Charlotte
Carr was born in 1890. After attending
Vassar College she became a policewoman in New York City. After twenty
years in the force she became Secretary of Labor in Pennsylvania.
Later she moved to New York and worked under Alfred
Smith and Frances Perkins as director
of relief in New York City.
In 1937 Carr was chosen by Louise Bowen,
president of the Hull House Association board of trustees, to replace
Adena Miller Rich as head resident of the
Hull House Settlement in Chicago.
Carr was an active trade unionist who held
radical political views and this led to clashes with Louise
Bowen. In 1943 Carr was fired when she refused to resign from
the left-wing Union for Democratic Action. Charlotte Carr died in
1956.
(1)
Milton Mayer, Charlotte Carr, Atlantic
Monthly (December, 1938)
A few months ago a "fat
Irishwoman" (as she described herself) decided she'd seen enough
front-line service for a while. For twenty years she had manned the
barricades, as a policewoman under Brooklyn Bridge, as Secretary of
Labor of war-torn Pennsylvania, and as director of relief in New York
City. Now she was tired and forty-seven (though she looked neither)
and she wanted a furlough. What she got was one of the toughest assignments
in America.
Charlotte Carr is probably the only graduate of boarding school and
Vassar who ever walked a beat. Tonight she dominates a drawing-room
with native grace; tomorrow she dominates a relief demonstration with
native persuasion. Her long service on behalf of the hard-bitten under-privileged
has awakened in this well-born women the traits of her ancestors.
They, seven or eight generations back, were meat-and-potatoes Irish.
When Jane Addams moved into Hull House, forty-eight years ago, Chicago's
nineteenth ward was one of the plague spots of America - an unrelieved
slum, rotting and stinking within and eating its way into the rest
of the careless city. In the square mile between Hull House and the
river there was one bathtub. There were no parks or playgrounds. For
every pickpocket clubbed by the police there were twenty maturing
in every poolroom. The children of the immigrants earned four cents
an hour at piecework on garments.
Hull House had two jobs, from the first. One was to make the poor
less miserable in their poverty. The other was to make them less poor.
The first had the blessings of Chicago's "leading citizens";
the second did not. Jane Addams and Hull House fought the city. They
forced Chicago to establish a juvenile court, to build small parks
and playgrounds where the children of the poor could get at them.
They forced Illinois to pass factory inspection laws, the eight-hour
day for women, and a workmen's compensation act. By their example,
they carried these reforms to many another city and state.
When Charlotte Carr took over, the place was a museum, a shrine to
Jane Addams. The thousands who still poured through its doors came
to see not what Hull House was doing but what it it had done. The
bloody battleground had become a "must" item for out-of-town
tourists. Tinted memories overlay the scenes of Jane Addams' struggles.
The crusaders were gone. Hull House had become Chicago's toy.
(2)
Chicago Daily News (January, 1943)
Charlotte Carr and the trustees
of Hull House have parted company. The trustees of Hull House pay
the bills. Therefore it is their show. Charlotte Carr is a hired hand,
and if she wants to take part in politics, she should do it on her
own time. And if the people who use the facilities of Hull House insist
on participating in its management, they are forgetting their place.
So I image, runs the reasoning of the trustees. And if I were a trustee,
I would probably feel that way myself. When you give a dog a bone
it's no fun having him snap at you.
(3)
Charlotte
Carr gave an interview to Time
Magazine after she was forced to resign by Louise
Bowen (11th January, 1943)
"Hell, I was fired!"
exclaimed Charlotte Carr last week at reports that she had "resigned"
after five years as director of Chicago's world-famed slum settlement,
Hull House. For many reasons, Charlotte Carr's position at Hull House
had become shaky. Some trustees and philanthropists in particular
did not like her outspoken political activity, her affiliation with
the Union for Democratic Action.
Hull House's founder, Jane Addams, in the 19th Century spirit believed
in the social adjustment and education of the alien poor. Miss Carr
thought that times had changed, that organization and political pressure
were now the best ways for slum dwellers to better their lot.
Tall, heavy and gusty, Charlotte Carr calls herself "a fat Irishwoman"
and is a female counterpart of John L. Lewis - more a labor leader
than a social worker.
(4)
A Hull House resident who supported
Charlotte Carr against the trustees was interviewed by the Chicago
Daily News after she was dismissed in January, 1943.
The fundamental point is: who
shall formulate the policies of Hull House? Does Hull House belong
to the people it serves, or to the trustees? Shall it be an 'agency'
superimposed from above; or shall it be an instrument of the people
themselves? Only by involving the people significantly in the management
of Hull House can it ever become a real part of the attitudes, sentiments
and thinking of the people.
Formerly the largest proportion of our adult population was foreign
born. But our community has now come of age. Most of the adults are
native-born, were educated in American schools and act and think as
Americans. We believe that our people are capable of participating
in the management of our educational and social welfare institutions.
Because Charlotte Carr was thoroughly familiar with conditions as
they are, and was in complete accord with our aspirations for democracy,
we consider her resignation an irreparable loss to our community.
And we hope that the trustees will reconsider it.
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