In
1888, while on a tour of Europe, Jane Addams
and Ellen Starr visited the university
settlement of Toynbee Hall, in the
East End of London. Named after the social
reformer, Arnold Toynbee, the settlement
was run by Samuel Augustus Barnett,
canon of St. Jude's Church.
Situated in Commercial Street, Whitechapel, Toynbee
Hall was Britain's first university settlement. The idea was
to create a place where students from Oxford
University and Cambridge University,
during their vacations, could work among, and improve the lives
of the poor. The settlement also served as a base for Charles
Booth and his group of researchers working on the Life
and Labour of the People in London.
When Jane Addams and Ellen
Starr returned to Chicago in 1889, they decided to start a similar
project in Chicago. Helen Culver agreed
to rent them Hull House for $60 a month. This large, abandoned mansion
had been built by the wealthy businessman, Charles J. Hull, in 1856.
Situated in Halstead Street in the run-down Nineteenth
Ward of Chicago, most of the people
living in the area were recently arrived immigrants from Europe
including people from Germany, Italy,
Sweden, England,
Ireland, France,
Russia, Norway,
Austro-Hungary, Greece,
Bulgaria, Holland,
Portugal, Scotland,
Wales, Spain
and Finland.
Jane Addams and Ellen
Starr moved in to Hull House on 18th September, 1889. They began
by inviting people living in the area to hear readings from books
and to look at slides of paintings. After talking to the visitors
it soon became clear that the women had a desperate need for a place
where they could bring their young children. Addams and Starr decided
to start a kindergarten and provide a room where the mothers could
sit and talk. Jenny Dow, who lived in an expensive part of Chicago,
agreed to come to Hull House to run the nursery school. Within three
weeks the kindergarten had enrolled twenty-four children with 70
more on the waiting list.
Other activities soon followed. Jane Addams
ran a club for teenage boys and Ellen Starr
provided lessons in cooking and sewing for local girls. University
teachers, students and social reformers in Chicago were also recruited
to provide free lectures on a wide variety of different topics.
Over the years this included people such as John
Dewey, Clarence Darrow, Susan
B. Anthony, William Walling, Robert
Hunter, Robert Lovett, Ernest
Moore, Charles Beard, Paul
Kellogg, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Ray
Stannard Baker, Francis Hackett,
Henry Demarest Lloyd and Frank
Lloyd Wright.
Family
living close to Hull House (1892)
Inspired
by the ideas of William Morris and John
Ruskin, the women decided to turn Hull House into an art gallery.
While in Europe Jane Addams and Ellen
Starr, had collected reproductions of paintings and these were
now hung in the various rooms of the house. Starr organized art
classes and exhibitions as well as developing a scheme where people
could borrow art reproductions to hang in their own homes.
Italian, German,
Irish and French
evenings were also organized. Local people presented songs, dances,
games and food associated with their home country. This was probably
the most successful of the settlement's early projects as it provided
an opportunity for local people to make their own contribution to
the venture. As Jane Addams later recalled,
it soon became clear that the object of the settlement program should
be to "help the foreign-born conserve and keep whatever of
value their past life contained and to bring them into contact with
a better class of Americans."
In 1890 Jane Addams and Ellen
Gates Starr were joined at Hull House by Julia
Lathrop. All three women had been students at Rockford Female
Seminary together in the 1880s. Lathrop, who had been trained as
a lawyer by her father, the United States senator, William
Lathrop, was an excellent organizer, and took over the day to
day running of the settlement.
Jane Addams, Ellen
Gates Starr and Julia Lathrop
gradually became more involved in the community where they were
living. They were shocked by the poor housing, the overcrowding
and the poverty that the people were having to endure. Addams wrote
to her step-brother that she was "overpowered by the misery
and narrow lives" of these people.
In the early days of Hull House, the three women were influenced
by the Christian Socialism that had
inspired the creation of Toynbee Hall.
This was reinforced by the arrival in 1891 of Florence
Kelley at Hull House. A member of the Socialist
Labor Party, Kelley had considerable experience of political
and trade union activity. It was Kelley who was mainly responsible
for turning Hull House into a centre of social reform.
The presence of Florence Kelley in
Hull House attracted other social reformers to the settlement. This
included Edith Abbott, Grace
Abbott, Alice Hamilton, Charlotte
Perkins,
William Walling, Charles
Beard, Mary McDowell, Mary
Kenney, Alzina Stevens and Sophonisba
Breckinridge. Working-class women, such as Kenney and Stevens,
who had developed an interest in social reform as a result of their
trade union work, played an important role
in the education of the middle-class residents at Hull House. They
in turn influenced the working-class women. As Kenney was later
to say, they "gave my life new meaning and hope".
Florence Kelley and several other women
based at Hull House carried out research into the sweating trade
in Chicago and this led to the passing of the pioneering Illinois
Factory Act (1893). Kelley was recruited by the state's new governor,
John Peter Altgeld, as the chief factory
inspector, and two other women involved in the research, Alzina
Stevens and Mary Kenney, also became
inspectors.
Helen Culver, who owned Hull House, also gave the women other adjacent
property. Wealthy people in Chicago contributed money, including
Louise Bowen who provided three quarters
of a million dollars. This enabled the group to expand its activities.
An art gallery was added in 1891, a coffee house and gymnasium in
1893, a club house in 1898 and a theatre in 1899.
In 1903 several women associated with Hull House, including Jane
Addams, Mary Kenney, Mary
McDowell, Florence Kelley and Sophonisba
Breckinridge, were involved in establishing the Women's
Trade Union League. Union meetings were often held at Hull House
and members of the settlement helped support workers during industrial
disputes. This resulted in some wealthy people withdrawing their
support from Hull House. One businessman wrote that Hill House had
"been so thoroughly unionized that it has lost its usefulness
and has become a detriment and harm to the community as a whole."
Many of the women at Hull House went on to play an important role
in the reform movement and the development of social work as a profession.
This included Florence Kelley (first
woman chief factory inspector and head of the National
Consumer's League); Julia Lathrop
(head of the Children's Bureau, 1912-21);
Mary Kenney (co-founder of Women's
Trade Union League); Grace Abbott
(director of the Immigrants' Protective
League and head of Children's Bureau,
1921-34); Alice Hamilton (first woman
professor at Harvard Medical School);
Edith Abbott (director of social research
at the Chicago School of Civics and editor of Social Service
Review); Sophonisba Breckinridge
(professor of social work at Chicago School of Civics), Mary
McDowell (co-founder of Women's Trade Union
League), Adena Miller Rich (vice-president
of the League of Women Voters) and
Jessie Binford (director of the Juvenile
Protective Association).
Hull House was also visited by a large number of people who were
to later have a profound impact on the development of the modern
world. This included John Peter Altgeld,
Mary White Ovington, Lillian
Wald, Frances Perkins, George
Herron, James Keir Hardie, John
Morley, J. A. Hobson, H.
G. Wells, John Burns, Sidney
Webb, Beatrice Webb, Graham
Wallas and William Stead.
The Hull House settlement received a considerable amount of publicity
and soon spread to other cities in the United States. This included
Andover House in Boston in 1891 and the Henry Street Settlement
in New York, established by Lillian Wald
in 1893. In 1897 there were 74 settlements in the United States
and by 1900 there were over a hundred. In 1911 leaders of the social
settlement movement, including Jane Addams
of Hill House, founded the National
Federation of Settlements.
The Hull House complex was not completed until 1907. The settlement
now had thirteen buildings spread over a large city block. There
were around 70 people living in Hull House and it cost the settlement
over $26,500 to run the house and its programs. Rents and sales
raised $12,000 but the rest had to come from donations.
After the death of of Jane Addams in
1935, Louise Bowen, president of the
Hull House Association board of trustees, was the most important
figure at Hull House. Bowen appointed Adena
Miller Rich, director of the Immigrants'
Protective League, as Hull House's head resident. Rich established
a new Department of Naturalization and Citizenship. The main objective
of this organization was to educate immigrants. Another innovation
was the formation of the Housing and Sanitation Committee, that
attempted to improve living conditions in Chicago.
Adena Miller Rich and Louise
Bowen did not have a good relationship and disagreed about staff
appointments, the use of funds, and the importance of the different
Hull House programs. As Bowen controlled the funds, she normally
made the final decisions and in April, 1937, Rich resigned.
Louise Bowen selected Charlotte
Carr as the next head resident. Carr agreed with Adena
Miller Rich that the most important objectve was help intergrate
the various immigrant groups. At that time the Hull House community
consisted of eighteen national groups: Italian, Greek, Mexican,
British, Scandinavian, Polish, German, Russian, Czechoslovakian,
French, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Swiss, Rumanian, Yugoslavian, Belgian,
Finnish and Dutch.
Charlotte Carr established the Workers'
Education Department and encouraged local people to join trade
unions. Under Carr's leadership the Hull House Settlement grew
rapidly and by 1940 it was estimated that 1,500 people entered the
building every day. However, Carr's radical political views resulted
in clashes with Louise Bowen. In 1943
Carr was fired when she refused to resign from the left-wing Union
for Democratic Action.
Louise Bowen, whose health was now poor,
decided to retire from active duty and instead became honorary president
and treasurer. The trustees decided to appoint Russell
Ballard as head resident. Ballard, a former school teacher,
decided to place the focus on the welfare of children. By 1944 there
were 685 children registered for daytime recreation activities and
275 for evening programs.
In 1959 the University of Illinois began looking for a site to build
a new campus. The following year the city authorities suggested
the area which housed the Hull House Settlement. The fight against
this scheme was led by Jessie Binford
and Florence Scala.
The struggle against closure was still going on when Russell
Ballard decided to retire in February, 1962. Paul Jans became
the new head resident but on 5th March, 1963, the trustees of Hull
House accepted an offer of $875,000 for the settlement buildings.
Jessie Binford and Florence
Scala took the case to the Supreme
Court but the ruling went against them and the Hull House Settlement
was closed on 28th March, 1963. After complaints from long-time
supporters of the settlement it was decided to preserve the original
Hull House building and turn it into a museum.
Hull House
Settlement in 1930
(1)
Jane Addams,
Twenty Years at Hull House (1910)
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 woman who had been given over too
exclusively to study, might restore a balance of activity along
traditional lines and learn of life from life itself.
With the advice of several of the oldest residents of Chicago we
decided upon a location somewhere near the junction of Blue Island
Avenue, Halstead Street and Harrison Street. I was surprised and
overjoyed on the very first day of our search for quarters to come
upon the hospitable old house 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. It responded
kindly to repairs, its wide hall and open fireplaces always insuring
it a gracious aspect.
We furnished the house as we would furnished it were it in another
part of the city, with the photographs and other impedimenta we
had collected in Europe, and with a few bits of family mahogany.
We believed that the settlement may logically bring to its aid all
those adjuncts which the cultivated man regards as good and suggestive
of the best life of the past.
(2)
In 1960 Helen Hall, Director of
the Henry Street Settlement in New York City, wrote about Jane
Addams and Hull House.
Jane Addams founded Hull House in 1889. In settling on Halstead
Street she deliberately put herself in a position to know intimately
the people who were having the hardest time to survive in the city
of Chicago. As Jane Addams experimented with immediate answers to
her neighbour's needs she faced the necessity for the fundamental
changes which took her far afield. She never dodged an issue no
matter where it led her. Laws affecting immigrants, child labour,
prostitution, labour's right to organize, the status of women, political
reform at its roots, and social justice through the Progressive
Party - and her passion for peace - all these and many more she
saw as urgent demands upon her creative efforts and interpretative
skills.
Aside from her own devotion and capacity, part of her success must
have come from her ability to pick gifted people and to strengthen
their hands as they worked. She recognized the capacities of those
around her. No matter who they were, rich or poor, and drew them
into her orbit of accomplishment. Hull House grew, as did her most
far-reaching endeavors, as a result of her understanding of people
and her ability to attract the most adventurous people of her day.
That Jane Addams could work with people of equal strength and genius
is proved by the names of her many associates who, with her, shared
in turning philanthropy into social work. At the same time they
were making possible much of the protective legislation of that
day.
(3)
Nora Marks, Chicago Tribune (19th May, 1890)
Miss Jane Addams and Miss Ellen Starr got tired of keeping their
culture, and wealth, and social capacity to themselves. These young
women believe that all luxury is right that can be shared. They
have taken their books, pictures, learning, gentle manner, esthetic
taste, to South Halsted Street.
From 9 to 12 a kindergarten under the direction of Miss Dow is held
in the long drawing-room. In the afternoon the kindergarten furniture
is removed and the hall is devoted to the use of various clubs and
classes. With its beautiful walls and pictures it is easily turned
into a drawing-room with the addition of a rug and chairs.
Monday afternoon the drawing-room is filled with Italian girls who
sew, play games, and dance, and the little ones cut out pictures
and paste them in scrapbooks. Sometimes they take a bath when they
can be convinced of the beauty of the porcelain tubs.
Monday afternoon a club of young women meets and read Romola,
aided by pictures of Florence, contemporary art, and lectures by
Miss Starr on Florentine artists.
Monday evening belongs to the French, who are reviewing the old
salons of Paris. Music, conversations, and coffee form the excuse
for a brilliant evening, with an occasional lecture on Marie Antoinette
and kindred subjects.
Tuesday afternoon the Schoolboys' Club meets, gets books from the
circulating library, and has reading aloud. At the same time a girls'
cooking class is at work in the kitchen. In the evening the boys
come back and have a lecture on what to do in emergencies, or simple
chemical experiments. One class is reading Shakespeare and others
not so advanced are studying the three R's.
Wednesday evening the Workingmen's Discussion Club has the floor.
The membership is already twenty-five, and many others who are interested
attend. The Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Henry Demarest Lloyd, or some
other well-known man delivers a short address, which is followed
by the freest discussion on strikes, labour unions, the eight-hour
question, child labour, etc.
Thursday afternoon Dr. Lelia Bedell talks to the women on physiology
and hygiene and how to raise healthy children, even near the Chicago
River. A cooking class is also being instructed. Thursday evening
the German population turns out en masse for a social evening of
reading, music, and "cakes and ale".
Friday afternoon the Schoolgirls' Club comes in to sew, embroider,
and cook, each taking home a book from the library. Friday evening
the working girls come in to enjoy a lecture or concert, and Saturday
evening there is a typical Italian entertainment. These entertainments
are crowded.
(4)
Jane Addams,
Philanthropy and Social Progress (1893)
The Settlement 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. 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 of its environment
may demand. It must be open to conviction and must have a deep and
abiding sense of tolerance.
It must be hospitable and ready for experiment. It should demand
from its residents a scientific patience in the accumulation of
facts and the steady holding of their sympathies as one of the best
instruments for that accumulation. They must be content to live
quietly side by side with their neighbours until they grow into
a sense of relationship and mutual interested. Their neighbours
are held apart by differences of race and language which the residents
can more easily overcome. They are bound to see the needs of their
neighbourhood as a whole, to furnish data for legislation, and use
their influence to secure it. In short, residents are pledged to
devote themselves to the duties of good citizenship and to the arousing
of the social energies which too largely lie dormant in every neighbourhood
given over to industrialism.
(5)
Florence
Kelley, Autobiography (1927)
On a snowy morning between Christmas 1891 and New Year's 1892,
I arrived at Hull House, Chicago, a little before breakfast time,
and found there Henry Standing Bear a Kickapoo Indian, waiting for
the front door to be opened. It was Miss Addams who opened it, holding
on her her left arm a singularly unattractive, fat, pudgy baby belonging
to the cook.
At breakfast on that eventful morning, there were present Ellen
Gates Starr, friend of many years and fellow-founder of Hull House
with Jane Addams; Jennie Dow, a delightful young volunteer kindergartner,
whose good sense and joyous good humor; Mary Keyser, who had followed
Miss Addams from the family home in Cedarville and throughout the
remainder of her life relieved Miss Addams of all household care.
(6)
Mary Kenney wrote about her experiences
at Hull House in her unpublished autobiography.
One day, while I was working at my trade, I received a letter from
Miss Jane Addams. She invited me to for dinner. She said she wanted
me to meet some people from England who were interested in the labour
movement.
When I went into Hull House, I saw furnishings and large rooms different
from anything I had ever seen before. With one look at the reception
room, my first thought was, "If the Union could only meet here."
Miss Addams greeted me and introduced the guests from England and
all the residents. My first impression was that they were all rich
and not friends of the workers.
Small wages and the meagre way mother and I had been living had
been making me grow more and more class conscious. By my manner
Miss Addams must have known that I wasn't friendly. She asked me
questions about our Trade Union. "Is there anything I can do
to help your organization?" she said.
I couldn't believe I had heard right. "Does she really want
to help our Trade Union?" I asked myself. She said, "I
would like to help. What can I do?" I answered, "There
are many things we need. We haven't a good meeting place. We are
meeting over a saloon on Clark Street and it is a dirty and noisy
place, but he can't afford anything better. I confided in her that,
as I passed through the large reception room, I had thought of what
a wonderful meeting place it would make.
"Can I help in any other way? she said. I said we needed someone
to distribute circulars. She said she would. When I saw there was
someone who cared enough to help us and to help us in our way, it
was like having a new world opened up.
Miss Addams not only had the circulars distributed, but paid for
them. She asked us how we wanted to have them worded. She climbed
stairs, high and narrow. Many of the entrances were in back alleys.
There were signs to "Keep Out". She managed to see the
workers at their noon hour, and invited them to classes and meetings
at Hull House.
Later, she asked me to come to Hull House to live. Knowing Hull
House and what it stood for, I know it "heaven". My whole
attitude toward life changed. I attended classes there. My first
was in English. My first was in English. I realized for the first
time how handicapped I was and how handicapped the children of other
wage workers were that left school at fourteen.
(7)
Alice
Hamilton joined Hull House in 1898 and stayed for twenty-two
years. Hamilton wrote about her experiences at Hull House in her
autobiography, Exploring the Dangerous Trades (1943)
Life at Hull House was very simple so far as luxuries went,
but it was full of beauty. Miss Addams and Miss Starr brought with
them many charming furnishings, and whatever they bought had the
two qualities of durability and beauty. Our food was inexpensive,
but dinner was served to us in a long, paneled dinning room, lighted
with chandeliers of Spanish wrought iron; breakfast in a charming
little coffee-house built in imitation of an English inn. To me,
the life there satisfied every longing, for companionship, for the
excitement of new experiences, for constant intellectual stimulation,
and for the sense of being caught up in a big movement which enlisted
my enthusiastic loyalty.
My part in it was humble enough. At that time there were few of
the social services which now we take as a matter of course. Hull
House had to have its own day nursery, kindergarten, public baths,
playground, as well as all the other activities which settlements
still carry on. There were no baby clinics, and, though I did not
feel at all competent to treat sick babies, I did venture to open
a well-baby clinic which very soon was taking in all the older brothers
and sisters, up to eight years of age.
Life in a settlement does several things to you. Among others, it
teaches you that education and culture have little to do with real
wisdom, the wisdom that comes from life experiences. If one's contact
with the poor is only through their organizations, their clubs and
trade unions, one gets a very one-sided, distorted impression of
the working-class, which contains not only rebel youth but conservative
middle age, not only the radical leader but his wife, who cares
more for a nice flat and an electric refrigerator than for the emancipation
of the workers.
(8)
Edith
Abbott, Social Service Review (September, 1950)
Hull House and the old West side were full of newly arrived
immigrants when Grace and I went to live there in 1908; we seemed
to be surrounded by great tenement areas which have now given way
to the factories and stores that have come with the business invasion.
Chicago at that time was the rushing, growing metropolis of the
West, but the crowded streets about Hull House with their strange
foreign signs and foreign-looking shops that were often very shabby
and untidy seemed strangely unrelated to the great, prosperous city
that was called the 'Queen of the West'.
The foreign colonies were well established, and there were Italians
in front of us and to the right of us; and to the left a large Greek
colony. There was a Bulgarian colony a few blocks west of Halsted
Street and along to the north that had almost no women; but large
numbers of fine Bulgarian men seemed to have emigrated - and they
were pitiful when they were unemployed.
Then you came to the old Ghetto as you followed Hull House a few
blocks to the south, where the Maxwell Street Market with its competing
pushcarts heaped with shoes, stockings, potatoes, onions, old clothes,
new clothes, dishes, pots and pans, and food for the Sunday trade
was as picturesque as it was insanitary.
The Greeks were our nearest neighbours, and many of them came to
Hull House for classes and clubs. The Greek immigrants at that time
were mostly young men working for money to bring over their relatives.
The Hull House residents and club leaders organized Greek clubs
of various kinds and Greek dances, when there were so few Greek
women that the women residents, young and old, were called in to
"help the Greeks dance."
(9)
Mary White Ovington, Reminiscences
(1932)
There was a fervor for settlement work in the nineties, for
learning working-class conditions by living among the workers and
sharing, to a small extent, in their lives. Toynbee Hall, London,
Hull House, Greenwich House, the Henry Street Settlement, these
were a few familiar names.
I knew Jane Addams and have never forgotten her piece of advice
to me: "If you want to be surrounded by second-rate ability,
you will dominate your settlement. If you want the best ability,
you must allow great liberty of action among your residents."
Jane Addams's name today is among the most famous in the world.
But perhaps few people realize the incalculable good she has done
in helping others to enlarge and glorify their own work. Many people
can build their fortune by using others. Few can encourage ability
without dominating it.
(10)
In her book Twenty Years at Hull House, Jane
Addams described how an unemployed shipping clerk had arrived
in 1893 at Hull House asking for help.
I told him of the opportunity for work on the drainage canal
and intimated that if any employment were obtainable, he ought to
exhaust that possibility before asking for help. The man replied
that he had always worked indoors and that he could not endure outside
work in winter. 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.
(11)
John Dewey, The School as Social Centre
(1902)
It is said that one ward in the city of Chicago has forty different
languages represented in it. It is a well-known fact that some of
the largest Irish, German, and Bohemian cities in the world are
located in America, not in their own countries. The power of the
public schools to assimilate different races to our own institutions,
through the education given to the younger generation, is doubtless
one of the most remarkable exhibitions of vitality that the world
has ever seen.
But, after all, it leaves the older generation still untouched;
and the assimilation of the younger can hardly be complete or certain
as long as the homes of the parents remain comparatively unaffected.
Indeed, wise observers in both New York and Chicago have recently
sounded a note of alarm. They have called attention to the fact
that in some respects the children are too rapidly, I will not say
Americanized, but too rapidly de-nationalized. They lose the positive
and conservative value of their own native traditions, their own
native music, art, and literature. They do not get complete initiation
into the customs of their new country, and so are frequently left
floating and unstable between the two. They even learn to despise
the dress, bearing, habits, language, and beliefs of their parents
- many of which have more substance and worth than the superficial
putting-on of the newly adopted habits.
One of the chief motives in the development of the new labour museum
at Hull House has been to show the younger generation something
of the skill and art and historic meaning in the industrial habits
of the older generations - modes of spinning, weaving, metal working,
etc., discarded in this country because there was no place for them
in our industrial system. Many a child has awakened to an appreciation
of admirable qualities hitherto unknown in his father or mother
for whom he had begun to entertain a contempt. Many an association
of local history and past national glory has been awakened to quicken
and enrich the life of the family.
What we want is to see the school, every public school, doing something
of the same sort of work that is now done by Hull House Settlement.
It is a place where ideas and beliefs may be exchanged, not merely
in the arena of formal discussion - for argument alone breeds misunderstanding
and fixes prejudice - but in ways where ideas are incarnated in
human form and clothed with the winning grace of personal life.
Classes for study may be numerous, but all are regarded as modes
of bringing people together, of doing away with barriers of caste,
or class, or race, or type of experience that keep people from real
communion with each other.
(12)
Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics
(1913)
Miss Addams has not only made Hull House a beautiful place;
she has stocked it with curious and interesting objects. It is no
accident that Hull House is the most successful settlement in America.
Yet who does not feel its isolation in that brutal city. A little
Athens in a vast barbarism - you wonder how much of Chicago Hull
House can civilize. Hull House cannot remake Chicago. A few hundred
lives can be changed, and for the rest it is a guide to the imagination.
Like all utopias, it cannot succeed, but it may point the way to
success. If Hull House is unable to civilize Chicago, it at least
shows Chicago and America what a civilization might be like.
(13)
Florence Scala was interviewed by
Studs Terkel for
his book Division Street: America (1967)
I grew up around Hull House, one of the oldest sections of the
city. In those early days I wore blinders. I wasn't hurt by anything
very much. When you become involved, you begin to feel the hurt,
the anger. You begin to think of people like Jane Addams and Jessie
Binford and you realize why they were able to live on. They understood
how weak we really are and how we could strive for something better
if we understood the way.
My father was a tailor, and we were just getting along in a very
poor neighborhood. He never had any money to send us to school.
When one of the teachers suggested that our mother send us to Hull
House, life began to open up. At that time, the neighborhood was
dominated by gangsters and hoodlums. They were men from the old
country, who lorded it over the people in the area. It was the day
of the moonshine. The influence of Hull House saved the neighborhood.
It never really purified it. I don't think Hull House intended to
do that.
For the first time my mother left the darn old shop to attend Mother's
Club once a week. She was very shy, I remember. Hull House gave
you a little insight into another world. There was something else
to life beside sewing and pressing.
Sometimes as a kid I used to feel ashamed of where I came from because
at Hull House I met young girls from another background. Even the
kinds of food we ate sometimes you know, we didn't eat roast beef,
we had macaroni. I always remember the neighborhood as a place that
was alive. I wouldn't want to see it back again, but I'd like to
retain the being together that we felt in those days.
(14)
Francis Hackett worked as a journalist
with the Chicago Evening Post when he became a resident at
Hull House in 1906. He wrote about his experiences in an article
that was published in The Survey (June, 1925)
When I went to live in Hull House in 1906, I did not really
know it, and I was totally ignorant of settlement work as I was
devoid of missionary spirit. I was torn at that time between the
two impulses of wanting to know Chicago and wanting to escape from
it, and I went to Hull House both for escape and for reconcilement.
I went there as one always goes into a new experience, on the terms
and in the light of the inappropriate things I already knew. Only
very slowly did I frame for myself the kind of experience I was
having. As I trusted myself to it gradually and suspiciously, and
felt it gave back more than it was receiving from me, I began to
realize the peculiar quality of this strange American creation,
its quality of goodness, of intelligence, of decent conscience,
which filled Hull House almost to overflowing, and which renewed
itself constantly from Miss Addams as a fountain is renewed. Hull
House not only recruited strong characters, it was excited about
them.
Hull House was American because it was international, and because
it perceived that the nationalism of each immigrant was a treasure,
a talent, which gave him a special value for the United States.
We were flooded by nationalisms. How many nights did I not stay
awake while the interminable whine of Greek folk-music came across
Halsted Street to my exasperated ears? And if the Greeks were neighbours,
with their sharp profiles and sharper wits, the Italians were not
less neighbours. An Italian family lived in the House, the handsome
matron who ran the coffee house, her seigniorial husband who was
an editor, and the two boys, one chiselled Latin and the other a
ball of Nordic-Latin energy. But there was also the stream of Italian
life from the neighbourhood, the black eyes blazing out of immobile
faces, the withered mothers, the gnarled fathers who seemed to carry
with them the parched heat of a beating sun.
(15)
Thomas Bayard of Delaware, speech in Congress (1926)
It is of the utmost significance that practically all the radicalism
started among women in the United States centers about Hull House,
Chicago, and the Children's Bureau at Washington, with a dynasty
of Hull House graduates in charge of it since its creation.
It has been shown that both the legislative program and the economic
program - "social-welfare" legislation and "bread
and peace" propaganda for internationalism of the food, farms,
and raw materials of the world for their chief expression in persons,
organizations, and bureaus connected with Hull House.
And Hull House has been able to cover its tracks quite effectively
under the nationally advertised reputation of Miss Jane Addams as
a social worker - who has often been painted by magazine and newspaper
writers as a sort of modern Saint of the Slums - that both she and
Hull House can campaign for the most radical movements, with hardly
a breath of public suspicion.
(16)
Elizabeth Dilling, The Red Network (1934)
Greatly beloved because of her kindly intentions toward the
poor, Jane Addams has been able to do more probably than any other
living woman to popularize pacifism and to introduce radicalism
into colleges, settlements, and respectable circles. The influence
of her radical proteges, who consider Hull House their home center,
reaches out all over the world. One knowing of her consistent aid
of the Red movement can only marvel at the smooth and charming way
she at the same time disguises this aid.
(17)
Congressional Record Report on Hull House (1926)
Florence Kelley has not only preached communism and urged a
study of the fundamental communist books by college women taking
up philanthropic or social work, but as president of the Intercollegiate
Socialist League - the organization chiefly responsible for socialist
propaganda in American schools and colleges - Miss Kelley has had
great influence for a number of years in promoting radicalism among
youth while in school.
It is of the utmost significance that practically all the radicalism
started among women in the United States centers about Hull House,
Chicago, and the Children's Bureau, at Washington, with a dynasty
of Hull House graduates in charge of it since its creation.
Hull House itself has been able to cover its tracks quite effectively
under the nationally advertised reputation of Miss Jane Addams as
a social worker - who has often been painted by magazine and newspaper
writers as a sort of modern Saint of the Slums - that both she and
Hull House can campaign for the most radical measures and lead the
most radical movement, with hardly a breadth of public suspicion.
(18)
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.
(19)
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.
(20)
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.
(21)
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.
(22)
In 1967 Florence Scala told
Studs Terkel about how
she campaigned with Jessie Binford
to save the Hull House Settlement (1967)
In the early sixties, the city realized it had to have a campus,
a Chicago branch of the University of Illinois. There were several
excellent areas to choose from, where people were not living: a
railroad site, an industrial island near the river, an airport used
by businessmen, a park, a golf course. The mayor looked for advice.
One of his advisers suggested our neighborhood as the ideal site
for the campus. We were dispensable. When the announcement came
in 1961, it was a bombshell. What shocked us was the amount of land
they decided to take. They were out to demolish the whole community.
A member of the Hull House Board took me to lunch a couple of times
at the University Club. My husband said, go, go, have a free lunch
and see what it is she wants. What she wanted me to do, really,
was to dissuade me from protesting. There was no hope, no chance,
she said.
I shall never forget one board meeting. It hurt Miss Binford more
than all the others. That afternoon, we came with a committee, five
of us, and with a plea. We remended them of the past, what we meant
to each other. From the moment we entered the room to the time we
left, not one board member said a word to us.
Miss Binford was in her late eighties. Small, birdlike in appearance.
She sat there listening to our plea and then she reminded them of
what Hull House meant. She talked about principles that must never
waver. No one answered her. Or acknowledged her. Or in any way showed
any recognition of what she was talking about. It's as though we
were talking to a stone wall, a mountain. The shock of not being
able to have any conversation with the board members never really
left her. She felt completely rejected. Something was crushed inside
her. The Chicago she knew had died.
Last
updated: 14th August 2002
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