never bring myself tofeel hard toward him, and I used to pray the good Lord to keep himfrom harm and bring him back to us; so, of course, I’m thankfulnow.” She passes on with a dignity which gives one a new sense ofthe security of affection.
I recall a similar case of a woman who had supported her three children for five years, during which time her dissolute husbandconstantly demanded money for drink and kept her perpetuallyworried and intimidated. One Saturday, before the “blessed Easter,”he came back from a long debauch, ragged and filthy, but in a stateof lachrymose repentance. The poor wife received him as a returnedprodigal, believed that his remorse would prove lasting, and feltsure that if she and the children went to church with him on EasterSunday and he could be induced to take the pledge before the priest,all their troubles would be ended. After hours of vigorous effort andthe expenditure of all her savings, he finally sat on the front door-step the morning of Easter Sunday, bathed, shaved and arrayed in afine new suit of clothes. She left him sitting there in the reluctantspring sunshine while she finished washing and dressing the chil-dren. When she finally opened the front door with the three shiningchildren that they might all set forth together, the returned prodi-gal had disappeared, and was not seen again until midnight, whenhe came back in a glorious state of intoxication from the proceeds ofhis pawned clothes and clad once more in the dingiest attire. Shetook him in without comment, only to begin again the wretched cy-cle. There were of course instances of the criminal husband as well
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Twenty Years Page 10 of 20
as of the merely vicious. I recall one woman who, during sevenyears, never missed a visiting day at the penitentiary when shemight see her husband, and whose little children in the nurseryproudly reported the messages from father with no notion that hewas in disgrace, so absolutely did they reflect the gallant spirit oftheir mother.
While one was filled with admiration for these heroic women, something was also to be said for some of the husbands, for thesorry men who, for one reason or another, had failed in the struggleof life. Sometimes this failure was purely economic and the menwere competent to give the children, whom they were not able tosupport, the care and guidance and even education which were ofthe highest value. Only a few months ago I met upon the street oneof the early nursery mothers who for five years had been living inanother part of the city, and in response to my query as to the wel-fare of her five children, she bitterly replied, “All of them exceptMary have been arrested at one time or another, thank you.” In re-ply to my remark that I thought her husband had always had suchadmirable control over them, she burst out, “That has been thewhole trouble. I got tired taking care of him and didn’t believe thathis laziness was all due to his health, as he said, so I left him andsaid that I would support the children, but not him. From that min-ute the trouble with the four boys began. I never knew what theywere doing, and after every sort of a scrape I finally put Jack andthe twins into institutions where I pay for them. Joe has gone towork at last, but with a disgraceful record behind him. I tell you Iain’t so sure that because a woman can make big money that she canbe both father and mother to her children.”
As I walked on, I could but wonder in which particular we are most stupid--to judge a man’s worth so solely by his wage-earningcapacity that a good wife feels justified in leaving him, or in holdingfast to that wretched delusion that a woman can both support andnurture her children.
One of the most piteous revelations of the futility of the latter at- tempt came to me through the mother of “Goosie,” as the childrenfor years called a little boy who, because he was brought to the
nursery wrapped up in his mother’s shawl, always had his hair filledwith the down and small feathers from the feather brush factorywhere she worked. One March morning, Goosie’s mother was hang-ing out the washing on a shed roof 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 windinto the alley below. His neck was broken by the fall, and as he laypiteous and limp on a pile of frozen refuse, his mother cheerilycalled him to “climb up again,” so confident do overworked mothersbecome that their children cannot get hurt. After the funeral, as thepoor mother sat in the nursery postponing the moment when shemust go back to her empty rooms, I asked her, in a futile effort to beof comfort, if there was anything more we could do for her. Theoverworked, sorrow-stricken woman looked up and replied, “If youcould give me my wages for to-morrow, I would not go to work inthe factory at all. I would like to stay at home all day and hold thebaby. Goosie was always asking me to take him and I never had anytime.”
This
statement
revealed the
condition
of
many
nursery
mothers who are obliged to forego the joys and solaces which be-long to even the most poverty-stricken. The long hours of factorylabor necessary for earning the support of a child leave no time forthe tender care and caressing which may enrich the life of the mostpiteous 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 youngchildren to spend themselves in the coarser work of the world! It iscuriously inconsistent that with the emphasis which this generationhas placed upon the mother and upon the prolongation of infancy,we constantly allow the waste of this most precious material. I can-not recall without indignation a recent experience. I was detainedlate one evening in an office building by a prolonged committeemeeting of the Board of Education. As I came out at eleven o’clock,I met in the corridor of the fourteenth floor a woman whom I knew,on her knees scrubbing the marble tiling. As she straightened up togreet me, she seemed so wet from her feet up to her chin, that Ihastily inquired the cause. Her reply was that she left home at fiveo’clock every night and had no opportunity for six hours to nurse
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CHAPTER 11 IMMIGRANTS AND THEIR CHILDREN
From our very first months at Hull-House we found it much eas- ier to deal with the first generation of crowded city life than withthe second or third, because it is more natural and cast in a simplermold. The Italian and Bohemian peasants who live in Chicago stillput on their bright holiday clothes on a Sunday and go to visit theircousins. They tramp along with at least a suggestion of having oncewalked over plowed fields and breathed country air. The secondgeneration of city poor too often have no holiday clothes and con-sider their relations a “bad lot.” I have heard a drunken man in amaudlin stage babble of his good country mother and imagine hewas driving the cows home, and I knew that his little son wholaughed loud at him would be drunk earlier in life and would haveno
pastoral
interlude
to
his
ravings.
Hospitality
still
survives
among foreigners, although it is buried under false pride among thepoorest Americans. One thing seemed clear in regard to entertain-ing immigrants; to preserve and keep whatever of value their pastlife contained and to bring them in contact with a better type ofAmericans. For several years, every Saturday evening the entirefamilies of our Italian neighbors were our guests. These eveningswere very popular during our first winters at Hull-House. Manyeducated Italians helped us, and the house became known as a placewhere Italians were welcome and where national holidays were ob-served. They come to us with their petty lawsuits, sad relics of thevendetta, with their incorrigible boys, with their hospital cases, withtheir aspirations for American clothes, and with their needs for aninterpreter.
An editor of an Italian paper made a genuine connection between us and the Italian colony, not only with the Neapolitans and the Si-cilians of the immediate neighborhood, but with the educated con-nazionali throughout the city, until he went south to start an agri-cultural colony in Alabama, in the establishment of which Hull-House heartily cooperated.
Possibly the South Italians more than any other immigrants represent the pathetic stupidity of agricultural people crowded intocity tenements, and we were much gratified when thirty peasant
tenements, and we were much gratified when thirty peasant familieswere induced to move upon the land which they knew so well howto cultivate. The starting of this colony, however, was a very expen-sive affair in spite of the fact that the colonists purchased the land attwo dollars an acre; they needed much more than raw land, and al-though it was possible to collect the small sums necessary to sustainthem during the hard time of the first two years, we were fully con-vinced that undertakings of this sort could be conducted properlyonly by colonization societies such as England has established, or,better still, by enlarging the functions of the Federal Department ofImmigration.
An evening similar in purpose to the one devoted to the Italians was organized for the Germans, in our first year. Owing to the su-perior education of our Teutonic guests and the clever leading of acultivated German woman, these evenings reflected something ofthat cozy social intercourse which is found in its perfection in thefatherland. Our guests sang a great deal in the tender minor of theGerman folksong or in the rousing spirit of the Rhine, and theyslowly but persistently pursued a course in German history and lit-erature, recovering something of that poetry and romance whichthey had long since resigned with other good things. We foundstrong family affection between them and their English-speakingchildren, but their pleasures were not in common, and they seldomwent out together. Perhaps the greatest value of the Settlement tothem was in placing large and pleasant rooms with musical facilitiesat their disposal, and in reviving their almost forgotten enthusi-asms. I have seen sons and daughters stand in complete surprise astheir mother’s knitting needles softly beat time to the song she wassinging, or her worn face turned rosy under the hand-clapping asshe made an old-fashioned curtsy at the end of a German poem. Itwas easy to fancy a growing touch of respect in her children’s man-ner to her, and a rising enthusiasm for German literature and remi-niscence on the part of all the family, an effort to bring together theold life and the new, a respect for the older cultivation, and notquite so much assurance that the new was the best.
This tendency upon the part of the older immigrants to lose the amenities of European life without sharing those of America has of-
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ten been deplored by keen observers from the home countries.When Professor Masurek of Prague gave a course of lectures in theUniversity of Chicago, he was much distressed over the materialisminto which the Bohemians of Chicago had fallen. The early immi-grants had been so stirred by the opportunity to own real estate, anappeal perhaps to the Slavic land hunger, and their energies had be-come so completely absorbed in money-making that all other inter-ests had apparently dropped away. And yet I recall a very touchingincident in connection with a lecture Professor Masurek gave atHull-House, in which he had appealed to his countrymen to arousethemselves from this tendency to fall below their home civilizationand to forget the great enthusiasm which had united them into thePan-Slavic Movement. A Bohemian widow who supported herselfand her two children by scrubbing, hastily sent her youngest childto purchase, with the twenty-five cents which was to have suppliedthem with food the next day, a bunch of red roses which she pre-sented to the lecturer in appreciation of his testimony to the realityof the things of the spirit.
An overmastering desire to reveal the humbler immigrant par- ents to their own children lay at the base of what has come to becalled the Hull-House Labor Museum. This was first suggested tomy mind one early spring day when I saw an old Italian woman, herdistaff against her homesick face, patiently spinning a thread by thesimple stick spindle so reminiscent of all southern Europe. I waswalking down Polk Street, perturbed in spirit, because it seemed sodifficult to come into genuine relations with the Italian women andbecause they themselves so often lost their hold upon their Ameri-canized children. It seemed to me that Hull-House ought to be ableto devise some educational enterprise which should build a bridgebetween European and American experiences in such wise as to givethem both more meaning and a sense of relation. I meditated thatperhaps the power to see life as a whole is more needed in the im-migrant quarter of a large city than anywhere else, and that the lackof this power is the most fruitful source of misunderstanding be-tween European immigrants and their children, as it is betweenthem and their American neighbors; and why should that chasm be-tween fathers and sons, yawning at the feet of each generation, be
made so unnecessarily cruel and impassable to these bewilderedimmigrants? Suddenly I looked up and saw the old woman with herdistaff, sitting in the sun on the steps of a tenement house. Shemight have served as a model for one of Michelangelo’s Fates, buther face brightened as I passed and, holding up her spindle for me tosee, she called out that when she had spun a little more yarn, shewould knit a pair of stockings for her goddaughter. The occupationof the old woman gave me the clue that was needed. Could we notinterest the young people working in the neighborhood factories inthese older forms of industry, so that, through their own parentsand grandparents, they would find a dramatic representation of theinherited resources of their daily occupation. If these young peoplecould actually see that the complicated machinery of the factory hadbeen evolved from simple tools, they might at least make a begin-ning toward that education which Dr. Dewey defines as “a continu-ing reconstruction of experience.” They might also lay a foundationfor reverence of the past which Goethe declares to be the basis of allsound 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 wasa resident at Hull-House. Within a month a room was fitted up towhich we might invite those of our neighbors who were possessedof 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 distinctvariations of the same spindle in connection with wheels. It waspossible to put these seven into historic sequence and order and toconnect the whole with the present method of factory spinning. Thesame thing was done for weaving, and on every Saturday evening alittle exhibit was made of these various forms of labor in the textileindustry. Within one room a Syrian woman, a Greek, an Italian, aRussian, and an Irishwoman enabled even the most casual observerto see that there is no break in orderly evolution if we look at his-tory from the industrial standpoint; that industry develops similarlyand peacefully year by year among the workers of each nation,heedless of differences in language, religion, and political experi-ences.
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stream and beating their wet clothes against the smooth whitestones; the milking, the gardening, the marketing in thousands ofhamlets, which are such direct expressions of the solicitude and af-fection at the basis of all family life.
There has been some testimony that the Labor Museum has re- vealed the charm of woman’s primitive activities. I recall a certainItalian girl who came every Saturday evening to a cooking class inthe same building in which her mother spun in the Labor Museumexhibit; and yet Angelina always left her mother at the front doorwhile she herself went around to a side door because she did notwish to be too closely identified in the eyes of the rest of the cook-ing class with an Italian woman who wore a kerchief over her head,uncouth boots, and short petticoats. One evening, however, Ange-lina saw her mother surrounded by a group of visitors from theSchool of Education who much admired the spinning, and she con-cluded from their conversation that her mother was “the best stick-spindle spinner in America.” When she inquired from me as to thetruth of this deduction, I took occasion to describe the Italian vil-lage in which her mother had lived, something of her free life, andhow, because of the opportunity she and the other women of the vil-lage had to drop their spindles over the edge of a precipice, they haddeveloped a skill in spinning beyond that of the neighboring towns.I dilated somewhat on the freedom and beauty of that life--how hardit must be to exchange it all for a two-room tenement, and to giveup a beautiful homespun kerchief for an ugly department store hat. Iintimated it was most unfair to judge her by these things alone, andthat while she must depend on her daughter to learn the new ways,she also had a right to expect her daughter to know something ofthe 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 hadbeen spent in a secluded spot under the rule of traditional and nar-rowly localized observances, until her very religion clung to localsanctities--to the shrine before which she had always prayed, to thepavement and walls of the low vaulted church--and then suddenlyshe was torn from it all and literally put out to sea, straight awayfrom the solid habits of her religious and domestic life, and she now
walked
timidly
but
with
poignant
sensibility
upon
a
new
and
strange shore.
It was easy to see that the thought of her mother with any other background than that of the tenement was new to Angelina, and atleast two things resulted; she allowed her mother to pull out of thebig box under the bed the beautiful homespun garments which hadbeen previously hidden away as uncouth; and she openly came intothe Labor Museum by the same door as did her mother, proud atleast of the mastery of the craft which had been so much admired.
A club of necktie workers formerly meeting at Hull-House per- sistently resented any attempt on the part of their director to im-prove their minds. The president once said that she “wouldn’t becaught dead at a lecture,” that she came to the club “to get some funout of it,” and indeed it was most natural that she should crave rec-reation after a hard day’s work. One evening I saw the entire clublistening to quite a stiff lecture in the Labor Museum and to myrather wicked remark to the president that I was surprised to seeher 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 thesuccess of the undertaking.
The Labor Museum continually demanded more space as it was enriched by a fine textile exhibit lent by the Field Museum, andlater by carefully selected specimens of basketry from the Philip-pines. The shops have finally included a group of three or fourwomen, Irish, Italian, Danish, who have become a permanent work-ing 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 thatimmigrant colonies might yield to our American life somethingvery valuable, if their resources were intelligently studied and de-veloped. I recall an Italian, who had decorated the doorposts of histenement with a beautiful pattern he had previously used in carvingthe reredos of a Neapolitan church, who was “fired” by his landlordon the ground of destroying property. His feelings were hurt, not so
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Twenty Years Page 16 of 20
much that he had been put out of his house, as that his work hadbeen so disregarded; and he said that when people traveled in Italythey liked to look at wood carvings but that in America “they onlymade money out of you.”
Sometimes the suppression of the instinct of workmanship is fol- lowed by more disastrous results. A Bohemian whose little girl at-tended classes at Hull-House, in one of his periodic drunken spellshad literally almost choked her to death, and later had committedsuicide when in delirium tremens. His poor wife, who stayed a weekat Hull-House after the disaster until a new tenement could be ar-ranged for her, one day showed me a gold ring which her husbandhad made for their betrothal. It exhibited the most exquisite work-manship, and she said that although in the old country he had beena goldsmith, in America he had for twenty years shoveled coal in afurnace room of a large manufacturing plant; that whenever she sawone of his “restless fits,” which preceded his drunken periods, “com-ing on,” if she could provide him with a bit of metal and persuadehim to stay at home and work at it, he was all right and the timepassed without disaster, but that “nothing else would do it.” Thisstory threw a flood of light upon the dead man’s struggle and on thestupid maladjustment which had broken him down. Why had wenever been told? Why had our interest in the remarkable musicalability of his child blinded us to the hidden artistic ability of the fa-ther? We had forgotten that a long-established occupation mayform the very foundations of the moral life, that the art with whicha man has solaced his toil may be the salvation of his uncertain tem-perament.
There are many examples of touching fidelity to immigrant par- ents on the part of their grown children; a young man who day afterday attends ceremonies which no longer express his religious con-victions and who makes his vain effort to interest his Russian Jew-ish father in social problems; a daughter who might earn much moremoney as a stenographer could she work from Monday morning tillSaturday night, but who quietly and docilely makes neckties for lowwages because she can thus abstain from work Saturdays to pleaseher father; these young people, like poor Maggie Tulliver, through
many painful experiences have reached the conclusion that pity,memory, and faithfulness are natural ties with paramount claims.
This
faithfulness,
however,
is
sometimes
ruthlessly
imposed
upon by immigrant parents who, eager for money and accustomedto the patriarchal authority of peasant households, hold their chil-dren in a stern bondage which requires a surrender of all theirwages and concedes no time or money for pleasures.
There
are
many
convincing
illustrations
that
this
parental
harshness often results in juvenile delinquency. A Polish boy of sev-enteen came to Hull-House one day to ask a contribution of fiftycents “towards a flower piece for the funeral of an old Hull-Houseclub boy.” A few questions made it clear that the object was ficti-tious, whereupon the boy broke down and half-defiantly stated thathe wanted to buy two twenty-five cent tickets, one for his girl andone for himself, to a dance of the Benevolent Social Twos; that hehadn’t a penny of his own although he had worked in a brass foun-dry for three years and had been advanced twice, because he alwayshad to give his pay envelope unopened to his father; “just look at theclothes he buys me” was his concluding remark.
Perhaps the girls are held even more rigidly. In a recent investi- gation of two hundred working girls it was found that only five percent had the use of their own money and that sixty-two per centturned in all they earned, literally every penny, to their mothers. Itwas through this little investigation that we first knew Marcella, apretty young German girl who helped her widowed mother year af-ter year to care for a large family of younger children. She was con-tent for the most part although her mother’s old-country notions ofdress gave her but an infinitesimal amount of her own wages tospend on her clothes, and she was quite sophisticated as to properdressing because she sold silk in a neighborhood department store.Her mother approved of the young man who was showing her vari-ous attentions and agreed that Marcella should accept his invitationto a ball, but would allow her not a penny toward a new gown toreplace one impossibly plain and shabby. Marcella spent a sleeplessnight and wept bitterly, although she well knew that the doctor’sbill for the children’s scarlet fever was not yet paid. The next day as
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Twenty Years Page 17 of 20
city, whose children have disappeared for days or weeks, have oftencome to Hull-House, evincing that agony which fairly separates themarrow from the bone, as if they had discovered a new type of suf-fering, devoid of the healing in familiar sorrows. It is as if they didnot know how to search for the children without the assistance ofthe children themselves. Perhaps the most pathetic aspect of suchcases is their revelation of the premature dependence of the olderand wiser upon the young and foolish, which is in itself often re-sponsible for the situation because it has given the children an un-due sense of their own importance and a false security that they cantake care of themselves.
On the other hand, an Italian girl who has had lessons in cook- ing at the public school will help her mother to connect the entirefamily with American food and household habits. That the motherhas never baked bread in Italy--only mixed it in her own house andthen taken it out to the village oven--makes all the more valuableher daughter’s understanding of the complicated cooking stove. Thesame thing is true of the girl who learns to sew
[Page 254]
in the
public school, and more than anything else, perhaps, of the girl whoreceives the first simple instruction in the care of little children--that skillful care which every tenement-house baby requires if he isto be pulled through his second summer. As a result of this teachingI recall a young girl who carefully explained to her Italian motherthat the reason the babies in Italy were so healthy and the babies inChicago were so sickly, was not, as her mother had firmly insisted,because her babies in Italy had goat’s milk and her babies in Amer-ica had cow’s milk, but because the milk in Italy was clean and themilk in Chicago was dirty. She said that when you milked your owngoat before the door, you knew that the milk was clean, but whenyou bought milk from the grocery store after it had been carried formany miles in the country, you couldn’t tell whether it was fit forthe baby to drink until the men from the City Hall who had watchedit all the way said that it was all right.
Thus through civic instruction in the public schools, the Italian woman slowly became urbanized in the sense in which the wordwas used by her own Latin ancestors, and thus the habits of her en-tire family were modified. The public schools in the immigrant
colonies deserve all the praise as Americanizing agencies which canbe bestowed upon them, and there is little doubt that the fast-changing curriculum in the direction of the vacation-school experi-ments will react more directly upon such households.
It is difficult to write of the relation of the older and most for- eign-looking immigrants to the children of other people--the Ital-ians whose fruit-carts are upset simply because they are “dagoes,” orthe Russian peddlers who are stoned and sometimes badly injuredbecause it has become a code of honor in a gang of boys to thus ex-press their derision. The members of a Protective Association ofJewish Peddlers organized at Hull-House related daily experiencesin which old age had been treated with such irreverence, cherisheddignity with such disrespect, that a listener caught the passion ofLear in the old texts, as a platitude enunciated by a man who dis-covers in it his own experience thrills us as no unfamiliar phrasescan possibly do. The Greeks are filled with amazed rage when theirvery name is flung at them as an opprobrious epithet. Doubtlessthese difficulties would be much minimized in America, if we facedour own race problem with courage and intelligence, and these veryMediterranean immigrants might give us valuable help. Certainlythey are less conscious than the Anglo-Saxon of color distinctions,perhaps because of their traditional familiarity with Carthage andEgypt. They listened with respect and enthusiasm to a scholarlyaddress delivered by Professor Du Bois at Hull-House on a Lin-coln’s birthday, with apparently no consciousness of that race differ-ence which color seems to accentuate so absurdly, and upon my re-turn from various conferences held in the interest of “the advance-ment of colored people,” I have had many illuminating conversa-tions with my cosmopolitan neighbors.
The celebration of national events has always been a source of new understanding and companionship with the members of thecontiguous
foreign
colonies
not
only
between
them
and
their
American neighbors but between them and their own children. Oneof our earliest Italian events was a rousing commemoration of Gari-baldi’s birthday, and his imposing bust, presented to Hull-Housethat evening, was long the chief ornament of our front hall. It calledforth great enthusiasm from the
connazionali
whom Ruskin calls,
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Twenty Years Page 19 of 20
not the “common people” of Italy, but the “companion people” be-cause 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 andEnglish by scholars of well-known repute, brought us into a newsense of fellowship with all our Greek neighbors. As the mayor ofChicago was seated upon the right hand of the dignified seniorpriest of the Greek Church and they were greeted alternately in thenational hymns of America and Greece, one felt a curious sense ofthe possibility of transplanting to new and crude Chicago some ofthe traditions of Athens itself, so deeply cherished in the hearts ofthis group of citizens.
The Greeks indeed gravely consider their traditions as their most precious possession and more than once in meetings of protestheld by the Greek colony against the aggressions of the Bulgariansin Macedonia, I have heard it urged that the Bulgarians are tryingto establish a protectorate, not only for their immediate advantage,but that they may claim a glorious history for the “barbarous coun-try.” It is said that on the basis of this protectorate, they are alreadyteaching in their schools that Alexander the Great was a Bulgarianand that it will be but a short time before they claim Aristotle him-self, an indignity the Greeks will never suffer!
To me personally the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Mazzini’s birth was a matter of great interest. Throughout theworld that day Italians who believed in a United Italy came to-gether. They recalled the hopes of this man who, with all his devo-tion to his country was still more devoted to humanity and whodedicated to the workingmen of Italy, an appeal so philosophical, sofilled with a yearning for righteousness, that it transcended all na-tional boundaries and became a bugle call for “The Duties of Man.”A copy of this document was given to every school child in the pub-lic schools of Italy on this one hundredth anniversary, and as theChicago branch of the Society of Young Italy marched into ourlargest hall and presented to Hull-House an heroic bust of Mazzini,I found myself devoutly hoping that the Italian youth, who havecommitted their future to America, might indeed become “the Apos-
tles of the fraternity of nations” and that our American citizenshipmight be built without disturbing these foundations which were laidof old time.
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